Rogue Tanking

[Hodenmaik]

I'm quite upset about the impending changes to rogue tanking.

I created my rogue specifically to tank. If you explain the concept of being essentially immune to physical damage to anyone, it sounds incredible.

However, in reality, it only works in certain situations.
If the boss uses any form of stun or other hard crowd control, you can't tank. If taunting the boss is necessary, you can't tank. If the boss deals spell-based damage, you can't tank. And there are plenty of other factors.

It requires specific items and causes a significant loss in damage per second. You don't have 100% dodge/parry uptime while soloing. It's absurd to think that anyone is wandering around and soloing raid bosses.

Even in raids, it only works on certain bosses. Take Loatheb, for example. The boss becomes simpler, but I imagine we could still have a hunter's pet tank it in the future, continuously healed by Mend Pet with healing gear. This boss can still be handled quite easily.

Patchwerk hateful strike tanking is another case. I believe you could still manage this with an evasion rotation. It was done in vanilla/Classic WoW, so this nerf doesn't change anything.

As for AQ40 trash, it remains doable with a small group, just as it was in Classic/Vanilla WoW.

Regardless of your opinion on Turtle WoW content and rogue tanking, it's important to remember that rogue tanking worked throughout the original TBC, and the game was perfectly balanced as a result.

Why remove an entire raid role instead of adjusting it a bit

[Healthyboundary]

Bring back Rogue tanking and make Combat Rogue great again!

[Kairion]

I'm quite upset about the impending changes to rogue tanking.

I created my rogue specifically to tank. If you explain the concept of being essentially immune to physical damage to anyone, it sounds incredible.

However, in reality, it only works in certain situations.
If the boss uses any form of stun or other hard crowd control, you can't tank. If taunting the boss is necessary, you can't tank. If the boss deals spell-based damage, you can't tank. And there are plenty of other factors.

It requires specific items and causes a significant loss in damage per second. You don't have 100% dodge/parry uptime while soloing. It's absurd to think that anyone is wandering around and soloing raid bosses.

Even in raids, it only works on certain bosses. Take Loatheb, for example. The boss becomes simpler, but I imagine we could still have a hunter's pet tank it in the future, continuously healed by Mend Pet with healing gear. This boss can still be handled quite easily.

Patchwerk hateful strike tanking is another case. I believe you could still manage this with an evasion rotation. It was done in vanilla/Classic WoW, so this nerf doesn't change anything.

As for AQ40 trash, it remains doable with a small group, just as it was in Classic/Vanilla WoW.

Regardless of your opinion on Turtle WoW content and rogue tanking, it's important to remember that rogue tanking worked throughout the original TBC, and the game was perfectly balanced as a result.

Why remove an entire raid role instead of adjusting it a bit

Funny that you bring up TBC - in Sunwell they specifically added a dodge penalty aura to the entire place so druid and rogues couldn't be completely melee immune there. Blizzard specifically stated they screwed up with the dodge stats and gave characters too much dodge in endgame gear.

Quite simply, there are quite a few bossfights that are massively unfun for the entire raid when the tank is immune to all physical damage. Twin Emperors, Patchwerk, Instructor razuvious, Mandokir & Oghan as well as a few others are completely trivialized with a rogue tank and simply an unfun experience for everyone else in the raid.

Its just easier to give flurrish a cooldown than to implement a cockblock ability for each of these bosses so people have to actually do the intended mechanics for them.

Adding rogue tank i think was mainly done for the fun novelty of it, but rogue due to being a dodge reliant class just doesn't work as a tank in endgame situations because of the way mobs criticals work. Either you survive it or you are straight up one shot. The only way you can make rogue tank work is by bringing mechanics like dmg staggering into the game (and at that point its just monk) or by massively buffing his pvp performance due to the additional survivability given. Its the same problem as with shamans. The class doesn't function as a tank if it is to remain close to what classic intended

But i do admit, same as with shaman, dangling the carrot with the promise to be able to tank in front of someone just to having reality hit in and be completely otherwise sucks.

[Drubarrymooer]

So a lot of people are crapping on these changes, and I agree, it kinda sucks. But I also agree with the dev's statement that its a zero sum game. It fundamentally takes healing a tank out of the question, and that's not the way the game was designed. HOWEVER, if you read the wording, they make mention of paying attention to rogue development in regards to rogue tanking in the future. From what I've heard on the grapevine is the when the dev's found out about it, they were interested in it. I truly believe that they are working on a different implementation of it.

[Tendies]

Rogue Tanking ruined

Good

[Hodenmaik]

Sunwell Radiance was never really about rogue tanking. The main issue was for tanks in general; tank healing felt too random back then. Even with that debuff, it was still possible to maintain 100% avoidance with a proper trinket and ability rotation.

