#0 - July 15, 2008, 5:04 p.m.
I heard 'nerf' was a bad word here, but I'm tired of it. I've heard that 'fix' is frowned upon because it implies something is broken.
Rogues are broken. There, I said it. Rogues are the overlords of Arena. They absolutely need a nerf.
The stats posted by gameriot show an incredible edge for melee classes, and rogues in particular.
The jokes' over.. WotLK won't be releasing for several months, and we have a season 4 live right now. Rogues dominated with superior scaling values in S3 in addition to the armor penetration introduction, which let them have even higher AEP due to better spread on points. It's like some developer said "Rogues aren't becoming overpowered fast enough, let's put the blender on Frappé."
Seriously.
I have nearly 13.5k health unbuffed, and I have over the cap on resillience. Even if I socket damage, my dots still don't benefit worth %%!#.
And the mechanics are impossible to ignore.
Caster Control:
You cannot kite a rogue. Period. You have to take the damage if they are on you, and you cannot cast anything with a cast time. You can claim 'lollearn2fakecast'. I do. I fake 90% of kicks.. but at the high end arena.. rogues stop kicking and start gouging. Gouge is 10 second cooldown and serves it's purpose better than kick. Fear will be jumped up to a 4 second cast with dedicated focus fire from a rogue. Let's examine the scenario.
I fake a fear cast. Rogue's on me.. Rogue throws kick and misses because of the fake. I start again and when it's about to go off, I'm gouged. Kick comes back up at the end of the gouge. Why did I waste time faking the cast again? I just gave the rogue 8 seconds of unadulterated ownage on me.. faking didn't work. They control casters too easily. Both Gouge and Kick will be back up and I will have wasted 8 seconds doing nothing while the rogue gets free swings.
Snares and Anti-kite methods.
Crippling Poison is the best snare in the game. It makes it impossible to beat a rogue even if you've caught him off guard, beaten his ShS cooldown and even trinket the crippling, he will snare you with a 1 point deadly throw to close the gap, or he'll cloak the snare you put on him then close the gap. Once your trinket is gone, it's gone. (captain obvious I know). It just seems that if you break one method, tthey have another.
You cannot keep a gap open with a rogue for more than 3 seconds. Period. There's no 'but' there. You can't do it.. they have far too many anti-kite abilities on far too short a cooldown. You can't trinket Crippling one second then turn around and trinket kidney shot the second. Even if you somehow magically get out of Blind, Kidney Shot, Crippling Poison, beat the Shadowstep cooldown, and outlast the snare on Deadly Throw, you still have to deal with Sprint/Shiv. There is no win. There is only loss here. You only have 1 trinket. Most of these abilities are on far shorter cooldowns.
Damage Output:
Not only do they control you, but Rogues have some of the sickest damage output in the game. Here's why:
-Better Itemization Spread: Rogues can focus on AP, Agi, Melee Crit, Hit, Armor Penetration, Haste, and Stamina as well as resilience. Casters focus on Spell Damage, Stamina, Resillience and Haste. Ocassionally spell crit. Intellect is nearly useless but put on our gear anyway. What does this mean? Itemization points are distributed more evenly for rogues so that they can get more benefit for the item value. Each successive point in an item's item budget costs more than the previous point does, so spreading makes things cheaper. Combine that with the next problem:
-Better Scaling. Rogues get more benefit per point of Attack Power than Casters get out of each point of spell damage, and guess what, spell damage costs more itemization than Attack Power!
-Armor Ignore. It's bull%%!#. Seriously. They introduced a stat for melee only and it's seriously *#!!ing bull%%!#. It hurts casters more because Armor is a regressive mitigation. Each point of armor after the first mitigates less than the one before it. So casters, with a low armor value, have precious mitigation, and each point lost is worth more than say if a warrior or druid lost a point of armor. It's *#!!ing overpowered and any rogue who tries to argue otherwise is delusional.
Class Bonuses:
Rogues are one of the only classes in the game who's pvp glove bonus actually changes the mechanics of an ability. Literally changes how a spell functions, granting increased functionality to a skill. It's wrong on a level that priest racials and pally racials are wrong. It literally gives rogues a ranged interrupt when they didn't have one before. It's as if blizzard patched in a cool new ability after BC released and you had already levelled up another toon based on BC info. No other class got this kind of functionality.
