Patch 1.18.1 broke the rogue class: please fix it

[Horyoshi]

Hey all,

I haven't played OctoWoW yet, so I'm not sure if rogues differ here from TurtleWoW. But patch 1.18.1 broke the class in PvE and PvP, and I'm hoping the octo devs take notice.

The PvE problem

The game forces the Assassination meta build, so your damage comes from poisons, but each poison type is immune to a certain monster type. Example: instant poison hits humanoids but not elementals, so you swap to dissolvent poison for elementals, which then makes you immune to humanoids.

In raids this is tedious and bad design. You constantly swap poisons, lose DPS joining fights late, or attack with the wrong poison applied and do half damage. Poison swapping should be a choice (healing reduction, cast slow, etc.), not a forced immunity workaround.

The PvP problem

Because Assassination is pushed as the meta, it's also the PvP go-to. It does insane damage and is overpowered in some situations. It's a dumb, pure-damage spec that ruins how a rogue should play.

Meanwhile the Hemo (Subtlety) spec is no longer viable. That's the spec with all the actual rogue tools, but Hemo does almost no damage now, and full-combo eviscerate got heavily nerfed. The most fun PvP spec is dead.

Suggested fixes

• Bring Combat/Swords in line with Assassination, or
• Remove dissolvent poison and let the other poisons hit all monster types, eliminating forced swapping.
• Bring back the PvP Hemo spec as it was before the patch

Verdict

I never understood why TurtleWoW overhauled rogues so drastically. They were fine before the patch, maybe a few tweaks were needed, not a full redesign into something different. I doubt I'm alone on this.

[Darktifa]

Hory is big Rogue, slightly worse than Brojo

I trust his judgement

[Cookieguy]

I agree with you and also made a forum post about the poison situation in raids a few days ago, how it is bad game design and very annoying.

Your suggestions are very nice

[Kantrul]

Hard agree. Poisons shouldn't be something that you have to use against certain types of enemies, they should be a choice depending on your playstyle or the goal that you want to achieve.

As for sub spec, I don't understand why it became a support spec for a DPS only class. Although some players were happy with a new talent tree for a class they didn't play (novelty yay!), not a single rogue main was happy with the new sub tree.

[Mrtinkles]

I agree about the poison change being annoying and bad quality of life. I do not agree about the subtlety rework being unloved by rogue mains.

I LOVE the support aspect of sub in pve. My guild mates also loved having a sub rogue in the raid. Keep support sub in the game.

Sub was impacted in pve by the taste for blood nerf however. All good pve specs took that talent from the assassination tree so its nerf was an across the board dps nerf to all builds. Sub didn't really need to be part of that nerf. One of their deep sub talents should have been boosted to compensate for the taste for blood change - it was challenging enough to be top DPS as sub (unless you had Thunderfall and/or your guild had ridiculously short kill times)

[Tassetasse]

The changes have been adopted on Octo as part of 1.18.1, I'd presume they don't reflect the future design direction. I agree with OP insofar that poison design is broken but there's a lot to unpack.

A short Turtle poison history

From the 1.17.2 patch notes about Corrosive Poison.

New Poison: Corrosive Poison:
Each strike has a 30% chance of poisoning the enemy for X Physical damage over 12 sec. Stacks up to 5 times on a single target. 105 charges.
Rank 1 (Level 56): 100 Damage
Rank 2 (Level 60/Book): 128 Damage
The Handbook of Deadly Poison V now also teaches the rank 2 of Corrosive Poison.
Rogues that already know Deadly Poison V will be retroactively taught Corrosive Poison II.

Developer Comment: This poison deals slightly less damage than Deadly Poison, but its corrosive properties allows it to bypass conventional Nature and poison immunities, allowing poisons to be a dependable factor in the Rogue’s arsenal no matter the opponent.

From the 1.18 patch notes about Dissolvent Poison

New Poison: Dissolvent Poison
Coats a weapon with poison that lasts for 30 minutes. Each strike has a 20% chance of poisoning the enemy which instantly inflicts Physical damage. This damage ignores armor.
Rank 1 (Level 52): 88 to 113 Physical Damage, 100 Charges
Rank 2 (Level 60): 106 to 142 Physical Damage, 115 Charges
Both Ranks of Dissolvent Poison gain damage equal to 4.75% of your Attack Power, 5% lower than Instant Poison.

Developer Comment: Dissolvent Poison serves as the Physical counterpart of Instant Poison, the same was Corrosive Poison served as the Physical counterpart of Deadly Poison. Dissolvent Poison allows Rogues to perform well against poison resistant and immune targets even when they don't have the chance to stack up their Corrosive Poison and gives them more options against these enemies.


Corrosive Poison: Attack Power scaling reduced by 5%.

Developer Comment: We're slightly reducing the scaling on Corrosive Poison as the current damage difference between it and Deadly Poison are too marginal, causing the latter to be overlooked in most cases. We hope that this encourages rogues to use poisons appropriate to the situation instead of always using the Physical solution as the original poison variant now pulls ahead by a noticeable amount.

