Wait, It's all mastery?
While I don't want to be upset constantly, Season 2 of The War Within continues a troubling trend for the tier bonuses of Assassination Rogues. More Mastery buffs. Looking back at the tier bonuses since they were added back with the last season of Shadowlands, a pattern that continues with our newest bonuses emerges.
There have been some interesting tier set bonuses, such as the first tier set from 9.2 which had
Grudge Match (now
Arterial Precision). Season 2 of Dragonflight also had
Poisoned Edges (which is now
Lingering Darkness).
Rapid Injection itself is a simpler version of
Envenomous Explosion. That being said, the vast majority of them are not interesting. Take this list of previous tier sets:
All these bonuses have one thing in common: they are all thinly veiled mastery buffs. Some of them hide it better than others, of course, but buffing
Envenom, nature damage, poison damage, buffing all bleeds, it all remains a steadfast design Blizzard continues to re-use over and over again when making Assassination tier sets.
When looking at a tier set bonus, I'm looking for something that either changes how I approach my talents in a new way, introduces a change in gameplay, or meaningfully shifts my damage profile. We have seen plenty of generic
Envenom and
Rupture buffs and other mastery-similar effects, yet this is where we are again heading with Season 2 of The War Within, making the Season 2 Tier Bonus functionally identical to the current tier bonus, but worse.
The big gamble
The 4pc is quite strange, starting with the verbiage of "have a chance to instead gain maximum stacks". Anything other than 100% makes little sense, and the implication of the tooltip that it isn't such is very concerning. Assassination Rogues cast roughly 14 finishers per minute in raids and mythic+. There is a 15% chance that the 2pc will lose the streak, which averages around two lost streaks per minute. If we assume a 100% chance to proc the 4pc bonus, that would give the 4pc bonus a 13% uptime. The TLDR is that this is a
REALLY BAD bonus, both in impact and uptime, with early estimates putting the 4pc at around 1%. After testing the bonus on the PTR, we've come to some conclusions, estimations, (and bugs) about how the bonuses interact and function. Let me go through what is weird about the effects and how they're probably intended to work:
The first piece of news surprisingly is positive:
Crimson Tempest does not snapshot, meaning there is no benefit in trying to cram a
Rupture or
Crimson Tempest into the bonus from the 4-piece. After that, I sadly hit the 15% chance of losing my positivity streak.
We quickly found that
Winning Streak! is very bugged, because while it says that
Rupture and
Crimson Tempest "have a 15% chance to remove
Winning Streak!", it actually is a 15% chance
per tick of
Rupture and
Crimson Tempest, not per cast. This is a huge difference and means that
Winning Streak! is removed instantly in AoE the moment it procs. We don't believe this is intended and will get fixed, but fixing it frankly makes the 4-piece bonus implementation even more strange because it hurts the uptime, and this is where things, to me, are simply indefensible from a design perspective. At the top of this section, I mentioned that if the 4-piece has a 100% chance to proc, the uptime would still be very low and sadly not impactful. After testing, the "a chance" in the tooltip of the 4-piece seems to land between 20% and 25%. That is abysmal. With the current bug on the 2-piece, this is almost manageable since we would be losing every stack instantly and cycling this effect a lot more; however, when that gets fixed, we're back to losing the streak roughly twice per minute, with each one of those then having this 20-25% chance to proc the 4-piece. What ends up happening is that the 4-piece would be activating on average once every 2 minutes. A single 4-second window. Every 2 minutes. Also as a side note, the "30% additional" seems to be 50%, but the hope is that this is only a tooltip bug.
Sadly, this is only the start of the problems. Remember that we must cast a finisher (most likely
Envenom, as this is our primary finisher) to lose
Winning Streak!. The
Rogue Assassination 11.1 Class Set 4pc then gives us 4 seconds of maximum stacks to increase the damage of our finishers (again, fitting an
Envenom into the window). But in losing
Winning Streak!, we naturally drop to zero
Combo Points, which means the first 2-3 seconds of this 4-second window is spent generating the
Combo Points back (at the mercy of critical strikes from
Seal Fate) to cast a buffed
Envenom. This is where the issue forms. Assassination, unlike most specs in the game, is not always casting. By design, we constantly run out of
Energy in single target encounters. Blizzard has been somewhat on the fence about whether or not pooling
Energy should be a gameplay feature of Assassination or if simply running out of
Energy is acceptable. Our current rotation mostly leaves out pooling
Energy, making
Rogue Assassination 11.1 Class Set 4pc difficult or sometimes even impossible to use. The window is too tight to generate
Combo Points back and still have time to
Envenom. In that way, the tier set could hypothetically promote a gameplay change, but in the worst way possible. Instead of having to manage your energy and pool as rewarding gameplay, in this situation, Assassination would have a pass/fail of pooling above a certain minimum in preparation to wait for our once-in-two-minute proc, from not only a random 15% chance to lose the streak but then also from 20-25% hidden percent chance in the 4pc, use the window to generate enough with
Seal Fate crits—all of that to even benefit from a very lackluster and weak bonus to begin with and empower a single cast of
Envenom. This boils down to simply needing a WeakAura to track stacks and sound a huge alarm when the 4pc eventually decides to proc. There is no rotational, visual, resource, or ability feedback. Just an Active/Inactive buff WeakAura for players to be laser-focused on.
Reframing the window
This 4pc window
could be salvaged with much effort, but it needs some massive fundamental changes not to feel terrible; the main thing is just loosening the screw somewhere. Before anything else happens, the first fix must make
Rogue Assassination 11.1 Class Set 4pc a 100% chance to proc rather than the 20-25% hidden chance it currently has. The entire idea of the set bonus does not function and holds no power otherwise. Additionally, if pooling for these windows is not the goal, adding some resource refund would help alleviate the pressure. Making the set focused on resources in general would be a breath of fresh air compared to all the bland "X increased by Y%" effects we've had over the years. If pooling for these windows
is the goal, it must be a more explicit goal rather than diluting the effect across multiple spells and finishers, especially considering how small the window is. Alternatively
(hopefully), the entire window can be redesigned, eliminating all the timing pressure, making the effect different from the generic +% increases, and promoting the intended gameplay of the spec.
In its current form, there are glaring design issues that have to be addressed quickly if this tier bonus experiment is to succeed. While
Winning Streak! probably isn't the best way to do role-based bonuses, it is still generic enough to mold and shape into something impactful and engaging if given time to mature and grow. I think the first iteration of these bonuses does not match most of their specs, and the implication of losing and gaining stacks of this buff needs more thought, as there are glaring holes in some of the effects. In my opinion, trying to salvage
Rogue Assassination 11.1 Class Set 4pc is simply not worth the effort, and the entire bonus needs to be reconsidered.
Hopefully, the PTR cycle will have enough time to address the community's concerns.
