rogue-assassination-encrypted-text
Latest
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: Customizing Power Auras for your rogue
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. This week, we discuss one of my favorite addons. Rogues hate unpredictability. Chance is what the others will try to stand on, and a well-prepared rogue will pull that pillar out from under them. Rogues perform at their peak efficiency when they're setting the tempo. While it may seem like chaos to the uninitiated, a veteran rogue is always in control. In order to properly manage our energy, combo points, and cooldowns, we need to stay several steps ahead of our opponents. Our talent trees and rotations reflect our love of predictability. Aside from the occasional talent like Ruthlessness, we don't rely on chance for anything. In the past, chance has encroached on our playstyle in a few areas, but those have largely been eliminated. Cloak of Shadows and Sap are now guarantees, and we don't have to hope that we get lucky with Initiative or Vanish. Our rotation is in always our control.
Encrypted Text: Pinpoint interrupts with Gnosis addon
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. This week, we talk about an addon that solves the problem of missing interrupts. Once, when experimenting on my holy paladin (I'm a dirty traitor, I know), I healed through an entire heroic dungeon with my user interface disabled. Matticus had recommended the exercise, as it allows you to focus on what's happening and your surroundings instead of little green bars. The experience was interesting, but I simply couldn't handle it. I'm an information junkie, and I want to know everything there is to know all at once. Why? Because knowledge is power, knowledge is the food of the soul, and knowing is half the battle. With that said, there's still such a thing as too much information. I can set up my UI to have all sorts of numbers and statistics displayed everywhere, but it's not valuable unless I can interpret them. When you're in a high-stress situation like learning a new boss fight, you want to spend as little time as possible worrying about your UI. A good UI should make your rogue easier to play, not harder.
Encrypted Text: Rogue roles 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. Feel free to email me with any questions! The rogue is the most feared class in player vs. player combat. While other classes may have had their 15 minutes of fame at the top, the rogue has been perennially powerful. In WoW, we were so hated that an entire video series was dedicated to how overpowered we must've been. In The Burning Crusade, the legendary Warglaive combo made us infamous in arena play. Death knights did dominate in the early stages of Wrath, but rogues came back strong throughout the patches. Cataclysm was the first time that I ever worried about the survival of the class in PvP. With health pools skyrocketing again and the much-maligned stunlock nerfed, it was obvious that fights were going to last longer than ever. Our energy system enables us to keep up offensively for an indefinite period of time, but our defenses typically gave out once our cooldowns had been consumed. Figuring out a way to stay alive throughout prolonged combat was going to be the key to success.
Encrypted Text: Even rogues have homework
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 screenshots you'd like to see featured here or any questions you might have! I hate homework. When I was in school, I was always finding creative ways to turn my assignments in as late as possible. I completed most my English assignments the night before they were due, and I've solved a few calculus questions in the car on my way to class. No matter how important the assignment was, there was always something more interesting that I would rather do. When it comes down to a heads-up match between playing Warcraft 2 and studying biology flashcards, there's really no contest. Playing a rogue successfully in the endgame of World of Warcraft requires a lot of homework. We've talked before about the very math-centric natures of rogue theorycrafting. Without a spreadsheet or other mathematical tool, it's almost impossible to create a working model for testing DPS and checking gear. Boss abilities are constantly changing and being added, and they often interact with our abilities in non-standard ways. Blizzard's developers are implementing fixes on a daily basis. In order to keep up with the pace of WoW's development, you simply have to do your homework.
Encrypted Text: Let's get kicking
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 article ideas or questions you have! You've all seen my arguments for having rogues top the DPS meters. We're the only pure melee DPS class, meaning we have the most specific role. Yellow is a great color, and so having a nice patch of it at the top of Recount is awesome. You get the idea. The fact is that rogues are known for their DPS, so doing lots of it becomes pretty important in succeeding. Even with this huge focus on DPS, we do have one other trick up our sleeve. Back in the days before balance, the developers had to find a way to ensure that every class was brought to a raid. Hybrids could bring powerful buffs, bosses would use debuffs that required certain healers, and there was always a boss per tier that you needed a warlock to Banish. Even the DPS-focused rogues had a special niche to keep them getting invited: Kick. A boss would be designed with an ultimate ability that needed to be interrupted, and there was nobody better at that job than a rogue.
