In this thread, we’re gathering focused feedback on the Rogue class set, coming in Eternity’s End.
Please note that initially in the PTR, class sets are a work in progress and will undergo substantial design changes in the near future. We’ll let you know the details of those changes as they are developed, both here in this thread and in our Development Notes thread.
Thank you for testing Eternity’s End with us!
Hey there Shadowblades! After taking a while to really sit with and comb through your feedback here and across the internet, we’re ready to talk about the next steps for Rogue’s tier sets. The following will encompass changes you’ll see in the short term (as in, the next build sometime early next week), as well as some longer-term plans or concerns that’ll be addressed in the future just to give y’all a good sense of where we’re at. En garde!
Assassination -
Bugfixes:
While the 4-piece seems to be appropriately valued now that people are getting to try it, it’s clear that the 2-piece is simply too weak. The plan is to try a rather significant buff to improve its value (by itself and with the 4-piece), and then consider if further action or functionality changes are necessary. The changes are:
The intention with this Tier Set is to push Assassination’s single-target identity, but a consistent point of feedback was that having no cleave/multidotting application made the spec feel worse there than it already does. Looking to a future update, another point of consistent feedback has been that Vendetta’s speed buff may make the spec feel a little too punishing to keep up with. There aren’t any plans at the moment to change the 4-piece bonus just yet, as we want to see the effects and feedback of the above changes before going any further.
Outlaw -
Bugfixes:
So far we’re happy that the theme of the set is being received so well! For a future build (as in, possibly not the next), our energy is going into addressing concerns and feedback surrounding the 4-piece underperforming - we’re still deciding what direction to take it in, but there will be a rework. We’re going to be keeping the ‘loading bullets over time into a big gun payoff’ as far as the gameplay loop goes, but the current bonus isn’t powerful enough or as interesting to the rotation as Outlaw players were hoping it would be. Want to really stress that feedback’s been super useful on this - once we land on a more complete 2/4-piece, expect some tuning to happen centered around 2-piece’s pistol shot rate and 4-piece’s bullet acquisition.
Subtlety -
Bugfixes: (warning, there’s a few)
As you can see, that’s a lot of issues with the 4-piece Shadowstrike not working as you all might expect it should, and fixing these should increase the power of the set non-trivially. That said, it feels like Subtlety’s set is a little overtuned numbers-wise, but we’re going to wait a bit longer to address these and other issues before looking into toning it down or not. So far it seems like this one’s landed in a pretty decent spot without too many major concerns, so once these are fixed if any of you have issue’s about Sub’s Tier Set, please make your voice heard!
That’s everything for now! As a TL;DR - Expect the listed bugs to be handled first, along with a functionality update/buff to Assassination’s 2-piece, with later builds addressing Outlaw’s 4-piece flow and a final tuning pass for all of the specs mentioned.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you for the next update!
-rogue vanishing noises-
quick update: the rogue changes posted here missed the cutoff for the PTR deploy that happened today, so those of you looking forward to testing them won’t be able to until the next one :< on the upside, when a future deploy does happen, it’ll contain an even larger change to the assassination 2-piece, the outlaw 4-piece rework, and should include a newer bugfix to assassination 4-piece which was accidentally excluding Deadly Poison from the speed increase, which should improve its performance overall.
sorry again to those of you who were looking forward to this, but we’re working to make the build that does have these changes pretty big for Rogues. thanks again for your continued discussion and the great points folks have brought up (especially sin rogues), and thanks for your understanding on this!
a little pre-holiday gift for y’all! in the last big post here, we talked about how Outlaw’s 4-piece and Assassination’s 2-piece would be undergoing some iteration - and with no new builds until January, it felt like rogues might like a look at upcoming changes that will be implemented and waiting for you when it comes time to log in:
(disclaimer that these numbers may change before january, etc etc)
Assassination
further changed from Friday’s post, the 2-piece now includes Poisons as well as changes from a Critical Strike bonus to Increased Damage, meaning that Crit still works on top of this as a synergistic stat rather than causing it to lose value for rogues. to clarify, the debuff is added to enemies at the time of using Shiv, so running away from targets after you’ve done this doesn’t cause them to lose the debuff or anything.