Counter Class:
Rogues are the only class in the game spawning a counterclass culture.
The rise of warriors has been nearly as swift as rogues, because they are actively one of the intended 'counter classes' having huge base physical mitigation in the form of plate armor. But here's the problem. The primary method for Warriors to hurt rogues is negated by stamina, of which there is copious amounts of on rogue gear. Overpower during Evasion means no Mortal Strike. The primary method of warriors to buff up their damage values (Death Wish, Beserker Stance) are negaated by their crippling weaknesses which only serve to further undermine class balance when the huge damage output of rogues is put into play. It seems as if Warriors have every concievable method to counter rogues, but yet rogues are //still winning//. It's obscene, and it's leading to Warrior buffs to play catchup, that are woefully imbalancing the class to be able to quickly overwhelm casters.
Defensive Abilities:
Rogues have the most defensive abilities in the game. That's a fact. In addition, having superior defensive abilities gives them itemization advantages not afforded to other classes. Rogues can wear PVE gear without a decrease in survivability due to the following defensive abilities.
-Cloak of Shadows. At some point in development, this skill was basically used to help fix vanish. I can see the point of the skill.. give rogues time to clean off their debuffs so that vanish can actually work. The problem? It's lasting too long. Waaaay too long. With waaaay too short a cooldown. It's used in place of trinket to nuke snares. It's used to pre-empt offensive CCs. It's a defensive ability being put to too much offensive use. Perhaps limiting it to trigger automatically with vanish and last only that second that vanish does so that a rogue can get away but not simply reopen immune, or use it again shortly thereafter, or it should be non-combat only so rogues don't have to whine about being beaten even after killing their targets.
-Evasion: Being able to reset this is silly, it's actual effects are mind bogglingly sillier. Overpower and Deep Wounds/Gouge are the only damage a warrior gets during this. Overpower has a cooldown. Usually what's avoided is Mortal Strike, which means that the rogue doesn't give a rat's ass if he's taking Overpowers.. he'd probably take more damage and a debuff from Mortal strike or simply more damage period from Execute, which shouldn't matter anyway because of:
-Cheat Death: Basically a free bubble when you're about to die, there's no bigger BS than this one. Nothing says 'You're about to die, quick use Vanish like' having essentially what amounts to immunity for 3 seconds so you can find your Vanish button even if you #%!!ing click it out of your god damn spellbook. I mean how moronical can you get that you have to give rogues time to freaking pull vanish out of their spellbook if they forgot to do it when they are about to die. Even if you can pierce through their hp with nonscaling dots and multiple cloaks, as well as stuns/incaps/interrupts, the rogue still has 3 seconds of immunity to just laugh and use another defense.
-Vanish: I get that rogues need a way to stealth in combat. I get that they need to simply wipe aggro (pretty op in comparison to everyone else, but I get the need) But they get to do it in rapid succession. They can Vanish, re-open, then prep-vanish and do it again. Mages get hypothermia when they iceblock to prevent the same basic ***!. Rogues need it too. No one needs this many do-overs just because they sucked it up the first time.. and skilled players don't need this many openers.
-Stealth. "Can't use in combat". Bull***!. Any rogue worth their salt can find a way to get out of combat in nearly any situation.
-Sprint. So even if I outkite them with less snares and outlast their snares, even then, I get screwed by a speed boost? Or if I were to finally get a rogue dead to rights, with no vanish, no cloak, no stuns, no combo points, they can just sprint and run the hell away. Ludicrous.
In summary, Rogues are broken.. I shudder a bit to say that word, because it implies a serious problem, but this is the kind of thing we are dealing with. Rogues are quickly becoming the only dominant class in arena and none are able to contest their reigns. They need a hard nerf. Not a soft nerf or a slap on the wrists. They need a dedicated, tailored nerf to curtail the total package on every level.
Warcraft was beset by World of Roguecraft in the beginning of the game, and are beset by it again. I don't know about you, but I'm not waiting for fixes anymore. I've rolled up a rogue and have it at level 61 already. I'm not waiting for the fix that never comes.
