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Encrypted Text: Hot rogue news from the developer Q&A
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 went all the way to BlizzCon this year, stood in line to ask the developers about rogue utility in person, and didn't really get an answer that anyone was satisfied with. Rogue utility came from our stuns, which every melee class now has in spades. I hung my head and accepted that rogues were going to suffer through another expansion without any improvements. I had been hoping that Ghostcrawler, WoW's lead systems developer, would have more news to share. But then, at first light on the fifth day after BlizzCon, Ghostcrawler appeared atop the hill on his brilliant crab Shadowfax. His white robes shone brilliantly in the bright dawn, and his nerf bat was raised high over his head. With him rode 1,000 answers, ready to rush down the hill to trample our questions, which were rallying in the valley below. As he parted his lips, a beautiful song poured forth: "We are reworking poisons."
Encrypted Text: Rogue news from BlizzCon 2011
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 love BlizzCon. I am a long-time fan of each of Blizzard's Big Three games, and I am eagerly awaiting next year's triple release of Diablo 3 paired with the StarCraft and WoW expansions. Channeling my rogue reflexes, I conquered the BlizzCon ticket boss again this year, so I had the opportunity to visit BlizzCon in person. While in Anaheim, I tried out a Pandaren monk, crushed some cowards in a Diablo PVP match, and shredded a batch of zerglings before losing to so many banelings. To all of those who I met at the WoW Insider Reader Meetup and on the convention floor, it was great to meet you! I have been collecting my notes on what we learned at BlizzCon about the future of rogues, but I am realizing that there's not much news. We're losing access to ranged weapons, but we will be able to simply throw our melee weapons with Throw and Fan of Knives. The revamp of the talent system affects everyone, and there's no use diving into the new trees since they're not even close to being finalized. Pandaren rogues will be available in Mists of Pandaria, but that's not really exciting information, is it?
Encrypted Text: The complexities of rogue DPS
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 am often asked about my favorite aspect of the rogue class. While our plethora of cooldowns are quite amazing and Stealth defines the class from an outsider's view, they're simply not relevant that often. Stealth is what rogues do when they're not in combat, and our cooldowns are only effective occasionally. The most pervasive portion of the rogue experience is our rotation system, which we're dealing with during every single second of every combat engagement. I have played my wife's retribution paladin a few times, and suffice it to say that I hate the spec with every fiber of my being. I hated their old FCFS priority system in Wrath, and I hate their new, holy power-infused "rotation" of Cataclysm. There are so many procs and random events that it's impossible to work out any sort of fixed strategy or priority system. Rogue rotations are actually true rotations, capable of being quantified and easily repeatable. Our combo point and energy systems work together to create a functional DPS model that hasn't changed since the game's original inception.
Encrypted Text: Reflecting on our Cataclysm abilities
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 love October. While any baseball fan will tell you that there's a special feeling in the air during October, I couldn't care less about the World Series. I know plenty of football fans who enjoy spending their Octobers obsessing over their fantasy rosters, but my team has cruised to a 5-and-0 start already. I'm not even particularly excited that my birthday falls in October, as another event takes priority. October is BlizzCon month for me, and I can't wait to hear all about what's in store for rogues as we learn about next year's expansion. When thinking about what cool abilities rogues might see in the next WoW expansion, I started reflecting on the new spells we received in Cataclysm. For our new high-level spells, we picked up Combat Readiness, Redirect, and Smoke Bomb. Recuperate was added to our low-level spells to help make leveling smoother and to provide rogues with a healing option that didn't involve bandages. How useful have these spells proven themselves to be over the past year?
