preparation
Latest
Encrypted Text: Readiness gone, Preparation next?
As part of the pre-Mists patch 5.0.4, in August 2012, hunters were given Readiness as a baseline ability. Readiness is a carbon copy of Preparation, which has been a rogue workhorse for years. While I am typically hesitant to give hunters any more ink, there's something interesting for them in the patch 5.4 PTR notes. Readiness is being removed from hunters entirely, and their cooldowns are being rebalanced to compensate. An ability that was considered so crucial that it was made baseline is being pulled completely just a year later. Cooldown management has been an integral part of the rogue class since day one. Preparation has been our go-to PvP ability since its inception. The entire World of Roguecraft video series was predicated by how amazing Preparation is. A rogue with full cooldowns is a deity, a rogue without cooldowns is a pushover. When Preparation was made baseline in patch 5.2 (January 2013), I was certain that the once-optional ability would be a permanent part of our arsenal. Now, I'm wondering if Preparation's next on Blizzard's chopping block.
Preparation, Readiness, and other cooldown resetting abilities may have grim future
Classes with cooldown resetting abilities probably won't find one of Ghostcrawler's most recent tweet all that surprising. The abilities (Preparation, Readiness, etc.) have been targeted by several nerfs and changes this expansion. Ghostcrawler wrote the following in reply to a tweet that said it may be time to stop adding cooldown resetting abilities to the game if they're constantly going to be nerfed. @Divine_Namjoo We agree. I'm not sure that design angle has payed out well. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) July 16, 2013 The abilities are particularly problematic in PvP, where players can chain several attacks or crowd control abilities together within a short period of time. What do you think? Do cooldown resetting abilities belong in the game? Are they overpowered?
Encrypted Text: The incredible, indestructible rogue
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. There used to be a saying amongst healers: "It costs less mana to rez a rogue than to heal one." Rogues were the only non-plate melee class (shaman and druids were healers), and our leather armor didn't absorb heavy blows. I remember gearing my first rogue specifically for stamina and fire resistance. I wouldn't be invited to the raid unless I could meet the 4,000 HP minimum health requirement. If I accidentally stole aggro, I would be squashed like a grape. Times have changed. Rogues are now the most durable melee class, and it's not even close. Enhancement shamans and fury warriors can't toss on a shield without severing all hope of dealing competitive DPS. Rogues are capable of dealing nearly their maximum damage while taking less damage than any other class in the raid.
Encrypted Text: How to play a rogue in patch 5.2
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. Now that the patch is live, we know which changes made it and which were cut in development. Vitality's buff was cut in half, but combat rogues are still sitting quite pretty. Assassination had a last-minute 10% boost to its damage via Assassin's Resolve, which should ensure that the spec performs well. Subtlety's Sanguinary Vein buff also stayed put, which should increase the number of subtlety rogues raiding in this tier. Along with the purely numerical changes, we also have to factor in our new set bonuses, talents, and ability changes that arrived with the patch. Rogues received more changes than usual in this patch cycle, and I am hopeful that we'll continue to excel in PvE while also gaining ground in PvP representation. Patch 5.2 is full of cool new tools for rogues, which has me very excited for this raid tier.
Encrypted Text: Cat and mouse in rogue PvP
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. Rogues deal maximum damage when in melee range of their opponents. The new Shuriken Toss is potent, but it's still no substitute for melee uptime. Ranged classes want to keep rogues at bay, while rogues want to close the gap as soon as possible. Rogues will beat a warlock that stands still, but a slippery mage can defeat us. When it comes to PvP, it's all about location, location, location. Mobility has become a back-and-forth battle between rogues and ranged classes. We compensate for their slows and snares with our Crippling Poison, while they counter our stuns with their teleports and trinkets. Rogues can use Shadowstep to close the gap, only to be rooted in place and left out in the open. Rogue PvP has become a mobility cooldown dance, as we try to snuggle up to our targets and they try to play hard-to-get.