Regarding Twin Emperors: they aren't affected by that change. You can still tank with Ghostly Strike, Flourish, and another Ghostly Strike. Healing the physical damage was never an issue in my raids. In my experience, the biggest challenge was the Warlock tank.

As for Patchwerk: Hateful Strike is his main damage output and rogues can still dodge-tank it. Now, they just need to rotate, which can be easily managed by reducing health.

Instructor Razuvious: He is only tanked in the beginning. After that, you should have the NPC rotation. You can't keep up with the raid aggro after the NPCs taunt. Even with the Flourish nerf, this initial tanking is still possible.

Concerning Mandokir: He should charge and use AoE fear, which can easily kill a rogue tank. If this isn't happening on Turtle WoW, the server should address this issue.

"Simply an unfun experience for everyone else in the raid" - what are you referring to? Having a tank that mitigates a lot of damage is unfun? I've never heard complaints about a tank being too well-equipped.

"By massively buffing his PvP performance due to the additional survivability given" - rogue tanking has nothing to do with PvP performance, and nobody ever asked for this.

"But I do admit, the same as with Shaman, dangling the carrot with the promise to be able to tank in front of someone, just to have reality hit in and be completely otherwise, sucks." Are you complaining that it's too good of a tank, just to say that it isn't? This makes no sense.

Rogue Tanking was a niche role and was only viable on a handful of bosses. You're acting as if raids were a breeze and boring. Even so, you could only list a few bosses that were affected, and they still are.

[Hodenmaik]

So a lot of people are crapping on these changes, and I agree, it kinda sucks. But I also agree with the dev's statement that its a zero sum game. It fundamentally takes healing a tank out of the question, and that's not the way the game was designed. HOWEVER, if you read the wording, they make mention of paying attention to rogue development in regards to rogue tanking in the future. From what I've heard on the grapevine is the when the dev's found out about it, they were interested in it. I truly believe that they are working on a different implementation of it.

There's still spell damage in the game. It's not like healers are out of a job. I mean, tanks use AoE Taunt with Limited Invulnerability Potion, and have you ever heard anyone complain?

I understand that it can seem extreme when a boss only deals melee swings, but don't people realize how few bosses and mobs actually do this?

I don't believe they'll introduce anything as enjoyable as this. Even if they do, my gear will most likely be useless. And why would they remove it without proposing an alternative?

Should I consider starting another class project, given that they could remove it at any point if it becomes a viable alternative or people start to recognize that it's a functioning option?

[Kairion]

Sunwell Radiance was never really about rogue tanking. The main issue was for tanks in general; tank healing felt too random back then. Even with that debuff, it was still possible to maintain 100% avoidance with a proper trinket and ability rotation.

Regarding Twin Emperors: they aren't affected by that change. You can still tank with Ghostly Strike, Flourish, and another Ghostly Strike. Healing the physical damage was never an issue in my raids. In my experience, the biggest challenge was the Warlock tank.

As for Patchwerk: Hateful Strike is his main damage output and rogues can still dodge-tank it. Now, they just need to rotate, which can be easily managed by reducing health.

Instructor Razuvious: He is only tanked in the beginning. After that, you should have the NPC rotation. You can't keep up with the raid aggro after the NPCs taunt. Even with the Flourish nerf, this initial tanking is still possible.

Concerning Mandokir: He should charge and use AoE fear, which can easily kill a rogue tank. If this isn't happening on Turtle WoW, the server should address this issue.

"Simply an unfun experience for everyone else in the raid" - what are you referring to? Having a tank that mitigates a lot of damage is unfun? I've never heard complaints about a tank being too well-equipped.

"By massively buffing his PvP performance due to the additional survivability given" - rogue tanking has nothing to do with PvP performance, and nobody ever asked for this.

"But I do admit, the same as with Shaman, dangling the carrot with the promise to be able to tank in front of someone, just to have reality hit in and be completely otherwise, sucks." Are you complaining that it's too good of a tank, just to say that it isn't? This makes no sense.

Rogue Tanking was a niche role and was only viable on a handful of bosses. You're acting as if raids were a breeze and boring. Even so, you could only list a few bosses that were affected, and they still are.

I reference the fact that being completely irrelevant as a healer in a fight is unfun. And mandokir and Razuvious have no enrage timer, so it is entirely possible to cheese it without DPS being a limiting factor either. Making the entire bossfights success reliant on one person keeping his rotation up. In mandokirs case especially you can basically solo him if you can somehow deal with the fear

It was never a "meta" thing to do, but its not a healthy state of a game when something is borderline soloing raidbosses in one instance but its unusable in others (For instance you couldn't tank huhuran, because one sleep and she murders you)

Me referencing rogue being "unsavageable as tank" comes down to every tank needing a certain threshhold of "worst case" mitigation. A completely melee immune tank is obviously problematic. So this shouldn't reliably be possible. but at the same time rogue would need a tool to survive if he does not dodge/parry a incoming hit. That sort of dmg mitigation could be hugely influental in PvP if rogue tank gets this buff to be usable in PvE.

