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Encrypted 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.
Encrypted Text: The lazy combat build, part 1
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. After this week's deluge of Mists of Pandaria information, Cataclysm is fading fast. Everyone is looking ahead to the future, with dreams of exploring Pandaria and complaining about monks being overpowered on the general forums. Deathwing has been vanquished millions of times, and with no new content slated for Cataclysm, this expansion has come to its end. We're now officially entering the inter-expansion lull. What better time than now to roll a new rogue alt? You've got plenty of justice and valor points banked, and your guild has probably been level 25 for months. If you haven't been playing recently, then you can simply have someone use a Scroll of Resurrection to give you a free level 80 character on the server and faction of your choosing. If you've ever wanted to play a rogue, there's no better time than today to try one out. If you're lucky, you might even make it to 85 in time to pick up your guild's inevitable fifth or sixth set of Fangs of the Father.
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.
Encrypted Text: The rotation system
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 rotation model of DPS, and how it defines our class in every way. Blizzard has a long history of taking popular addons and rolling their functionality into the game's base user interface. The first instance of this that I can remember was when Blizzard introduced its own quest objective tracking overlay, nearly copying MonkeyQuest's original configuration. The dev team also inserted dungeon maps for the various instances, taking a page out of Atlas' book. Their latest invention is a replacement for Power Auras, the popular notification mod that displays custom graphics when a specified event occurs. Looking at the list of spells for which Blizzard created custom "spell activation" effects (thanks BB!), we see mostly random and reactive abilities on the list. Paladins will enjoy the art for Art of War, and every mage spec has a particular proc to watch patiently for. What intrigued me was that there is actually a spell activation effect for rogues, an orange lightning bolt that represents Slice and Dice. Slice and Dice, as any rogue will inform you, is not a random proc; it's a core part of our DPS and should be up at all times. While having a lightning bolt on my screen at all times sounds like fun, it got me thinking about the rogue DPS model. I utilize Power Auras extensively on every other character I play, yet I don't even have it enabled on my rogue.
Encrypted Text: Leveling a rogue, level 1-10
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 talk about leveling a rogue from level 1 to level 10. So, after reading the list of pros and cons, you've committed to starting your new rogue. This is a proud day for the brotherhood of assassins, as we welcome a new member into our fold. You will learn to embrace the shadows and your adrenaline will spike after your first kill. You will learn to hide your tracks and strike fear into your enemies. Before you're ready to slay dragons and assassinate high-profile targets, you've got a lot of learning to do. Rogues can be a complex class, with our nearly limitless bag of tricks and a playstyle that is uniquely our own. You must learn how to use your techniques effectively, and how to maximize your damage output while staying alive. The journey from a young rogue to a powerful assassin begins today.
Encrypted Text: Rogue Glyphs, part 2
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 finish a discussion on upcoming Rogue glyphs in WOTLK.Wrath of the Lich King (and also the upcoming patch 3.0) includes a new tradeskill: Inscription. Inscriptionists will be able to create scrolls, off-hand items, and parchments to help enchanters sell their wares. However, their key crafted item comes in the form of spell/skill enhancing Glyphs. Every non-inscriptionist character has six Glyph slots they can use to enhance themselves. There are three major and three minor slots; of which you can mix and match appropriate Glyphs. An image of the Glyph interface is shown above (the center slot is thought to be for Inscriptionists themselves as a tradeskill perk).Some of the various Glyphs enhance existing abilities, while others add utility to skills that change its function completely. The current Rogue Glyphs come in 3 major flavors: cooldown/energy cost reduction, range increase, and damage/effect increase. After the cut, let's explore these groups individually.
Build Shop: Rogue 19/42/0
Welcome to another Tuesday edition of Build Shop! This past week I received an email from a Rogue reader in an up and coming guild that's just starting to raid Kara who says he's a non-believer in the "No Ruthlessness, No Murder, No Relentless Strike -- No Raid" policy. He also wanted to know about the viability of a hybrid build (30/0/31), and how it could be improved for casual instances, raids, and the occasional PvP skirmish. Well, that's kind of a tall order, and I plan to address it more fully tomorrow in Encrypted Text.However, I will deal with part of the question today by talking about why Combat is the superior tree for PvE in many cases. Although there are many different types of Combat builds (Mace + Sword, Daggers, Fist, etc) these days, I'm going to focus on Combat swords (19/42/0). This is a build that doesn't rely on positioning like Combat Daggers or Mutilate, making it great for fights with a lot of movement. This is also a build which can really crank out the damage with the right weapons and gear. I feel that this is one of the finest and most effective DPS builds in the game -- read on to find out why.
Encrypted Text: Macros and you
To be honest with you all, there are precisely two macros that I use with any regularlity. Now this isn't to say that there aren't some really creative macros out there. There are no less than three monstrous threads on the US Rogue forums full of all manner of macro you could ever want. (While we're on the topic, Blue, could you sticky the most recent one please? Thanks!) But to be honest, a lot of it is, from personal experience -- really superfluous. Sure. I could set up a macro that would throw five Sinister Strikes and then an Eviscerate:/startattack/castsequence Sinister Strike, Sinister Strike, Sinister Strike, Sinister Strike, Sinister Strike, Evisceratebut to be blunt, looking at the above makes me a sad panda. It takes all of the challenge and fun out of playing a Rogue to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a place for macros that are pages long. But I'm not certain that automating everything via an enormous compendium of macros will honestly ever take the place of a smart Rogue who pays attention and can tell "useful" macros from "overkill."Now, before everyone sends me tons of hatemail about how I'm 'teh worst Rogue evar' bear with me. I'll try to explain why I'm pointing fingers at some of the Rogue macros out there, and why I feel they are more of a hinderance than a help. And just to prove I'm not totally anti-macro -- I'll share the two that are staples in my bar and I admit I'd hate to play without.
