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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: Examining the tempo of our rotations
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 StarCraft, my favorite RTS, there's a common term known as APM. APM stands for actions per minute, which refers to how many commands a player is able to enter per minute. If you have fast fingers and you're incredibly skilled, your APM can soar into the hundreds with your flurry of multiple commands per second. If you're an average player, you will probably stay under 100 APM for the majority of each game. APM isn't a direct indicator of player skill but rather a measurement to describe the way the player is interacting with the game via a keyboard and mouse. The tempo of our rogue rotations is a topic that I love exploring. Subtlety feels fast to players, while assassination rogues often complain that their rotation is slow. By applying the concept APM and a few other input metrics, we can try to quantify exactly what makes a rotation seem fast or slow. Rogue rotations are constantly evolving between expansions and even as we acquire gear, and math can help us examine the net effect of these changes.
Encrypted Text: The challenges of haste and energy regeneration
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. Email me with any topics you'd like to see covered! One of Cataclysm's biggest changes came in the form of the stat redesign. Blizzard's team made several huge changes to the stats we were used to seeing on our gear. Attack power was rolled into agility's base potency, while armor penetration was never to be seen again on an item. We picked up a new, role-agnostic stat in mastery, with the hopes that it might help consolidate gear between the various rogue specs. Finally, haste was changed to increase the resource regeneration of melee classes and specifically accelerates the rate of energy regeneration for rogues. Haste has always boosted our energy recovery in PvE, although that mechanic was reliant on talents like Focused Attacks and Combat Potency. Now, all three specs see an energy boost from their haste, with combat still regenerating the most energy due to Combat Potency. The idea is that as your character gains gear, you get the ability to push more buttons per minute. As we progress through raiding tiers and the ilevel of our gear climbs, our rotations should be becoming more robust.
Encrypted Text: Lifestyle of the Northrend Rogue
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 explore quality of life changes for Rogues in the upcoming expansion.After playing The Burning Crusade for nearly two years now, most Rogues have gotten into their level 70 groove. They know where the poison vendors are in Shattrath and where to acquire some good leather gear. They know where to level up their lockpicking and the best way to organize reagents in their bags. However, all that is about to change.Blizzard is implementing a ton of new simple changes to the Rogue class that are guaranteed to have many of us confused at first. I've tried to make this transition a little bit easier by outlining some of the differences between your time at 70 and the upcoming road to 80. Read on to find out what these changes mean to your daily Rogue lifestyle.
Mana and energy regeneration mechanics revamped on Beta
A change went in with the last Wrath Beta patch that's deceptively simple, but may have far reaching ramifications for many of the classes in game: Both energy and mana regenerate on a per second basis, rather than the previous ticks. Instead of a chunk of mana or energy every few seconds, you'll now see a steady trickle reappearing constantly at your bar (outside of the 5 second rule for casters, of course). As a friend put it, "Woah. It feels like I am playing Diablo II now." You can see an example of the change in action in the video above from Youtube user koblec. The energy change should be especially helpful for Rogues and Feral Druids in that they won't have to obsessively time their attacks to the rhythm of the energy tick system, and should be able to use extra energy from talents in an easier and more fluid manner. Likewise, mana and energy users alike won't be waiting for that one last tick to cast a crucial spell or ability, but can cast as soon as they have the mana. Plus, it's honestly sort of empowering to see the mana bar running up like it does. Technically, I'm not regenerating mana any faster, but watching that blue bar go up so quickly makes it feel like I am, and makes it much easier to tell when I'm stuck in the 5 second rule, besides. Of course, as with all changes, this is Beta, so things can change, and Koraa is asking for focused feedback and bug reports on the concept, but it's something I'm certainly hoping makes it live.
