Combo Points on the rogue; yea or nay?

There’s been a lot of controversy lately about if this change is good or bad, and the outcome that would result from it going through to live. So I figured I’d add more noise to the situation.

 

My artistic rendition of combo points on the rogue.

 

Personally, I love the change. It’s been a sort of accepted thing that rogues are bad at target swapping, be it for positional requirements, ramp up time, or what have you, but this change allows us to at least perform the role consistently without being a hindrance to the group.

This change allows for more smooth target swapping without having to worry about Redirect or it’s cooldown, by letting us do things like immediately getting Rupture up for Sanguinary Veins or Venomous Wounds, or getting a Kidney Shot up in order to have the rest of the group benefit from Prey on the Weak.

A problem brought up by other rogues, such as Haileaus (http://theshadowydancer.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/thoughts-on-combo-points/), is that by putting combo points on the rogue, we’ll feel -less- like a rogue and more like the other classes that had combo point-esque mechanics added over time; that by putting combo points on the rogue, we’ll lose the feel of being a single-target damage master, because we’ll actually be able to swap targets on the fly with relative ease. I whole-heartedly disagree with this sentiment. What makes a class feel like that class shouldn’t be what they’re bad at, but rather what they’re good at, how they go about it, and the flavor each spec brings. Keeping Combo Points on the target simply because that’s the way things have been since day 1 isn’t a good excuse, it’s just a different way of saying that change is scary; however, some change is needed in order to keep things fresh.

The pacing of today’s WoW raids demands that the player is able to swap targets frequently and with enough power to nuke the swap target down quickly. Blizzard has also gotten considerably better with keeping the single-target damage of specs considerably more competitive than in previous expansions, so the “strength” of rogue single-target is largely a moot point.

Then, you know, there’s PvP. While we’re not quite sure how the change will effect PvP outside of being able to Focus-Kidney more frequently for CC/Swaps, it seems this change is only going to really benefit those that try to play a pressure-comp as Assassination.