Combat rogues: the autopsy of what went wrong

[loosie1]

From an MMO Champion post


Amen brotha.......

As I wonder why my primary attack has lost several thousand damage per button-press after patch, and things just aren't very much fun any more, as well as wait for the pumpkin buff timer to go away (since sitting in Dalaran appears to be my new class utility), I thought it was time to lay out a proper combat rogue autopsy- we're dead in the water dps wise, with no real hope or improvement at 85. We gain no meaningful new skills past level 80 for PVE DPS, and that's sad. I had hoped for better.

Don't get me wrong, I understand how things conspired inadvertently to get where they are. I'm not blaming the devs at this point for this - it was something that the community should have noticed too but we didn't. Many of the changes for rogues were well-designed from a 'looks really good on paper' perspective - it's just that when carried out in conjunction with other changes within the class, and to game-wide mechanics, the changes became a monster, synergizing with other changes to drag us down promptly to hell.

Combat went from decent to terrible overnight in a perfect confluence of factors that in retrospect is easier to see coming than not. I'm not blaming anyone here for any of this, but it's time to look at the autopsy of the corpse of combat to figure out *what* went wrong - because this could happen to any class. I'm also not real interested in figuring out how to wishlist Revealing Strike or LOLThrownSpecialization or their ilk into something useful - but simply to figure out what went wrong in an effort to untangle the knot we find ourselves in.

We weren't amazing in TOC or earlier in this expansion, but the fact is that by T9, the offset gear with ARP once it got decent was better for combat rogues than the 245/258 ilevel tier. What was generally well-itemized for mutilate was god awful for combat, but we were saved by the availability of options. Fast forward a while, and the literally automated re-itemization of gear with ARP created a situation where it was T9 all over again - except this time there was no offpiece gear to save the spec.

The ARP removal and class redesign really hit badly as well, taking effect at the same time. The synergy between the two meant that damage lost from ARP was compounded by other factors. Had items been manually re-done to compensate, or some other design change made, ARP loss might have been survivable and maintained some competitive DPS, but the problem was that the staple of the rogue class before inflated gear levels - crit - was toast - and we got nothing for it.

With the utter removal of talents that benefitted from crit other than Lethality (in particular Prey on the Weak, an awful talent that was basically combat's version of Hunger for Blood, except that it left you at the mercy of personal health vs increasingly unforgiving encounter mechanics and AOE damage), crit was devalued - along with the fact that we had hit a crit wall so laughable that running laps around Dalaran gave me crit that you'd have to have visited Loatheb pre-ICC to have seen. This was a double whammy in practice: since we had huge crit levels (and were balanced around it), removal of crit talents was a huge reduction in actual, practical real-boss-world DPS. This hurt basically everything, from instant poison to white attacks to actual abilities that didn't require parking behind the boss and simply going AFK. Once we lost Prey on the Weak, it hurt every other multiplier in the combat tree: multiplicative scaling backfired.

And then, as if the convergence of factors didn't already just make me laugh, ARP was essentially replaced with haste for combat. Now, haste is a wonderful thing - if you're a caster. It's not as terrible as it was pre-4.0, but the fact is that increasing ability usage by making energy available isn't as hot as it sounds. We're paying the same ilevel price for haste as casters, but don't get the gcd-reducing benefits, instead we careem towards GCD lock and push autoattack and poison damage higher and higher, eliminating the difference between a rogue who knew what it was doing and one who doesn't. Don't believe me? Go equip a pair of 1.5 weapons as combat and go to town. You won't lose nearly as much damage as you think - because at this point the crit scaling and haste make up for terrible play.

Haste falls off in practical function and benefit for combat as well as poison talents are removed. Compare the time it takes for a full 5 stack of Deadly Poison to rack up now vs. pre-patch with the old 20/51/0 build - it means that rampup just went up significantly, since we're losing not only deadly stacks but MH poison procs from deadly refreshing itself. And since Deadly doesn't apply nearly as well as before, we're losing even more poison damage, both MH an OH.

And since we're on poison damage, about FOK. Losing the proc of the second poison and the second attack per FoK hurt a ton - along with the fact that there is no decent or appropriate thrown weapon of meaningful ilevel to match what we had before. Sure, they reitemized totems and idols and librams and their ilk - but thrown, the rogue libram, remained terrible - 264 ilvel junk that remains a choice between BadgeAwful and 10 man ICC RNG. And about that - since 10 and 25 now share a lockout on ICC - a rogue who didn't have the 264 heroic thrown from Rotface already won't be getting it post-patch. But the neutering of FoK damage wasn't enough - we had to remove the synergy between it and Blade Flurry, eliminating one of the 'use of appropriate cooldowns at appropriate times' that allegedly defines the playstyle of the combat spec.

