Cataclysm class preview

[Faphnir]

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we'll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. Here, you'll get a glimpse at what's in store for the rogue class, including a look the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with the rogue's different talent specs.

New Rogue Abilities

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue's current target, helping to ensure combo points aren't wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

Combat Readiness (level 83): Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and the timer will be refreshed whenever a new stack is applied. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped to go toe-to-toe with other melee classes when Evasion or stuns are not in play. This ability lasts 6 seconds and has a 2-minute cooldown.

Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

We're also planning to make changes to some of the other abilities and mechanics you're already familiar with. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we want for each spec.


•In PvP, we want to reduce the rogue's dependency on binary cooldowns and "stun-locks," and give them more passive survivability in return. One major change is that we'll put Cheap Shot on the same diminishing return as other stuns. The increase to Armor and Stamina on cloth, leather, and mail gear will help with this goal as well.


•In PvE, even accounting for active modifiers like Slice and Dice and Envenom, a very large portion of the rogue's damage is attributable to passive sources of damage. Yes, they are using abilities for the entire duration of a fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of rogue damage that comes from auto-attacks and poisons. More of their damage will be coming from active abilities and special attacks.


•We would like to improve the rogue leveling experience. Positional attacks and DoT-ramping mechanics will be de-emphasized at low levels and then re-introduced at higher levels for group gameplay. We are also providing rogues with a new low-level ability, Recuperate, to convert combo points into a small heal-over-time (HoT).


•To complement the change to combo points, non-damage abilities such as Recuperate and Slice and Dice will no longer have target requirements and can be used with any of the rogue's existing combo points, including combo points remaining on recently killed targets. This will not affect damage abilities, which will still require combo points to be present on the specific target you want to damage. To coincide with this, the UI will be updated so that rogues know how many combo points they have active.


•Ambush will now work with all weapons, but will have a reduced coefficient when not using a dagger. When opening from Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose from burst damage, DoT abilities, or a stun.


•As we've done recently with some of the Subtlety abilities, we want to make sure more rogue abilities aren't overly penalized by weapon choice. With a few exceptions (like Backstab), you should be able to use a dagger, axe, mace, sword, or fist weapon without being penalized for most attacks.


•Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in the ranged slot. In addition, we hope to allow rogues to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.


•We are very happy with Tricks of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to give rogues more group utility, but we don't want it to account for as much threat transfer as it does now.

New Talents and Talent Changes

In Cataclysm, the overall feel of each of the rogue's talent trees will change, as we would like each tree to have a clearly defined niche and purpose. The talent details below are meant to give you an idea of what we're going for.


•Assassination will be more about daggers, poisons, and burst damage.


•Combat will be all about swords, maces, fist weapons, axes, and being engaged toe-to-toe with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without needing to rely on Stealth and evasion mechanics.


•The Subtlety tree will primarily be based around utilizing Stealth, openers, finishers, and survivability. It'll be about daggers, too, but less so than Assassination.


•In general, Subtlety rogues needs to do more damage than they do today, and the other trees need to have more tools.


•Weapon-specialization talents (for all classes, not just rogues) are going away. We do not want you to have to respec when you get a different weapon. Interesting talents, such as Hack and Slash, will work with all weapons. Boring talents, such as Mace Specialization and Close Quarters Combat, will be going away.


•The Assassination and Combat talent trees currently have a lot of passive bonuses. We plan to dial back the amount of Critical Strike Rating provided by these trees so that rogues still want it on their gear.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Assassination
Melee damage
Melee critical damage
Poison damage

Combat
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety
Melee damage
Armor Penetration
Harder-hitting finishers

The initial tier of rogue Mastery bonuses will be very similar between the trees. However, the deeper that a player goes into any tree, the more specialized and beneficial the Masteries will be to the play style for that spec. Assassination will have better poisons than the other two specs. Combat will have very steady and consistent overall damage. Subtlety will have strong finishers.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we're looking forward to hearing your initial thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.

Discuss 

[Splishy]

Wtb Redirect for Paladin seals

[Dar]

and huntards! i can really notice a major drop in mana whenever there are a fair amount of adds that need to be stinged

anyway, cool changes. I'm not really into rogues these days but i like the fact that they are trying to get away from stunlocks. I might actually get a fair fight

[Lionwelp]

looking good at first sight, i really hope they 'buff' the subtlety tree to be on par with the others on dps terms.

[Faphnir]

My first thoughts are (from one read through)

Redirect: Useful for solo play, but the cooldown is far to long to be useful in raid or dungeon play.

Smoke Bomb: Quite a situational skill, and the long cooldown seems to go against Blizz's stated desire to avoid people not using an ability becasue "I might need it more soon".

Reducing "white" damage whilst not dramically reducing overall DPS is going to be a very fine balancing act, and I doubt they really know what a Gordian Knot all the interactions are that make up total damage. This one could take them months to rebalance after release. At first sight, it looks like Haste will lose much of its attraction, but I'll need to look into the poison application mechanic to make a more informed decision.

Recuperate: Probably meant to be a leveling aid, but if it stacks, might have a small utility in dungeons and raids. All depends on how small the HoT is.

The idea of being able to use combo points from dead MOBs is going to be useful, but might prove to be an awkward one to use. I really don't want to have to <TAB> through things that have been killed to retrieve unused points. They say there will be an UI update to help with this, so I'll wait and see.

Applying poison to thrown weapons and using thrown weapons for Fan of Knives and Deadly Throw: As Rogues melee, the most use for thrown weapons is these two skills (and mostly FoK). I haven't looked into Deadly Throw, but for FoK this is a pretty large DPS reduction (unless they give FoK a % damage boost, or create thrown items with a slower speed and higher damage). They might be working on the assumption that adding poisons to thrown will make up fo the loss of FoK damage, but as we have seen in the past, Rogues will change poisons on the fly during a fight (by item swapping - a practice that Blizz changed the Deadly Poison mechanic in response to). Mainly this will mean Rogues won't carry bows or guns most of the time.

Tricks of the Trade: They have given no details on this, but I have concerns that it might not be good.

Doing away with weapon specializatoins is quite nice (but takes away some of the colour from the combat tree), and it gives Blizz a few less bases to cover with loot drops (look at the fact that there is not even a passable off-hand mace that drops). I'm guessing most fast weapon drops will be daggers in Cataclysm.

So there are my initial thought. I'll probably revise and rethink most of them once I actually get to experiment with how thing work at the moment.