rogue-cooldowns
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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.
Encrypted Text: Learning the rogue calculus
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. You don't have to be good at math to play a rogue. Anyone can log into WoW and create a rogue. You can get all the way to level 90 and into raids without ever having to do any addition or long division. You can do dailies and dungeons simply by using the highest ilvl gear available and ignoring everything else. Rogues are played with a keyboard and mouse, not a pen and paper. However, if you want to wring every last drop of DPS out of the class, you're going to have to get your hands dirty with numbers. I love when a class' design forces the player to make tough choices. The choices that we make as rogues, when you think about it, are really just math problems. The secret to making good choices is to do the math ahead of time. You don't want to be faced with an unexpected set of fractions in the middle of a tough raid encounter.
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: 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.
Encrypted Text: How to gank a monk
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. With the launch of Mists of Pandaria, the season of world PvP is upon us once again. Over the next few weeks, there will be thousands of players trying out the new monk class. These rerollers are likely to be undergeared and inexperienced, making them perfect targets for your daggers. Rogues were able to take advantage of fledgling death knights as they were still learning to use their awkward new bodies in Wrath. Blizzard promised to bring world PvP back in Mists, and with the massive influx of grounded players trying to level, they've made good on their promise. Don't plan on facing many mistweaver monks out in the open world, as they'll be safe inside of their dungeon queues. The staff-wielding brewmaster tanking monks will be very difficult to defeat unless they're at a significantly lower level than you, so be careful. Our primary targets will be our melee DPS rivals, the windwalker monks. You can identify them by their dual weapons and smug (likely pandaren) faces.
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: Openers and the element of surprise
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. One of the interesting dichotomies of the rogue class is use of Stealth. Stealth, and by extension, surprise, is paramount to rogue PvP and most of the rogue leveling experience. In these situations, the optimal strategy is to use an opener to gain an early advantage over your foe. Ambush, Cheap Shot, and Garrote immediately set the pace of the encounter. When fights only last a few brief seconds, Stealth tips that tenuous balance in our favor. Once raiding enters the picture, the value of Stealth drops to near zero. Assassination rogues get a slight boost from using Garrote against a raid boss, but we're talking about less than a 1% difference. Combat rogues don't even bother using an opener at all -- all of the options are too weak. Subtlety rogues, who are designed around Stealth and openers, require the cooldown Shadow Dance to function. Stealth and its relationship with combat simply don't work in protracted battles.
Encrypted Text: A Cataclysm 101 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 Cataclysm questions you have! There was once a time where rogues were one of the worst soloing classes in the game. We have never had any tanking or healing abilities like the hybrid, and our fellow pure DPS classes have the advantage of ranged attacks. Rogues were simply wrecked by their enemies. While we had decent levels of dodge, our survivability depended entirely stunlocks to control our opponents. Against anything immune to stuns, we were pretty much worthless. Times have changed. Rogues have reached levels of survivability that were previously fantasy. We remain the single best DPS class for toe-to-toe damage, and now we can actually last long enough to get the job done. Each of the three rogue specs has a purpose and a direction, and the title for top DPS spec is still up for grabs at level 85. Blizzard has already tweaked the mastery system for rogues several times to ensure that no spec is left behind. I'm looking forward to our bright future in Cataclysm.
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.
