The TBC Classic Beta started 10 days ago, and I recently managed to get my own access to it in order to provide more informative feedback about the rogue class, thanks to Blizzard for allowing me to be part of this. This is a huge chance.

In the first part of our Beta testing from a rogue perspective, we detailed multiple things such as the Vanish bug, the weapon swapping global, Shadowstep interaction, and so on.
For this second report, I tried to gather more information based on the community expectations and questions that I read here and there on our TBC Classic Rogue Discord (nearly 3K members already!).

Short summary of the tests done in this second report :

  1. The level 58 character boost for rogue: quick gear preview, and starter pack
  2. Perception
  3. Vanish mode
  4. Pet aggro when dropping combat and using Stealth
  5. Throw animation
  6. Spell sound on missed abilities
  7. Main Hand poison proc on Cheapshot/Garrote (with no auto-attacks)
  8. Jumping on Charge/Interception
  9. “A more powerful ability is already active”, error message.

The level 58 rogue starter pack

The first thing that I wanted to check with the Beta was the level 58 starter pack. As you can see in this video, the gear is called “the Communal set” and isn’t that great. It allows you to start on level 58, with a bit more than 460 attack power, zero hit, and 3100 health points.
For your information, you can find every piece of the Communal set for each class on Wowhead TBC.

outland survival kit from the level 58 boost character on TBC Classic

Note that you have your riding skill set at 75/75, and in your bag, you can find the Outlands Survival Kit that contains 25 golds, 20 vanishes, your 60% mount, a few poisons, and food. There is also two 2.6 attack speed swords included in the pack. No 1.4 or 1.5 daggers or off-hand. MEHH.

For now, I have not read any confirmation if this pack is the same starter gear for the level 58 boost character that Blizzard plans to sell. So it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Testing stealth & detection

Perception

The thing that hyped me the most was Perception, and it looks sick on TBC Classic, not gonna lie. Detection scripting was always changing from one private server to another, and I really feel better now that I tested it on the Beta. This will be huge.

In this clip, we both had 5/5 in Master of Deception, and were both level 60. So we were detecting each other with the same range naturally.

I can imagine how good that will be to pair this racial with goggles (X11 X44) and even Paranoia! I feel like the old stories of players saying “it was almost possible to find a stealthed enemy rogue in the starting room from the center of the map in Nagrand’s arena.” will be more realistic now.

Also, one more thing to check:

I have not yet tried to see if Perception was working to detect a stealthed enemy rogue that would be in the same range, but out of my line of sight (behind a pillar) or not.
This article will be edited accordingly once I manage to test it. The purpose is to see if we can detect an enemy inside Loarderon’s arena’s starting room while being outside, or if we have to enter to hear him/see him. I’ll let you know with a clip in the next few days.

For those who wanted to see the range to detect an enemy with Shadowmeld, you can check this video.

Vanish mode

The vanish mode also appears to be working correctly. 

As explained in my ultimate in-depth TBC stealth guide, you cannot detect an opposing rogue under Vanish until the very last yard. In this clip, you can see that I don’t see the opposing rogue, and when I make one step forward to be in that last yard range, I suddenly see him while his Vanish buff is still active. Nice job Blizzard.

This means pre-vanishing to Shadowstep + Sap a human warlock will be risky if the rogue is in the cone of vision of the fellhunter and in a 1-yard range (or less). which is common when the pet is following the warlock.

Pet aggro behavior when using Stealth

If you’re going off-combat while being chased by an enemy’s pet (in this video, that is a hunter’s one), the pet continues to follow you until he can land his attacks, no matter the distance and time needed to reach the rogue. In other words, if you don’t use Vanish, it might be impossible to kite into stealth a pet, and you may need to kill it behind the pillars if you’re finishing in 1v1 against a hunter.

Testing Abilities (effect, animation, sound) 

Throw animation

As you can see in this clip, the throw is not showing animation for me, nor for the opposing rogue (according to his whisper).

Spell sound on a missed ability

On the Classic TBC Beta, when a rogue player misses an attack/finisher move or gets it resisted or parried, we can hear the sound of that ability. Obviously this is not correct and I hope to see it fixed because this can be misleading. Usually, the sound of a spell is the signal that it successfully happened. For example, it happens a lot on KS and Rupture.

Main-hand Poison procs on Cheapshot over Sap (90°angle)

As I explained in my guide that lists every TBC subtlety rogue openers, you can perform some actions on your enemy without breaking the Sap (or any similar control, such as Gouge, Blind, Sheep)

In this clip, you can see the main-hand poison proc happening on the Cheap Shot.
Since Crippling does not damage the target, the enemy is crippled during the Sap.
But, for most arena situations, a rogue is using a Wound Poison on his main hand, and in this case, the poison does damage and breaks your Sap, which ruins the openers such as Sap+Garrote+Rupture (without breaking Sap).

Don’t get me wrong, this is the correct script, but I personally almost never experienced poison procs on these tricky openers during my private server experience, so I felt that it was worth keeping this in mind and sharing with you.

Jump on Charge

There’s a popular “trick” that consists of using a jump (especially when mounted, in arenas) to kite warrior’s Charge and Intercept. This is something that I wanted to test on the beta, and it works, as you can see in this clip. This potentially means that you can get your Shadowstep kited in a similar way.

I have not tested yet if using Shadowstep on Intercept was correctly working but I’ll edit this article after the test.

“A more powerful spell is already active”

A thing that I particularly appreciate in terms of quality of life is that when a target is sapped for 10second, it can’t be overridden by a second Sap for half its duration. In other words, it prevents rogues from messing their own Diminishing Returns due to unintended re-Sap caused by lag spikes, lack of communication (if double rogue situations, in battlegrounds, or skirmishes), or too much spam.

And that’s it for my first days of beta tests on WoW TBC Classic. I hope this second report was informative for you. Since I am quite a low level, for now, it’s hard for me to test more things especially in duels; because I am quite ungeared and do not have a PvP trinket.

Update: I created this sheet to report more rogue bugs : link

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