rogue-control
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Encrypted Text: Stealth, openers, and the 5.3 nerfs
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 an identity problem. We're a class that's based around Stealth and subterfuge, but WoW's combat mechanics aren't conducive to that design. Our opener abilities are immensely powerful to compensate for their relative unavailability. If you've ever dueled another rogue, you know how critical the element of surprise is to PvP combat. A rogue stuck in the open is hardly a rogue at all. The flip side of that coin is that a rogue in Stealth is a powerful force. Cheap Shot and Garrote are amazing abilities without any true cooldowns, and Shadow Dance keeps subtlety at the top of the arena charts. Rogues that specialize in PvP are focused on how to sneak as many openers as possible into an encounter. Vanish, an inconsequential PvE ability, is one of the most potent offensive PvP cooldowns available. The divide between a stealthed rogue and an exposed rogue is massive.
Encrypted Text: The evolution of rogue 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 or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. During the lull between WoW expansions, I've been trying out a few action real-time strategy games like League of Legends and Dota 2. One of the things I've been learning about A-RTS games is that there are several different roles that the characters can fill. While WoW typically revolves around the tank/healer/DPS trinity, these PvP-only games have much more diversity. For example, there's the nuker role, which focuses on quick bursts of damage, and the disabler role, which focuses on controlling enemies to set up a kill. If you look between the lines, some of these roles are present in WoW PvP as well. Rogues have been relied upon to provide the stuns and snares to control targets, as well as to provide the burst needed to eliminate our enemies. We've worn a lot of hats over the past few years, and we've found ways to excel in each niche.
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.