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: 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.
Encrypted Text: Fresh patch 4.0.6 PTR notes for 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 rogue questions you may have. Have you ever read Blizzard's patch notes and wondered exactly where the developers are going with certain changes? We're all familiar with the fact that subtlety has been lagging behind the other rogue specs in DPS. It's actually still seeing some use in top guilds on healing-intensive encounters, due to Enveloping Shadows giving us nearly permanent Feint on top of 30% AoE damage reduction. The fact remains that subtlety has largely been a PvP spec outside of very specific situations, although it's a quite potent PvP spec. The patch notes show us that the developers obviously want for subtlety to be more competitive in PvE -- no surprise here. What I don't understand is the new Blade Flurry mechanic. On the PTR, Blade Flurry no longer has a fixed duration, meaning that you can have it up 100% of the time. While yeah, it sounds awesome, it also opens up huge balancing issues. It means that any time there's a raid encounter with more than one target, we're stuck swapping to combat. There are plenty of other classes with similar Cleaving abilities, but none as powerful as Blade Flurry. While I'm all for spec diversity, I'd rather not waste development time on something that's certain to be cut once it makes it to live.
Encrypted Text: Tools of the rogue's trade
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 Chase if you have any questions or want to submit a great screenshot. If you've been plugged into the rogue community for any length of time, you're familiar with some of the common thoughts that we share as a class. We're all very thankful that Cloak of Shadows is now a 100% immunity to spells, that aggressive min-maxing is part of our culture, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that our most pressing concern is getting Swirly Ball back. I would mention our years of torment waiting for a functional Vanish, but it's working now, and I don't want to jinx it. We don't always see eye to eye on every detail, though. While I imagine the rogue as a brutal killer, some prefer to think of our class as a group of honorable assassins. One of the most common ideas that I've seen but not understood is the obsession with daggers. I've heard the old standby of "a rogue not wielding a dagger isn't a rogue" a million times, but I just don't get it. Maybe it's combat talking. I even lobbied at BlizzCon for the devs to implement quick off-hand axes and swords, but the request fell on deaf ears. Like it or not, rogue weaponry has evolved.
Encrypted Text: The rogue guide to gear customization
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 good screenshots or questions you have! Back in the good old days, rogues were stuck with whatever leather gear that happened to drop. It didn't matter if it had spirit or strength on it, as we really had no other options. We could augment our pieces with a few different enchants, but even those were better suited for warriors. While sometimes it seemed as if there were a random number generator churning out tier loot, we happily scooped it up anyway. The class, and everyone else, was at the mercy of the itemization gods of Blizzard. Times have changed quite a bit since those days. While we're still not able to craft custom pieces of gear tailored to fit our every need, we're not stuck with caster stats anymore. With the number of dungeons and bosses available, combined with the addition of justice points, there are a ton of options for nearly every slot on our character sheet. Enchanting has grown to encompass most of our gear, while reforging and the gem system have taken gear customization even further. Not only is there more gear to be had, but the gear we do get is much more malleable, allowing us to pick the perfect combination.
Encrypted Text: Slicing up hit and expertise for Cataclysm 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, especially if you've been playing subtlety lately! I love hit and expertise. While their mechanics and nuances can be complicated, I enjoy the diversity they bring to our gear options. We have stats like critical strike chance, which give us a chance to hit harder; haste, which lets us hit more often; and of course, hit and expertise, which let us hit our targets more often. The interaction between all of these different gear stats is one of the most interesting parts of theorycrafting for me. Think about it, would you really enjoy picking gear if you were just choosing between haste, mastery, and crit? Unfortunately for us, hit and expertise are also our only two remaining stats with tangible caps on their potency. While we were able to cap out on critical strike chance and armor penetration in the past, one of those stats has been rebalanced and the other completely removed. Because of the caps in place, hit and expertise's value drops off immediately after reaching that golden value, and so we're left always keeping those caps in mind.
