Three Days Out: Rogues

The first thing you will probably notice is that you now have a long-overdue Poison fold-out menu. Some of you newer players may not remember that back in the day, Rogues all had a kind of third profession, which was Poisons. You’d either buy materials from the poison vendor or pickpocket them off of random humanoids They’re one of the things you’d consistently find those junkboxes you used to level up your FOURTH profession, which was lockpicking. (Notice how strongboxes show a required lockpicking skill? That did not used to automatically go up as you leveled. It was something you’d either have to constantly be doing, or you’d have to go to various random places in Azeroth that were littered with locked chests.)

Anyway, poisons are no longer a physical item you keep in your inventory at all. Instead, Poisons are more akin to Shaman weapon imbues. The other big change is that your poisons will be applied to both weapons. Gone is Instant Poison. Instead, you have two baseline “Lethal” poisons, which are Deadly and Wound (PvE and PvP respectively) and then a handful of “Non-lethal” poisons, two of which are talents. You'll be able to have one Lethal and one Non-Lethal poison at a time. Physical poisons have gone the way of Blinding Powder and Flash Powder.

Non-Lethal Poisons have a specific instant effect that will occur when you use Shiv. Deadly Poison has also been reworked somewhat. It no longer needs to stack to five. Once it’s been applied, it will tick for full damage and every subsequent proc will refresh it and deal full instant damage.

Additionally, weapon speeds have been normalized. All daggers are 1.8 speed. Combat also can now equip any speed weapon in the offhand, but I’ll get into that when I do the spec-by-spec.

The removal of the ranged slot means that both Throw (which now has a cast bar to go along with the cast time it’s always had) and Fan of Knives operate off your Main hand weapon now. Fan of Knives also generates a combo point if it hits your target. We also now have Crimson Tempest, an actual AoE finisher that does a good chunk of damage and then puts a bleed on the affected enemies. Hooray! An actual AoE rotation!

Now for the spec-by-spec:

Assassination: The only major change beyond the class-wide changes is that Backstab has been replaced by Dispatch. Dispatch does not have a positioning requirement, but also cannot be used until the target is in Execute range (which was when we were using Backstab anyway.) However, Assassination has an actual, honest-to-God proc, with an in-game Power Aura and everything, that allows you to use Dispatch early. You’ll still want to be running Rupture to fuel Venomous Wounds’ energy recovery (and damage,) and Cut to the Chase still keeps your Slice and Dice going. And Mutilate/Envenom still haven’t gone anywhere.

Combat: This is another spec that’s only gotten one major change. Revealing Strike now gives your Sinister Strike a chance to grant an extra CP, as well as its old effect of buffing finishing moves. So your priority now is to keep the RS debuff up on your target to take advantage of the extra points. Combat Potency has been changed to proc more often on slower weapons, so theoretically you can now equip slow swords, axes, maces, or fist weapons in either hand and be fine.

Subtlety: And now for the victory music from Final Fantasy. My Rogue, the first to get to Outland and hit level 70, was my main for much of Burning Crusade. Two things did that in: one was simply that I realized tanking on a Paladin was awesome (though it worked entirely, entirely different to how it does today.) The other was that Subtlety sucked in PvE. At the time, you had to run Combat or go home. While Combat Daggers was technically useable, it just didn’t feel right. So Wrath comes out, and I’m super excited about this Honor Among Thieves talent that seems to finally get Subtelty working. Then they smash it into pieces. So then Cataclysm comes out, and I think: Holy Crap, they’re finally going to make Subtelty viable in PvE! But then they make it unplayable with five freaking finishers you’re supposed to maintain, and GOD FORBID you should let any of them drop or you have to start over from scratch while an Arcane Mage is doing three times your dps spamming a single button.

Ahem…. Still on Subtlety: But with Mists, they finally seem to have hit the right balance. Energetic Recovery is now linked to Slice and Dice, meaning we no longer have to keep up Recuperate unless we need the healing. Rupture also seems be lasting longer, meaning that you’ll actually have time to get in some Eviscerates between refreshing Slice and Dice and Rupture. We no longer get a free Rupture refresh on Eviscerates, but it’s a fair trade, because the rotation is far more forgiving (as in, no longer less forgiving than all other specs in the game.) The key to Subtlety is to keep up Rupture and Slice and Dice while trying to maximize the uptime of Expose Weakness through Vanish and Shadow Dance. Shadow Dance now reduces the cost of Ambush by 20, allowing you to get more in without going out of Energy. The flow of CPs from Honor Among Thieves appears more predictable, too (though that could be all the epic-geared people in my dungeon runs.) Crimson Tempest also interacts nicely with Sanguinary Vein.

The trade-off for balanced damage numbers is that a lot of the funky tricks Sub had are now available as talents. Shadowstep, Preparation, and Cheat Death can all be attained by all three specs. Preparation and Shadowstep are on the same tier, as well, and while I know all the theorycrafters are probably going to say to go with Preparation and that Shadowstep is a clutch mobility ability for PvP... screw you. Shadowstep! Forever!

The Rogue resource model has often been extolled as Blizzard’s favorite system (well, specifically Energy, rather than CPs.) Monks will be the first class to have Energy, but not use Combo Points (I’d say Chi is more like a cross between Holy Power and Death Knight Runes.) The fundamentals of the Rogue class – using Energy to build up CPs and maintain Slice and Dice and Rupture (Combat might be able to get away without the latter) and then using your instant-damage finisher as a kind of “filler” – are probably never going to change. But with each iteration, we see a bit of refinement, and frankly, I think the Rogue is in a better place than it ever has been.

Oh, and we can now do like Illidan and give the whole party stealth temporarily. Are Demon Hunters literally just Rogues and Warlocks at the same time?