wow Upcoming Rogue Tier Set Bonus Changes on the 9.2 PTR

[Staff 1,409]

Blizzard is working on changing the Rogue Tier Set bonuses in next week's 9.2 PTR build. Assassination's 2-piece bonus is too weak and will receive buffs. Outlaw's 4-piece flow will also be addressed in the future, and more.

(Source)

Hey there Shadowblades! After taking a while to really sit with and comb through your feedback here and across the internet, we’re ready to talk about the next steps for Rogue’s tier sets. The following will encompass changes you’ll see in the short term (as in, the next build sometime early next week), as well as some longer-term plans or concerns that’ll be addressed in the future just to give y’all a good sense of where we’re at. En garde!

Assassination -
Bugfixes:

• Doomblade, Serrated Bonespike, and Sepsis aren’t affected by either 2 or 4-piece bonuses
• Currently, DoTs applied before Vendetta runs out stay at 2x speed after it expires. This is a bug, but was left it in for the initial PTR period because it seemed potentially interesting to play around rotation-wise. Feedback’s been a little split so far on if it’s interesting or fun, so calling it out explicitly should help get some more eyes and opinions on it.

While the 4-piece seems to be appropriately valued now that people are getting to try it, it’s clear that the 2-piece is simply too weak. The plan is to try a rather significant buff to improve its value (by itself and with the 4-piece), and then consider if further action or functionality changes are necessary. The changes are:

1. Your bleeds have 25% increased crit chance → 100% crit chance, and
2. against your current shiv target → against all targets

The intention with this Tier Set is to push Assassination’s single-target identity, but a consistent point of feedback was that having no cleave/multidotting application made the spec feel worse there than it already does. Looking to a future update, another point of consistent feedback has been that Vendetta’s speed buff may make the spec feel a little too punishing to keep up with. There aren’t any plans at the moment to change the 4-piece bonus just yet, as we want to see the effects and feedback of the above changes before going any further.

Outlaw -
Bugfixes:

• Looking into some reports of Between The Eyes crit value during blade flurry being off, as well as some bug reports concerning the gun-focused legendaries (Greenskin’s Wickers and Concealed Blunderbuss)

So far we’re happy that the theme of the set is being received so well! For a future build (as in, possibly not the next), our energy is going into addressing concerns and feedback surrounding the 4-piece underperforming - we’re still deciding what direction to take it in, but there will be a rework. We’re going to be keeping the ‘loading bullets over time into a big gun payoff’ as far as the gameplay loop goes, but the current bonus isn’t powerful enough or as interesting to the rotation as Outlaw players were hoping it would be. Want to really stress that feedback’s been super useful on this - once we land on a more complete 2/4-piece, expect some tuning to happen centered around 2-piece’s pistol shot rate and 4-piece’s bullet acquisition.

Subtlety -
Bugfixes: (warning, there’s a few)

• 2-piece procs correctly add to an ongoing Shadow Blades, but casting Shadow Blades resets the bonus instead of adding them together
• Animacharged Combo Points from Kyrian’s Echoing Reprimand aren’t increasing the 4-piece’s chance to proc
• Slice and Dice can activate the 4-piece from Stealth
• 4-piece procs can hit CC’d enemies and break their crowd control
• 4-piece isn’t granting Slice and Dice with Premeditation
• 4-piece Shadowstrikes aren’t triggering the 2-piece
• 4-piece Shadowstrikes aren’t applying Find Weakness
• 4-piece is consuming Symbols of Death’s one-time critical strike buff
• 4-piece Shadowstrike’s aren’t triggering Akaari’s Soul Fragment’s legendary effect
• 4-piece Shadowstrikes properly increasing the damage of Gloomblade/Backstab with the Perforated Veins conduit

As you can see, that’s a lot of issues with the 4-piece Shadowstrike not working as you all might expect it should, and fixing these should increase the power of the set non-trivially. That said, it feels like Subtlety’s set is a little overtuned numbers-wise, but we’re going to wait a bit longer to address these and other issues before looking into toning it down or not. So far it seems like this one’s landed in a pretty decent spot without too many major concerns, so once these are fixed if any of you have issue’s about Sub’s Tier Set, please make your voice heard!

That’s everything for now! As a TL;DR - Expect the listed bugs to be handled first, along with a functionality update/buff to Assassination’s 2-piece, with later builds addressing Outlaw’s 4-piece flow and a final tuning pass for all of the specs mentioned.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you for the next update!
-rogue vanishing noises-