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Encrypted Text: Combat and the GCD
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. The three rogue specs share many common mechanics. They all follow the same formula: generate combo points, use finishers, activate your cooldowns when they come up. The real differences between the specs only show up once you start playing them. Assassination is well-known for being more relaxed and favors pooling energy over spamming attacks. Subtlety rogues have a knack for massive burst damage via their complex cooldown, Shadow Dance. Combat is arguably the simplest of the three specs, and is often characterized by its fast-paced gameplay and high actions-per-minute rate. Adrenaline Rush, which has been combat's signature cooldown for years, is designed to let you push buttons even faster. Assassination's Vendetta lets you hit harder, subtlety's Shadow Dance lets you use openers, and Adrenaline Rush doubles the numbers of buttons you can push. Unfortunately for combat, the concept of "push more buttons" can't scale forever.
Encrypted Text: Examining our tier 15 set bonuses
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. The Nine-Tail Battlegear is our new tier 15 raid set, and it's beautiful. The nine-tailed fox is a famous Asian mythological creature. The animal is known in many cultures for its trickery and cunning, both of which are famous rogue attributes. They're also known for frequently running from hunters and their pets, which is another one of our pastimes. I think that our opponents are likely to find the sharp-toothed fox snout on our helms to be quite imposing. Our tier 15 set bonuses are very interesting, and much more exciting than our tier 14 bonuses. I've never been a fan of the simple "Ability X does Y% more damage" set bonuses. Our two-piece bonus is unlike anything I've seen before, and our four-piece bonus has already been the topic of much discussion between the rogue community and the developers. All three rogue specs are receiving sizable buffs going into patch 5.2, and with some fresh new set bonuses to look forward to, exploring the Throne of Thunder should be a good time.
Rogue glyph changes in patch 5.0.4
When the new 5.0 patch flips over on Aug. 28, will you be ready with glyphs? Blizzard is recycling old glyphs instead of making new spell IDs and charring old ones. Some glyphs are staying the same, some are new, but some share IDs with old Cataclysm glyphs. Below is our list of new or changing glyphs for rogues. This is not a list of changing tooltips, just which glyphs you ought to have if you want to automatically have the new glyphs when the patch flips over. Rogues have no brand new glyphs and are keeping most glyph names. Glyphs that are changing into new majors: Sinister Strike becomes Adrenaline Rush Rupture becomes Cheap Shot Fan of Knives becomes Deadly Momentum Eviscerate becomes Debilitation Revealing Strike becomes Detection Deadly Throw becomes Recuperate Adrenaline Rush becomes Shadow Walk Slice and Dice becomes Shiv Preparation becomes Smoke Bomb Shadow Dance becomes Stealth Glyphs that are changing into new minors: Backstab becomes Decoy Mutilate becomes Disguise It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Encrypted Text: The challenges of haste and energy regeneration
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. Email me with any topics you'd like to see covered! One of Cataclysm's biggest changes came in the form of the stat redesign. Blizzard's team made several huge changes to the stats we were used to seeing on our gear. Attack power was rolled into agility's base potency, while armor penetration was never to be seen again on an item. We picked up a new, role-agnostic stat in mastery, with the hopes that it might help consolidate gear between the various rogue specs. Finally, haste was changed to increase the resource regeneration of melee classes and specifically accelerates the rate of energy regeneration for rogues. Haste has always boosted our energy recovery in PvE, although that mechanic was reliant on talents like Focused Attacks and Combat Potency. Now, all three specs see an energy boost from their haste, with combat still regenerating the most energy due to Combat Potency. The idea is that as your character gains gear, you get the ability to push more buttons per minute. As we progress through raiding tiers and the ilevel of our gear climbs, our rotations should be becoming more robust.
