Blizzard's buffed my favorite WoW spec in the most monkey paw way it possibly could

World of Warcraft's latest patch has come with… well, let's just say it's not exactly landed well with the playerbase. That's owing to a swarm of nasty bugs that have made it through the net—ranging from genuinely game-breaking to tiny frustrations, but gathering speed into one big mess.

One of the funnier outcomes of Blizzard's difficulty with QA this patch cycle, however, comes from the Outlaw Rogue, and it's either completely unintended, or just an accidental consequence of something that seems cool on paper but in practice, uh, gets people killed.

I've been playing this specialisation since Dragonflight, and it's always held a special place in my heart—I like the fast-paced, proc-focused elements of it, and Midnight tidied up the spec's Roll the Bones feature so I could merrily keep shooting people without a loud WeakAura screaming at me to toss some dice every 30 seconds.

Article continues below

It has, however, been a touch underperformant in Midnight, and needed some tweaks. Blizzard, like a mischievous genie, has granted my wish—but not without dire consequences.

There's a new talent in the Trickster hero tree, and it's called Cloud Cover. Whenever you activate Adrenaline Rush (you will be doing this a lot), you drop a huge smoke bomb. Attacks made from within the cloud have a chance of applying Fazed, which is the Trickster's damage debuff.

It's an objective improvement to the Trickster rogue for both Outlaw and Subtlety specialisations (that share the Trickster tree) and it's flavourful as hell—I think it's genuinely cool that my rotation now includes throwing down a smoke bomb and doing a bullet storm from within it with my dual pistols a-swashbuckling.

There's just one problem: This is a game about not standing in the fire. And you know what makes it hard to stand in the fire? A giant sodding smoke cloud. Look at this thing.

This is a massive problem, because it means that if you want to do content as a Trickster rogue, you've got to basically ask a whole group of very patient strangers to bear with you while you drop a giant muddy puddle in the middle of everything. And while there are options in the menu for adjusting what you see from other players, the point remains that I still gotta deal with it, man. And I'm already bad at not standing in the fire.

Anyway, I hope Blizzard at the very least makes the cloud a little less thick. I do genuinely adore the flavour of it, just not the way it clashes with just about every design decision in every piece of content in the game. At least I don't have to chug a darkness potion to up the contrast, anymore.