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Encrypted Text: Subtlety doesn't need a buff
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 would have to be pretty dumb to play a subtlety rogue right now, right? If you check out World of Logs or DPS Bot, it's one of the game's worst specs. Subtlety is ranking down there with frost mages, as usual. Blizzard is buffing Sanguinary Vein by 4% in patch 5.2, which results in a slightly smaller overall buff for subtlety. Toss in a couple of extra Vanishes from baseline Preparation, and you're looking at a reasonable DPS boost for sub rogues. But how can a few percentage points of damage make up for the 50% gap that subtlety is showing on the meters? Subtlety is not doing just 50% of assassination or combat's DPS. In fact, top subtlety rogues are parsing right up there with the best assassination and combat rogues in the game. Subtlety's problem is self-fulfilling: the rogues with the most skill and the best gear aren't playing sub because it looks bad. Subtlety looks bad because there are so few parses from rogues with the appropriate skill and gear. Most subtlety parses are from poorly played rogues in PvP gear that are just soaking up valor points and leather gear.
Chase Christian01.08.2013Encrypted Text: It's time to eat cake
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. Preparation has always been our most controversial ability. From the early episodes of The World of Roguecraft, to the chart-topping AR/Prep days of BC, to our recent Prep vs Step conundrum, Preparation has always been the focal point of rogue cooldown discussion. Many rogues have advocated removing Preparation altogether and adjusting our cooldowns to be potent without it. Several other classes don't see the ability as a fair technique, lending itself to our image as a cooldown-reliant class. Blizzard clearly has other thoughts on the matter, as the ability will become baseline and available to all rogues at level 68 in the upcoming 5.2 patch. If I was making a list of rogue talents that might become baseline abilities, Preparation would've been all the way at the bottom. Many vocal rogues have been asking for Shadowstep to be added to every rogue's repertoire to resolve the Prep vs Step debate, but I don't think anyone saw the reverse happening. The decision to baseline Preparation is a clear buff for rogues everywhere.
Chase Christian01.02.2013Encrypted Text: Santa Ghostcrawler kills Blade Flurry
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. Apparently rogues haven't been getting the message. Year after year, as punishment for our evil deeds and shady dealings, we've only received coal in our Winter Veil stockings. We were not deterred, as we simply pickpocketed good presents from everyone else. A frustrated Greatfather Winter, tired of our shenanigans, finally turned to his manager. Santa Ghostcrawler, with the rumored Naughty List tight in his grasp, set about enacting a Winter Veil surprise that rogues would not be able to ignore. A 75% nerf to Blade Flurry in patch 5.2 did the trick. Melodrama aside, Blade Flurry was broken. While I would've preferred to see the ability spread to all three rogue specs and balanced appropriately (back to a cooldown?), Blizzard went in a different direction. Blade Flurry remains firmly a combat-only ability, but the edge it held over assassination and subtlety has waned significantly. Combat is no longer shackled to purely two-target gimmick fights, and assassination and subtlety rogues no longer need to respec and reforge multiple times per night to flex for Blade Flurry. The net effect is incredibly positive for rogues as whole, and we should be embracing this change.
Chase Christian12.26.2012Encrypted Text: Rogues, spam, and haste
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 spent the past weekend playing a new mech game, Hawken. One of the game's signature weapons is a powerful RPG, which has a short cooldown. During intense battles, I often found myself spamming my RPG button, just as I would spam Mutilate while playing my rogue. I wanted to make sure I used it as soon as it came off of cooldown. Unfortunately for me, pressing the button a second time once the RPG is airborne causes it to detonate prematurely, which usually resulted in the RPG's explosion damaging my mech instead of my target. While raiding in Dragon Soul, combat was the spec du jour, you had to spam your Sinister Strike key. If you weren't fervently mashing the '2' button on your keyboard, your energy would cap and you'd be throwing away free DPS. What's worse is that combat's favorite stat was haste, which only served to exacerbate the issue. Rogues weren't spamming their keys because they were impatient, they were spamming their keys to do their job.