Encrypted Text: Maximize your rogue's cooldowns
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 suggest a topic you'd like to see covered! Rogues are the cooldown class. You've heard it before. For the entire lifetime of World of Warcraft, rogues have been defined by their cooldowns. Vanish and Blind were the key ingredients to the infamous Roguecraft videos, while Shadowstep and Adrenaline Rush defined an entire expansion's worth of arena matches. Preparation, the cooldown-eliminating cooldown, has been considered to be the most powerful ability in a rogue's arsenal. Aside from the low-level ability Recuperate, all three of our new Cataclysm abilities are cooldowns. We have a plethora of both defensive and offensive cooldowns, and knowing when to use them becomes key in defining the difference between a good rogue and a great one. While it may seem simple to pop CDs as soon as they're ready to be used again, defensive cooldowns are much more complex. Offensive CDs can be coordinated with external effects to increase their potency significantly. Many cooldowns ride the line between the offensive and defensive categories, as they're viable for each purpose.
Encrypted Text: BlizzCon news for patient rogues
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. This week, I'll be sharing my report from BlizzCon 2010 for rogues. As a member of our shadowy brotherhood, my duty to investigate and report on the rogue class is never over. Even though I was enjoying the festivities at BlizzCon 2010 and testing out the new demon hunter class in Diablo 3, I still made time to take care of business. The class Q&A panel is one of the best places to communicate directly with the WoW development team, and so I staked my place in line before the prior panel had even ended. When my turn finally came, I had to first pay my respects to the developers. I had asked them at the prior year's BlizzCon if we would ever see a Vanish fix implemented, and Ghostcrawler avoided promising anything. Fast-forward a year and we finally have a Vanish that I'm proud to call my own. I opened my time by giving them their much-deserved thanks. I then took the opportunity to ask about something near and dear to my heart: off-hand weapon speeds. Axes and daggers were simply never meant to be used at the same time. Their art styles don't even match!
Encrypted Text: The cooldown class
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we talk about our shared reliance on cooldowns, and how to break the cycle of being overpowered and underpowered at the same time. Rogues have somewhat of a paradoxical standing amongst the other classes, in both PvP and PvE. At times, we're unparalleled, and we become the goal that everyone else can only chase. During other times, we are frail and vulnerable, barely capable of holding our own against our opponents. Rogues have a toolbox of active abilities that were designed to give the class flavor, but have the unfortunate side effect of leaving us bland without them. We are intensely hot peppers with all of our moves ready to go, and we are simply plain rice when they're not. Are our cooldowns so powerful that they really define the class? Absolutely. Are we so weak without them that our raid leaders and arena partners are looking to recruit wet noodles instead of rogues? Probably not. However, the place we're in right now isn't necessarily where we want to be either, where our CD addiction restricts us from having a more engaging time playing the game. While being demi-gods for 20 seconds every three minutes may seem enjoyable, it still leaves quite a long stretch of impotence for us to deal with. What we need to do is find the middle ground where our CDs are still meaningful, but we're not sitting ducks for the majority of our time outside of Stealth.
Encrypted Text: Macro guide for rogues
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we talk about a few of the most common rogue macros in use today.Over the past couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to play my rogue quite a bit more than I am typically able to. Brewfest and Onyxia have had me busy every night, helping my guild mates slay Coren Direbrew over and over again. I was able to pick up a Direbrew's Shanker 2.0, although it won't see much use, it's still nice to see one in my bank beside the previous versions.I captured this bit of a World of Logs parse from one of the Onyxia attempts, where I was able to my AoE combination macro: it's a very deadly combination. Looking at numbers like these make me wonder if perhaps the great FoK nerf of 3.2.2 wasn't as heavy-handed as it was made up to be. With a Vanish fix on the horizon for patch 3.3 (who's PTR is coming "soon") and the red-hot topic of 'weapon swapping', I decided to do a bit of housecleaning and tidy up my macros and addons in anticipation.
Analysis of stated 3.1 rogue changes
All right, rogues. So by now some of you have likely read our list of 3.1 changes for our bloodthirsty class, and if not, you should! Right now! Make no mistake, these are some very cool changes, and even if this is the whole list (it's not), I'm pretty happy with how things are shaping up--not just for rogues, but for all the classes mentioned so far. If you haven't read through them yet or if you're not a big theorycrafter, you can take a moment and read through our analysis of how 3.1 will (so far) affect you, the rogue.Let's have a look!
