dragonflight-rogue-nerf

The Dragonflight Rogue was incredibly OP. For a little while, at least.

Yet another "exploit" recently emerged thanks to the Dragonflight talent tree and recent hotfix. For at least a brief moment, the Dragonflight Rogue was broken (or reached its full potential, depending on your point of view), as players found a way of literally one-shotting their opponents in PvP before they could even blink. Alas, the moment was as ephemeral as the lives of the Rogue's victims.

The build in question required a max-level Rogue with the subtlety specialization and a PvP trinket. A series of abilities to buff damage and guarantee crits would then support a devastating Echoing Reprimand blow, made all the more possible by a Rogue's talent tree feature that doubles the damage to an incapacitated enemy, and a recent "hotfix" that removed all damage reductions in Echoing Reprimand in PvP. The same ability can also power-up a finishing blow, but by that point, the opponent was typically already dead.

Needless to say, the build was enough to cheese off even the most gracious of PvPers. After all, not getting a chance to respond in kind feels all kinds of unjust. But these are sneaky Subtlety Rogues we're talking about, after all.

Regardless, a recent nerf has reigned in the Dragonflight Rogue once more, with a 30% reduction in damage to Echoing Reprimand. "We've seen that the ability could have extremely high burst, more than we're comfortable with, so we are partially reverting the change made in last week's hotfixes, where Echoing Reprimand's damage was no longer reduced in PvP," noted the devs.

It wasn't the only nerf that the Dragonflight Rogue received in the hotfix, however. Assassination Rogues have also suffered a hefty increase to Exsanguinate's cooldown time, with the bleed effect shrinking from 100% to 80%. The devs do state, however, that this is only a temporary measure as they assess Exsanguinate's role heading into the first season of Dragonflight.\

In fact, the recent patch was an exercise in fine-tuning many classes in Dragonflight, an expansion that has, so far, landed pretty well with fans.