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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsUnderstanding the Cheat Death nerf
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
Jun 18th 2008 at 10:00PM
As regular forumgoers may have noted, there's been a lot of antipathy toward rogues in PVP lately. Most of this is based on the newfound popularity of the seventh-tier subtlety talent Cheat Death, which was buffed to mega-awesome proportions. Here's the old Cheat Death:- You have a 10/20/30 percent chance to survive any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you.
- You have a 33/66/100% chance to completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you and reduce all damage taken by 90% for 3 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.
- Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.
The big benefactors from this are ... mostly anyone fighting a rogue. Burst damage classes like mages will benefit from being able to take the rogue down to 10% with their big spells, and sustained damage or DOT classes will be able to gnaw away at that remaining health if the rogue isn't resilience capped. This will also ease some of the complaining about Cheat Death-enabled rogues getting healed back to full during the proc, or Cloak of Shadowing away and vanishing before starting an inescapable stun lock.
The major losers here are leveling rogues and rogues who PvP in high-damage PvE gear. If you don't have much or any resilience on your gear, that 90% damage reduction is going to get pretty low, pretty fast. Rogues will have to start stacking resilience like everyone else, even though it will hurt their damage output. Time to put away that 4/8 Tier 6 and Warglaives ...
It's tough to gauge what the full reaction to these changes will be from the wider rogue community. Community Managers have stepped into the rogue forums to remove gloating posts by warriors and mages. So far, most rogues seem to have realized long ago that a change was on its way and have come to terms with it.
What do you think about this change?
Filed under: Rogue, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, News items
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 4)
Heilig Jun 19th 2008 10:03AM
Any rogue wearing full T6 and Warglaives that is spec'd subtlety should have his license revoked. By the time you get that gear, you should know better than to wear it for PvP, and you wouldn't even have gotten that gear if you raided as ShS.
Den Jun 19th 2008 7:32PM
You make it sound like people can't respec.....who ever thought getting 50g would be so hard.
Siorra Jun 18th 2008 11:37PM
I'm sure as hell gunna be using my 'glaives still, but it looks like piling up slayer gear isn't the way at all. Then again, I prefered using PvP gear myself, so this doesn't really effect me too much. Despite playing Rogue, I know Cheat Death was hugely overpowered, so it's a much called for nerf.
kidsmoke Jun 18th 2008 10:42PM
I dont see the point in it?
Cheat Death was added because Rogues are so damn squishy.
If it can't or doesn't prevent a KB, like say from an execute spam then what the hell is the point of the talent?
I mean ChD just delays then enevitable and if you can't CC their healer and coordiante your KB on the rogue then you just suck.
Yay for Warriors being more difficult again!
Quisling Jun 19th 2008 12:07AM
Yeah, I don't see the point of it either. I think this detracts from the viability of cross-gear usage (a rogue's ability to use her pve gear in a pvp setting) and even takes away from blizzard's supposed "focus" of making multiple specs pvp viable for each class.
Shame Blizz. Shame.
Dominace Jun 18th 2008 10:44PM
Going to suck for any rogue without resilience, that's for sure. My guess is that is going to be changed to have a base reduction + additional reduction for every point in resilience, otherwise the skill alienates everyone who doesn't wear resilience gear.
Something along the lines of, 30% base reduction and maybe 4-5% additional reduction for every percent in resilience.
Jason Jun 18th 2008 10:49PM
Still Sounds a tad bit to powerful. Rogues just have to much control and escapes. Although I do pretty darn well with my warrior, it certainly isn't an anti-class any longer. Perhaps good, but who is 'your' anti-class then? All other classes have at least one or several.
Of course the upcoming expansion might again cause a shift in balance though, so let the rogues have some fun until then.
Sythel Jun 19th 2008 1:13AM
A rogue's counter is not a class. It's time. The class has always been heavily, heavily cooldown dependent and to a lesser degree stealth opener dependent. Some classes are easier and others more difficult to fight of course, but even the "easy" matchups will go bad if you don't have the right cooldowns ready and/or don't get the first shot. Rogue pvp is extremely bipolar and you either fight off a nightmare of blades and poison or basically run over a baby bunny with a lawnmower partially depending on what class you are and more importantly what combination of vanish, blind, evasion, sprint, and cloak of shadows are waiting to refresh at the time. The class is simply designed extremely differently and balances differently as a result.
kidsmoke Jun 18th 2008 10:50PM
Eh, they need to refine the Subtelty tree anyway. Just look at the Rogue trees. All of our great PVP talents are far too spread out. Buff Mutilate tree for PVE daggers, keep combat relatively where it is and move all the pvp talents to the sub tree.
Most other classes have their PVP talents in one tree.