4-piece is unchanged, with the exception of the Deadly Poison bugfix mentioned just a bit further up!
Outlaw:
goals here are to avoid some awkwardness with the previous iteration, such as 1) the cooldown refresh often coming near when BTE was cooling down anyways, and 2) refreshing the cooldown still required the rogue to build up combo points to use. additionally, these ‘free’ BTE’s will still count as finishers for the purposes of talents like Alacrity, but also Outlaw passives like Ruthlessness and Restless Blades, which hopefully makes the Tier Set much smoother to play than previously.
this change is accompanied by a few other fixes - first, a nerf to the 2-piece - a bug was found where the chance to proc was actually 62.5% instead of 25% - this likely means it’ll go from being overpowered to in need of a slight numbers buff.
second, free Pistol Shots from the 2-piece bonus won’t consume or benefit from Opportunity, the Greenskin’s Wickers legendary effect, or the above 4-piece - all of those will only work on Pistol Shots you yourself cast, which should give players more control over their burst windows and overall game flow, which was a major point of feedback from the set’s original implementation.
Greenskin’s Wickers benefits especially from this, as now you can set up Between The Eyes → 300% Pistol Shot w/ 6 bullets → 4-piece instantly casts a 6-point Between the Eyes → 300% Pistol Shot combos with proper planning and execution.
thanks for being patient! happy to clarify if parts of this post were unclear, but otherwise look forward to the next meaningful updates or info to come in January - see you then!
Hey folks! Now that the latest PTR build is out, wanted to give some updates on the future of Rogue’s sets + tuning, by spec.
As a general disclaimer, tuning for Tier Sets as a feature is happening asynchronously, so while it may feel to you that some sets are being buffed/nerfed unjustly, our intention is to hit the same target across the board - while there will naturally be variance, this means that comparing future plans detailed in this post to classes that have yet to receive tuning or more recently received an update to their functionality isn’t super productive (especially when I just gave rogues a 2-piece that outdamaged entire sets on accident, that’s just the magic of PTR babey)
Last week the 2-piece shipped with higher numbers than intended, as the proposed 100% from a month ago, it turns out, was pretty strong. Even with the recent update the 40%, the whole set in aggregate is perhaps slightly ahead of where it should be, but decently close so far. Unlikely to receive any major changes beyond squashing bugs that come up and finalizing numbers to keep the two in-line so far, after the multi-dot/cleave element of the 2-piece & the move to an overall damage amp seems to be working out well so far.
Power-level wise, this one’s just shy of our target but on the weaker side of things overall. A lot of the new 4-piece’s power is intentionally baked into how an extra 6-point finisher affects the rest of the kit (via Restless Blades and other passives), but it’s looking like there’s room to amp the actual damage of the BTE proc somewhat in a way that won’t send those passives out of control & give it more impact. Overall though, the rework seems to feel a lot smoother and less ear-flicky than before, and is actually pretty close power-level wise. Still looking into reports of bugged or unintended interactions with BTE, Blade Flurry, and certain covenant abilities + the gun legendaries to help it feel like a complete package.
Lastly, we get to Subtlety. Astute testers may notice that not much has changed since our previous post - both in terms of the set’s power level and the bugged interactions surrounding Shadowstrike working like a real cast. Sadly, we ended up finding that those bugs were trickier to solve than we’d originally hoped & required a bit of new tech so that stuff like Akaari’s Soul Fragment wouldn’t proc infinitely off itself (which Sub players will now dream about). In any case, these are still coming, but unfortunately will be a little slower in getting to you than intended. In any event, we’re looking to do initial tuning on this bonus sooner than later so players can get an idea of where it might end-up balance-wise.
Overall, a pretty light update! It’s worth noting that once we get into the tuning phase, it’s unlikely you’ll see more of these for Rogues as you’ll just be seeing numbers go up or down, but we’ll try to keep you in the loop as to why and what our goals are as we get closer to 9.2’s release. That said, we appreciate your continued testing and feedback, and hope y’all have a great week.
