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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.
Encrypted Text: Crimson Tempest revitalizes the rogue AoE game
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. For rogues, enemies come in one of three group sizes: a single enemy, two enemies at once, or several enemies at once. Subtlety rogues love to focus on a single opponent, combat rogues absolutely soar when destroying two targets, and assassination rogues are the kings of sustained damage on multiple targets. Combat's AoE damage to a group is pitiful, while subtlety rogues start falling behind the instant there's more than one target on the field. The balance of rogue AoE today is determined by two abilities: Blade Flurry and Fan of Knives. These are currently our only two multi-target abilities, and so each spec's AoE potential revolves around these two moves. Mists of Pandaria is changing everything we know about rogue AoE by introducing a brand new AoE finisher, Crimson Tempest. In addition, the AoE hierarchy is also being shaken up via the revamping of Fan of Knives. The days of mindless FoK spam are over.
Encrypted Text: Rogues need to be number one
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 topic requests. Back towards the end of Wrath, Blizzard shared with us a lot of information about the then-upcoming Cataclysm expansion. The new 31-point talent trees were unveiled, along with the mastery bonuses for each tree. The mastery bonuses were heralded as the ultimate balancing tool: Developers could tweak these numbers without touching a tree's talents. Mastery would ensure that any given spec could be tuned independently of the other specs. The concept made sense, as buffing individual talents had a tendency to cause players to just cross-spec into those newly powerful talents. The other option at Blizzard's disposal is buffing talents that are deep in a talent tree, which works well since we can only go 10 points deep into our secondary trees. In order to buff rogues in the upcoming patch 4.2, the developers have used both approaches. Our assassination and combat masteries are both being buffed by 5%. Deep talents in each tree, like Vile Poisons, Savage Combat, and Sanguinary Vein, are also being improved. Finally, subtlety rogues will see Hemorrhage's base damage improved by 40%, although it remains to be seen how this change affects the spec's viability. Even with these buffs, combat and assassination rogues are still slated to be well behind most other classes. Rogues are generally middle-of-the-pack in DPS for most tier 11 bosses, and these changes will just make us "less behind." Other classes might ask us why being "average" is so bad. Average might be okay for a hybrid, but rogues need to top the meters -- not for our egos, but by design.
Encrypted Text: Fresh rogue rotations in Cataclysm
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 rotations that rogues will be using. After Blizzard's latest press release, we know that Cataclysm will be released in early December. We already know that there will be at least one patch that precedes the expansion. The period of time between patch 4.0.1 and the expansion's actual launch is a time of transition, and it's rapidly approaching. The transition phases of The Burning Crusade and Wrath were rocky to say the least; it's safe to say that that we're looking forward to exciting times. Many classes are hurting pretty badly on the PTR for patch 4.0.1 right now. Blizzard had the great idea of temporarily granting rogues Cloak of Shadows as our 31-point subtlety talent back in patch 2.0 to help us deal with the souped-up casters of that era. A similar change could be used to give retribution paladins access to Inquisition (at the cost of Zealotry) to bolster their damage until Cataclysm. Luckily for rogues, we were on the receiving end of the latest "damage pass." Several of our core abilities were granted significant damage and scaling bonuses to keep us competitive in a pre-Cataclysm world.
