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Encrypted Text: Breaking down Shadow Blades
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. Shadow Blades is the most anticipated new rogue ability in Mists of Pandaria. We're finally learning a new technique for our combat repertoire, instead of simply picking up defensive cooldowns like Smoke Bomb or Combat Readiness. While I'm disappointed to see yet another cooldown in my spellbook, Shadow Blades actually sounds pretty cool. Who doesn't want to deal shadow damage to their enemies, piercing their precious armor in the process? The truth is that while Shadow Blades sounds cool from the tooltip, it fails to live up to these expectations in reality. The damage increase in incredibly minor at best for all three rogue specs, and the gameplay mechanics end up being negligible. While I'm fine with our rotations staying mostly stagnant, many of you were hoping for something new to spark your interest. Shadow Blades seemed to be just the thing rogues needed in Mists. Unfortunately, Shadow Blades ends up writing a check for awesomeness that it is completely unable to cash.
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: 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.
