A Look Back at Outlaw Rogue in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Outlaw Rogue Writer, JustGuy, offers a retrospective highlighting Outlaw’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Outlaw Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

The Talent Trees

Going into Dragonflight, a significant focus was put on the talent system, last iterated on back in Mists of Pandaria. Returning to the good ol’ days full of minor pathing nodes and capstones that have significant implications on how the spec is played overall. This was the feature I was the most excited for as the old talent tree began to feel too binary and uninteresting.

However, overhauling a system as large as talents can end up with some less immediately apparent problems that end up rearing their head after playing with them for extended periods. The two main issues plaguing Rogues were that the class tree had too many generic damage talents that directly competed with what should be considered core Rogue utility. Sprint, for example, for years, was given a rank 2 version which lowered the cooldown to 1 minute, which was then put back into the talent tree but directly competed with vital damage nodes such as Lethality and Deeper Stratagem. After two tiers of playing the specs extensively, my takeaway was that my class felt like it got teleported back to Cataclysm, where it just felt like it was always missing out on many of the core quality-of-life buffs other classes got to their utility through the years.

Thankfully, most of these issues have been fixed on our way out of Dragonflight. 10.2 Brought in significant sweeping changes to the core talent tree, drastically reducing the amount of low-impact damage nodes and now allowing the Rogue player to decide if they want to run talents such as Deadened Nerves, Superior Mixture and Featherfoot which feels better.

You Really FEEL like a Pirate

As somebody who has played Outlaw for years and has enjoyed every single iteration the spec has been through in different ways, I will say that the current version is my favorite. Due to the combination of Fan the Hammer, Underhanded Upper Hand, and Crackshot, the spec has gone from caring about the efficiency of cooldowns for combo points to putting a significant focus on feeding Crackshot. The result is that the spec is high APM and highly reliant on consistently playing well to perform well. Mistakes are punishing, but if you know all the rules they are easy to overcome. The spec’s difficulty can be a sure turnoff, but I’m a big fan of how it turned out.

The King of Cleave

Over the years, Outlaw has been fighting with Subtlety for the Mythic+ title of “Best Rogue Spec,” and it’s ebbed and flowed between the two all expansion. At a core level, Outlaw tends to excel at what Mythic+ is about. Blade Flurry is an powerful ability that allows Outlaw Rogues to sacrifice little single target while still dishing out lots of consistent cleave damage. However, Outlaw’s consistently high damage and no burst has its own set of strengths and weaknesses attached to it. For example, many large coordinated groups tend to pull and route dungeons around certain specs having cooldowns to help kill packs fast; Outlaw can’t really ever help in these types of packs in a significant way both due to lack of an actual major cooldown and the strict 8 target cap that still exists to this day. However, nothing is a zero-sum game. This means that after your group has dumped every cooldown into the last pack, the Outlaw Rogue will help carry the next 3 packs with its consistently high output alongside high single target, as mentioned earlier.

To hone in on the cooldown issue, this has been a large hurdle the spec struggles to overcome in raids. Many raid encounters, especially Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope, are largely designed and balanced around high-value burst cooldowns. Smolderon giving you an insane damage buff you have nothing to pair with is an issue. Tindral Sageswift requires large AoE and single target burst to deal with Mass Entanglement and Supernova respectfully. Even Fyrakk, which on paper should be a good Outlaw fight with lots of switching between AoE and single target, some good 2-target cleave followed by aoe is still just worse than Subtlety and Assassination because Rogue has been designated as the way you break Corrupt. Outlaw is just stuck and can’t contribute meaningfully due to the inherent weaknesses of the spec. However, I don’t think the solution is just giving Outlaw a broken cooldown to abuse is the solution I want to happen either. I will discuss what I want to see to help remedy this issue later in this article.

