When Cheat Death was first released, there were quite a bit of complaints due to the fact that it allowed Rogues to become virtually untrainable. With it's original bugged design of allowing almost 100% immunity to damage, it was completely broken in combination with the already strong arsenal of escape abilities and tools Rogue's had available for use when they were under any extreme amount of pressure. Even with the nerf/bug fix that soon followed and brought the damage reduction down to 90%, there have still been pages and pages of complaints.

The bigger problem came into play when Rogues began to realize that because of this, they could potentially run anywhere from 2/3 to 1/2 the amount of resilience they were previously wearing before the ability was implemented. In addition, those that had access to PVE gear quickly increased the distance and broke away from those that did not have access to the same shiny purples and legendaries. Double Warglaive Rogues running 250-300 resilience had a significant advantage against Rogues without.

Eventually, even team makeups began to revolve around the current untrainable state that the Rogue class is in. Euro comp is a perfect example of the extremely large efficiency a Rogue can be with access to PVE gear in combination with Cheat death.

A lot of players have been complaining about it for some time, and it was a huge source of QQ for a substantial amount of the players that competed in the "BG9 Tournament" whom also previously played in top 10 BG9 5v5 competition. Many of those players have since quit or abandoned competitive WoW, and a lot of newer players or those who managed to stick it out, still find it to be a problem. Recently I had a small idea in terms of what could be done to bring the strength of Cheat Death and Rogues in general to a more respectable and consistent level with other classes. I know the exact response I'll get from this majority Rogue based community, but don't kid yourself.

I remember the day when Shadow Priests got royally owned when Blizzard responded to the mass amounts of QQ dissertations on the general forums related to the un-checked damage level of Warlock dots. It was a huge kick in the face when we were affected because of another class, but at this point, I do think it was necessary - there just needed to be some sort of compensation or at least acknowledgement that both classes would need to be balanced even though it was only aimed at Warlocks.

Step forward a little bit into the future, and we find resilience has now been thrown even further into the balance world when it starts affecting the effectiveness of Mana draining abilities - another much needed fix and adjustment to something that was plain and simple, getting way out of hand.

So now, has Cheat Death reached that same level? Some would argue yes, others would say no. I personally don't mind the ability either way - yes, it can really frustrate and upset me, but I've learned to deal with it and really not care anymore. However, for those who really would want to see it fixed, I propose this idea. Before I go into it, note that to my knowledge, I've never seen someone else suggest this idea before, but I could be completely wrong. I'm not in a position where I want credit for it, rather I think it could be potentially good even if I wasn't the first person to think of it.

Why not have Cheat Death follow suit with other abilities that slowly became broken or allowed a class to be broken, and have it's effectiveness be affected by resilience as well? Not following? Look at it this way.

Say for every 4 resilence, Cheat Death reduces incoming damage by 1%, to it's current maximum of 90%. This means that those who wear 360 or more resilience, will maintain their current 90% immunity level upon Cheat Death proccing, but those who wear as little as 250, would see their reduction impacted in an attempt to balance out their more risky offensive gearing setup with only a 60% overall damage reduction. This level could not go below say, 40-50% so as to not make the ability entirely useless.

Now of course, there could be many variances in the overall numbers. You could even go as far as only reaching a maximum reduction from Cheat Death if and only if you were at the resilience cap, or you could go the opposite way and find a less impacting alternative and only allow at the least, a 70% reduction - as this would still allow Rogues to maintain some strength and utility from access to PVE gear, but could potentially make them less "broken".

Preliminary level 80 AoC Assassin Build

Lotus/Corruption Hybrid

This build basically includes all of the possible utility abilities an Assassin could want, and although Light Footed is currently bugged, I would definitely include it once it's fixed. This will basically give you 10% more evasion, 10% more melee invulnerability, activatable evasion from Catlike Reflexes, immunity to fear/stun from Avatar, your own CC and ability to close distances etc. I'll go much more in-depth on Tuesday.