Encrypted Text: Designing the ultimate rogue quest chain
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. In preparation for researching the upcoming pair of legendary daggers for rogues, the Fangs of the Father, I have already copied over several rogues to the PTR servers. Unfortunately, it's impossible to start the quest chain just yet, as not all of the new dungeons are accessible. I will have more information on exactly what's required to obtain our upcoming orange weapons once I'm able to actually start working on it. The black dragon Wrathion will be giving us orders, and we'll be completing his missions in return for the legendary weapons. Some information has been datamined on a few of the quests that we'll be completing. While we don't know much, we do know that there will be at least one Pick Pocket job and a Stealth mission, based on both the datamined info and Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler's own statement on the rogue-themed quest line. Picking a few mobs' pockets for a ring and sneaking into Ravenholdt doesn't seem to that challenging, but obviously we don't see the whole picture yet. I have been mulling over ideas for what pieces of quintessential rogueness could be introduced to make our quest for legendary weapons that much more memorable.
Encrypted Text: Blackfang Battleweave, or Deathwing is the Joker
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. Blizzard has been posting previews of the upcoming tier 13 sets, allowing us to see what our new sets will look like visually. When describing the tier 13 set for rogues, Blackfang Battleweave, it was said that the armor is bat-themed. When I think of bats and bat-themed armor, I immediately think of the Caped Crusader. Not to worry, as the preview also claimed that they "were careful to skirt the more obvious inspirations." Oh, that's good news -- so they're not designing our next tier set in such a way that it would warrant a cease and desist letter from DC Comics. The only real similarity between our gear and the Dark Knight's is the pointy cowl; I don't see any shaped abs on our leather tunic. As soon as I let my guard down, the WoW Facebook page posts an image of a rogue soaring through the night air on a pair of dark wings. Our new legendary daggers, the Fangs of the Father, apparently, give us wings. You can't see this picture and not immediately see the resemblance to the Masked Manhunter himself. I can only think of two possibilities: Either I accidentally started playing DC Universe Online at some point without realizing it, or Frank Miller has replaced Samwise Didier as Blizzard's art director.
Encrypted Text: Welcome your new legendary-wielding rogue overlords
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 alive. The game is dynamic, always churning and changing. Guilds rise and fall, chapters of lore are closed, and new challenges are introduced. The balance of power shifts like a scale at sea. While the developers do their best to steer the ship through the rough waters of chaos, players are exploiting even the slightest imbalances to gain any advantage over their peers. The constant struggle to maintain order and balance has been fought for years, with neither participant yielding to the opposing side. As the developers are tweaking class mechanics and players are finding new ways to break them, there is one force that silences everyone -- the legendary weapon. With their orange text and powerful attributes, legendary weapons are capable of raising a class out of the war zone of balance and elevating them to the pillar of dominance. The wielders of legendaries are above the laws of balance and fairness; they get to define their own reality. Rogues have been named as the next recipients of this power in the form of a pair of legendary daggers, the Fangs of the Father. I couldn't be more excited. Even in my glee, I still wonder: Why would the devs introduce weapons so powerful that they undermine their own attempts at balance?
Encrypted Text: Rogues do it from behind
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 best way to improve your DPS is to attack more. I'm not talking about stacking haste so that your attacks are swift as lightning, but rather about not missing any opportunities. In order for a rogue to deal maximum damage, he needs to be in melee range of something that needs to die at all times. Staying in melee range can be difficult, as bosses are always tossing out pools of fire and knocking us back into the walls. Rogues need to be tenacious; we need to be vicious dogs that won't let go of our prey for any reason. We need to hustle between targets, minimizing the amount of time we see "Out of Range" at the top of our screen. In order to ensure that we're on our targets at all times, we need to learn about how melee mechanics work.
