warglaive
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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: 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.
Why now's the best time to run BC content
Spartonian over on WoW LJ has been running some old content, and he points out something that everyone should hear: now is the absolute best time to be running the old Burning Crusade endgame. He says the contest is laughably easy with current endgame levels and gear, and yet, because we're still basically at the beginning of this expansion's endgame, there are still quite a few items that can be picked off of the end bosses in Black Temple and Sunwell (not to mention you can pick up the achievements for those places if you weren't able to down them before.And he's right -- there are some nice trinkets still found in those old instances, and who wouldn't want to complete their Warglaive set or grab a Thori'dal from Sunwell? Sure, the stats may not be the best, but until the ammo changes go in, you can save money while soloing -- and own a legendary to boot.Of course, when Ulduar shows up, we'll all likely be too busy with the new content (be it the raids or the Argent Tournment or whatever else you got) to go back to Burning Crusade. But now, during the downtime post-OS and Naxx, is the perfect time to go back and clean up the old content.
Forte Gaming goes the way of the Alamo
Forte Gaming, one of the top guilds in World of Warcraft and the world's first to kill Anetheron, disbanded over the weekend. Their web page cites recruitment woes, long delays between content releases, and continually postponed raid times as reasons for the fall. "For many it has felt like a slowly sinking ship for some time and now it's over," says the guild's last post.Forte was consistently ranked in the top two or three guilds in worldwide rankings and stayed in a tight race with Nihilum for game firsts, snagging no less than nine legendary Warglaives from Illidan in the Black Temple. In their three-year reign, they changed realms three times. Although the raiding arm of the guild (EU Boulderfist-A) will no longer exist, they will still maintain a more casual form of the guild on their previous server (A-Kazzak-EU).