The Blessed Rework

As stated earlier, the initial talent tree was rough around the edges. The main issues are the inability to access core iconic Rogue utility due to being in direct competition with damage and just general inflexibility of the shape of the tree. These problems were fixed, and all 3 specs got large structural gameplay changes due to the talent shakeup. Overall, they feel like what they should have felt like on launch. The only remaining issue is that some talents are still just bad. Sleight of Hand continues to be an underwhelming talent, Riposte is iconic but just isn’t very useful, it feels a bit awkward to have Improved Wound Poison in the way of Superior Mixture, and I don’t like that Subterfuge is hidden behind Shadowrunner especially considering that Subterfuge is just a DPS talent for all 3 specs at this point. Even if you aren’t a fan of the current playstyle of current Outlaw, I think it’s easy to say that the general redesign of the talent tree was a success.

The Augmentation Evoker Problem

Augmentation Evoker is a contentious topic throughout the community due to high initial tuning and more or less being designed from the ground up to be abused by classes with strong burst cooldowns. As mentioned previously, Outlaw Rogue really doesn’t have any burst cooldowns to leverage, which puts it in a spot where it’s one of the worst specs to be grouped with an Augmentation Evoker. Not only is an inherent lack of burst a weakness, but the inability to perform well with an Augmentation Evoker puts it in a weird spot for when it’s considered core to comp building either in dungeons in the raid as Outlaw is now a liability to your group.

Last season was an extreme outlier, with the “God comp” being so brutally efficient that it already pushed everything outside the comp to see play. Still, for example, in this season where Augmentation Evoker isn’t considered core to timing keys, Outlaw is way better positioned overall to perform well since you aren’t forced to bring Augmentation to all content at all times.

Augmentation inherently as a spec with how it’s currently designed is going to continue to be a spec that is used and abused by “the specs that do the most damage in the shortest amount of time,” which is why Augmentation is so strong with Subtlety and Assassination this tier. Overall, Augmentation has harmed Outlaw’s role in the game due to being a multiplier to already broken burst cooldowns, which not only can you not take advantage of, but you have 2 specs in your arsenal that are two of the best targets in the game for Augmentation.

The Return of Tier

Tier sets have finally returned to the game this tier, reminding me exactly how they were always; some being boring but effective, and others being transformative in ways I’d like to see baked into talents going into War Within. Vault Delver’s Toolkit and Lurking Specter’s Shadeweave are pretty boring, do-nothing passive tier sets that just made you do more damage for just doing the rotation you were already supposed to be doing; meanwhile, Lucid Shadewalker’s Silence is the most transformative one. Rogue Outlaw 10.2 Class Set 4pc is the main part that affects things. Thanks to Loaded Dice, you can force yourself to have a really high uptime of 3 buffs at a time, which impacts the general reroll priority. For years, the general Roll the Bones reroll priority has been keeping one of the good buffs as a single and then keeping any combination of 2. It’s shifted to keeping 3 buffs at a time, which feels great and strong, as seen in the past where the tier set from Antorus, the Burning Throne in Legion was Item – Rogue T21 Outlaw 4P Bonus, which was effectively the first draft of Count the Odds, which has managed to sneak its way into the class and been a super fun talent to play with. I think this would be a perfect opportunity to take Sleight of Hand, which feels incongruent with how current Outlaw plays, and replace it with the current 4 piece.

Carving out a Niche

Rogue has a very weird but powerful set of utilities that usually ends up being fairly valuable, even if sometimes it tends to be fairly niche. The first big one that was given this tier was Atrophic Poison becoming a choice node with Numbing Poison, paired with Master Poisoner, which gives Rogue access to a powerful raid buff that, outside of a few niche sources of damage, works as a 2nd copy of Devotion Aura. Numbing Poison generally flies under the radar despite being a slightly worse version of Curse of Tongues, but it does stack and might as well be used if you are playing double Rogue comps while raiding.

One piece of fairly universal utility that has been missing from its toolkit is the lack of any AoE stop of any kind. Thankfully, with the 10.2 rework, we got Airborne Irritant, which causes Blind to become an AoE spell. At the end of the day, all this is a Blinding Light, but it’s better than nothing! Another strong utility piece is Tricks of the Trade, which is the best misdirect in the game and is mainly useful in dungeons but sometimes has its use in raids.

