WOD Alpha Patch Notes

[Krushinator 49]

Yes this is a direct copy and paste from battle.net, all credit to Blizzard for the contents, blah blah blah.

 

In our efforts to reduce cooldown stacking across the game, we chose to remove the damage increase from Tricks of the Trade. And second, we decided to loosen the weapon requirements on Assassination. It's important to note that we still intend for daggers to be the optimal choice for Assassination Rogues, but this change will help Rogues who want to try out Assassination but don't have two daggers.

 

- Tricks of the Trade now has no energy cost and no longer increases damage caused by the target by 15%.

- Assassin’s Resolve no longer requires daggers to function.

- Dispatch can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 331% weapon damage (instead of 480%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

- Mutilate can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 137% weapon damage (instead of 200%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

- Sinister Strike now deals 188% weapon damage when used with a dagger (instead of 130%).

 

Bandit's Guile is an interesting mechanic that is important to Combat gameplay, but wasn't working out quite as well as we think that it could. In particular, there's basically no way to adjust when you're going to be in Deep Insight, other than stopping your rotation (and thus wasting energy, combo points, temporary effects, cooldown time, etc.). So, we're making an adjustment to Revealing Strike and Bandit's Guile. The intention here is that you can use Revealing Strike in place of Sinister Strike when you want to delay Deep Insight (such as to line it up with a specific upcoming fight mechanic), and have little lost damage besides the overall Deep Insight uptime. We don't expect this nuanced rotation adjustment to be used by all Combat Rogues, but having a little more control over the pace of your rotation will be useful to some.

 

- Revealing Strike now deals 20% more damage, but no longer advances Bandit's Guile.

 

Among some other changes to Rogue AoE damage, we wanted to make sure that Fan of Knives benefitted from Seal Fate.

 

- Seal Fate now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Rogue's primary target.

 

Honor Among Thieves is an extremely powerful ability, but has the downside that it adds significant disparity between character power while soloing and while in a group. We made this change to bring up the soloing Subtlety Rogue, without having a significant impact on their performance while in a group.

 

- Honor Among Thieves can now also be triggered by critical hits from the Rogue's melee Auto Attacks.

 

A couple of Rogue abilities do periodic damage, but don't have an intended alternative if that periodic is already on the target. We made these abilities roll remaining damage from their previous effect into the new effect, so that it's still ideal to use them again in these cases.

 

- Crimson Tempest's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

- Hemorrhage's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

 

Subterfuge has proved too powerful, and frustrating to play against in PvP, so we decided to reduce its defensive capabilities, while preserving its offensive power. We changed the Subterfuge period to allow the use of stealth abilities without actually stealthing you, similar to Shadow Dance.

 

- Subterfuge now allows you to use abilities that require stealth for 3 sec after leaving Stealth, instead of actually staying stealthed for 3 sec.

 

 

Reminder : These are Alpha notes, and will most definitely change over time. Still, post your thoughts, I'll post mine in a reply.

[Krushinator 49]

- Tricks of the Trade now has no energy cost and no longer increases damage caused by the target by 15%.

Well, it's no longer a DPS ability. You will likely be saving this solely for target switching so you can open faster.

 

- Assassin’s Resolve no longer requires daggers to function.

This is just part of the new Assassination direction where you don't need daggers to play the spec. I think it's a good thing because weapon availability is a big barrier to spec switching right now. I like being able to wander around the specs during a raid so this works out great for me.

 

- Dispatch can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 331% weapon damage (instead of 480%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

Again, Assassination no longer needs daggers. The buff/debuff values will definitely change over time so no point in commenting about the exact numbers now.

 

- Mutilate can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 137% weapon damage (instead of 200%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

Yep, no dagger requirement.

 

- Sinister Strike now deals 188% weapon damage when used with a dagger (instead of 130%).

Just part of removing weapon requirements per spec.

 

- Revealing Strike now deals 20% more damage, but no longer advances Bandit's Guile.

Now this is interesting. Bandit's Guile is currently a bit tough to work with due to the reasons mentioned in the article. The higher end rogues have found ways to deal with it, but this change will make Bandit's Guile manipulation more accessible for the average rogue. I like it.

 

- Seal Fate now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Rogue's primary target.

An attempt to improve AoE damage. I've never really been into the AoE damage thing for Rogues, I think we should be about high and bursty single target damage. However, if AoE has to be a part of our repertoire, I suppose we might as well be better at it.

 

- Honor Among Thieves can now also be triggered by critical hits from the Rogue's melee Auto Attacks.

This won't change anything in the raiding environment, but it will make questing and solo grinds more viable as Subtlety. Good change.

 

- Crimson Tempest's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

This makes the ability more spammable. It kind of dumbs down the rogue AoE rotation which I think is kind of lame.

 

- Hemorrhage's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

I guess I understand the Crimson Tempest change of this kind, but I don't like this one. I guess this is meant to make Subtlety damage from the front of a target more viable, but I don't think it should be that way. Frankly, I'd be in favour of making more Subtlety abilities only castable from behind, or at least reducing their damage from the front.

[song 3]

Disarm Trap has been removed.

Rupture is no longer available to Combat Rogues.

Shadow Blades has been removed.

Combo Points are 'on the Rogue' now

Dismantle has been removed.

Paralytic Poison has been removed and replaced by Internal Bleeding.

