HFB's Bleed Requirement Is Seriously Staying?

At this point in time, we don't want Hunger for Blood to look attractive to any PvP rogue. Period. We realize that most Assassination rogues wouldn't currently want to go 51 Assassination for PvP because they want to get Prep. That's good. We don't want to ever get HfB to look too attractive to them or they might consider giving up Prep or something else, at which point rogue burst damage in PvP would be too high again.

The energy cost and duration changes are intended to make keeping the buff up a little easier for PvE rogues while still keeping the bleed as an insurance policy. On bosses, the bleed will almost certainly be there. On trash, the bleed might be there (though Fan of Knives is also fine for large groups of trash). When solo you can get a bleed on if you want or choose to forego HfB depending on the encounter.

At a higher level, yes, we would love to have talent trees where there are 51 point Assassination PvP rogues and hybrid PvE rogues. That would take substantial redesign of all the rogue trees and probably rethinking things like chaining cooldowns, burst out of stealth and a lot of other PvP mechanics. We just think that magnitude of change isn't appropriate for a content patch.

We think Assassination rogues with Mutilate / Prep can be competitive in PvP now, and some players (especially outside of North America) do well with Subtelty in PvP.

We think for 3.1 that Combat rogues are in good shape for PvE and with a few more tweaks, Assassination can get there. Subtelty can be great depending on how willing you are to stack your party to use Honor Among Thieves.

That isn't 3+ specs viable for PvP and PvE, which is our ultimate goal. But it's a start.

Of course we will continue to evaluate how rogues perform in the remainder of the 3.1 test time and once the patch gets loosed in the real world. I hope that clears things up.

EDIT: HUNDER!

Q u o t e:
Now, I go and look at another class, and see classes that ARE having their trees reworked (read:DK), so how is this magnitude of a change not appropriate for a content patch?

We invented a couple of new DK talents to replace bad ones and changed the numbers on some existing talents. The changes the rogue tree required would have been much larger and would have required a lot of testing, especially PvP testing, which is typically hard to get on a PTR. Moving around talents like Prep, or Shadowstep, Cheat Death or CB can have massive ramifications for PvP.

The class was ultimately designed to be able to quickly kill someone. For a long time that worked okay, though you can’t pretend that other classes weren’t very frustrated with the mechanic of being stun-locked. Once we got the paladin, hunter and Arcane mage more Arena viable, as well as adding the DK class, we realized that being able to burst another player down quickly was just not a good direction to continue to go with PvP. It was annoying but not too annoying when one class was doing it. When several classes started doing it, it was pretty intolerable.

Like I said though, we aren’t throwing up our hands with the class. We think we have gotten rogue PvP and PvE to a point we’re happy with. There are some rough spots in the trees, though you could say that about other classes too. Ultimately we believe it is more responsible to have a playable class (the one we have now) than risk throwing everything into the blender for 3.1 and hoping for the best (the massive tree overhaul).

I hesitated to comment on the design until we had a good idea what we were going to do for 3.1. Reading the responses to this thread, I think you can understand our reluctance to try and explain our motivation. We have had to ban several players who might have had useful things to say but couldn’t control themselves when typing a response. If your post gets deleted, nobody is going to know of your threats or insults anyway, so there is really no point. You certainly don’t have to agree with our designs, but if you want a response from us, you’re going to have to behave like civilized adults when you post. Those are the rules.

Q u o t e:
ignore the fact that you're doing damage below that of most hybrids...

You’re not in 3.1.

Q u o t e:
Can we see this in other classes perhaps or maybe more so? Or Is the Dev team happy with with 90% of talents?

No, we’re probably happy with 10% of the talents. I think that is often a disconnect between the community and the developers. We are much harder on our stuff than you guys are (and you guys can be pretty hard). That’s just the way Blizzard rolls. We are our own worst critic and don’t believe there is a thing in the game that couldn’t be improved. So when you say X is broken, our response is often: yes, we know, but there is an awful lot that we also want to work on.

Q u o t e:
Combat PvE is largely fine now, but HfB and HaT are the only things propping up their respective trees and that's terrible game design.

That is one definition of game design, but another way to look at it is that HfB gets rogue PvE dps where it needs to be while keeping PvP dps also where it needs to be. In that regard, that single talent is responsible for a lot of balance. In that sense, it’s a good design. A bad design would be “Well, Mutilate rogues just can’t PvE” or “Well, rogues are just going to own in PvP because their CC and escape mechanism, which are of limited value in PvE, are huge in PvP.”