What does it mean?
It means get fast weapons and smear them with Dissolvent, alright? Assassination rogues start insanely strong because the most important thing, weapon speed, is easy to achieve. There's plenty of 1.3 WS weapons, and even a 1.2 WS fist. The rest of the damage is essentially "baked in". That also means Assassination barely scales with gear. Yes, Dissolvent has an AP bonus, more crit is more better, set bonuses synergise well, but Noxious Assault does not use weapon damage in the damage calculation, so only white damage suffers when you show up with a green Lv28 fist weapon.

For this reason, Assassination falls off hard in Naxx unless you actually try, and is basically useless in K40. This is the stage where you pray for a slow dagger, optimise for Agility and spec combat to pump fat backstabs into raid bosses instead.

What changed with 1.18.1?
Originally:

Taste for Blood: Physical damage bonus reduced from 1/2/3% to 1/1.5/2% and no longer increases damage dealt by Corrosive Poison and Dissolvent Poison.
Noxious Assault: Attack Power-scaling reduced from 35% to 30%.

Revision:

Taste for Blood is now a 2-point talent. Increases duration by 4/6s and damage by 1/2%.
Corrosive Poison and Dissolvent Poison now both only apply on the following types: Elementals, Mechanicals, Giants & Undead.

What's not to like?

The game forces the Assassination meta build [until ~K40].

Yes, the design has too much damage in early game and not enough in late game.

In raids this is tedious and bad design. You constantly swap poisons, lose DPS joining fights late, or attack with the wrong poison applied and do half damage.

I'll be honest. This can be worked around with weapon swapping. If Octo rebalances Assassination though, I don't think we can be expected to swap and soak actual weapons at that rate, as a baseline no less.

Poison swapping should be a choice (healing reduction, cast slow, etc.), not a forced immunity workaround.

I thought this read like a PvP argument, but it is in the PvE section. Assassination Rogues would not run CP/WP/MN in PvE, that would be tasks for the Combat/Sub rogue.


My additional points on why this is bad design
- This change reintroduced enemies immune to all poisons, i.e. nature-immune mobs that aren't Elementals, Mechanicals, Giants & Undead (can't even sim Corrosive/Dissolvent on dummies............ come on now), which is in conflict with the 1.17.2 and 1.18 design intentions of universal poisons.
- Before 52, when Dissolvent can be applied, Assassination Rogues are dead weight against nature-immune mobs (Elementals, some Undead, certain unclassified mobs). Not game breaking in the open world, you can pick what you fight, even if it's a bit of a stretch in practice. But it sucks during leveling. When talent resets cost gold, you stick with Combat.
- From the Dev comments, I believe the person designing Rogue on Turtle really, REALLY wanted us to "pick the right poison for the job" always, and when they looked at logs, they always felt that "too many lazy mfers just ran Corrosive/Dissolvent again this patch", when this naturally followed from the design choices of 1.18, aka Taste for Blood buffing physical damage. Dissolvent is physical. Bob's your uncle.
- Boo hoo, poor rogues, can't kill everything always at record speed and minimum effort with any spec. I know. I didn't design the Assassination tree, I didn't design your class.


Suggested fixes

• Bring Combat/Swords in line with Assassination, or
• Remove dissolvent poison and let the other poisons hit all monster types, eliminating forced swapping.

I can't endorse #1 since I'd like to get a raid invite to K40. Assassination is the odd spec out, Assassination needs to be fixed. #2 solves part of the physical damage problem, but it'd be very Blizzard, it removes flavour and lowers the skill ceiling. (And so did nerfing Taste for Blood, by the way.) If this is the route, you might as well patch in DP proccing MH poison at 5 stacks.

I never understood why TurtleWoW overhauled rogues so drastically. They were fine before the patch, maybe a few tweaks were needed, not a full redesign into something different. I doubt I'm alone on this.

I presume you're referring to patch 1.18.1, which hardly was a redesign of Rogue. Rogue is very well tweaked on Turtle. The Assassination redesign of 1.18 created a fun rotation and gameplay but lacked foresight with regard to endgame and scaling. Separate from that is the stubborn pursuit of bending poison use to the will of the designer, with progressively tighter thumb screws.


TL;DR
Your "fix rogue" checklist:
- Undo all 1.18.1 Rogue changes.
- Keep Assassination gameplay as it is but decouple the tree from static poison damage, don't let it peak in high school.
- To do this, you should look very closely at either Envenom or Efficient Poisons (chain it to Envenom). The key balancing changes to poison damage have to go into these talents and lock the Rogue into deep Assassination.
- Add lower level analogues for Corrosive and Dissolvent so it is a viable tree from Lv20, not Lv52.

[Albator168]

I would like the see the talents tree of the rogue before they implemented noxious that would be the best and easy fix in my opinion (also puting back the vanilla distract back would be nice)
where is our skilled rogue backstab pvp ? bring it to live again !
but i really like the improve energy tick for pve from the combat spec it make the pve way more dynamic