shuriken-toss
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Encrypted Text: Why mobility doesn't matter
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. Brian Holinka, who is quickly becoming the most frequent tweeter on the dev team, recently talked about Shadowstep and rogue mobility in a series of tweets. Mobility is one of those things that gets trotted out every time a melee class starts talking about PvP balance. One melee class has a teleport, another has a snare break, yet another has a speed boost –- no two melee classes are equal. I'm sure we all remember ret paladins complaining about their lack of a "gap closer." The problem with mobility is that mobility doesn't matter. Well, not really. What really matters to a melee class is uptime. Our goal isn't to have 100% mobility, it's to have 100% uptime. We want to be attacking our target as often as possible, and that usually requires being in melee range. Looking at mobility in a vacuum is missing the forest for the trees. Mobility is just one of the tools that we use to achieve a high melee uptime. All of our other abilities, like CCs, stuns, and slows are critical components to maximizing our uptime. Shuriken Toss is the exact opposite of mobility, but its strength comes from increasing our uptime despite being out of melee range.
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: Rogue basics in patch 5.2
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 one glance at the notes, you'll see that rogues are obviously the class getting the most updates in the upcoming patch. There's an unusual number of changes coming our way. I'm used to a few terse sentences under the brittle yellow Rogue heading in the patch notes. Currently, we're facing paragraphs of tweaks, a handful of completely new abilities, and even redesigns of old techniques. None of the changes should affect our core DPS mechanics. Our rotations are going to stay exactly the same, our weapon and poison changes won't be changing, and we'll want the same stats on our gear. Combat and subtlety rogues were both slightly buffed, but all three specs should be competitive in PvE. Many of the changes should significantly increase our stock in PvP, via both offensive and defensive improvements.
Encrypted Text: The rise of the ranged 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 original Shuriken Toss never made sense. Why would rogues, a purely melee class, want a single ranged attack? We don't have the supporting toolbox to make the transition into a ranged DPS spec. Melee uptime is our top priority. Because of our reliance on our melee attacks, mobility is our most requested feature. Why would a class want Shuriken Toss when they can have Shadowstep? Patch 5.2 is turning a one-off ranged ability into everything a rogue needs to attack targets from range. If you use Shuriken Toss on a target that is farther than 10 yards away, your auto-attacks gain a 30-yard range for 10 seconds. The auto-attacks turn into tiny shuriken that you throw at your target. These shuriken have several special properties, but the extended range is obviously the most important aspect of the ability. With Shuriken Toss, ranged auto-attacks, and Deadly Throw, rogues suddenly have a ranged repertoire.
New rogue talents and other rogue buffs coming in patch 5.2
If you follow rogue news, you know the class is in a bit of a funk. The developers are certainly aware of the class's low representation and they're aiming to fix it. Two new rogue talents have been datamined from patch 5.2: Hit and Run and Marked for Death. Where these new talents fall in the talent trees, we aren't yet sure. One of them is surely replacing Preparation, which has now become a baseline ability. In addition to the new talents, great changes have been made to select existing talents and abilities. For example, Deadly Throw no longer requires a full 5 combo points to interrupt an opponent's spellcasting, but rather only 3. Shuriken Toss, when used beyond 10 yards, turns all of your auto-attacks into ranged shurikens with a 30 yard range for 10 seconds. Do keep in mind, however, that this is the PTR. So sayeth Ghostcrawler: @dylanrogue We have had the discussion about whether we're buffing rogues too much in 5.2. Give it a spin on the PTR and let us know. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 20, 2012 Everything on the PTR is subject to change. Get excited, but cautiously so.
Encrypted 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.
Encrypted 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.
Encrypted Text: Shuriken Toss breaks all the 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. Raise your hand if you remember fighting against Shazzrah. I'm not talking about our recent bout with Shannox or even our old fights against Mother Shahraz. Shazzrah goes way back, to WoW's very first raid instance, Molten Core. Due to the frequent AoE explosions that Shazzrah unleashed, rogues couldn't engage him without being slaughtered immediately. While the rest of the raid fought the boss, I joined the other rogues in my group crushing Blindweed and making some food next to the Cooking Fire. As a melee class, our biggest weakness for years has been that we can only deal damage to nearby targets. It's limited our ability to swap targets effectively, our ability to avoid point-blank AoE attacks, and our ability to attack any target that's not on the ground. Rogues, along with other melee classes, have actually been benched because of these limitations. These shackles and restrictions have bound our class since its inception. Shuriken Toss has the chance to change all that. The new level 90 rogue talent slated for Mists of Pandaria might redefine what it means to play a rogue.
