Rogue Q&A Released

We’re down to our last two class Q&A’s and it’s time for the rogue class to have the spotlight. As you know these class q&a’s are really more for knowing what the development team has in mind for the classes going forward especially in terms of design philosophy. You can see the whole Rogue Q&A here. As usual it’s Ghostcrawler giving the answers.

two rogues posing in group shot

Rogues used to be the the class with the best dps but now Blizzard has been pushing them into being more normal and having some utility instead.

Blizzard is very happy with the combo point/finisher system that rogues use. In fact there’s a risk of making other classes adapt a similar system but that would make rogues less unique.

Vanish is not working properly. A possible solution to the problem would be to make the rogue always enter stealth for a minimum of 1 second.

A long term plan is in the works to change Hunger for Blood wherein it will be more reactive and used for certain situations instead of just a plain passive damage increase.

Blizzard would like to buff the Subtlety tree a bit to make it more competitive but they want to be careful since if they make it too good, then every rogue would want to play subtlety because of its utility.

Cloak of Shadows isn’t meant to be an I-win button. Buffing it further would give them an unfair advantage even in PvP, by being immune to thing they shouldn’t be immune to.

They would like to make rogue survivability a lot easier by making some active abilities passive, like the Feint change.

Blizzard could allow rogues to be able to take more damage. Rogues seem to rely on crowd control a lot and if they can’t do this, the rogue just takes too much damage. They might allow rogues to be able to take some punishment while cooldowns are active.

Blizzard could allow a weapon swapping feature in the future similar the Diablo 2. This could be the answer for those weapon swapping macros rogues use. But they don’t feel like it’s something they need to address right now.

They’re allowing rogues to use one handed axes because of itemization and because it fits with the rogue image anyway. They felt they were dropping one handed maces a bit too much and wanted some variety in what players would use.