guide-to-rogues
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Encrypted Text: We've been normalized
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 have a long history of exploiting weapon speeds for their own gain. The Barman Shanker was farmed by thousands of rogues, becoming a rite of passage in the early rogue community. While its model was unique, nobody farmed it for looks. The Shanker's unusual 2.0 attack speed dramatically improved the damage of our Ambushes and Backstabs, providing us with an amazing amount of burst damage potential. The slow-is-best phenomenon was cropping up with the other classes as well, and it started to create balance issues. Blizzard countered by introducing a new mechanic, normalization. By adjusting the attack power formula, instant attacks no longer favored slower weapons as heavily as before. Thus began the first of many changes that have led us here to the obsolescence of weapon speeds entirely.
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: 3 Diablo monk moves that WoW rogues should steal
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. Like many of you, I've been playing a monk all week. Every minute of my free time has been spent using my fists to dole out some serious justice. I've been alternating between twirling a staff and a pair of bladed fist weapons. Monks are a lot of fun to play. I'm not talking about our furry panda friends from Pandaria, but rather the master martial artists from Sanctuary. While there are plenty of pandaren monk abilities that I wouldn't mind borrowing, the Diablo III monk's arsenal is quite appealing. Due to our mutual focus on martial arts, several of their techniques would fit right into our toolbox. There might not be any poisonous strikes or sneaky stabbing going on, but we're adept at kicking and punching as well.
Encrypted Text: Rogues can actually tank
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 the original WoW beta, rogues were designed to be off tanks. Complete with a high dodge coefficient from agility and a buckler, rogues could survive quite a beating. Evasion was a tanking cooldown, and Vanish was a useful tank-swapping ability. Hunters worked similarly, also sporting bucklers and using Feign Death to lose aggro. Obviously, the developers scrapped both of these ideas before launch. During The Burning Crusade, Gaeowyn broke the combat table by achieving unhittable status with 102.63% avoidance and using it to successfully slay Illidan. After that, the crew slew Gruul with just five people while it was still relevant content. In Wrath, Jider abused Shadowstep and our amazing damage output to solo several Naxxramas bosses. The upcoming Mists expansion looks to again revitalize rogue tanking, with the advent of the druid ability Symbiosis and our bonus ability, Growl.
Encrypted Text: 2 Stealth secrets in Mists
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. Our Stealth system, which has survived dozens of patches unscathed, is seeing some new action in Mists of Pandaria. In spite of the developers' previous attempts to normalize Stealth levels via the removal of Master of Deception, they're bringing some of that flavor back. Shadow Walk and Shroud of Concealment bring brand new elements to our Stealth repertoire. Shadow Walk looks to improve our own personal Stealth capabilities, while Shroud of Concealment allows us to share our Stealth with others. The duo is the most exciting thing to happen to Stealth since Distract, and I look forward to finding new and unique ways to abuse both of them.
Encrypted Text: Should all rogues use daggers?
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 the art team at Blizzard developed the class icons for World of Warcraft, it based them on that class' weapon of choice. Mages cast spells through their crystal-laden staves, druids fight with their paws and sharp teeth, and paladins wield a mighty, righteous hammer. The rogue class has been represented by the swift, poisoned dagger for years. While our dark leather armor and our brittle yellow class text are easily recognizable symbols of the rogue, the dagger is our one true sigil. While only two of our abilities can't be used with swords or other weapons, both assassination and subtlety rogues are still forced to bend the knee to the dagger god. Even the most stalwart combat rogues carry a dagger in one hand. Why not go all the way?
Encrypted Text: Crimson Tempest revitalizes the rogue AoE game
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. For rogues, enemies come in one of three group sizes: a single enemy, two enemies at once, or several enemies at once. Subtlety rogues love to focus on a single opponent, combat rogues absolutely soar when destroying two targets, and assassination rogues are the kings of sustained damage on multiple targets. Combat's AoE damage to a group is pitiful, while subtlety rogues start falling behind the instant there's more than one target on the field. The balance of rogue AoE today is determined by two abilities: Blade Flurry and Fan of Knives. These are currently our only two multi-target abilities, and so each spec's AoE potential revolves around these two moves. Mists of Pandaria is changing everything we know about rogue AoE by introducing a brand new AoE finisher, Crimson Tempest. In addition, the AoE hierarchy is also being shaken up via the revamping of Fan of Knives. The days of mindless FoK spam are over.
Encrypted Text: An interview with Haileaus, the white knight of subtlety 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 suggestions you'd like to see covered here. One of the developers' design goals in World of Warcraft is ability parity between PvE and PvP. The problem with this strategy is that it becomes very difficult to buff a dominant PvP class if it's performing poorly in PvE. Beast mastery hunters and frost mages have long been maligned in raids while being feared in PvP combat. No spec knows this story better than the subtlety rogue, which has simultaneously been the best PvP spec and the worst PvE spec in the game. Most active subtlety rogues are quite content, as their main focus is PvP. Due to the stringent requirements of most raiding guilds, there are only a few raiding rogues that have stuck with subtlety through the years. In order to get inside the head of these persistent shades, I spoke with one of subtlety's most stalwart champions, Haileaus. He currently maintains the amazing subtlety PvE thread on the official forums and was the rogue who inspired me to try out subtlety raiding on more than one occasion during Cataclysm.