Encrypted Text: Smoke Bomb's new trick
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. Kick will cost zero energy in patch 5.2, bringing it in line with most of the other melee interrupts in the game. Ghostcrawler indicated that as PvE utility ability, Kick should be free to encourage regular usage. In PvP situations, Kick was already the straggler in the process of becoming free, not the forerunner. Blade Flurry's new 4-way 40% cleave allows us to deal 260% of our normal melee damage to 5 targets. Combat's cleave is still quite potent against two targets, but now excels when facing small groups. In addition to these improvements, Smoke Bomb is learning a new trick. In patch 5.2, Smoke Bomb will reduce damage taken by our allies inside the Smoke Bomb radius by 20%. While Tricks of the Trade has always been a valuable addition to our arsenal and we have several buffs and debuffs, the new Smoke Bomb is our first true raid cooldown.
Encrypted Text: It's time to eat cake
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. Preparation has always been our most controversial ability. From the early episodes of The World of Roguecraft, to the chart-topping AR/Prep days of BC, to our recent Prep vs Step conundrum, Preparation has always been the focal point of rogue cooldown discussion. Many rogues have advocated removing Preparation altogether and adjusting our cooldowns to be potent without it. Several other classes don't see the ability as a fair technique, lending itself to our image as a cooldown-reliant class. Blizzard clearly has other thoughts on the matter, as the ability will become baseline and available to all rogues at level 68 in the upcoming 5.2 patch. If I was making a list of rogue talents that might become baseline abilities, Preparation would've been all the way at the bottom. Many vocal rogues have been asking for Shadowstep to be added to every rogue's repertoire to resolve the Prep vs Step debate, but I don't think anyone saw the reverse happening. The decision to baseline Preparation is a clear buff for rogues everywhere.
New rogue talents and other rogue buffs coming in patch 5.2
If you follow rogue news, you know the class is in a bit of a funk. The developers are certainly aware of the class's low representation and they're aiming to fix it. Two new rogue talents have been datamined from patch 5.2: Hit and Run and Marked for Death. Where these new talents fall in the talent trees, we aren't yet sure. One of them is surely replacing Preparation, which has now become a baseline ability. In addition to the new talents, great changes have been made to select existing talents and abilities. For example, Deadly Throw no longer requires a full 5 combo points to interrupt an opponent's spellcasting, but rather only 3. Shuriken Toss, when used beyond 10 yards, turns all of your auto-attacks into ranged shurikens with a 30 yard range for 10 seconds. Do keep in mind, however, that this is the PTR. So sayeth Ghostcrawler: @dylanrogue We have had the discussion about whether we're buffing rogues too much in 5.2. Give it a spin on the PTR and let us know. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 20, 2012 Everything on the PTR is subject to change. Get excited, but cautiously so.
Encrypted Text: The 4 unspoken laws of rogue duels
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 used to read a rogue blog called World of Ming, where a rogue named Ming would explore our class' capabilities in the world of high-end PvP. My favorite posts were his deep-dives into dueling. Ming had the belief that the rogue class should be able to defeat any other class in a series of duels. If you wanted to fight Ming, you just needed to log onto the PTR servers to find him dueling outside of a major city. Blizzard has often claimed that WoW simply isn't balanced around 1v1 combat. In fact, even the 2v2 Arenas are considered to be a lower tier of competition -- complete with lower compensation. The 3v3 and 5v5 Arenas are heralded as the truly balanced PvP platforms. In spite of Blizzard's disclaimer, the fact is that many people consider duels to be the ultimate form of PvP. The rogue-vs.-rogue duel has long been held as the truest test of skill between two brothers of the shadows. If you ever plan to engage in a rogue duel, you need to know about the sacred code of dueling conduct that every rogue should follow.
Encrypted Text: Preparation vs. Shadowstep
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 new Mists of Pandaria talent calculators are designed to promote tough choices. None of the new rogue talents are awful, and all of them will see play at some point. Deadly Throw and Shuriken Toss could be useful to attack distant targets. Paralytic Poison and Nerve Strike could allow us to reduce our target's outgoing damage significantly. The battle between Versatility and Anticipation will likely be decided on a fight-by-fight basis. The truth is that all of these choices pale in comparison to the ultimate decision in the new rogue talent tree: Preparation or Shadowstep. Burst of Speed is certainly interesting, but it doesn't have the history of Prep or ShS. Subtlety's two signature spells are facing off in a battle of utility abilities. Putting both of these abilities on the same talent tier is sadistic, but we have to cope with the reality of this decision.
