Encrypted Text: Turning murder into legendaries

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

Patch 4.3 is now live, and with it comes plenty of new additions. You can spend your time playing games at the newly revamped Darkmoon Faire, or you can play dress-up by transmogrifying your old tier sets. The developers buckled down and cranked out three new dungeons, complete with a plethora of new gear and valor point options. The new dungeons are also bristling with new lore moments and plot exposition, giving us insight into Deathwing's madness.

But you're not here for that. You're not reading this post because you can't wait to hear what fashion style I'll be transmogging to. (A pirate, FYI.) You couldn't care less about tossing rings or commanding tonks on Darkmoon Island. Dungeon guides can wait. If you're as black-blooded as I am, then there's only one thing on your mind: Who does a rogue have to kill around here to get a pair of legendary daggers?

Vengeance and Fear are pushovers

If I don't see every single rogue wielding Vengeance and Fear by this time next week, I will be very disappointed. The developers have made it easy to score the first tier of epic daggers that we'll be upgrading to legendaries. All that you need to do is pickpocket a ring from Hagara the Stormbinder, the fourth boss of Dragon Soul. You pick up the quest to steal the ring from Lord Afrasastrasz in Dragon Soul. You don't need to complete the new dungeons first; you just need to enter Dragon Soul to get started.

Let me start by deflating a few of your plans right now. The ring can't be obtained if you queued up for Dragon Soul with the new Raid Finder. Only normal and heroic versions of the boss actually have the ring in their pickpocket inventory. Once your raid has cleared to Hagara, including the gauntlet preceding the boss, you will want to stay in stealth and pickpocket the ring. Use Vanish if you happen to get caught unstealthed, as you have to be stealthed to pickpocket successfully. You don't have to kill the boss -- you just have to be there to grab the ring.

The PTR version of this objective change several times, but initial reports from live servers indicate that it's possible for multiple rogues to loot the ring by waiting for Hagara's pockets to refresh. Unless this is unintentional and is hotfixed, the ring will reappear in her pockets after just a few minutes. Rogues can cycle into the raid, grab the ring, and then leave the raid without getting saved to the lockout. I doubt that this will work for long, so expect for this to change to a one-ring-per-raid system soon.

Even if multiple rogues can loot the ring on the first week, the speed at which you acquire your legendary daggers is more likely to be dependent on future raid drops than if you start on week one or week two. I imagine that industrious guilds might even start selling spots to down-on-their-luck PUG rogues once everyone they know already has a ring.

A true rogue's quest

The developers heard our requests for a quest that exemplified the rogue experience, and they delivered an ace. The quest line for the Fangs of the Father is so steeped in the rogue class that I am convinced that actual rogues designed it. While you'll be dropping 10,000 gold coins immediately after obtaining your ring and then waiting 12 hours of real time, the next few quests don't require any raiding and are just plain fun.

I won't spoil the quests, but you'll be infiltrating a compound, sneaking around cities, and assassinating your targets. A new UI feature has been introduced specifically for this quest chain. While stealthing around, a red awareness circle is displayed beneath your character's model, allowing you to stay undetected. If a target wanders into the circle, they'll be startled and will be able to detect you. You have to use all of your roguish wiles, like Sap and Distract, to even have a chance of completing your stealth missions successfully.

After you complete a few of the best-designed quests in WoW, you'll be rewarded with your first pair of daggers, the aforementioned Fear and Vengeance. These daggers are good enough to have you wielding them immediately, regardless of what weapons you were using before. Fear and Vengeance will be considered baseline rogue equipment after a couple of weeks, and so expect to see every single brother and sister of the shadows using these by Christmas. The developers were even nice enough to toss a set bonus on these daggers to further boost their potency.

And now for some raiding

You might have picked up Fear and Vengeance without killing any raid bosses, but you're not going to get anywhere past that. If your raid picked up any Dragonwraths, you know how the next part goes. We'll be collecting items from bosses, and then collecting different items from the same bosses. Specifically, the next phase of the quest has you collecting Shadowy Gems from Dragon Soul bosses, and so you'll be working on this for several weeks.

After finishing the Shadowy Gem collection phase, you're tasked with another assassination mission. The foe you face this time is far more deadly and might actually take you a couple of tries to vanquish. Be prepared to use all of the moves on your action bar, including one we've been neglecting for a while (Shiv ... cough, cough). You're then rewarded with The Sleeper and The Dreamer, which are the second tier of daggers we'll receive.

Again, the Shadowy Gems don't drop from the Raid Finder version of Dragon Soul; in fact, none of the pieces do. Everything must be obtained from normal or heroic bosses. Raiders facing the 10-man version of Dragon Soul will be collecting their pieces at roughly half the rate of their 25-man colleagues. With many, many months of raiding Dragon Soul ahead of us, I assume that multiple rogues from both raid sizes will have the Fangs of the Father before Mists of Pandaria is upon us.

You'll be raiding Dragon Soul with The Sleeper and The Dreamer for several more weeks, collecting Elementium Gem Clusters this time. After you've filled your bags with the clusters, your final task is to kill Deathwing. The killing of Deathwing is analogous to the killing of Ragnaros that capped the Dragonwrath quest chain, and we can assume that finishing off the end boss of a tier will be a requirement for any legendaries moving forward.

Once the Fangs of the Father are finally yours, you'll be able to do anything. Parsing your DPS in raids will become a mere formality, as you'll always be on top. I am already shopping for two rogue partners to join me for a triple-orange Arena team. The daggers are nothing short of amazing, and they'll firmly cement patch 4.3 as my favorite of all time.

Sneak in every Wednesday for our Molten Front ganking guide, a deep-dive into the world of playing a subtlety rogue -- and of course, all the basics in our guide to the latest rogue gear.