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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 Unfortunately for you, much of your old gear is now quite out of date.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: Cataclysm heroics from a rogue's perspective
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 discuss the new heroic dungeons in the upcoming expansion. I remember what it was like to play a rogue in dungeons in vanilla WoW. Our only form of long-term crowd control was Sap, and it brought us out of stealth every time we used it. Subtlety rogues could spend three talent points on Improved Sap, which still left Sap knocking us out of Stealth a tenth of the time. Every mob had some sort of AoE or whirlwind-style attack, and rogues were often right behind tanks in terms of healing necessary. We've come a long way since the old days. Tricks of the Trade, with its instant threat transfer, has become the crutch that supports even the greenest tanks. Fan of Knives is one of the best AoE abilities in the game and synergizes with our poisons for incredible potency. Improved Sap has been baked in to the ability, and we can use our CC safely on a wide variety of targets. Feint's new ability to reduce our AoE damage taken also allows us to survive most attacks. You might say that rogues are nearly perfect for running heroics. Unfortunately for us, Cataclysm's heroics have a thing or two to teach us about complacency.