Encrypted Text: Leveling your rogue in Cataclysm
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 I was selecting my first class, back in the early days of WoW, I chose the rogue for its awesome killing potential. Mindlessly grinding mobs used to be a valid way to level, especially since questing in the past involved so much travel and downtime. Our unique mix of stuns and damage allowed rogues to chew through enemies quickly and efficiently. My strategy was to find an area populated by caster-type mobs and then simply burn through them all day long. Over the years, rogues have continued to evolve, and we're now one of the strongest leveling classes in the game. Our past weaknesses were our lack of self-healing and our difficulty against elite mobs, but Recuperate and the near total removal of any quest-based elite mobs in Cataclysm has solved both of our problems. Leveling a new rogue today is an enjoyable experience, as we have the finesse to avoid unwanted encounters and the brawn to handle any combat that we do have to engage in.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 5
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 first time I faced Ragnaros, I was invited to soak up gear in a Molten Core run. The only reserved item was Perdition's Blade, as one of the guild's veteran rogues had been waiting for it for weeks. Of course, as soon as we Ragnaros packing, that infamous dagger was left behind. The master looter tried assigning it to the experienced rogue, but his name didn't show up in the looting console. He had fallen asleep during the Majordomo encounter, and because he didn't participate in the Ragnaros kill, he was ineligible for the weapon. As the only other rogue present, I was given Perdition's Blade by default. Drunk with power, I killed hundreds of priests and warlocks over the next few days, just because I could. When I heard that we'd be facing Ragnaros again, I immediately started salivating at the thought of scoring a Perdition's Blade 2.0 from his fiery corpse. When I found out that Rag still drops a Sulfuras for the warriors but doesn't have a single dagger on his loot table, I was pretty upset. He's had like six years to forge a new Perdition's Blade for me, but apparently he spent all of his time building an army instead. Forgetting to make a new dagger will be Ragnaros' biggest mistake, as I will have my revenge by sharing all of my tips for killing him with you.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 4
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. In order to challenge Ragnaros in the Sulfuron Keep, we have to defeat his fire-loving cadre that blocks our way. Baleroc acts as the Spire's gatekeeper, preventing us from crossing the chasm between us and Ragnaros. After dispatching the first fours bosses in Firelands, we knock out Baleroc to make our way across a fiery bridge to dethrone Ragnaros himself. Unfortunately for us, Rag's newest Majordomo, the former archdruid Fandral Staghelm, is guardian the entrance to the Spire. Luckily for us, we just picked up a Gatecrasher from Baleroc's smoldering corpse, and we're ready to cleave our way through whatever Staghelm throws our way. The Staghelm fight is fairly simple for rogues. We're focusing on nuking the boss for nearly the entire fight, and that's exactly the type of encounter we shine in. Staghelm does have a few adds he spawns, though, and they need to be taken down quickly. Combat rogues are uniquely suited for burning these unwelcome guests down, due to Blade Flurry. Blade Flurry can boost your DPS on this encounter by nearly 20%, and combat's extra expertise helps us attack Majordomo from the front.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 3
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 topics you'd like to see covered. Alysrazor is not an ideal fight for rogues. We waste a lot of time running around, and we spend hundreds of energy points on Kicks. We swap targets often, never spending more than a minute on any single enemy. We're often too far away from the rest of the raid to receive their buffs, and our targets are rarely fully debuffed. Due to encounter mechanics, even the tanks are dealing more damage than us. While it might seem like the odds are stacked against us on Alysrazor, the good news is that our damage here isn't nearly as important as our utility. Alysrazor is the official Interrupt Boss for Firelands. There's always an Interrupt Boss in each raid tier. Tier 11 saw us Kicking all of Maloriak's casts, while Lady Deathwhisper and Valithria Dreamwalker had us interrupting Scourge casters all night. It was almost impossible to defeat the Faction Champions without solid interrupts, and General Vezax's Searing Flames was deadly if not Kicked. Rogues have been the go-to interrupters for years, and the Alyzrazor encounter again challenges us to put our boots in some caster faces.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 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 any questions or article suggestions you have. If there's one trend that I am enjoying in Firelands, it's that the encounters are much more rogue-friendly than those of the previous tier. We're not swapping targets as often, and there are several fights where combat rogues get to shine via Blade Flurry. There are also role-based encounters like Rhyolith, where our DPS is less important than our reaction time and planning. Beth'tilac and Baleroc start very differently, but they both finish with a race to beat the ever-increasing damage being dealt to the tank. Rogues are particularly effective against both bosses, especially since both are simple fights that let us establish our rotations. Rogues prefer to focus on single targets, as opposed to specs like boomkins and shadow priests that prefer tossing their DOTs around.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 1
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 your favorite ganking stories or dictionary definitions of the word "griefing." The best part of playing a subtlety rogue has always been Shadowstep. Warriors have been blessed with Intercept since day one, and feral druids have Kitty Leap built into their default specs. Rogues, on the other hand, are forced into subtlety to match the mobility of our leather-wearing brethren. Shadowstep could be such a powerful tool for maintaining our uptime in raid situations, if only every rogue had access to it. Subtlety rogues don't want Shadowstep to become baseline, because then subtlety loses half of its attractiveness. Even without Shadowstep, rogues have plenty of buttons to push in Firelands. There are plenty of adds to test our AOE potency, utility encounters that stress precision instead of damage, and plenty of nasty spells to interrupt. While we're not fighting against Lucifron and Golemagg again, we can use our experience against Ragnaros' former entourage to help us combat the new crew hanging out around his castle. Just remember to have your Volcanic Armor and Helm of Fire equipped; I hear Rag likes to keep his thermostat set to "crispy."
