Friday, December 14, 2007

Blizzard backstabs Rogues... again

More changes are coming up for Rogues in the next patch...
  • Hemorrhage: This ability now correctly does additional damage when its debuff has already been applied.
  • Preparation now resets the cooldown of Shadowstep and no longer resets the cooldown of Adrenaline Rush.
  • Shadowstep now adds a 3 second, 70% movement speed increase.
  • Sinister Calling now also increases the percentage damage bonus of Hemorrhage and Backstab by 2/4/6/8/10%.
I'm getting increasingly irritated by the way Blizzard keeps changing their mind about Rogues. Just when a spec is finally being acknowledged as being decently powerful for the Arena ("HARP": Hemo, Adrenaline Rush and Preparation), Blizzard decides that the very popularity of this build was not intended and changes it... again.

From their own admission, they want the entire Subtlety tree to become viable, and they didn't like the fact that players decided to only go as far as Hemorrhage and stop there to pick damages in other trees that, you know, actually do damage.

I don't understand this logic at all.

Yes, the Subtlety tree has long been ignored and is universally considered inferior to Combat and Assassination, and it does sadden me a bit since one of the main traits of a Rogue *is* to be subtle, but I think it's impossible to reconcile this goal with the expectation that a Rogue is first and foremost a very strong DPS class. Rogues are expected to deal a lot of damage, and buffing stealth or speeding up our mobility is not going to help us at all in raid and not that much in the Arena.

Also, while I understand the important of constantly rebalancing the classes as months go by to keep everyone interested, it seems to me Arena Rogues are given quite a run around by Blizzard. Is there any other class that has had to relearn from scratch the way they fight in the Arena from one patch to the other?

I love my Rogue, but Blizzard is making me hate the class more every day.

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