Internal Bleeding: Causes successful Kidney Shot to also apply a periodic Bleed effect for 12 seconds, with damage increasing per combo point used.

Edited April 4, 2014 by song

[Krushinator 49]

Disarm Trap has been removed.

Boooo, I liked disarms. I like the overall reduction in the amount of CC every class has, but it's unfortunate that we have to lose such a unique ability. Can't it just be unusable in battlegrounds? Can we then add disarming traps to more rogue-only quests?

 

 

Rupture is no longer available to Combat Rogues.

It stopped being a serious part of the Combat rotation anyway, good riddance.

 

Shadow Blades has been removed.

It was alright while it lasted, but for all specs it just made the rotation frantic. Assassination was generating crazy amounts of combo points and making it very hard to control the Envenom buff, Combat just merged it with Adrenaline Rush, and Subtlety had to try to wedge this in between Find Weakness uptimes or waste most of the potential by merging it with Shadow Dance.

 

Combo Points are 'on the Rogue' now

Target switching just got a lot easier. With the number of recent raid mechanics that require sudden and often target changes, Redirect, even glyphed, was not cutting it. I think this puts us on a more even playing ground with the other melee specs.

 

Dismantle has been removed.

Grarr, I liked this one too. Stopping a warrior in the middle of a Bladestorm was so satisfying. Just another unfortunate sacrifice on the path to (hopefully) better PvP play.

 

Paralytic Poison has been removed and replaced by Internal Bleeding.

Meh, I barely used it anyway. 

 

Internal Bleeding: Causes successful Kidney Shot to also apply a periodic Bleed effect for 12 seconds, with damage increasing per combo point used.

I'm not really seeing where having Kidney Shot apply a bleed helps us though. I guess it's nice in rogue vs rogue where you don't have to time a bleed with the end of stun or quickly apply one if they trinket. It seems like a pretty narrow field to improve upon. Am I missing something here?

[Watermasta 7]

I'm curious if this bleed from Kidney shot will be appyable (SP?) to raid bosses considering their stun immunity.

[Krushinator 49]

The term "successful" Kidney shot would imply that the target must be stunned in order for the bleed to be applied. However, "successful" could also mean "did not miss", a test applied before the immunity check. Testing will have to wait until open beta.

[song 3]

I pretty much agree with what you said - I liked disarm trap and dismantle ( i liked dismantling thrash mobs, adds at Thok etc).

Paralytic poison was barely useful and at time annoying - as you said barely used it.

 

I'm not sure why you said Rupture isn't a serious part of the rotation but i wonder what will replace it .

 

Combo points on rogue = greatest ever

[Tanthiris 0]

With combo points now on the rogue, how is Redirect gonna work? Didn't see any mention of it being in the ability removed section on the main website, so wanted to ask here.

[Krushinator 49]

It would seem only logical that Redirect is being removed, but you're right, there is no mention of it. Perhaps they are changing it to something else and haven't decided on what yet, or maybe it's just an oversight. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[Falcifer 7]

About redirect: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/451907010447933440

 

And a run down of all/most of the changes, collected by @SvelteKumquat on twitter, from patch notes and various twitter conversations; http://redhattedrogue.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/meet-your-alpha-rogue-warlords-patch-notes-summary/

Edited April 9, 2014 by Falcifer

[Falcifer 7]

As someone who is unlikely to change from assassination...

 

I do like the direction things are going. I've only played since MoP, so I have no real knowledge of how rogues were before, and I never had much of an issue with rogues as they are. I never thought it myself, but I can understand the people who feel that the rogue specs are too similar, so it's nice to see that they're trying to give them a definitive identity.

 

I do agree with Krush about rogues being single-target, but it would be nice to have some sort of competitive AoE when required.

 

The idea of having a skill gap is really nice, too. Sub has it already, assassination lacks it almost completely, and combat has it to some degree with rupture and bandit's guile, so it should be interesting to see how that works out (for assassination especially)

 

I was never too fussed about the combo points being on the target. Talents and glyphs can be used to mitigate some of the "problems" with it, but I liked the mechanic. But it will obviously be a huge change. If the Shadow Reflection talent stays, it should make it easier to handle.

 

I quite liked being daggers-only. I'm glad that (for now) they're not opening it up to axes and maces, and it will be nice to be able to use some swords and fist weapons, even if only for the transmog options (Hanzo Sword is sitting in my bank). And from what I've read, the idea is that you can get by without daggers, if you're unlucky with drops, but it's still optimal to have daggers for assassination, so it's a great move, in my opinion.

 

Dismantle and Disarm were nice things to have. I like the rogue arsenal a lot, and even the spells I very rarely use, it was nice to know that I had them. It'll be sad to see those go.

 

Shadow Blades was a no-brainer spell, really. At least with Vendetta, it's tied to a target, so you have to know it's going to be used to its full potential, rather than just using it whenever you can. I don't suppose it will be missed a great deal.

 

Tricks of the Trade isn't something I use a great deal, either. Sometimes for tanks on fights like Spoils or Galakras. Or just for messing with people. And I think I used it once or twice during progression for the extra damage. 

 

I haven't been paying a great deal of attention to sub and combat, but it seems like assassination should be more engaging to play, which will be nice. I do enjoy the slower-pace and passive nature of the spec, but I'm looking forward to the changes