rogue-spec
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Encrypted 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.
Mists of Pandaria: Guide to 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 questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. While Mists of Pandaria is still actively being developed and patches are dropping regularly, the rogue of tomorrow is starting to take its final shape. The amorphous blob of shadow that we see on the horizon is congealing into something resembling a functioning class. In fact, rogues have been receiving fewer changes these past few weeks than any other class. I'm not surprised by this fact, as there's really not much to improve upon when we're already a model class. With talent choices reduced to a half-dozen easy decisions, there's really not much you can mess up while playing your rogue in Mists. I like to think that you can break a class down into three basic categories: customization, enhancement, and execution. You need to pick the talents and glyphs that best suit your situation, gear up with the right gems and enchants, and finally push the right buttons.
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: Why rogues now love hunters and other HaT ironies
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'll discuss how Blizzard is shifting the Rogue paradigm.Hunters. Does any other class provoke such a strong response of malice from a Rogue? They're not necessarily our counter-class, Warriors fill that role quite nicely (curse you Overpower!). I always think of Hunters as a parallel to us; Rogues at a distance. Regardless of how you classify them, one thing stays the same: Rogues hate Hunters.The next question would be: but Chase, why do you keep inviting all these Hunters to your Naxxramas raids? At first I wanted to remain nonchalant and pass my decision off as charity. We need someone to soak up all the mail gear that drops. But after constant prodding from my healers as to why I am wasting their infinite talent on mere pets, I had to finally give up the goose. I needed the Hunters to feed my CP addiction. I am just another HaT Rogue stacking the raid to power my Eviscerate engine. We're having an intervention tomorrow. I'm so ashamed.
