POST CATEGORY : Blizzcon

An Interview with Paryah

Hey everyone, Haileaus here. I thought it would be cool to interview Paryah post-Blizzcon, so I did! Hope you enjoy!

Part 1 – Legion

Ok, so I’m way out of the loop. What happened with the whole Legion thing? Did we win?

We did! We…um…defeated the Legion? We assume? …since the last raid isn’t quite here yet. But yes, Sylvanas and Anduin, at least, live to fight another day. And fight they will.

What is the current state of the rogue class? I know Legion brought lots of changes, are there any generalizations you can make that would help old fogeys like me decide if we want to learn the new ways?

The state of rogue is good. There are always things that we might like tweaked or changed, but for the most part Assassination and Subtlety are both acceptable. Outlaw boasts fun gameplay but damage-wise it falls a little behind the other two. What it lacks in competitiveness, it makes up for with swagger, so all is not lost.

Even before Alpha there was drama about the rogue HQ being in Dalaran instead of Ravenholdt. In your eyes, how did it turn out?

When I first visited the rogue class hall I was super impressed with the detail and care that they put into it. It really is an amazing place and very roguelike. That said, as the expansion wore on, I began to wish once again that we had been put at Ravenholdt. Being able to get away from Dalaran to our own space that felt more like a rogue enclave and less like a seedy bar would have been nice. There is a teleport to Ravenholdt item that spawns in the class hall that you can pick up. Delightfully, it allows you to get to Ravenholdt from anywhere. I did find myself wishing for a permanent portal though, rather like the one that the monks got to go to Kun-lai Summit. And the druid hall is spoiled for portal choices. When all is said and done, I think it worked. Just <stares wistfully into space>, I like Ravenholdt…

 

Part 2 – Blizzcon and Beyond

Ok, now to the more relevant bits. You attended Blizzcon. How was it? Did you get a chance to say hi to Daxxarri?

Blizzcon was amazing. My expectation was that I’d be able to see more panels than I have in previous years on the Virtual Ticket, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. There was so much going on and so many people to meet…it was differently awesome than the Virtual Ticket. It was much more of a social experience. I met so many super cool people. Relevant to us, I met Celestalon who is a total sweetie and Perculia of Wowhead who I think is a Demon Hunter now but certainly used to main rogue. I also met Mitch and Matt of Blizzard Watch who write awesome stuff. I even got to shake Ion Hazzikostas’ hand and we exchanged a few words. He was wonderful. Sadly I did not get to meet Daxxarri. I would very much have liked to. Next year!

What upcoming feature(s) are you most excited about?

I think that I’m most excited about the new races. I’ve wanted to be a Zandalari troll since Mists and I am gratified that my prediction that Horde would get Nightbourne turned out to be correct. I had predicted High Elves for Alliance, but Void Elves are the next best thing – though I confess I’d hoped that Alleria would join Sylvanas on the Horde side. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to trying them all out. I may even roll a Dark Iron Dwarf. Maybe.

I read Fans and Ravenholdt’s Rogue Recap and I see we’re getting a bunch of new races. My question is, when will the Tauren rogues finally come out of stealth?

Ha. Only with the judicious use of toys, I fear. Despite being a fairly common ask, rogues have once again dodged the bovine bullet.

I hear PvE servers are going away, which could mean a legitimate return of world PvP. As the traditional master of ganks, what do you think this means for the rogue class?

This will be interesting. PvP mode will be toggleable, but only in major cities so you will have to go forth into the world having made the decision to PvP. My first thought was that the PvP targets may be reduced, but on reflection, with higher rewards for PvP mode and those who are really opposed to PvP able to opt out, I think it will make for a livelier and overall better experience for everyone.

Finally, Vanilla servers are coming back. Thoughts?

This is an interesting one. I was never among those who called for support of vanilla servers, but I find myself thrilled at the prospect of revisiting old haunts and getting to remember old quests. I will be an enthusiastic vanilla tourist. That said, my suspicion is that a large number of those calling for vanilla servers (not all to be sure) are wanting to relive the social experience and the newness of the MMO. I feel that those people, many of whom are in different places than they were in their lives, will find themselves disappointed and I fear that they will blame their disappointment on Blizzard for giving them exactly what they asked for. This is all speculation, of course, because Blizzard still hasn’t totally decided how they are going to implement the experience. Will we get a vanilla world and vanilla quests but with modern graphics and optimizations? Will there be flying and other more recent conveniences? Or will we all be in a way-it-was, more pixelated world, jogging about trying to figure out how quests work and what herbs are pickable? Will the Classic servers remain vanilla, or will they get expansions as time passes? Only time will tell but I’ll be excited to see how it all plays out.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I thoroughly recommend the Blizzcon experience. For getting the straight information, the Virtual Ticket is great, but nothing beats being there in person. The people and their energy make the con. It is so apparent how hard each Blizzard employee works to pull this thing off. And you still get the Virtual Ticket as well.

