#0 - Aug. 6, 2010, 1 a.m.
Elusiveness: While this is probably one of the least interesting talents ever and it's not actively changing how you play, reducing the cooldowns on those abilities in a pvp scenario becomes make or break SO often with the lack of mobility going on as rogues. I hope that blizzard manages to do SOMETHING with preparation and deals with these types of talents for ALL classes. It's just not like a fury warrior and speccing to reduce the cooldown on intercept... that's actually interesting because it means you'll be zooming around more often and since they can't charge in combat and have another ability to reset the cooldown and break snares it plays well with the tree. I know if they don't end up changing it I'm going to wind up speccing it anyways but with the limited mobility of Assassination as it is, I'm just hardpressed to agree that this is a great talent at all.
Dirty Tricks: Ah what's left of old improved sap, do any of you remember when there was a 10% chance that even if you managed to sap someone with a 5 yard range and *%#* your own energy pool that you'd just unstealth and have to deal with their buddies. This talent hasn't slowly evolved over time as some quirky change to sap to make it interesting. No, this talent makes the abilities it effects usable, PERIOD. I could perhaps deal with not having a longer range on blind(assassination mobility still hindering -_-) but the 10 yard sap is so required in pvp that if nothing happens I will HAVE to take this talent over elusiveness and be screwed entirely on even the small mobility buffer that elusiveness provides.
Opportunity: This ability used to just increase the damage you did with abilities that required you to be behind your opponent. Eventually mutilate was changed to be a multipositional ability because countering the only real damage dump for assassination by putting your back to a wall as a healer was extremely frustrating to players and made for terrible leveling experiences(I leveled assassination backstab in vanilla so believe me I know how frustrating this was). The major problem I have with this talent is that originally it was pseudointeresting with it only effecting certain types of abilities but now it doesn't have that and is completely against the new design philosophy. What happened to the developers saying that passive damage talents would be going away in favor of more interesting talents that change how you play making up the bulk of specs... and those passive bonuses just being given as you specialize into a tree? While it's definitely a LONG way to go to fix how mandatory it is to subspec into subtelty for pvp as combat or assassination I would hope that at least blizzard realises how out of place this talent is now. Just put the 30% onto the abilities in the first place, I don't see anyone who would have mutilate or be backstab based being able to even CONSIDER not speccing into this talent.
If dirty tricks stays a tier 2 talent I suppose we could all live with it, but opportunity and elusiveness are just bad. Really bad. Obviously including preparation, talents of this design are what hold back anyone from playing their class how they want to.
I really do like the new talent tree design in general and believe it'll be easier to manage to succeed but in cases like subspeccing into subtelty, the trees really used to be designed around being able to dip a little bit into two trees. I want to be able to take that dual-wield spec in combat if I wanted to considering it's been sort of a staple spec for assassination. You need to consider the needs of players and why they were speccing like that in the first place before redesigning in a way to chokehold us from making strange cookie cutter specs. I really don't even believe the old 41/5/25 was that cookie cutter. Blizzard obviously liked it enough that they designed pvp mutilate in a hacky way all wotlk to keep the basis of it intact... even if the master poisoner change did in the end skew it slightly.
I wish I could post in the beta forums but if any blues are reading, could I possibly get a reply on what ideas are being tossed around as far as preparation and soul link? It was mentioned a while back that they might be removed. I do honestly believe those talents hinder their respective classes.
Anyone else have any ideas as well? Keep it civil too! :)
Edit: Having to correct typos, I typed this all up and a thunderstorm happened. Had to save it to post later.
