by Chase Christian

I’m freshly back from slaying elementals and cultists alike in the Cataclysm beta, and I’m here to bring you some good news. I already talked about how Vanish was finally fixed and has managed to stay fixed on the beta servers. The mechanic they’re using is a two-stage process, similar to how a space shuttle launches. The first stage is a buff called (unsurprisingly) “Vanish,” which isn’t actually Stealth, but a pseudo-Stealth that keeps us out of sight. The Vanish buff only lasts for 3 seconds, at which point regular Stealth takes over. We can’t leave Stealth for those 3 seconds because we’re not actually in Stealth anyway, which is a pretty elegant way of fixing the problem.

I’m rambling again, as Vanish is fixed and you’ve already heard about it. Blizzard’s newest gift to the rogue community comes straight out of our de facto wish list, again. General mobility worries have been heard from rogues since warriors received Intecept, which is to say we’ve been complaining about it since Day One. An oft-suggested change has been halving Sprint‘s cooldown and duration, and it seems that the dev team actually took the idea to heart. As the screenshot above shows, Sprint is now on a 1-minute cooldown.

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by Chase Christian

Energy is simple to model and even simpler to use; no ability is more than 6 seconds away. The system has seen constant upgrades since its humble origins, though its core functionality has remained unaltered. It’s become a crucial part of our mindset, and it defines the experience of playing a rogue. I had an old friend that used to say that all true rogues set their watches to only tick every 2 seconds. What is about energy that keeps it marching on so reliably?

Energy has come a long way

Energy hasn’t always been quite as amazing as it is in today’s environment. Originally, it was generated in 20 energy chunks every 2 seconds, which was incredibly clunky. You could be just 5 energy short of using Kick against a clutch enemy ability and get stuck waiting for a full 2 seconds before you’d see your next energy tick. Luckily, in Wrath, Blizzard’s dev team smoothed out energy generation, and we now see 10 individual energy ticks every second. The new regeneration model helps us pull of more clutch Kicks, Blinds and Dismantles, as well as allowing us to squeeze out every last drop of DPS.

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by Zach Yonzon

A new, exciting build of the Cataclysm beta has been released, implementing the promised overhaul to the talent trees. It’s still raw at this point, but we get a glimpse of the direction the developers want to take. The basic or starter abilities have been defined and although some of these may change, such as Divine Storm for retribution paladins (Ghostcrawler, lead systems designer, mentioned that it would probably go back into the talent tree), the changes feel solid and refreshing. One of the ideas the developers have is that “both the 31-point and the 10(-point) ability need to have more single-target use,” which means we should get very good one-on-one abilities early on as well as at higher levels. The trees are a long way off from being done, but that shouldn’t stop us from taking a look at them and picturing the possibilities.

One of the cooler, less noticeable things to come out of this build are the one-liner descriptions about each of the talent specs, allowing players to quickly grasp the concept of each spec. Blizzard seems committed to keeping this model, complete with talent tree lock-outs to prevent players from straying into other trees early on. As you might have suspected, the real culprit (or at least the most notable one) behind this change is PvP

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by Chase Christian

Ruby Sanctum fills the role of being the last salute to Wrath‘s raiding scene before Cataclysm. It’s a short, single-boss instance, designed to start ushering in the lore of Deathwing’s imminent release. Those of us who had a chance to fight against Sartharion will be familiar with this type of dungeon. Since it’s such a small raid, the total loot table is relatively small, and there’s only a few pieces of interest to us leather-wearers. However, the loot that is there is worth some discussion, as it fits into a few very particular roles.

The goal of much of the Ruby Sanctum loot appears to be filling holes in itemization that left us without ideal items for every slot on our character. In particular, you’ll notice that none of the new gear (save the trinket) has any armor penetration on it. With combat rogues outscaling mutilate at top levels due to massive amounts of ArP, mutilate rogues have been looking for something to help close that gap. They were hampered by the fact that there are a few slots where it was almost impossible to find a non-ArP piece of leather, especially when we talking about the upper tier of ICC gear.

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by Chase Christian

I often see players talking about their experiences in PvP, sometimes in trade chat or a battleground. Almost inevitably, after a few minutes of chatting, the old stereotypes about each class start coming out. They’ll start complaining about paladins having three lives, due to Divine Shield and Lay on Hands. They’ll label any arena composition with a warlock as a “drain team,” even though warlocks are clearly capable of massive burst damage now. If there’s an arena team composition that they don’t like to face, that comp is immediately labeled as cheesy or unskilled.