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Blizzcon 2017 Rogue Recap

Following this week’s Fans of Knives it’s been hard to miss that we have a new expansion on our hands. There was a large focus on gameplay features and progress systems in Blizzard’s presentations this year. I’m certain that Blizzard managed to make many people happy with largely sought after features such as a revamped leveling experience with scaling zones, no less than six new playable races, scrapping of the current legendary system in exchange for the new Heart of Azeroth and last but not least the announcement that a vanilla legacy server is finally in the works! (For which Blizzard is currently searching for a software engineer if any reader feels up for the challenge.)

In the shadows of these huge announcements we rogues were in good company of all other classes. There were no groundbreaking class announcements as we’ve had previous years. This doesn’t mean that our classes will stay the same or that you should worry about being stuck with that thing you didn’t like. The class devs are of course hard at work improving and polishing our classes, there’s a lot of work to be done considering that we’re losing a lot of mechanics and abilities when the artifact weapons and legendary effects are phased out.

A sneak peek into this work can be gleaned from the playable Battle for Azeroth demo that was playable at Blizzcon. Two major features were that classes are once again getting an unique class buff and that there will be another major stat and item level squish. We had the opportunity to see some ability and talent changes already in the works. Below I’ve made a recap of the first public view on new talents.

All specs

  • Expose armor seems to be our class buff. 5% increased physical damage, gets applied by our generators.
  • Feint gets reduced from 50% to 40% AoE damage reduction.

Assassination

  • Crimson Tempest is back as a level 100 talent and replaces Death from Above on the level 100 talent row.
  • Poison Bomb is now a level 100 talent with 4% chance per Combo Point and replaces Venom rush.
  • Venom Rush is moved to level 90 and replaces Alacrity – now reduces mutilate cost by 5 energy on poisoned targets, and moved to tier 90.
  • Master Assassin is now a level 30 talent and replaces Shadow Focus – 50% increased crit chance for 3 seconds after breaking stealth.
  • Iron Wire is a new level 75 talent that replaces Thugee – increase the duration of Garrote’s silence effect to 8 sec. Enemies silenced by Garrote deal 15% reduced damage for 8 sec.

Outlaw

  • Grappling Hook baseline becomes baseline with 1 minute CD.
  • A new talent Retractable Hook takes Grappling Hooks place for a level 30 talent. – Reduces cooldown on Grappling Hook by 30 seconds
  • Loaded Dice becomes a talent on the level 100 row and replaces DfA.
  • Blinding Powder is a new level 100 talent that replaces Parley. – Reduces the cooldown of Blind by 30 sec and increases its range by 15 yards.

Subtlety

  • Tangled Shadows changed to Shot in the Dark, your first Cheap Shot after stealthing is free.
  • Shuriken Combo gets nerfed from 10% per stack to 5%.

Our class buff becomes Expose Armor, which works differently than it has before. The current iteration simply requires us to be on a target using our abilities to work. The effectiveness will go down if we have more than one target however, and how this works on our AoE generating abilities remain to be seen. All in all I doubt this is a change that will have any impact on us as rogues. It means that you would always want to make sure you have a rogue on your raiding roster but this is nothing new for our class.

There’s always been a lot of speculation about rogue survivability. Cloak of Shadows, Cheat Death, and Feint are extremely strong tools that, more as a rule than as an exception, have been vitally strategy defining on at least one boss per tier. I’m happy to see that these have so far not been butchered; survivability is currently the main raid utility we have. I hope to see us keep these tools into the future as well, even if at a reduced effectiveness.

Certain legendaries or artifact traits have been converted to talents. So far we can see Poison Bomb (trait), Master Assassin (Legendary shoulders) and Loaded Dice (trait) being refitted as talents. There’s also a lot of room to see our current traits and legendary effects coming back in the Heart of Azeroth system. The changes in the Assassination tree also point to the creation of an AoE row which lets you tune around massive AoE, controlled AoE, and perishable adds coming throughout the fight. Interesting!

Another thing that has people excited is that Grappling Hook is now a baseline ability for the Outlaw spec. Cooldown has been increased to 60 seconds, but in its place there’s a new talent to reduce it to 30 seconds again. This means you can both have the extra burst of mobility from Grappling Hook, as well as either the attack range increase from Acrobatic Strikes or the extra movement speed from Hit and Run.

Personally I’m looking forward to this expansion and to following the development of our awesome class from now to when we get to make everyone feel uneasy about being in the shadows when they have world PvP toggled on!

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