Blizzard on Subtlety and Rogue Talents

Blizzard has posted a response to a forum post relating to how Sub is performing in PvE and PvP. It talks about the long lasting issue of utility vs damage and the challenges there are with finding a balance. It does not offer solutions but it gives us hope that significant changes will be done to the rogue class in the future (Cataclysm?).

(SOURCE)

Now, we do want Subtlety to be more attractive. All of the pure dps classes have a spec that isn’t as popular as the others. Mages may be the closest because at least Frost has a viable PvP use, but there are also plenty of mages who want to be able to use Frost in end-game PvE too.

Subtlety (and Frost for that matter) are specs focused around utility. The problem is that players understandably nearly always choose damage over utility for raiding and often choose utility over damage for PvP, unless the damage is really high or the utility just doesn’t cut it for some reason.

What we are talking about doing is sharing more of the utility among other specs, or the core class, so that there aren’t “utility trees.” To do that though, we have to make the way the different specs do damage different enough so that players might choose a play-style preference over highest damage. This is particularly challenging for rogues, who have a history of giving up a preferred spec or play style for one with a sub 1% dps increase.

I think we are closest with the Arcane vs. Fire mage specs at the moment. They play a little differently, which goes beyond just the type of magic damage they do. While Fire might still do the highest damage overall, Arcane is close enough and plays different enough that even competitive players don’t feel stupid for playing that spec. There are a lot more Arcane mages out there than I think a lot of players assume.

That is harder with rogues. “I’m the sneaky one” doesn’t translate into sustained raid dps. Assassination feels like it emphasizes poisons more and Combat feels like it emphasizes weapons more, so we’re a little closer there. Subtelty needs a stronger yet damage-oriented niche.

HaT, sadly, is not a niche. HaT has scaling problems. It’s appropriate for a 5-player group, but gets too in larger groups with all of their raid buffs. We don’t want HaT to be the one talent that pushes players into Subtlety.

So what does this tell us? Well basically Blizzard is telling us that they would like that players choose specs becuase of play style over damage potential but they have not managed to bring the game to that point yet. It is clear that the choice is happening over utility and damage for PvE and PvP and Blizzard states that they have tried to balance it out amongst the three specs in order to diversify rogues without one spec being better by default.

It would seem they are trying to achieve this by making the way each tree does its damage more diverse. Assassinations through poisons and Combat through weapons. The problem with Subtlety is finding a special damage generating path. Poisons and weapons are already taken, so what is left?

For PvP the problem is a little easier to fix because utility is much more important and Assassination and Combat both have their utility in PvP. Subtlety however still has some problems because of how easily Shadow Dance can go wrong or be wasted if CCed when it is activated amongst others. Other signature abilities such as Killing Spree from Combat cannot be wasted due to its immunity effect for example but Shadow Dance doesn’t have such a security measure for fear that it would become too powerful. So for Subtlety to reach equal ground with the other specs serious ability changes will have to be done. Blizzard seems to be on the right path in Cataclysm with their idea of making some stat talents passive to their respective talent tree allowing for more utility talents which could make up for the weaknesses of some abilities.

Blizzard is not promising anything in this statement but it shows that they have understood the issue and are actually trying to change it.