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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Chase Christian

If you look at the game as it stands today and compare it to its humble beginnings, it’s easy to see the numerous improvements to both gameplay and also to the general quality of life of a player. One area that saw an abundance of changes was the profession system, which has gone through several iterations. We’ve seen new trade skills introduced with each expansion to the game, as well as many additions to the capabilities of each. Due to the strong tradition of min/maxing in the rogue culture, choosing the right professions has obviously become a topic of discussion amongst those looking to perfect their characters.

History

In vanilla WoW, professions were initially used to make money, as there was a rapid influx of players needing gear and enchants. The Burning Crusade introduced the trade skill jewelcrafting, while also introducing the idea of profession perks: small bonuses to a player for choosing a particular trade skill. These were found in the form of unique, epic items that were only available to the crafter themselves. Some of these were trivial, like a tailor’s custom-made robe. Others, however, were nearly gamebreaking. I speak of the Stormherald, one of the most fearsome weapons to see in your opponent’s hand. When coupled with the old Mace Specialization, an arms warrior was a rogue’s worst nightmare in PvP.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Chase Christian

What is combat?

Combat is one of the main talent trees of the rogue class and home to the some of the most powerful cooldowns in the game. Combat is the bread and butter of every rogue PvE build, and you won’t see any serious spec neglecting to point several points in the center tree. Combat rogues focus on maximizing their physical damage and pass up many poison and subtlety options to become the masters of open combat. White damage (auto attacks) will make up the core of your damage, while yellow (special) and poison damage will fall behind. Combat is the least complex of any rogue spec, as it focuses on very simple ideas that lead to very powerful results.

Combat benefits

• Amazing multi-target and AoE DPS
• Potent cooldowns for every situation, ensuring you’re never out-muscled
• Flexible gear selection, since combat values both ArP and haste
• Works with many weapon combinations (just about anything except a main-hand dagger)
• Short ramp-up time and simple rotation allowing for powerful target swaps
• A fairly unique raid debuff: Savage Combat

Read the rest of this entry »

by Chase Christian

With ICC becoming a more of a regular farm raid and less of a great unknown, I’ve had more free time to begin my period of self-examination before the next tier of content is released. If you’re looking to add some spice to your rogue experience, try adding a few new addons to the mix!


Fun stuff

Let’s start with some of the fun addons first! One of my favorite addons, especially with the often-heralded 2 piece Tier 10 bonus, is TrickOrTreat. Not only is it functional (it alerts you when you give/receive Tricks of the Trade), it also lets you know exactly how much threat you redirected to your target and how much of a DPS boost they received from your Tricks.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Chase Christian

I’m going to do my best today to lay all of the changes on the table, and let you know which ones are important and which ones you can safely ignore. The patch notes affect all 3 rogue specs, and so you’ll want to understand the updates even if you’re not interested in the subtlety revival (which is more of a whimper).

Subtlety

Let’s talk about the biggest changes first. In terms of PvE viability, sub is dead last, and it’s not even close. None of the changes make up for the forced PvP / survivability talents that we’re required to take as we make our way down the tree. While our other trees make look more similar to sub once Cataclysm is released, we are still firmly in the Lich King’s grasp and the dominance of a DPS-oriented tree is too strong for sub to overcome.

Forget about it for now, and hope that a future patch or expansion brings sub PvE back from the dead. I’m not going to post a “best possible” sub PvE spec, because frankly, you can throw your points just about anywhere in the tree and you’re still so far behind Mut or combat that it’s not worth trying. The spec misses all of the hit, expertise, and CDs that make combat so potent, or it misses all of the poisonous goodness of a Mutilate build. Even if you had some hybrid gear set with enough hit and expertise to cover the spread, you’re missing out on all the other stats that push Mutilate and combat to their current levels.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Chase Christian

Now, if you’ve been working on gearing up your rogue recently, you’ll likely have noticed a distinct lack of hit and expertise on much of the gear that we can find in ICC. We’ve only got a single piece of tier gear with hit on it, as opposed to the 2-3 items of our previous WotLKsets. In addition, expertise has been particularly hard to balance, with only 3 leather slots itemized for expertise at all. Take into account that we’re also trying to work around various caps, and it can be a real nightmare to get your character where you need to be. I’ve decided to dive deep into the loot tables to find out how to balance our hit and expertise books with minimal effort.

Hit rating

I really don’t want to have this post devolve into a lot of me spamming various numbers around and shouting about caps and what not. Let’s get the dirty work out of the way ahead of time so we can focus on the fun stuff: loot. For a quick reference guide of various stat caps, I like to use Accomp’s guide at RogueDPS.com, as it lists everything in an easy-to-read format. A rogue should shoot for 315 hit rating as a minimum these days. That’s enough to get you hitting with your poisons at every opportunity, with or without the 3% hit buff from one of the hybrid casters. Because our poisons do so much damage now, especially as Mutilate,maintaining the Poison Hit Cap is really key to doing good DPS. Now, Mutilate will often want way more hit than that due to crit cap issues, and hit is still a great stat over the cap for both specs. Don’t shy away from more than 315 (if a spreadsheet says so), but be sure not to dip below that.

Read the rest of this entry »