The last big part of utility is Rogue’s massive defensive toolkit. The main two Cloak of Shadows, and Feint which allow you to trivialize a lot of raid damage and maximize nice your uptime on the boss. There also is Evasion and Crimson Vial, which are less useful but still come in handy in a pinch. Alongside the universally useful Cheat Death, one of Rogues biggest utility aspects is how tanky this spec can be for bleeding-edge content.

Improving on Quality of Life

Regarding quality of life, it’s a hard-to-define term since it means something different for everybody. What I want to focus on in this section is highlighting some of the bugs that still exist for the spec that are remaining nagging issues, alongside some talents and interactions that might become an issue going into War Within that need to be addressed for the sake of the enjoyment of the spec.

The first main issue I want to mention is the weird bugs and quirks related to Stealth. Many of these bugs have existed for a while, but due to Crackshot being the centerpiece of the class, a lot of these bugs have become super annoying to deal with. The first bug is that using an on-use trinket while in Stealth, Subterfuge will not activate. The second bug mainly happens in Dungeons is that if you try and cast Stealth while Subterfuge is active, no part of Underhanded Upper Hand or Crackshot will work, but only for a few seconds. The last bug is the weirdest where after benefitting from Shadow Dance or Subterfuge, there is a small window of time right as it ends if you try to use Shadow Dance or Subterfuge, Crackshot will stop working for the duration.

Other than that, another important thing to fix is that during the 10.2 beta Hidden Opportunity with the rework and the tier set bonus; Rogue Outlaw 10.2 Class Set 2pc, was too strong of talent and was nerfed to be half as effective. The tier set is going away, which means there has to be some compensation somewhere because with Opportunity chance being that low, the spec doesn’t work fully and becomes high variance and just not fun to play with. Other than that, I strongly think the current 4 piece; Rogue Outlaw 10.2 Class Set 4pc should be put into the talent tree somewhere. It feels great and helps with variance the spec has always had issues with.

War Within Wishlist

The big question mark on everybody’s mind for War Within is the hero talents, which could be even bigger game changers than the talent trees themselves. Crackshot putting a focus on Stealth alongside Subtlety’s stealth-focused talents could lead to more powerful interactions numerically. However, I think that Outlaw needs to become viable to be given a strong execution via the Assassination hero talents. Not only will this allow Outlaw to keep its design of having no burst cooldowns, but it can also give Outlaw its own niche of being a strong execute spec that doesn’t revolve around cooldowns. If Outlaw were to have a strong execute, a fight like Fyrakk could easily become an Outlaw fight.

Closing Thoughts

Dragonflight for Rogue was a fairly bumpy ride, both in balance and design. The rework brought many great changes and helped build a better foundation to build upon in The War Within. The spec has felt great to play despite numerically being hit or miss. However, I think the most important thing that Outlaw needs is some way to excel in raid encounters that don’t just rely on hoping that Assassination and Subtlety are undertuned. I prefer to keep Outlaw as a flat line with no burst cooldown spec, but something else needs to be given. Restless Crew was an idea floated around during Dragonflight beta; now, with Augmentation Evoker in the game, it’s time to bring it back. A strong execute given via the hero talents would also be something welcome.

About the Author

Hey my name is ForeverGuy or just Guy, I’m the current guide writer for Outlaw Rogue. I raid mythic on Mal’Ganis but a lot of my time is spent in the Rogue Discord helping people out with their rotation, and general theory crafting and just talking with regulars. I’ve worked on previous guides in the past and I’ve helped optimize Outlaw for Simulationcraft in both the gear, talents, and APL. Feel free to message me about any questions you have about rogue, I’m usually around for anything just find me in Ravenholdt, my discord is guy#4019. I stream progression whenever the raid comes out, so feel free to give me a follow on Twitch, or follow me on Twitter if you like the guides.