Encrypted Text: Bringing fun back to the rogue class
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 amount of fun that you can have on a rogue has been steadily declining since WoW's release. The original stunlock is gone, Swirly Ball was removed without any warning, and the Dungeon Finder effectively killed stealth boss runs. There are no more random chests for us to unlock, and our lockpicking levels up automatically. In Cataclysm, for the first time since launch, there was no epic weapon to look forward to through pickpocketing. Mists of Pandaria is bringing fun back. With just three little glyphs, I've had more fun in the past 48 hours than I've had in years. Glyph of Detection reintroduces Swirly Ball to our arsenal, after years of fervent lobbying for its return. Glyph of Decoy leaves a copy of you behind when you Vanish to distract your enemies, just like our old friend, Archmage Vargoth. Finally, Glyph of Disguise allows you to copy the appearance of any humanoid that you use Pick Pocket on. There is nothing more fun than flying around, looking for new appearances to steal. I will never forget the first person I ganked while disguised as Durn the Hungerer. %Gallery-152755%
Encrypted Text: The Shock and Awe build
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. If you have been raiding 10-man Dragon Soul every week, Wrathion should be handing over the Fangs of the Fathers any day now. Even the second rogues in most 25-man groups will be collecting their last Elementium Gem Clusters shortly. For many rogues, these daggers are the first legendary weapons that they've ever acquired. When you receive them from Wrathion, it might feel a bit overwhelming. What do you do with these weapons? What will they do to you? There is a quote that's been passed down from thief to thief, assassin to assassin, and rogue to rogue for generations: "If your blades are happy, you're happy." You want your weapons to work for you, and not the other way around. You can't starve your blades, trying to forcefully adjust their diet to tolerate Morchok's rocky hide or Hagara's snow cones. If you want to keep your blades happy, you have to feed them what they really want: player blood, and lots of it.
Encrypted Text: The lazy combat build, 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 with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. You can be a mediocre rogue simply by pushing three buttons. While that might seem shocking, remember that you can be a great mage with just one button. There's just one problem with being a rogue who spams Sinister Strike blindly -- you're not using all of your capabilities. Rogues have a rich culture of maximizing our damage at all costs. Rogues are a conceptually simple class. We only have the capacity to deal damage in melee range. Rather than letting that stifle us, we embrace the purity of form. Every single ability that a rogue wields is designed for a specific purpose. Our talents are designed around a single paradigm: kill. As you being to unleash the full arsenal of the rogue, it's easy to see why we're so efficient -- and why we're so feared.
Encrypted Text: The lazy combat build, 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 any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. After this week's deluge of Mists of Pandaria information, Cataclysm is fading fast. Everyone is looking ahead to the future, with dreams of exploring Pandaria and complaining about monks being overpowered on the general forums. Deathwing has been vanquished millions of times, and with no new content slated for Cataclysm, this expansion has come to its end. We're now officially entering the inter-expansion lull. What better time than now to roll a new rogue alt? You've got plenty of justice and valor points banked, and your guild has probably been level 25 for months. If you haven't been playing recently, then you can simply have someone use a Scroll of Resurrection to give you a free level 80 character on the server and faction of your choosing. If you've ever wanted to play a rogue, there's no better time than today to try one out. If you're lucky, you might even make it to 85 in time to pick up your guild's inevitable fifth or sixth set of Fangs of the Father.
Encrypted Text: Shuriken Toss breaks all the rules
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. Raise your hand if you remember fighting against Shazzrah. I'm not talking about our recent bout with Shannox or even our old fights against Mother Shahraz. Shazzrah goes way back, to WoW's very first raid instance, Molten Core. Due to the frequent AoE explosions that Shazzrah unleashed, rogues couldn't engage him without being slaughtered immediately. While the rest of the raid fought the boss, I joined the other rogues in my group crushing Blindweed and making some food next to the Cooking Fire. As a melee class, our biggest weakness for years has been that we can only deal damage to nearby targets. It's limited our ability to swap targets effectively, our ability to avoid point-blank AoE attacks, and our ability to attack any target that's not on the ground. Rogues, along with other melee classes, have actually been benched because of these limitations. These shackles and restrictions have bound our class since its inception. Shuriken Toss has the chance to change all that. The new level 90 rogue talent slated for Mists of Pandaria might redefine what it means to play a rogue.
Encrypted Text: More rogue poison news from Ghostcrawler
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. Two weeks ago, I asked you to throw out everything you knew about rogue poisons. I was being silly, because I know that would be a lot to ask. Many of us have spent years learning the intricacies of the poison system, studying PPM charts and evaluating our options. Unfortunately, it looks like there was actually no hyperbole in my original request. With the latest round of info we've received, every single poison mechanic in the game will be overhauled in Mists of Pandaria. We already know about the new lethal/non-lethal designations and how we'll be able to have two poisons on both of our weapons at all times. We already know that poisons will be critting for double damage in Mists and that their crit chance will be calculated based on our melee crit rate. These improvements are just what we needed to increase our utility options and to boost crit's viability as a secondary stat. In addition to these sweeping changes to poison crit mechanics, we've learned that poison's hit mechanics are also being revamped.