Combine MOD and Camo into one talent. Move around IMP KS, QR, and FF to the sub tree from the Mutilate tree, and move oppurtunity to the mut tree in its place, and combine Imp BS with Imp ambush.
Move SC to the mutilate tree for SF, and move NoS to the mutilat tree. Theres a few other things we may have to give up as well in the sub tree, but since arenas are more about survivability i have no problem with giving some stuff up in sub for the survival of the other trees.
if those things get fixed then remove CD from the game completely because it wont matter.
patrick Jul 15th 2008 12:06PM
Speaking as a warlock who is preyed upon by op rogues I love this change. Anything could only help. I feel like with many counter classes in the game, there's still a chance but whenever I kill a rogue with my shadowpriest pard in arena we feel like we should go out an celebrate. I counter mages, but mages can get me more often than I can get a rogue. If it isn't bad enough that I am stunlocked most of the fight and can't get away, curse of exhaustion is useless, death coil's cd is too long, cloak removes everything including ua, then the cheat death effect allows them to somehow hang on long enough to hide from me for over a minute and come back with full health and cooldowns and kill me after I had him at 1 percent. Fear is useless, 99 percent of rogues we face are undead. If I try to cast fear, it's gotten out of or I'm kicked out of my shadow school entirely. I'm sick of running loops around an arena looking for an almost dead rogue with a felpuppy and taking the crystals and still not finding them. The only way to survive them is sl/sl.
I wouldn't gloat at any classes nerfed. We warlocks have been nerfed into the ground almost every patch, however to the previous poster who claims that almost all classes get their pvp viability in one tree, I'm here to tell you warlocks do not. To pvp with my shadow priest, I have to be ua to avoid dispel teams and to up our burst damage. This takes away my soul link talent in the demonology tree which helps me absorb physical damage and neither of those two talents can every be used with shadowfury which is pretty much solely pvp viable and in the destro tree.
Kidsmoke Jul 16th 2008 2:12AM
Well we had a hybrid spec too it was called HARP and was nerfed very shortly after it was made viable.
The only locks that are "easy" to kill are undergeared ones. SL/SL dominates once you get the stam. and resil; however, it only dominates if your paired with a healer. SL/SL is pretty weak w/o one and if your playing with a S Priest then yes, rogues are going to eat you alive, but if you paired yourself with a healer then the split damage with your pet and 20% to healing will make up for your perceived "squishy-ness"
Very few drain teams do well in 2v2 unless they are played very well. Your a lock you drain the team to death. Get a healer and watch your rating improve.
kuno Jun 18th 2008 10:52PM
At the end of the day I would rather they nerf Cheat Death than mess with Prep as I think Bliz realised that with Cheat Death and Prep in their current form the survivability of ShS rogues was OP.
Dominace Jun 18th 2008 10:56PM
Nerfing prep anymore will completly make the skill useless.
Taytayflan Jun 18th 2008 11:29PM
I'm a rogue who reached 70 a month ago, and am not much of a pvp-er except for welfare points on a 2v2 team I'm on, and I'm combat because I want to get into heroics with only decent gear, so it doesn't affect me that much, I'll just be able to burn down other rogues easier.
But a RL rogue friend will be f@#$ing livid, and will start going on a rant about how Preparation should reset all rogue cooldowns, including Blind, CloS, Gouge, and Kidney Shot, which would make the AR prep build awesome again, and in his mind it would be a worthy trade off.
Matthew Rossi Jun 19th 2008 1:40AM
You know, I'd like a talent that reset all of MY cooldowns. You know, the three linked 30 minute ones?
Rabbit Jun 19th 2008 7:21AM
You have a rogue friend in real-life?
Taytayflan Jun 19th 2008 6:59PM
Ok, to clear something up, he's a RL friend who plays a rogue, has full T6 and is working on S3/4.
hellshire Jun 18th 2008 11:28PM
Get your facts straight, the 99% bug only occured when the rogue took two simultaneous killing blows, or two killing blows in rapid succession (Like, 1 second in between blows). The rogue would essentially get a cheat death proc for each killing blow (usually two, hence the 99% damage reduction as cheat death is apperiently multiplicative).
Of course this was blown WAY out of proportion by the idiot masses who used it to justify their scrub status in the arenas (I don't suck, cheat death is just OP!). This resulted in bug fix that essentially gutted the skill in 2.4 (it would some times fail to proc), which was later hotfixed.
robotrock Jun 18th 2008 11:41PM
As a Mut rogue it doesn't affect me much.
Except that it is clear Blizzard wants Sub to be THE PvP spec for Rogues....which sucks because it isn't nearly as fun as Mut.
Ryuhou Jun 19th 2008 5:08AM
Or takes as much skill as muti, Sub is all about how fast you can press hemo. Skill-less imo.