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Encrypted Text: Rogues need to be number one
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 topic requests. Back towards the end of Wrath, Blizzard shared with us a lot of information about the then-upcoming Cataclysm expansion. The new 31-point talent trees were unveiled, along with the mastery bonuses for each tree. The mastery bonuses were heralded as the ultimate balancing tool: Developers could tweak these numbers without touching a tree's talents. Mastery would ensure that any given spec could be tuned independently of the other specs. The concept made sense, as buffing individual talents had a tendency to cause players to just cross-spec into those newly powerful talents. The other option at Blizzard's disposal is buffing talents that are deep in a talent tree, which works well since we can only go 10 points deep into our secondary trees. In order to buff rogues in the upcoming patch 4.2, the developers have used both approaches. Our assassination and combat masteries are both being buffed by 5%. Deep talents in each tree, like Vile Poisons, Savage Combat, and Sanguinary Vein, are also being improved. Finally, subtlety rogues will see Hemorrhage's base damage improved by 40%, although it remains to be seen how this change affects the spec's viability. Even with these buffs, combat and assassination rogues are still slated to be well behind most other classes. Rogues are generally middle-of-the-pack in DPS for most tier 11 bosses, and these changes will just make us "less behind." Other classes might ask us why being "average" is so bad. Average might be okay for a hybrid, but rogues need to top the meters -- not for our egos, but by design.
Breakfast topic: Cha cha cha changes
I have to admit, I was a little bit astonished by news of patch 2.4.3. We know that Blizzard is ramping up for the release of Wrath of the Lich King, as they did for the Burning Crusade. The two things that stand out most to me are the Cheat Death nerf and the reduction of riding skill level requirement to 30. Even as a Cosmo Girl, I don't really care much about Harris Piltion's new line of designer bags. (Unless those bags have 24 slots and don't have tacky, brand-name logos on them.) I think we can expect more changes in the not-too-distant future. We've already seen the death of most raid attunements. I expect to see the cost of epic flying skill reduced considerably in future patches. The same thing happened with epic land mounts, and long ago Drysc hinted that such a change may be in the works. I'd also like to see an additional character slot or two added to each realm. What changes do you predict will occur prior to Wrath's release?