Encrypted Text: Rogue Glyphs, part 2
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we finish a discussion on upcoming Rogue glyphs in WOTLK.Wrath of the Lich King (and also the upcoming patch 3.0) includes a new tradeskill: Inscription. Inscriptionists will be able to create scrolls, off-hand items, and parchments to help enchanters sell their wares. However, their key crafted item comes in the form of spell/skill enhancing Glyphs. Every non-inscriptionist character has six Glyph slots they can use to enhance themselves. There are three major and three minor slots; of which you can mix and match appropriate Glyphs. An image of the Glyph interface is shown above (the center slot is thought to be for Inscriptionists themselves as a tradeskill perk).Some of the various Glyphs enhance existing abilities, while others add utility to skills that change its function completely. The current Rogue Glyphs come in 3 major flavors: cooldown/energy cost reduction, range increase, and damage/effect increase. After the cut, let's explore these groups individually.
Encrypted Text: Rogue Glyphs
Every Wednesday, Encrypted Text explores issues affecting Rogues and those who group with them. This week Jason Harper, the Rogue feature blogger, discusses a new feature in Wrath, Glyphs and the opportunities for Rogues. Inscriptions, a new profession in Wrath of the Lich King, allows for the creation of tradable Glyphs that can enhance your spells and abilities. Recently a number of these glyphs were released into a beta build and Inscription was announced to be apart of the new pre-Wrath patch. As you'll see in the list below, Rogues get a wide variety of both lesser and greater glyph options, and in a lot of cases can greatly effect your talent choices in a way that gemming or enchanting never did.
Encrypted Text: Examining your spec
So yesterday on Build Shop, I mentioned that I'd gotten an email this past week from a Rogue who wanted to know about the viability of a 30/0/31 build for casual instances, raids and PvP. The short answer is OK, not very, and sure. The long answer is slightly more complex, so this week on Encrypted Text I'm examining exactly where a non-conventional hybrid build like could work, and why there are usually better specs available for both PvE and PvP.First of all, I'm a big supporter of non-standard specs. I think that your own play experience should help determine where you spend your talent points. However, I do think that you should at least examine why certain specs are tried and true, and how certain talents outperform others. If you never play in any type of group (instance, raid, battleground, arena, etc), then how you spec only affects you. Once you start spending time with other players, though, the way you play and spec starts to directly impact your teammates. Raids especially are all about teamwork, and if you're not contributing 100% in all the ways that you could, you start to become a liability. You become less of a liability in dungeons where fights are generally shorter, but you're still not living up to your potential.
Build Shop: Rogue 19/42/0
Welcome to another Tuesday edition of Build Shop! This past week I received an email from a Rogue reader in an up and coming guild that's just starting to raid Kara who says he's a non-believer in the "No Ruthlessness, No Murder, No Relentless Strike -- No Raid" policy. He also wanted to know about the viability of a hybrid build (30/0/31), and how it could be improved for casual instances, raids, and the occasional PvP skirmish. Well, that's kind of a tall order, and I plan to address it more fully tomorrow in Encrypted Text.However, I will deal with part of the question today by talking about why Combat is the superior tree for PvE in many cases. Although there are many different types of Combat builds (Mace + Sword, Daggers, Fist, etc) these days, I'm going to focus on Combat swords (19/42/0). This is a build that doesn't rely on positioning like Combat Daggers or Mutilate, making it great for fights with a lot of movement. This is also a build which can really crank out the damage with the right weapons and gear. I feel that this is one of the finest and most effective DPS builds in the game -- read on to find out why.
Encrypted Text: Upcoming Rogue changes
This week on Encrypted Text, I'm going to go over some upcoming changes to the Rogue class that everyone should be aware of. Rogues have some nice tweaks and some serious changes in the pipeline, so let's get to it.As a long time fan of the Subtlety tree, I've been really enjoying the last couple changes Blizzard has made to Rogue abilities. In patch 2.3, Hemorrhage was buffed to deal 125% weapon damage, Shadowstep became usable out of stealth, Cheat Death became more reliable -- all great changes. Although the next patch will nerf Hemo down to 110% weapon damage, there's also a talent in the Subtlety tree to increase it's damage by 10%, so heavy Subtlety rogues won't feel the pinch quite as bad.Another important change that we reported on indirectly a few days ago was a new tweak to Shadowstep -- once activated, it grants a 3 second, 70% speed increase. What does this mean for rogues? Read on and find out.