Encrypted Text: Finesse in PVP
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. World of Warcraft is more than just a game. Over the years, an entire ecosystem surrounding the game has developed, created by the gaming community. I've read a few WoW novels and comic books, seen fanfics and fan art featured on the community portal, and I've enjoyed so many awesome pieces of WoW machinima. It's actually quite common for the community to influence the game itself, as we've has seen countless changes implemented after community demand. The fan-created Leeroy Jenkins video, for example, still represents WoW for most of the world. When I first started playing the rogue, I watched a lot of rogue-centric machinima. Boss encounter videos weren't very popular then, and so most of the machinima was based in PVP. I watched in awe as Grim annihilated everything in his path. I laughed as Happyminti stomped on characters who were 10 levels higher than himself. I sat agape as Hector leaped off of the tower of Karazahn after a mage who tried to escape. My style of rogue PVP has always been colored by the finesse and grace of these rogues, and that still holds true today.
The Road to Mordor: Packing for Isengard
Isengard. Isengard. ISENGARD. It's all I can think about since last week's E3 reveal, and I know I'm not the only one. For some reason, having a firm launch date for Lord of the Rings Online's third expansion feels like a starting pistol's gone off, and we're beginning the race to the expansion in earnest. Of course, we're not in that much of a hurry at this point. We still have well over three months to go, the beta has yet to begin, and something tells me that Turbine's got a few more tricks to pull out of its top hat before all is said and done. Still, I'm officially in "Go!" mode, and I bet I'm not the only one. While I can't make September 27th come any sooner, I can think of six ways that we can prepare for our upcoming journey into Dunland and beyond. Seven, if you include putting together the absolute perfect outfit to slay Saruman in, but that's a given. Hit the jump and I'll walk you through everything you should be doing this summer to get ready for Rise of Isengard!
Gold Capped: How to profit from every single new patch
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Being good at making gold in WoW is more than simply finding a gold tip online and executing it on your server, along with everyone else who read the same article you did. One of the most important traits that will help you get past this is perception -- being able to distill facts and data into patterns that you can use to prepare for similar situations in the future. I'm not talking specifically about predicting the future, not even trying to capitalize on "copy-paste tradeskill development." I'm talking about something much simpler than that: making money when a patch is released, for example. If you pay attention, you'll notice some things happen every single patch. If you can figure out what they are, you may be able to take advantage of them and make a decent profit.
Google said to be preparing NFC checkout trials for San Francisco and New York City
Google does not sell hardware, Eric Schmidt told us as much, but the company has few qualms about buying the stuff up. Bloomberg is reporting, on the authority of a pair of well informed sources, that the Mountain View team is about to buy up "thousands" of VeriFone's NFC payment terminals, with a view to installing them in stores across San Francisco and New York City. Those two technophile cities represent the most receptive audience NFC is likely to get in the US, and Google will be hoping that users there will be able to appreciate the convenience of being able to swipe their Nexus S (or other similarly equipped handset) to complete payments. We already know that Schmidt and co. consider the concept of "mobile money" a priority and there have been rumblings of Google setting up its own payment system, which together make this hookup with VeriFone appear highly credible. Bloomberg expects the trials to commence within the next four months, just in time to make iPhone 5 users green with envy.