Encrypted Text: 5 tips for heroic 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 article suggestions or screenshots you may have. Why do I ever talk myself into running heroics without my guildmates? I always end up with a tank that doesn't like waiting for CC, the healer who thinks that Recuperate is all the healing I need, and the hunter who wins the roll on Left Eye of Rajh. Despite all of this, I still put myself through all of pain because I love running heroics. Not everyone I meet is awful, and it helps me to keep my gameplay sharp for my upcoming raids. Practicing in heroics, as if they were raids, can have you learning your new rotation and gearing up at an accelerated pace. The last thing you want to do is underperform at your opening raid, as you'll be first on the chopping block. Heroic bosses have come a long way from the easily conquered Wrath dungeons, and many bosses are basically bite-sized raid encounters. By learning new mechanics and keeping your timing and rotations sharp, you can be fully prepared for whatever tier of raiding you intend to conquer.
Encrypted Text: Pre-raid gear for Cataclysm 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 rogue questions you have. Let's be honest here, rogues don't really need a leveling guide. We simply continue to exist, as we always have, leaving a trail of the dead in our wake. We're trained killing machines who also have the ability to Stealth around to avoid detection. With Recuperate, we never need to stop and eat, and with Deadly Momentum, we never need to stop and Recuperate. Basically, if you want to level your rogue from 80 to 85, just find any new zone and start killing anything in sight. After questing your way through Cataclysm's new content, you've reached level 85. Unfortunately for you, much of your old gear is now quite out of date. Think of Azeroth as a giant piñata filled with loot, and then imagine Deathwing's entrance into the world ripping a hole in said piñata the size of the Maelstrom. There are reputation vendors dying to give out new leather gear to anyone loyal to their cause, and new dungeon bosses mean new dungeon drops. The best part of all this new gear is that with the new armor specialization system, hunters and warriors will finally stop rolling on our leather.
Encrypted Text: A Cataclysm 101 guide for 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 Cataclysm questions you have! There was once a time where rogues were one of the worst soloing classes in the game. We have never had any tanking or healing abilities like the hybrid, and our fellow pure DPS classes have the advantage of ranged attacks. Rogues were simply wrecked by their enemies. While we had decent levels of dodge, our survivability depended entirely stunlocks to control our opponents. Against anything immune to stuns, we were pretty much worthless. Times have changed. Rogues have reached levels of survivability that were previously fantasy. We remain the single best DPS class for toe-to-toe damage, and now we can actually last long enough to get the job done. Each of the three rogue specs has a purpose and a direction, and the title for top DPS spec is still up for grabs at level 85. Blizzard has already tweaked the mastery system for rogues several times to ensure that no spec is left behind. I'm looking forward to our bright future in Cataclysm.
Encrypted Text: Rogue mechanics for the Cataclysm era
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 rogue questions you may have. After writing Encrypted Text for over two years now, I have gotten into the groove of writing about rogue life at level 80. I've talked about all about armor penetration's various iterations (and eventual removal) and where to snag the best leather gear with your emblems justice points. We've discussed the trade skills that best suit the discriminating rogue and how to hide from our would-be assassins and their Turkey Shooters. However, all that is about to change. Blizzard has implemented a ton of changes that affect the rogue class in serious ways. Cataclysm is by far its most ambitious expansion yet. With such a huge delta between what was and what is, the transition is going to be a bit rough as we cope with the post-Shattering world. Poisons have been streamlined (again), our Stealth was buffed significantly, and our talent trees were redesigned from the ground up to ensure that each spec provides a useful raid buff. I think it's safe to say that the rogue as we know it has evolved.