Rogue tank completely trivializes some of the hardest encounters in the game. If it would be used on pre-raid / t1 content i wouldn't care, but some of the hardest challenges in the game being solved by a custom spell that wasn't properly evaluated before implementation should obviously not be a thing.

Edit: With the patchwerk scenario, i think having rogues rotate is not as bad as the other fights, it introduces possible failure points (via the rogues not coordinating properly), making it a risky tradeoff to take.

[Drubarrymooer]

There's still spell damage in the game. It's not like healers are out of a job. I mean, tanks use AoE Taunt with Limited Invulnerability Potion, and have you ever heard anyone complain?

I don't understand how this is relevant?

I understand that it can seem extreme when a boss only deals melee swings, but don't people realize how few bosses and mobs actually do this?

Quite a lot of them do, however the main ones like Patchwerk, Raz, etc were just blatently being cheesed.

I don't believe they'll introduce anything as enjoyable as this. Even if they do, my gear will most likely be useless. And why would they remove it without proposing an alternative?

They explained why in their post....because it was cheesing some fights and some people were using it for ill-gotten gains. On top of that, development takes time. They didn't intend to have rogues be tanking and when they found out about it, they didn't put the kibosh on it right away. If you read the wording in the dev post, they say pay attention to it in the future. I wouldn't assume your gear will be useless. TWoW is always tweaking/reworking gear. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. Like the devs said....stay tuned to find out.

Should I consider starting another class project, given that they could remove it at any point if it becomes a viable alternative or people start to recognize that it's a functioning option?

I mean, that's a risk you run playing any online based game. Whether it be TWoW, Retail, another private server, ESO, FFIV, etc, etc.

Rogue tanks are not tanking anything with spell damage for the most part, and if they are, they're not mitigating it like most tanks do via cd's. I've raid tanked with rogues as OT's pretty consistently and they're not tanking any mobs where they'd be taking spell dmg unless its a trash mob that doesn't hit particularly hard.

I'm not trying to poopoo your post or your feelings. I just wanted to reiterate what the devs said. It might be dead in its current iteration, but I highly doubt its gone for good.

[Bayanni]

The main issue is that rogue tanks were offered tools to do exactly what they asked for in Flourish and Agitating Poison. This gave them both threat generation, something completely useless outside of group PvE content, and a 20% avoidance finishing move. There's no way to interpret this other than TWoW likes the idea of rogue tanks.

Then their make-or-break tool Flourish, the thing that made the entire build feasible, was nerfed to make it unusable for any PvE tanking situation. It's already pretty much worthless in PvP. It still has some niche uses in solo play.

It's mixed messaging and the devs gave some explanation of why, except they already did a rogue tanking nerf before this one that made avoidance cap at 80% when "solo". This, in practice, seems to be any group of 10 or less people can't reach avoidance cap as rogues currently cannot tank anything in UBRS even when they should be able to, meaning their ONLY tanking options are raids right now. Then that was removed too. They're literally worse off than before any of this was implemented as now that can't even emergency evasion tank in dungeons and can't solo content in dungeons they could before like DM:E.

I fully agree that rogue tanking in raids was a bit of a problem. There were new strats emerging all the time and more and more bosses were being trivialized. I heard one rogue actually tanked Morgraine in 4hm on a successful kill attempt. Spell-damage is rarely enough to 1-shot someone from a boss so rogues could actually tank a lot more than we initially thought; they'd just get healed like a normal tank and would negate all of the physical damage. It needed an alteration.

This change, however, is just a nerf with nothing on the horizon to give rogues to let them tank again. They're specifically, precisely, and expressly steered towards the tank role as an option by the devs themselves only to feel a hard whiplash in August. It's not fair to them.

[Redmagejoe]

Lot of words here, but the bottom line is that just because the devs were enthusiastic about something and tried to make something work, it doesn't mean they gave it all the duly necessary foresight and consideration before implementing it. Saying it's "not fair" to people because something that is objectively problematic to game design and because the devs made a mistake isn't helping anyone or anything. If the devs made a mistake and gave every character a Thunderfury, should they just cave and leave it in because it's "not fair" now?

The devs clearly want the concept of Rogue tanking to exist, and they clearly are trying to devise solutions, even if some are off the mark. They're not perfect and they don't have the resources of a multi-million dollar company, so rather than bemoaning the missteps, let's try to take some solace in the fact that they're experimenting and taking feedback into consideration and not circling the wagons on bad design decisions.

[Drubarrymooer]

Lot of words here, but the bottom line is that just because the devs were enthusiastic about something and tried to make something work, it doesn't mean they gave it all the duly necessary foresight and consideration before implementing it. Saying it's "not fair" to people because something that is objectively problematic to game design and because the devs made a mistake isn't helping anyone or anything. If the devs made a mistake and gave every character a Thunderfury, should they just cave and leave it in because it's "not fair" now?