Encrypted Text: How to run the Molten Front
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 topics you'd like to see covered. Varian Wrynn isn't happy. He sent his best and brightest men to the Molten Front to assist the Guardians of Hyjal in invading the Firelands, but all he received back was a stack of casualty alerts. The cause of death on each report was the same: several deep dagger wounds. As Varian assigned more soldiers to the Molten Front, he simply received more body bags in return. Varian confronted Garrosh about the issue, claiming that the Warchief was breaking their peace accord by using assassins in the Molten Front. Garrosh feigned ignorance and promised Varian that he'd find the perpetrator and have him properly handled. The next day, I received a post from Garrosh himself. It was brief: "Lok'tar, brother!" I've read several articles that claim that world PVP is dead and has been for a long time. The truth is that world PVP is alive; it has simply transitioned into a seasonal event. With the release of the Molten Front quest hub, Blizzard's developers directed a ton of level 85 players into a zone where they can't use their flying mounts. If that doesn't count as revitalizing world PVP, then I don't know what does. I spend every spare moment I have plunging my daggers into the questers' ribcages. There's a plethora of targets available, with new enemies zoning in every minute. World PVP hasn't been this active since the Isle of Quel'Danas, and that means I have a lot of catching up to do.
Encrypted Text: Patch 4.2 gear guide 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 questions or article topics you would like to see covered. If you're like me, you've been spending way too much time in the Dungeon Finder queue lately. With a plethora of new loot available in patch 4.2, we need to earn valor points as fast as possible. Patch 4.2 introduced several new gear options, including new valor point vendors, a new reputation vendor, new leatherworking recipes, and even unlockable vendors. Rather than idling around a capital city, I prefer to work on my daily quests as I wait. I want to minimize the amount of time it takes me to upgrade my gear, and multitasking is the best way to accomplish that. The most important determining factor in the gear available to you will be whether or not you are raiding in Firelands. A large subset of the new rogue gear is only available to raiders, whether that's due to requiring a certain reputation that you can only obtain by raiding or the fact that the items only drop from bosses in Firelands. Patch 4.2 brings gear for rogues at every level, including those who aren't raiding for one reason or another. Your goal should be to identify the gear that is available to you, and then to prioritize that gear and start working towards acquiring it.
Encrypted Text: Blade Flurry is broken
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 topics you'd like to see covered! Whenever I think of the current state of combat, I recall rogue blogger Aldriana's insightful post from when the Blade Flurry change was first announced. Blade Flurry has always been the spec's signature ability, but now it's transcended into its only ability. Combat rogues currently fluctuate between "just ahead of subtlety" and "best in the game" based on whether or not Blade Flurry works on a particular encounter. Blade Flurry makes or breaks combat rogues, making it incredibly unbalanced. Combat rogues are lucky that Magmaw and Halfus are relatively easy heroic encounters, because doing six-digit DPS on Sinestra would've certainly drawn the developer's attention. At one point in time, Blade Flurry was simply an extra perk of the combat tree. You could pick up some extra damage if there was something nearby to cleave, but it rarely decided your outcome. Even on ideal Blade Flurry fights like the Twin Val'kyr, combat rogues weren't that overpowering. The new BF design is impossible to balance against.