Chase Christian12.19.2012Encrypted Text: Rogue questions, rogue answers
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. Why don't our poisons last forever, like death knight weapon runeforging? New rogues have no idea how easy they have it. Back in my day, rogues had to hike uphill in the snow to a special poison vendor hidden deep in the bowels of the capital cities. Once there, we had to look at our shopping list of obscure reagents to figure out what to buy and in what quantities. Rogues had to combine these ingredients in vials, creating one poison dose that faded every time we zoned. Vanish also consumed a vendor reagent, and we had to farm up Blindweed Fadeleaf ourselves in order to use Blind at all. Once you've died because you didn't have any Blinding Powder in your bags, you see class reagents differently. The fact that poisons no longer consume bag space in Mists of Pandaria was considered to be a boon. Poisons are easier now than they've ever been before.
Chase Christian12.12.2012Encrypted Text: What does a rogue look like?
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. Ghostcrawler recently described the rogue class as "slippery". He was met with a backlash of rogues arguing every side of the argument. I have personally struggled with my mental image of the rogue class. What does a rogue look like? Are we lightly-armored thieves or toughly-bound brawlers? Let me get this one out of the way early: "A rogue doesn't look like anything because you can't see them!" While I appreciate Stealth humor, the quip doesn't answer my question. Appearances have always been an important aspect in WoW. Players used to gauge their opponents' strength based on what shoulder armor they were wearing. Transmogrification is easily the most important feature of the past few years, as it has breathed life into content both old and new. The rogue class draws from several diverse archetypes, such as the thief, the assassin, and the brawler. Each source archetype contributes flavor to the class, but the end result can look like a confused mess.
Chase Christian11.28.2012Encrypted Text: Why does Kick cost energy?
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 always been the premier interrupters of World of Warcraft. Back in the day, druids and paladins didn't have any interrupts, much to their chagrin. Warriors couldn't interrupt from Berserker Stance, which left them unable to interrupt effectively. Up until recently, death knights and monks didn't even exist. Shamans have been valuable in the past with their short-CD interrupts, but the main job of locking down a target always fell to the rogues. Rogues have been tirelessly interrupting spells since WoW's launch 8 years ago. Individual mobs use spells quite frequently. You're bound to find an array of dangerous casters in a dungeon. Interrupts have been a crucial raid mechanic from the days of Molten Core. Other players are also notorious for trying to cast spells at rogues. Kick has been a featured part of the rogue arsenal for years. So why has it failed to evolve alongside the other interrupts?
Chase Christian11.21.2012Encrypted Text: Stabbing your way through Mogu'shan Vaults
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 tier 14 raiding system is a new experiment by Blizzard. I actually see Mists' first batch of raid content as three sub-tiers underneath the tier 14 umbrella. Mogu'shan Vaults is the introductory raid that can be done in mostly blue gear. The Heart of Fear requires purple-equipped raiders and a skilled roster. Finally, the upcoming Terrace of Endless Spring will be a challenge even on normal difficulty. The early heroic bosses have already been toppled, while I expect it will be weeks before we see the difficult Terrace cleared on heroic. Everybody has to start somewhere, and chances are that you're starting in Mogu'shan Vaults. If you're equipped with a mix of heroic blues and an epic item here or there, you'll be fine in MV. Rogues are performing quite well in MV, in spite of being a melee class. We have several tricks that allow us to maximize our damage against the first six bosses that we face in Pandaria.
Chase Christian11.14.2012Encrypted Text: Breaking the rogue 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. Rogue rotations haven't changed significantly since Cataclysm. Each of our three specs has a new element or two added to the mix, like Blindside and the revamped Revealing Strike. The combo points and energy systems keep on ticking, enabling our familiar rotations in yet another expansion. Rogue mechanics, on the other hand, have had several significant tweaks. While each change is significant on its own, what's really interesting is how they fit into a larger story. The "quick offhand" paradigm that has lasted for years is breaking down. Rogues are bringing significant buffs and debuffs to every environment. Combo points are more fluid than ever. Rogue rotations may not have evolved since Cataclysm, but the class as a whole certainly has.
Chase Christian11.07.2012Encrypted Text: Rogues rotations by the numbers
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 task of giving rogues three unique specs is incredibly difficult. Our class design doesn't allow for much flexibility in our mechanics. Assassination, combat, and subtlety all rely on the same energy bar and the same combo points to get the job done. The cyclical rotation of generators and finishers is always going to make up the core of our button presses. Rogue spec diversity is maintained by three main tenets: differing finishers, interesting cooldowns, and a unique generator mechanic. All rogues will be using Shadow Blades as often as possible and Feint to reduce their damage taken. The utility abilities of the class have been consolidated, and the variance in how we deal our damage is what's left to separate each spec.