The devs clearly want the concept of Rogue tanking to exist, and they clearly are trying to devise solutions, even if some are off the mark. They're not perfect and they don't have the resources of a multi-million dollar company, so rather than bemoaning the missteps, let's try to take some solace in the fact that they're experimenting and taking feedback into consideration and not circling the wagons on bad design decisions.

Well stated!

[Trismegistos]

I do believe a 40-second cooldown will harm Flourish unnecessarily much. In its current state, rogue tanking is not realistically about building up large combo point pools, but rather about getting one or two, then changing targets to maintain area threat (in dungeons) or juggling Flourish and Slice and Dice uptime while trying to weave in one or two 5-combo Eviscerates (over the duration of a raid boss fight). Many raid bosses can be tanked by rogues despite not having unhittable avoidance, but reaching that point certainly makes them trivial.

I fully agree with the Turtle developers that being unhittable, while thrilling for the rogue, ruins the fun for many others in the raid; healers become useless, other tanks become useless, in certain fights (Patchwerk) even melee become useless. In this sense, it is absolutely the right move to somehow prevent rogues from reaching avoidance cap. However, I don't think a cooldown is the way to go. Rogues have the lowest armor of all tanks (paladins and warriors wear plate with a shield, shamans wear mail with a shield, druids have a massive armor buff from bear form giving them the highest armor values reachable in game), no raw damage reduction (in the same vein as Defensive Stance), no threat multiplier (Defensive Stance, Righteous Fury, bear form, Rockbiter Weapon (I don't know shaman tanking, so I'm not sure if it sees any use)).

Flourish, in a single ability, gives rogues most of their tanking potential. It not only reduces damage taken, it also grants the rogue Riposte procs (which is a great source of low-cost threat and additional mitigation due to its disarming effect) and parry haste, which further increases auto attack damage and poison procs, allowing for Agitating Poison to build up threat comparable to other tanks. It would be almost an understatement to say that rogue tanks rely on Flourish.

Not only would a 40-second cooldown reduce the rogue's mitigation, but also their threat. This would have largely harmful implications on the rogue tanking community, essentially destroying what interest has started to form for this niche build. Dangling a "future patch" in front of us with such a gruesome nerf seems almost insulting. How long would we have to wait to get to play the characters we have grown to love? I don't think going nuclear on rogue tanking just because some have reached avoidance cap is the correct response.

Instead, I propose that the effect of flourish is simply adjusted: rather than 20% parry, it could give 15% or 10%, but an additional X% of damage reduction, and Y% threat multiplier. The threat bonus would help alleviate the loss of riposte procs and parry haste, and the damage reduction would shift the rogue from straight-up avoidance tanking into a form more in line with the other tanks, though still heavily avoidance-based. This would make damage less spiky and unpredictable, giving healers more of a chance to react to what is going on.

Another alternative would be to reduce the chances of crushing and critical strikes on the rogue – without a shield to block with, with low armor and a health pool on the small side, rogues are extremely weak to both.

[Gantulga]

Effectively removing rogue tanking without giving all those promised reworks just comes off as a spiteful, kneejerk reaction to a complete non-issue.

[Whalemilk]

Who cares.

The class was not made for tanking. If you want to tank… play a tanking class.

[Trismegistos]

Who cares.

The class was not made for tanking. If you want to tank… play a tanking class.

Clearly with the additions on Turtle the class was re-made to tank. Rogues have no other major changes on Turtle than Flourish, giving them a 20% parry buff, and Agitating Poison, giving them extra threat. In the Turtle canon, rogues have been tanking for some time now, and suddenly it is being gutted. Who cares about what Blizzard thought rogues should be doing?

[Mativh]

Rogues are masters of stealth, which is essentially the opposite of tanking, from all non-tanks they have the most insight to threat generation, as they attempt to do the opposite of it, while sneaking.
Considering this, they could use this knowledge to generate threat if they wanted to, it is just not in their nature, but they should technically be capable of it.
Therefore, if they had an ability generating threat, talents improving stealth should also improve it.

[Kairion]

Rogues are masters of stealth, which is essentially the opposite of tanking, from all non-tanks they have the most insight to threat generation, as they attempt to do the opposite of it, while sneaking.
Considering this, they could use this knowledge to generate threat if they wanted to, it is just not in their nature, but they should technically be capable of it.
Therefore, if they had an ability generating threat, talents improving stealth should also improve it.

Thats some doube jumping to conclusion
By that logic warlocks should be able to cast frost spells, since they are adept at fire and frost is just the opposite.

They have aggitating poison to generate threat, which makes sense, so if anything poison related skills can be leveraged to boost rogues threat generation