And then there's Blade Flurry. Sure, it seemed like a grand idea to have 50% BF uptime as a possibility for add fights and cleave in the future. It really did - until we look at the energy regen penalty for using the ability and realize that between it and the now-sad levels of damage for basic combat rogue abilities after the crit blender and ARP were removed - and realize that 50% uptime wasn't going to solve anything. Unless the adds on a boss are tanked precisely to where we can cleave off the boss and hit them as well, we're forced to target switch at some point - and with the increased time to stack up deadly poison and other debuffs post-patch, the real problem with combat kicks in.

That's right, target switching. Bandit's Guile seemed like it could be an interesting mechanic - until I started raiding with it. Switch to valks on HMLK, stack drops, go to Frostmourne room, stack drops, raid ports back up, takes you half of the upphase to get it and Deadly Poison, rolling again, then you're down. Or, even on older content - go do TOC and enjoy target-switching penalties on say, Jaraxxus hardmode or phase changes and switches on Northrend Beasts. The rampup time for BG (and deadly poison) won't be solved at 81 with Redirect either - since combo points are frankly the least of our worries when we're trying to get other things working.

But then, I thought, maybe it won't be so bad. Restless Blades means that cooldowns will be up more often, and we can recover from some of the switching if that works out, but like a lot of this, my hopes were ill-founded. We're expected to save our cooldowns for trinket procs and Bandit's Guile stacks, which means that these shorter cooldowns don't actually work as promised - which means that the staples of combo point generators and finishing moves hit for very little.
I'm sure the 'hit a lot more often for less' model could work fine, but then the ability queue hotfix for 4.0 slams us home for the last unintended consequence. While this has affected every class, the ability queue hotfix in the world where we don't have 3ms latency on a LAN, it's terrible for reactive abilities (hello, 4 pc 10 proc, oh, crap, eviscerate double queued and I just blew it) and awful for 1s global classes - especially when they're now drowning in energy thanks to all the haste on gear and hitting buttons as fast as possible to keep up.

Of course, there's always that tuning knob, mastery. Except mastery seems to have been designed for combat rogues to directly counter the rest of the class design: it wants you to do a lot of offhand damage. So there was that attempt to buff offhand damage from 50% to 75%, but that didn't solve it - it merely made mediocre become sad and drove the skill differentiation down even further. But the problem is that no matter how much the knob is turned up on mastery, it's still going to be a sad and underperforming stat - because offhand damage is terrible and let's be realistic, the class is not going to be redesigned in the next month to use a slow offhand. That's a long-term coding and balancing nightmare that will have its own unintended consequences.

So then I was just sort of sad, and tried to figure out what sort of changes could be done to rectify these problems, and realized that melee-centric raid buffs got blasted into the ground - we lost the BoM/BoK/MOTW (and now-equivalent buffs) crossover, windfury totem got cut in half, and then..there was the change to sunder. As if tossing ARP out the window wasn't enough of a kick in the teeth, Sunder (and equivalent buffs) got knocked down almost 50% in effectiveness. So combat took another dive, since poisons took longer to stack, for less damage, and physical damage was becoming more and more of our DPS equation. Since rogues always did scale insanely with gear and raid buffs, as those things were chopped out and dumbed down, we found ourselves paying the price for years of dependence.

So we're back to square one. Buffing one thing isn't going to fix the core problems that have been creeping together to create the mess of 4.0 for combat rogues - since it's not any one thing that went wrong.

And since it's late in the design cycle, I don't realistically believe a redesign is feasible even if greenlit, so it's down to simple tweaks. Buffing Sinister Strike and Eviscerate damage is clearly going to be some of the easiest knobs to tweak - I can see taking Lightning Reflexes back up to the 10% haste of before as well (not that it makes rogue skillcap or diffentiation any better), but at this point anything is better than where we are.

Forgive the rambling - but I'm honestly not sure that the convergence of factors that led to the state of combat these days was really understood as a coherent whole, and we're just now seeing the results in the wild. It's not pretty. I can't expect change if the reason for our current state isn't laid out clearly.

TL;DR version: rogues got screwed by mechanics and changes acting together in an ugly synergy. Yay.