I don’t really care if warlocks get a bum rap, it’s up to them to convince the public that they can nuke too. What I am concerned about is that rogues have been stereotyped since the earliest days of vanilla WoW, and we need to break that cycle. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I would suggest watching the World of Roguecraft films. These early pieces of WoW machinima firmly cemented rogues as stunlocking gods in the minds of thousands of players. Even now, with Cataclysm putting the final nails in stunlocking’s coffin, we will still be thought of as dirty fighters that need to be nerfed.

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by Chase Christian

If you’ve ever played with a hunter, then you know that every weapon is a hunter weapon. Either they need to gear for some special gear set they’re working on they’re hoping that Blizzard allows them to use maces and wands someday. Polearms, swords and even daggers can all fall prey to their instant need rolls. I’m just happy that they’re not allowed to equip their pets with gear à la Diablo II, or else there would be a massive weapon shortage.

Rogues, on the other hand, have very narrow weapon requirements. In most cases, weapon speed can trump nearly any other stat weight, due to specific mechanics that favor a certain type of sword or dagger. While Cataclysm has promised to roll all weapon types into a single, balanced specialization, we are currently forced to pick our instruments of destruction carefully.

Historically, “slower is better” has been a staple of rogue weapon selection. Going all the way back to two best-in-slot items, Teebu’s Blazing Longsword and the Barman Shanker, we can see that even a 0.1-second difference was enough to tip the scales. While there have been several changes to rogue mechanics in the years since Molten Core, the most drastic changes to rogue mechanics were the recent poison updates. Most of our percentage-chance poisons were moved to a proc-per-minute (PPM) mechanic, shifting the entire paradigm of how we look at weapon speeds.

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by Tyler Caraway

Haste follows a pretty different system between spells and melee attacks. When it comes to casters, haste influences how fast a spell is cast as well as the GCD for all abilities, allowing for the standard 1.5-second GCD to be reduced to 1 second. Haste for melee attacks, however, only increases the swing timer of auto-attacks and does not reduce the GCD on physical abilities.

This has created a pretty big disparity between how melee value haste over casters, with casters generally favoring haste far more than melee classes. Blizzard has attempted to equalize this in some ways throughout Wrath of the Lich King by increasing the amount of haste that melee get per point of rating, yet that really hasn’t made much of a difference. Cataclysm will attempt to address this disparity once again by increasing the resource gain of melee classes through haste. Obviously the finer points of this mechanic are not known to the community at large yet, and it is unlikely that Blizzard has the system fine tuned at this point anyway, so this article will not address that fact. It is something to remember for the future, though.

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by Chase Christian

Spreadsheets make gear choices easier

The first step in gearing your rogue for a raid is to get familiar with a spreadsheet. I highly recommend Aldriana’s sheets, which you can find at Elitist Jerks. Make sure you get the right sheet for your build, whether it be mutilate or combat. Now, while you’re gearing up, it can be difficult using the spreadsheets since they don’t have a lot of weaker gear in them. Now, you could go through and make manual entries for every single item you’re wearing and ever could wear at some point in the future. However, I have an alternative that will actually save you quite a bit of time.

First, get familiar with Tinkerbob’s guide to modifying the hidden gear tab of the spreadsheet. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with adding new gear to the sheet, you can use my trick to save yourself some tedious work setting up every single item you have equipped. In reality, the spreadsheet doesn’t look at any individual piece of gear to determine your DPS, but rather takes the total of all of your stats and plugs those into various formulas.
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by Chase Christian

If you’ve been following along with the recent news in the WoW stratosphere, you know that patch 3.3.5 is currently being tested on the PTR. Included in this patch is the new Ruby Sanctum raid dungeon, which is very likely to be the last raid that we’ll see this side of the Cataclysm. While I think it will be more of a Sartharion-like raid and less of an actual progression instance, the fact is that after Halion and company go down, Deathwing’s emergence will be soon to follow.

With Icecrown Citadel on farm status for many guilds, you might have some free time to start rounding out your rogue for Cataclysm‘s imminent release. Read on for a few pointers on how to get yourself into top shape for the upcoming expansion.

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