Encrypted Text: Meet your new poisons
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 new poison system that's being implemented in Mists of Pandaria might seem like a fairly major revamp for a class that's typically seen very little change between expansions. The conversion of poisons from items to skills and the new lethal/non-lethal categorization is a massive update compared to what we saw between Wrath and Cataclysm. A rogue's ability to provide utility in a raid environment is being expanded dramatically and has always been a weakness of ours. The truth is that those changes pale in comparison to the other poison updates due in Mists. While not carrying poisons around in our bags is simply a quality of life change, obtaining new poisons for the first time in years will have a much larger impact. The poison crit system, which has been fundamentally flawed since its inception, is being redone properly. Shiv is actually going to be back on every rogue's hotbar. Poisoning both weapons at once is merely chump change, while the rebirth of random stuns deserves the loudest possible heralding.
Encrypted Text: Rogue poisons dramatically redesigned in Mists of Pandaria
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. Throw out everything you know about rogue poisons. No, we need to go deeper than that. Throw out everything you know about rogues altogether. In the past few days, we've seen more blue posts on the official rogue forums than we'd seen since Cataclysm's launch. Poisons have been at the heart and soul of the rogue kit from day one. Even though parts of the poison system have changed over the years, the general concept has always remained the same. Let me blow your mind: In Mists, you can have two poisons on each of your weapons at once. Let me do it again: All poison proc rates will be percentage-based. And a third time: Poisons are no longer applied to your individual weapons but to both weapons at once. What does it even mean to put your poisons on both hands at once? What in the world am I supposed to write this column about if nobody's asking which hand to put Deadly Poison on any more? I'm going to slip and tell some new rogue that IP/DP is the best, and he's going to laugh and call me an old man.
Encrypted Text: No'Kaled makes its claim for the throne
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. If you're frequenting any of the rogue community sites, you've seen the question: Should I be using No'Kaled? While assassination and subtlety rogues can blindly equip the legendary quest daggers at each stage, combat rogues have to make a decision. As I've said for years, rogues spec for their weapons. You need to round up all of your available weapons, and then mix and match to find the right combination. There are three different levels of No'Kaled, and there are also three stages of daggers we receive from Wrathion. Between all of these weapons, there are nine different possible combinations that you could have today. Your personal arsenal of weapons is dependent on your Elementium Gem Cluster acquisition rate and your luck with Madness of Deathwing drops, but chances are that you have at least one version of both the quest daggers and No'Kaled.
Encrypted Text: Examining the rogue's assassin ancestry
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. If you start looking into the history of the rogue class, you end up reaching several dead ends. The reason is that a rogue who's easy to track or trace isn't much of a rogue at all. We specialize in disappearing, which makes rogue family trees notoriously difficult to map. Garona Halforcen is often considered to be the mother of the rogue class, executing one of the earliest and most daring acts of assassination and regicide in Azeroth's history. The truth is that if we want to find our spiritual beginnings, we have to look back even further than Garona and even further away than Azeroth. The true ancestor of today's rogue class first found life eons ago, in another realm, known only as Sanctuary. There, the assassin class stood against the three Prime Evils, defeating the Burning Hell's greatest powers with elegance and subterfuge. The rogues of WoW were inspired by the assassins of Diablo II, and that influence can still be felt today.
Encrypted Text: My ganking toolbox
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 being prepared. I always like having the right tool for the job. My desk at the office is covered with spare parts and manuals, and my junk drawer at home is filled with cables and loose screws. And when I say junk drawer, I mean junk cabinet. I won't throw away something that could be useful later, which has me worried that my next TV appearance will be on Hoarders. Luckily, I can't be judged for all of the goodies that I keep in my rogue's bags. One of my favorite threads on the official rogue forums is the Ganker's Kit of Ganking. It's a very robust list of items in WoW that can help you kill your targets and avoid being killed yourself. I find that we're usually so focused on our normal gear that we forget about all of the other items in our inventory that can make playing a rogue fun.
Encrypted Text: When your DPS doesn't matter
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 are all about DPS. You've heard my spiel about us being the only pure melee class, which makes DPS the only thing we bring to the table. SportsCenter can claim that Tim Tebow is a great quarterback, in spite of his shortcomings, because of his "intangible" benefits. Rogues don't have that luxury. If you parse poorly, then you get labeled as a bad rogue. I was in the Raid Finder last week, and a warrior from another server tried calling me out for using Cloak of Shadows to stay in during Morchok's Black Blood phase. "Hey, that rogue didn't run out, that's not fair," he complained in raid chat. The last time I checked, all is fair in love, war, and the DPS meters. However, there is one higher calling than DPS, and that is the success of your raid or party. Even though it's against our nature, we occasionally have to sacrifice some of our personal DPS in order to benefit the raid.
