venomous-wounds
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Encrypted Text: Examining assassination's AoE rotation
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. Deadly Poison is everything to an assassination rogue. It makes up between 35-40% of our single-target DPS. Our mastery bonus, Potent Poisons, increases our poison damage and causes mastery rating to be our best stat by far. Our primary finisher, Envenom, is designed specifically to increase the amount of Deadly Poison procs we see. Mutilate, Dispatch, and assassination's other abilities are all minor players compared to Deadly Poison. Deadly Poison is also the key to assassination's AoE performance, as it makes up over 50% of our overall damage. All of our AoE decisions have to be seen through the lens of maximizing Deadly Poison's damage. Fan of Knives is the key to applying Deadly Poison to several targets at once. When there are more than two targets around, we replace Mutilate and Dispatch with Fan of Knives as our main combo point builder and work from there.
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: Steal these rogue tips
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 any questions you may have about our cloak-and-dagger class. Rogues are a results-driven class. While napkin math and fluff may suffice for the hybrids, rogues need for their hard work to end in a DPS increase. There's no reason to perform at anything else than our best, and so every adjustment or suggestion is viewed through our critical lens of analysis. Every optimization is made in order to bring up that bottom line. What's the best way to improve your DPS? What's the optimal strategy on a given boss fight? These answers are closely guarded secrets for many rogues. Luckily for us, we have other ways to extract information. World of Logs is a public repository of combat parses, and with a bit of know-how, we can mine this data for nuggets of wisdom. Many of the best rogues in the world don't even realize that all of their secrets are being laid bare. We can exploit this to increase our own skill and strategy.
Encrypted Text: Fresh rogue rotations in Cataclysm
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 new rotations that rogues will be using. After Blizzard's latest press release, we know that Cataclysm will be released in early December. We already know that there will be at least one patch that precedes the expansion. The period of time between patch 4.0.1 and the expansion's actual launch is a time of transition, and it's rapidly approaching. The transition phases of The Burning Crusade and Wrath were rocky to say the least; it's safe to say that that we're looking forward to exciting times. Many classes are hurting pretty badly on the PTR for patch 4.0.1 right now. Blizzard had the great idea of temporarily granting rogues Cloak of Shadows as our 31-point subtlety talent back in patch 2.0 to help us deal with the souped-up casters of that era. A similar change could be used to give retribution paladins access to Inquisition (at the cost of Zealotry) to bolster their damage until Cataclysm. Luckily for rogues, we were on the receiving end of the latest "damage pass." Several of our core abilities were granted significant damage and scaling bonuses to keep us competitive in a pre-Cataclysm world.
Encrypted Text: Rogue glyphs in the Cataclysm beta
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 new glyph system and talk about which glyphs look good so far. Back in the day, before Wrath was even released, I had incorrectly speculated that there would be three tiers of glyphs in the expansion. It was my very first post on WoW.com, and my mistake was clearly pointed out to me by some of the helpful commenters. It turns out that I was actually right -- it just took Blizzard a few years to get around to adding the extra tier of glyphs. There are now three types of glyph: prime, major and minor. Prime glyphs aren't necessarily fun; they just buff us. Major glyphs are sort of the utility glyphs that give us a measurable benefit, but they're not necessarily mandatory. Minor glyphs are just for fun things that make our lives easier. Luckily for us, many of the new Cataclysm glyphs are available on the beta, complete with the shiny new glyph interface. While scribes may be complaining about their business models going out the window, I'm busy drooling over some of the new glyph options we have available.