Chase Christian10.31.2012Encrypted Text: Shuriken Toss' unlikely popularity
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'm not very happy with how the rogue talents turned out in Mists. Rather than new utility or cool features, we saw our old abilities given back to us, except that they were made mutually exclusive. The level 90 tier was particularly disappointing, as it focused on improving our quality of life instead of adding new functionality. Paladins get Boundless Conviction for free, and yet we're paying for Anticipation. I have yet to meet someone using Versatility. Couldn't we just see Redirect's base CD lowered to 30 seconds and call it even? The worst talent of the bunch seems to be Shuriken Toss. Why would you use an ability that's significantly weaker than Mutilate? The surprise is that assassination rogues don't care about how much damage Mutilate does; mutilate is only their 7th-highest source of damage. Shuriken Toss, on the other hand, generates more combo points per energy than Mutilate. Shuriken Toss still procs Deadly Poison, which makes up 40% of our overall damage. Rogues across a variety of gear levels are reporting Shuriken Toss results that are at or near Mutilate's performance. Update: Due to last night's PTR updates, Shuriken Toss will no longer proc Seal Fate when in melee range. As such, Shuriken Toss will not be viable after patch 5.1 goes live.
Chase Christian10.24.2012Encrypted Text: Rogues are reluctantly leading the melee pack
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 were to ask a random rogue how the class is doing, you would receive one of a dozen answers. Many rogues are frustrated with the class' transition to passive damage and the meager number of actions we perform to maintain our rotations. I have met rogues that are both extremely disappointed and incredibly enthusiastic about how we're competing in PvP. For every subtlety rogue that longs to have Preparation back, there's an assassination rogue that is praising Shadowstep's usefulness. If you take an empirical look, like our friend Rfeann suggests, you'll see that rogues are doing quite well in Mists of Pandaria. Assassination rogues are sitting at the top of the melee DPS classes in Mogu'shan Vaults, and of course we're untouchable on the combat-friendly Stone Guard encounter. We're not at the same ridiculous level of DPS as we were in patch 4.3 with our legendary daggers, but we're still making a name for ourselves against raid bosses. Why are so many rogues discontent when we look to be doing so well?
Chase Christian10.17.2012Encrypted Text: Combo points, chi, and your slow 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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. The official rogue forums are one of the last places that I expect to find a blue post. The community managers tend to avoid the class-specific boards, and our rogue nook tends to have a poor signal-to-noise ratio. However, the recent thread titled "Why we are energy starved" was graced with several blue posts from Daxxarri. The original poster, Cloake, was lamenting on the fact that our finishers cost both energy and combo points to use. Several posters commented on how our cousins, the windwalker monks, have solved this by having their chi finishers only consume chi and not energy. Daxxarri commented that Jab, their version of Sinister Strike, isn't exactly a great damage-dealer like our generators, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. Rogues aren't monks, and monks aren't rogues. But the question remains: why does the windwalker monk rotation feel so much more active and engaging than a rogue rotation?
Chase Christian10.10.2012Encrypted Text: Mists of Pandaria guide to a raid-ready 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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. I'm not a fan of gearing up. I hate watching my gear fade into obsolescence. I hate swapping out my legendary Fangs of the Father for a set of blue weapons that were given to me after I washed a few yaks and played the role of a pre-employment drug screener for some amped-up goats. Bill Gates infamously picks lazy people to do difficult jobs, because they'll find the easiest way to do it. I am that lazy person. I am always looking for the quickest way to get my rogue into raid-ready shape. The quicker that my rogue is geared up, the quicker I can get back to Eviscerating leveling players of the opposing faction. With a couple of weeks of grinding daily quests and some heroic dungeons mixed in, your rogue can be ready for the first tier of MoP raiding.
Chase Christian10.03.2012Encrypted Text: How to gank a monk
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. With the launch of Mists of Pandaria, the season of world PvP is upon us once again. Over the next few weeks, there will be thousands of players trying out the new monk class. These rerollers are likely to be undergeared and inexperienced, making them perfect targets for your daggers. Rogues were able to take advantage of fledgling death knights as they were still learning to use their awkward new bodies in Wrath. Blizzard promised to bring world PvP back in Mists, and with the massive influx of grounded players trying to level, they've made good on their promise. Don't plan on facing many mistweaver monks out in the open world, as they'll be safe inside of their dungeon queues. The staff-wielding brewmaster tanking monks will be very difficult to defeat unless they're at a significantly lower level than you, so be careful. Our primary targets will be our melee DPS rivals, the windwalker monks. You can identify them by their dual weapons and smug (likely pandaren) faces.