Encrypted Text: A rogue's guide to patch 4.2
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 topics you'd like to see covered! Rogues have a lot to look forward to when patch 4.2 is released. If you spend most of your time in dungeons or raiding, you'll be happy to hear about the sizable buffs to all three of our talent trees. Unfortunately for rogues that favor PVP, there are some cooldown changes to Cloak of Shadows and Combat Readiness that won't be well-received. While I'm not completely satisfied with the size of our buff when compared to our relative position in the DPS pack, our potency in Firelands still remains to be seen. In addition to the slew of balance changes, we can start salivating over the new gear that will be available. Our tier 12 set has some very fun bonuses, and also some great crafted gear coming up. Our caster rivals will get access to their first legendary weapon since Atiesh, so we'll have to do our best to keep up. The duration of Blind in PVE is going up to a full minute, giving us two forms of long-term CC in Sap and Blind. As proof that rogues are designed to be the best at what they do, most other CC effects in the game are going to start mirroring Sap. Polymorph and the rest won't aggro mobs that they're used on, which should make it far easier to coordinate CC in a PUG. Plus, even if the group manages to somehow mess up CC and starts combat early, we can just use Blind as a stand-in for Sap anyway.
Encrypted Text: Controlling tempo 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. Please email me with any topic requests or questions you have! PvP is hard to discuss in writing. (I'm not talking about how to properly 4-gate your opponent on Shakuras Plateau, but rather about WoW's player-vs-player content.) It's a relatively easy task to distill a PvE encounter into a list of salient points, but that's because raid bosses aren't random. Magmaw is going to do the same thing against every single raid group that encounters him, and so our strategies for countering him are fairly unilateral. We're playing rock-paper-scissors with the developers, except that we know they're going to throw paper ahead of time. All we have to do is successfully become scissors, and the raid bosses will fall over and explode with purples -- they're just loot piñatas. PvP, meanwhile, is impossible to condense into a single strategy. In a raid setting, most classes use less than a dozen simple abilities on any given encounter. In an arena or battleground, players will be drawing from the deepest, darkest pages of their spellbooks to gain any advantage. I can't tell you what that warrior on the opposing team is going to do, because he can literally do anything. Instead of trying to make some sort of overly complicated flowchart in an attempt to remove all decision-making from PvP, you have to adjust and react on the fly. The key to surviving in this volatile environment is to maintain control of the tempo -- you need to fight on your terms.
Encrypted Text: A rogue's resumé
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 topic requests or questions you have! I feel bad for all of the guild leaders who are looking for rogues right now. As the least-played class in the game, we're already pretty scarce. The fact that we're usually invisible doesn't help the situation, either. Have you seen the frenzy that gets into people during Pilgrim's Bounty? Everyone is roaming the streets with their Turkey Shooters, looking for rogues to snipe. They start by denying that there's a rogue shortage, claiming that they'll find us eventually. After a few days of being unable to find a dwarf rogue, they get angry and start cursing us rogues for staying in Stealth all the time. Shortly after, they start bargaining, offering us large sums of gold to just show ourselves for a moment. The truth is that regardless of how well we're performing at the moment, rogues are still in demand, due to short supply. Guilds both big and small are looking for assassins and shades to join their rosters. I have personally interviewed several rogue candidates for my own guild, and unfortunately, I am incredibly strict when reviewing their applications. You might be able to trick some hunter into thinking that you're great by swapping to a combat spec and posting your Halfus parse, but that won't convince a vigilant rogue. In order to prove yourself amongst your fellow rogue brethren, you need to compose your curriculum mortem. It's like a curriculum vitae, but with death instead of life. Get it? Rogues kill stuff? Okay, I'll leave the bad puns to Christian Belt.