HaT is a different story. There are things we like about the talent (getting flooded with cps is fun without being a huge balance problem) and things we don’t like (stacking hunter pets). The thing that we would most like to improve is having more synergy with the rest of the tree. Ideally, it would also be a raid mechanic instead of a party mechanic, but certain things still can’t scale from 5 to 25 well under our current paradigm (or even 2 to 5 in the Arena case).

Q u o t e:
I don't understand your reasoning, Ghostcrawler. With all due respect, the way you're saying it is simply "we are lazy". That's how it's sounding to us.

"Risk adverse" might be fairer. It is far too easy with bad choices to make rogues terrible or dominant in PvP. We can solve most issues for PvE because that is much easier to theorycraft and test. PvP testing takes a lot more time and ideally the participation of a lot of skilled PvP players, which are just hard to attract for a patch beta compared to an expansion beta.

With a game that has as many players as WoW, part of the design has to include risk analysis. We think we have 3 viable PvE specs and 2 viable PvP specs in 3.1, compared to less than 1 viable PvE spec for 3.0. Being willing to eject that to redesign a few talents is not responsible game design, at least in our opinion. We want to see what these changes do. If rogues overwhelmingly shift to Combat because it’s easier or more fun to play for about the same dps, then we’ll have to try something else.

Q u o t e:
As to assassination specific problems, I am unsure if the poison bugs have been fixed. I have seen at least two replies on the PTR forum that it is a known problem, but I have yet to see a fix in the patch notes, and I haven't been on to test it since this latest build.

We make so many changes that I lose track a little of which build is going up on the PTR. We think Assassination damage will be very close to Combat damage for PvE.

Q u o t e:
But what about bleed-immune bosses?

There should be no bleed immune bosses. Please report them if you encounter any. Bleeds are too fundamental a mechanic now.

Q u o t e:
Yet you are willing to redesign druids every content patch???

We don’t make changes unless we have a very good idea what they would do. Imagine moving Preparation higher or lower in the tree. It’s an interesting idea that might solve some of the rogue problems. But it’s going to be difficult to predict exactly what would happen with those changes, and the ramifications might not be felt for some time. I understand that some of you are tolerant of rapid change and wouldn’t mind trying something crazy even if we had to reel it back in in a few weeks. But that always causes a lot of anxiety among the players. “Let’s do something crazy and nerf it to death if it doesn’t work out” is a bit too reckless. It happens sometimes, but we try to avoid it. There are a lot of threads already about "the rollercoaster" of changes since LK shipped. Not everyone is as tolerant of major and rapid iteration as you might be.

Q u o t e:
For the better part of a year, that the class requires too much work for a content patch...

It’s not the work involved. It’s the risk. The work is easy. Getting it right is hard, especially for a class built around exploding out of stealth to stun an opponent and then quickly kill them before they can respond. Make that too easy, and the class dominates PvP. Make it too hard and the class is dead in PvP. It’s not an issue of adding a little bit of damage here and there. That is not what makes rogues tick in PvP.

PvE is a different story and all of the stunlocks, stealth and escapes are much less valuable than raw dps. The class has to function differently in PvP and PvE arguably moreso than any other class. That is what we are going to have to change if we want similar talent builds to function well in both, and that is a major overhaul of the class.

Q u o t e:
Today, you have confirmed the validity of every complaint saying that rogues have been neglected. Today you have confirmed that our class's poor design was a direct result of a lack of priority, attention, interest and raw work.

I find some of the drama a little overstated. Every class complains of neglect and how their ideas aren’t listened to. Welcome to the forums. You are going to have a hard time convincing players of other classes that you are the most deserving. We have ten classes and we owe it to all of them to improve them as much as we possibly can. Rogues have not somehow been singled out, and I don’t think trying to prove that assertion is a great way to spend this thread (or any thread).

If you want me to pay attention to your points, discuss class mechanics. I gloss over the stuff about the history of your treatment at the hands of malicious developers. That’s not something I can use in my discussions with the design team. Those are not actionable items. Sorry if that sounds harsh.

Do not QQ. That is not what these forums are here for.

If you find aspects of your class not to be fun, if you have feedback on mechanics or balance, please bring them up. If you are here just to state how neglected you feel, please just don't post.

If you keep making posts about your unhappiness with the frequency of my responses or where or how much I choose to respond, then I can promise you (and I rarely promise) what the result will be. Blizzard will conclude that my frequent posting is too controversial, and it will stop. I think that would be unfortunate.

Please focus your discussion on the class and not the developers. If your post contains a lot of words like "communication," "ignored," and "response," and not "rogue" and "Hunger for Blood" then you are talking about the people behind the game and not the game. This forum is about the game.