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: Fresh patch 4.0.6 PTR notes for 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. Feel free to email me with any rogue questions you may have. Have you ever read Blizzard's patch notes and wondered exactly where the developers are going with certain changes? We're all familiar with the fact that subtlety has been lagging behind the other rogue specs in DPS. It's actually still seeing some use in top guilds on healing-intensive encounters, due to Enveloping Shadows giving us nearly permanent Feint on top of 30% AoE damage reduction. The fact remains that subtlety has largely been a PvP spec outside of very specific situations, although it's a quite potent PvP spec. The patch notes show us that the developers obviously want for subtlety to be more competitive in PvE -- no surprise here. What I don't understand is the new Blade Flurry mechanic. On the PTR, Blade Flurry no longer has a fixed duration, meaning that you can have it up 100% of the time. While yeah, it sounds awesome, it also opens up huge balancing issues. It means that any time there's a raid encounter with more than one target, we're stuck swapping to combat. There are plenty of other classes with similar Cleaving abilities, but none as powerful as Blade Flurry. While I'm all for spec diversity, I'd rather not waste development time on something that's certain to be cut once it makes it to live.
EVE Evolved: Preparing for war
As a sandbox game, EVE Online allows every person to play his or her own way. Some players like to trade on the market, run missions in whatever spare time they get or manufacture ships for their corporation. Others play for the adrenaline rush of PvP or the strategy of political conquest. EVE's population can be roughly split into those players that PvP regularly and those that don't, with a surprising number of pilots abstaining from it altogether. But what if you're one of those players who doesn't PvP and thinks it's time for a change? Maybe you've had enough of mining rocks and finally want to give piracy a go. Or perhaps your corp is the target of yet another war declaration and you think it's time to make a stand. Whatever your reasons, making the transition into the world of ships blowing each other to smithereens can be a tricky business. In this informative guide, I look at the various things a player or corporation can do to prepare themselves for war and ease the transition into a PvP play style.
Ready Check: Zen and the art of precognition
Ready Check focuses on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Icecrown Citadel or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Your regular host, Mr. Michael Gray, is still trying to fight his way out of Tyler's fever dreams, so Ready Check this week has fallen to me. I had to check in the blackened heart and the mage-hate on the way in, so if you want that stuff, you'll have to read Blood Pact. I toyed with the idea of doing some hardcore theorycrafting post or the like, but instead I want to talk about one of the raiding "soft skills." Hamlet said, "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!" Today, we look at angelic actions through godlike apprehension.
Patch 3.3 PTR: WoW moves towards shorter cooldowns
If you checked the most recent Patch 3.3 PTR patch notes, a comparison of spells would show that Blizzard has reduced a lot of spells' cooldowns by a notable amount. This makes a significant impact on the playing environment on numerous levels, as most of these spells on long cooldowns were long considered to be powerful abilities whose use were once thought situational. These shorter cooldowns will see more abilities in play, figuring more into dungeons, questing, or world PvP. Most of these abilities still won't see action in Arenas, where the allowable spells have been limited to abilities with cooldowns below ten minutes (down from fifteen). The change appears to be a direct result of many spell cooldowns being reduced. This continues a trend in shortened cooldowns, reflecting what Ghostcrawler said in one thread about how Blizzard "in general (has) been moving away from long cooldowns, anyway." Players saw this when the iconic long-cooldown ability Lay on Hands -- an inevitable Patch 3.3 candidate for a nerf -- became usable every 20 minutes from a formerly mind-numbing one hour. More abilities are now being adjusted to be usable more often and, when necessary, balanced accordingly. Check out the full list after the jump.
WoW TCG: Arena Grand Melee expansion released
The World of Warcraft Trading Card game has released its latest expansion, but it's a little bit different than what's come before. It's called Arena Grand Melee, and it actually changes the gameplay of the TCG just a little bit, including some very different mechanics than those players have seen before. For instance, there's a card called "For the Fallen" that will grant additional cards to players when they act out their melee strikes in real-life. Another card called "Steamwheedle Casino" has players playing a quick game of Blackjack with their WoW TCG cards to win an extra card. Arena Grand Melee sounds it puts a very strange twist on the current TCG game.The WoW TCG site has been highlighting some of the new cards in the game -- there's a new ability called Preparation, which allows you to use a card twice in quick succession, and there are cards that boost your hand size and beef up your allies, as well as cards that offer up some other new heroes and abilities. It sounds like an interesting addition to the game, but on the other hand, this doesn't seem like a pack for newbies -- experienced players will get the best thrill from these twists. Pick up the eighty card sets in either of the Horde or Alliance versions at your local gaming store.