Chase Christian09.26.2012Encrypted Text: Deftly leveling your rogue 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. If druids are going to roll on our leather, I'll gladly roll on theirs. Regardless of your spec of choice, leveling your rogue in Mists of Pandaria should be an enjoyable experience. I tend to enjoy combat's simple Sinister Strike-spamming playstyle for the leveling grind, but subtlety's amazing burst and assassination's potent poisons are more than powerful enough to get the job done. If you were lucky enough to acquire your Fangs of the Father, they'll carry you until level 88 or 89 with their awesome damage. The first key to a swift leveling experience is to minimize your downtime. The less time you spend in combat, the longer it will take to hit 90. The second key is to increase your damage output. While our damage is already formidable, taking out targets faster is always a good thing. The third and final key is to eliminate the competition. If a member of the opposing faction is killing mobs in the same area that you are, you need to increase the supply of mobs by reducing the demand.
Chase Christian09.19.2012Encrypted Text: What Fangs of the Father could have been
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. Every DPS spec in World of Warcraft is in competition with every other DPS spec. It doesn't matter if you're playing the pure DPS rogue or the hybrid DPS priest, you want to be at the top of the meters. For some players, being at the top of their raid's DPS chart is good enough. For others, they won't stop until they're at the top of World of Logs' rankings. World of Logs is like a world-wide Recount. When the first few Dragonwraths were earned by casters, their stock on WoL saw a notable spike. The legendary staff's massive stats and spell-doubling effect were incredibly potent. Every caster with Dragonwrath saw their DPS skyrocket. When the first few Fangs of the Father were earned by rogues, it was largely anticlimactic. Heroic No'Kaled, which had already been obtainable for months, was a viable competitor to our legendary daggers. No legendary weapon has ever been pre-empted as quickly as our daggers were.
Chase Christian09.05.2012Encrypted Text: Answering your post-5.0.4 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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. Patch 5.0.4 might not have brought all of Mists of Pandaria's content, but it did contain all of its mechanics and class changes. Our new talent trees are active and Swirly Ball has finally returned. As with all of the pre-expansion patches, we are given a few weeks to cope with the new changes before the actual expansion goes live. While we're still missing out on our level 87 abilities and our level 90 talents, we still need to be able to deftly control our rogues for a few more weeks. The majority of our rotations have remained intact, and you should feel right at home after a few cycles. Most of the changes that rogues are seeing are passive or quality of life improvements. Other classes are faced with relearning major facets of their playstyle, but combo points and energy continue to hold steady.
Chase Christian08.29.2012Encrypted Text: Preparing your rogue for patch 5.0.4
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 upcoming patch 5.0.4 only contains part of Mists of Pandaria's content, but it does bring all of its class changes. Our new talent trees and glyphs will be in place, and our specializations will be dramatically revamped. While rogues are receiving fewer changes than any other class, we will experience a shift. Our new mechanics will be in place following patch 5.0.4's release on Aug. 28. We will have nearly a month to learn our rotations before Mists' official launch. That should be plenty of time to get our gear and glyphs in order in preparation for leveling in Pandaria. Poisons and talents will be at the forefront of our effort to adjust.
Chase Christian08.22.2012Encrypted Text: Rogue celebrities and the lack thereof
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 world has an obsession with celebrity. A person can be famous simply for being famous. We want to wear what they wear, we want to drive what they drive, and we want to have what they have. The endorsement of a celebrity is all that it takes to instill confidence and to engender trust. Celebrities have become the perfect image that we shape our lives after. Every culture has its model members that create the standard by which the others are judged. Rogues are running out of celebrities. While the old joke about how "the best rogues are the unknown ones" is clever, it's not accurate. Every class needs avatars to represent it on the global scale. Every class needs intelligent theorycrafters to curate class knowledge and flashy all-stars to exploit that knowledge. Rogues used to have heroes that we could stand behind, but their count is fading fast. Can you name the best rogue in the world right now, in either PvP or PvE? Can you even name anyone in the top 10? I couldn't either.
Chase Christian08.15.2012