GC 5 months ago - 100% Cloak is I-WIN

#0 - April 17, 2010, 2:26 a.m.

Q. Cloak of Shadows is an incredible ability; it helps rogues avoid most incoming spell damage and effects. However, how do we feel this ability stacks up versus classes that possess both melee and spell damaging abilities? Do we still feel the 90% avoidance is sufficient to aid Rogues in PvP encounters against spell casters and hybrids?

A: It’s meant as a tool that’s part of a toolkit, not an I-win button. It’s sufficient, and extending it to 100% would make rogues largely immune to interesting PvE effects they shouldn’t be (e.g. Mimiron’s Shock Blast).

Q u o t e:
Q. With the emphasis moving to Battlegrounds, have you looked into rogue cooldown dependency issues?

A. We definitely want to give rogues a considerable boost in the passive damage reduction department, and then tone down some of their active cooldowns in the process. We still want the rogue to feel twitchy and exciting to play, but not to the extent that you can’t deal with another class toe-to-toe without any cooldowns up. Oh, and Cloak of Shadows now provides 100% resistance.

Ghostcrawler

#20 - April 17, 2010, 8:04 p.m.

Okay, you caught us. We'll go back and make paladins heal all of the time too, since that's what the original design was (Alliance only of course).

Ghostcrawler

#58 - April 18, 2010, 2:28 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm curious to know what changed your mind. PVE Rogues will now be immune to the exact things you didn't want to make them immune to, and can theoretically give them an I-WIN button in PVP.

In actuality it's not quite this extreme, but the stereotypical rogue encounter is that if they have their cooldowns available, they're going to wreck you and if they don't have their cooldowns available, you're going to wreck them. Giving Cloak a chance to fail was a way to make sure that rogues couldn't guarantee that they would be immune to spells for a few seconds. Usually they would be, but sometimes they'd get unlucky and the lock or whoever would have a chance against them.

In Cataclysm, we want to reduce both extremes. That is, the rogue shouldn't feel invulnerable when they have all of their cooldowns available and they shouldn't feel helpless when they get caught without them. In that environment we think it's safe to remove the chance to fail because Cloak won't be the only thing that determines victory or defeat vs. a caster. Things like Smoke Bomb and larger health pools as well as other changes should help keep a rogue alive when Cloak is on cooldown. Likewise, the warlock won't be stunned so much so they won't be quite so frustrated when the rogue does pop CoS.

Having a ninety percent chance to succeed is actually a pretty frustrating place to be. At that point you aren't grateful when you roll lucky. You're mad because you were so unlucky. At 90% you start to count on something, which makes it worse for it to fail. If Cloak had a 10% chance to succeed (we wouldn't do that, but just for sake of argument) then you'd feel awesome when it did work because you got lucky. What I'm getting at is that it's not like we thought the 90% deal was super fun gameplay. We just thought it was necessary.

Without the entire gamut of Cataclysm changes though, we're not sure rogues need a PvP survival boost at the moment.

My paladin comment above was more poking at the silliness of expressing "Gotcha!" because we figured out a way that we're comfortable getting rid of a 10% chance to fail on Cloak of Shadows.