ETA on Shadow Dance Fix
I think I said before that changing the bar won't happen soon. It will be after Nov 13 and Lich King ships. The change to the cooldown on the openers should be in now on beta and very soon on live. (src)
Fan of Knives
We'd love to get rogue AE higher if we can do it where Fan is only used for AE and not as a general part of the single-target rotation. (src)
Hemo usability
But the charges are the entire point. Hemo is supposed to be a debuff, not an alternative to Sinister Strike. It in fact yields better damage per energy than Sinister Strike untalented and it's only the talents that prop up the latter ability. Adding more Hemo talents just gives you another high dps, spammable attack.
It is true that the rogue personally may not benefit a lot from Hemo when the charges get used up correctly. I think the attitude that that is "bad" just stems from the "winning the damage meters" mentality, not whether the ability helps you beat the boss. I'm not saying that looking at damage meters makes you shallow. I understand a nearsighted raid leader may not take you if your personal dps is low, but we're also not sure what to do about that until we can come up with some kind of "raid contribution" measurement that includes your buffs and debuffs. (src)
Developer Q/A (src)
Like what you plan to do with sub?
We recently made some changes to boost it, such as moving Dual-Wield Spec to tier 1 combat.
Why is hemo so bad?
It has a great debuff that boosts raid damage. It’s not intended to be Sinister Strike.
Why is Shadow Dance dagger only?
We agree with the above comment that it can do a lot of different things. You may just be focusing too much on it as a +dps cooldown.
Whether you feel rogue mobility is fine?
Rogues have a lot going for them in the way of stuns, damage avoidance and “get out of jail” cards. When you get up on other classes, they do have a tendency to die. We’re not sure we want rogues to also be zipping around the battlefield like warriors.
What is happening with Lightning Reflexes?
We mentioned this as a possible change (or perhaps we even promised it -- I don't recall) but it didn't materialize because we found other knobs to turn in combat that felt better during playtesting. Because LR is a passive talent, the side benefits would also end up being passive.
What is the deal with the Glyph of Sprint?
If I understand the question, I think it's just a tooltip bug. The glyph was made before the base cooldown of Sprint was lowered from 5 minutes to 3 minutes (2 min talented). If that's not the issue, can you elaborate a little more?
Why is there a major glyph of feint?
Basically, rogues have relatively few abilities, and we were desperate for something that wouldn’t have serious PvP balance ramifications. I agree this might be a good candidate for a minor glyph. Remember that we are going to be adding a lot more glyphs over time. You shouldn't view this as one of your very few useful glyphs is less useful, because you'll eventually have a lot of choices.
Why is Fan of Knives so weak with daggers, and even weak with swords?
It's designed to give you a button to hit when you want to AE. It's not supposed to turn you into an AE class, if that makes sense.
Are you happy with Hunger For Blood being horrible for PvP, and like the old Rampage for PvE?
No, not completely. We understand that CC + a short duration limit how often you can benefit from it. Obviously, we think removing MS and Hamstring was a little too good, just because those are generally hard debuffs to get out of.
How exactly are expose, mind numbing and wound major raid utility, when they so obviously are not?
Couple of things here, and forgive me for being a little brief.
First, I am reading between the lines a little here that it would be really nice to have a unique buff or debuff. Everyone asks for that, but it defeats the whole point.
Second, Expose is one of the strongest debuffs in the game. The dps increase can be 30% or more. So I suspect what you're really getting at is that "we'll always have a warrior with us doing that debuff." The whole point of the revamp is we can’t assume you have anyone but we still want you to be able to get the buff. Mind Numbing is a cast speed debuff that is only offered by one other class (warlocks), and another class that doesn’t even exist in the game at the moment. Granted, it doesn't offer the benefit of Expose. Wounding Poison offers the strongest debuff in the game for PvP, and also offers some dps to not over-penalize rogues who are balanced around poison damage.
Third, ultimately we still want raids to want rogues because they bring good dps. We just don't want it to feel that only the rogues (hunters, mages and locks) are doing the group's dps.
Will there be a mutilate/HFB/cold blood/Assassination oriented glyph made before release?
Probably. We do want to add more glyphs over time, just like new gems started to show up in BC.
Overkill - why is it the pre-req to mutilate?
It's always a hard call to decide what prereqs to what. We do like talent prereqs, and it seems like a good talent regardless. Are you wanting to skip it?
It has been stated that there is a plan to still have some poison immune mob/bosses in WotLK, what can a mutilate rogue do during these situations. Mages were helped with frostfire to combat the fire immune/frost immune mobs, but the poison requirement on mutilate still exist and when dealing with poison immune mobs, we're(for the lack of a better term) seriously screwed in our dps. I still don't understand why our signature move(for assassination) still has this requirement when it still cost 60 energy.
Poisons are what the rogues are balanced around, so we need to be pretty careful about that now. I can't promise there won't be any poison immune bosses -- resistance and immunity are things we can change on a boss to make the fight play out pretty differently from the previous boss. But there won't be a lot of them.