Encrypted Text: One last look at the rogue of Azeroth past
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. Today, we look back on the great kills of the past. With The Shattering's complete ruination of the planet, Azeroth has been transformed forever. Entire zones have been uprooted, flooded, and even broken in half. Deathwing's ascent to the mortal realm has left our world with several battle scars. Thrall and the shaman are doing trying their hardest to contain the damage, but the elemental planes are bleeding through. Insert some bad pun using the word Cataclysm here. Rogues have been sneaking through Azeroth for eons. Mages weren't around until a race discovered magic, and priests couldn't heal anyone until they discovered the Light. The art of stealth has been around for as long as there have been shadows to hide in. We've walked a million miles without ever leaving a footprint and killed a million foes whose bodies were never found. As we watch the Azeroth we've known and loved disintegrate around us, I can't help but remember our history.
Encrypted Text: Theorycrafting basics for the studious rogue
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 rogue questions you would like to see answered. In the immortal words of our favorite crab, "WoW is a game about upgrading your stuff." While achievements and professions allow for your character to grow, they don't make you any stronger. If you want to increase your power, you need to upgrade your stuff. Gear improvements are often the difference between success and failure on cutting-edge encounters, when your raid needs to meet specific raw damage and healing numbers to pull off a win. While it sounds easy, it's not always as simple as it seems to upgrade your stuff. While the advent of the ilvl system allows for us to quickly judge the rough quality of an item, it doesn't provide any help when comparing two items from the same dungeon. It also doesn't assist us in our gemming or reforging choices. Making intelligent gear decisions is a part of every rogue's life. In order to make the best choices for our characters, we use what's known as theorycrafting to evaluate the various stats in the game. The end result allows us to make educated gearing strategies and ensure we're doing the most DPS we possibly can. But how do we get from evaluating stats to choosing an actual piece of gear?
Encrypted Text: An interview with the ever-cautious Aldriana
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. This week, I interview Aldriana, the infamous author of rogue spreadsheets. Nobody likes rogues. Whether it's due to an instinctive fear of being stabbed repeatedly in the back or a Freudian bout of jealousy, we are easily the most reviled class in WoW. Death knights may be characterized as noobs while hunters are blamed for rolling on every single weapon, yet rogues still receive the least amount of good will. Because of this, it's rare to see anyone talking about rogues outside of asking for massive nerfs for all of our abilities. Playing a rogue has become a thankless job. I'd like to take this opportunity to reverse that trend. With the last tier of content for level 80s (and the associated gear), Aldriana released the final copy of his infamous Wrath spreadsheets, which had been maintained since Naxxramas' release. Aldriana has a long history of involvement in the rogue theorycrafting community, particularly on the rogue forums of Elitist Jerks. With spreadsheets dating back to The Burning Crusade and numerous contributions before that, Aldriana has been dedicated to keeping rogues informed for years. Blizzard itself even gave Aldriana a nod via an in-game item, Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy (thanks splodesondeath). I recently had the pleasure of asking him a few questions about his rogue, his spreadsheets, and life as an EJ moderator.
Encrypted Text: Answers to your pre-Cataclysm rogue questions
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 rogue questions you may have, like how to get yourself out of a straightjacket with only your mace. With just one month remaining until Cataclysm's release, everyone is getting ready for WoW's latest installment. I have been working on refining my leveling builds for my characters, preparing heirloom gear for my upcoming goblin shaman, and solidifying my guild's roster for January's inaugural raids. Cataclysm will be the biggest expansion yet, and there is no lack of work to be done. Many of you are doing likewise, adapting to the changes introduced in patch 4.0.1 and planning for the future. I have been receiving a ton of great questions via email about best practices moving forward. While some things are still up in the air (like combat's viability), most of the changes are settling down, and we can really start to make plans knowing that it's unlikely we'll see any new major changes.