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Rogues and Cataclysm

With all the information revealed at Blizzcon a lot of websites have already started speculating on the future of individual classes in the next expansion. It is still way too early to judge the full effect of the expansion on the rogue class as the information given to us at Blizzcon is most likely just the first course in one big meal of an expansion. However let us look at the information we have so far.

General

Every class has a specific talent spec that just fares better then others in PvE or PvP and so specs every time the “standard” good spec changes everyone changes to it. This completely kills individuality and diversity. Blizzard seems to have seen that talents are not as much of a character customization tool as they would have liked. The introduction of the new “Paths” of the Titans shows Blizzard’s response to this class diversity problem and will probably impact rogues by allowing more options for players of all playing styles and will therefor make PvP in particular much more interesting (and complex) due to it being harder to anticipate the reactions of a class.

PvP and PvE

In PvP racial abilities such as human Perception have always given certain races an edge as rogues over others. When seeing the Worgen and Goblin racials many players instantly thought they would be the ideal rogue races but they have forgotten one thing, Blizzard has stated that the current races will have their racials revised so expect to see an approach which would make every class equal(ish) in terms of advantages for the rogue class.

Something that will affect PvP and PvE are the stat changes. Agility filling the role of AP (1 agi = 2 ap) solves a lot of problems rogue have when it comes to pimping out their gear using gems and other enchants, no more sacrificing one stat for another! This also goes towards Blizzard’s goal of making classes more diverse. We can not talk about stat changes without mentioning the usually neglected haste. The once barely useful rogue PvP stat haste will stage a comeback by contributing to energy regeneration! I don’t think I have to explain how that will drastically change how rogues view haste

Blizzard has also mentioned passive bonuses from the different talent trees. Maybe this will finally give rogues talents that we should passively have anyways like Master of Deception which is absolutely necessary or else there is no reason to even bother to stealth. Blizzard has stated that the more “boring” talents which offer lets say a certain % increase in crit chance will be eliminated and made passive for certain trees and they will be replaced by more “fun” talents. Now all that is left to see is if these “fun” talents don’t make certain classes too overpowered.

PvE rogues have not been left out and by looking at the patch notes of the PTR of patch 3.2.2 we can see Blizzard is already implementing PvE Assassination changes to already start bringing diversity to the PvE rogue scene mostly dominated by combat. The aim is to bring daggers back to the PvE world which has basically forced rogues to use heavier weapons for quite some time. The way Blizzard is doing this is by buffing up the good old ability Envenom. To put it simply Envenom’s damage will be buffed and the Master Poisoner talent will have a 33/66/100% chance of preventing Envenom from consuming Deadly Poison which will solve a very basic problem with Envenom which is the reduction of DoT.

That’s all for now! Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with breaking news!

Just to clarify the “weekly” part of Rogue Weekly, We will try to submit one article a week concerning the Rogue and PvP community such as news.

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