combat-potency
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Encrypted Text: Rogues, spam, and haste
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. I spent the past weekend playing a new mech game, Hawken. One of the game's signature weapons is a powerful RPG, which has a short cooldown. During intense battles, I often found myself spamming my RPG button, just as I would spam Mutilate while playing my rogue. I wanted to make sure I used it as soon as it came off of cooldown. Unfortunately for me, pressing the button a second time once the RPG is airborne causes it to detonate prematurely, which usually resulted in the RPG's explosion damaging my mech instead of my target. While raiding in Dragon Soul, combat was the spec du jour, you had to spam your Sinister Strike key. If you weren't fervently mashing the '2' button on your keyboard, your energy would cap and you'd be throwing away free DPS. What's worse is that combat's favorite stat was haste, which only served to exacerbate the issue. Rogues weren't spamming their keys because they were impatient, they were spamming their keys to do their job.
Encrypted Text: Breaking the rogue rules
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. Rogue rotations haven't changed significantly since Cataclysm. Each of our three specs has a new element or two added to the mix, like Blindside and the revamped Revealing Strike. The combo points and energy systems keep on ticking, enabling our familiar rotations in yet another expansion. Rogue mechanics, on the other hand, have had several significant tweaks. While each change is significant on its own, what's really interesting is how they fit into a larger story. The "quick offhand" paradigm that has lasted for years is breaking down. Rogues are bringing significant buffs and debuffs to every environment. Combo points are more fluid than ever. Rogue rotations may not have evolved since Cataclysm, but the class as a whole certainly has.
Encrypted Text: Should all rogues use daggers?
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. When the art team at Blizzard developed the class icons for World of Warcraft, it based them on that class' weapon of choice. Mages cast spells through their crystal-laden staves, druids fight with their paws and sharp teeth, and paladins wield a mighty, righteous hammer. The rogue class has been represented by the swift, poisoned dagger for years. While our dark leather armor and our brittle yellow class text are easily recognizable symbols of the rogue, the dagger is our one true sigil. While only two of our abilities can't be used with swords or other weapons, both assassination and subtlety rogues are still forced to bend the knee to the dagger god. Even the most stalwart combat rogues carry a dagger in one hand. Why not go all the way?
Encrypted Text: Dissecting rogue stats
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 article suggestions! Do you remember when armor penetration was all the rage? While combat rogues lusted after all the ArP as they could get their hands on, the other physical DPS classes shared the same desire. I forgave all of the feral druids who asked for the leather gear with armor penetration on it; I know we have to share the agility-based leather gear with our furry friends. I didn't put my foot down until hunters, warriors, and even death knights started rolling on our stuff. While having such a powerful stat allowed us to scale competitively, it also created a massive amount of gear competition. Blizzard's developers decided to end armor penetration's reign as the top stat and actually named a successor to the throne -- agility. Agility is now a rogue's best stat, and since it's always on our gear, we never have to worry about whether we'll see it or not. The plate DPS classes now only want strength, and so our precious leather is safe from their clutches. The stat redesign also shifted the balance of power between the other secondary stats, and we saw several stat functions changed as well.
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: 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: Weapon speed analysis
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 discuss the reason we're picky about weapon speeds. 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.
Encrypted Text: Fan of Knives mechanics deep-dive
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 Fan of Knives, and how to get the most out of it.One of the great Rogues on my server recently released a video, showcasing some unique world PvP clips. All of them involved aerial kills using Killing Spree and engineering items to blow up a target on a flying mount. I showed this video to a few of my friends who also play Rogues, and many of them were surprised that you could successfully kill opponents in midair, and that Killing Spree was even usable while moving.The conversation that followed revealed that they were unaware of several other Rogue mechanics that aren't typically covered in your average "how to Rogue" guide or even completely understood by veterans who've been playing for years. I decided to do some intensive testing and exploration into a few of these mechanical anomalies that still elude even experienced raiders and arena combatants alike. I focused on Fan of Knives in particular, as this is the newest spell added to our arsenal.
Mana and energy regeneration mechanics revamped on Beta
A change went in with the last Wrath Beta patch that's deceptively simple, but may have far reaching ramifications for many of the classes in game: Both energy and mana regenerate on a per second basis, rather than the previous ticks. Instead of a chunk of mana or energy every few seconds, you'll now see a steady trickle reappearing constantly at your bar (outside of the 5 second rule for casters, of course). As a friend put it, "Woah. It feels like I am playing Diablo II now." You can see an example of the change in action in the video above from Youtube user koblec. The energy change should be especially helpful for Rogues and Feral Druids in that they won't have to obsessively time their attacks to the rhythm of the energy tick system, and should be able to use extra energy from talents in an easier and more fluid manner. Likewise, mana and energy users alike won't be waiting for that one last tick to cast a crucial spell or ability, but can cast as soon as they have the mana. Plus, it's honestly sort of empowering to see the mana bar running up like it does. Technically, I'm not regenerating mana any faster, but watching that blue bar go up so quickly makes it feel like I am, and makes it much easier to tell when I'm stuck in the 5 second rule, besides. Of course, as with all changes, this is Beta, so things can change, and Koraa is asking for focused feedback and bug reports on the concept, but it's something I'm certainly hoping makes it live.
