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Encrypted Text: Rogue Is
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. Word on the street is that the old rogue finally hit the dirt. Nobody is exactly sure how it happened. Did he get a little too cavalier in a duel with Rossi and eat the wrong end of a two-handed Overpower? Did Frostheim land a lucky Flare/Freezing Trap combo after seeing him slinking in the shadows? Did some hotshot mage get lucky and land the ultimate Shatter bomb while his cooldowns were recharging? Or did he simply Vanish into thin air? Did anyone actually see the body? Were they able to identify his daggers by comparing the multitude of scrapes and scars? Was there a trace left behind to prove he was ever really here? That's the funny thing about rogues: you never know when they're dead, or just in repose.
Encrypted Text: Patch 5.4's new Killing Spree and rogue glyphs
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. Killing Spree has been killing rogues since 2008. While assassination rogues are discussing the best opportunities to use Vendetta and subtlety rogues are planning their Shadow Dances, combat rogues are just hoping their cooldown won't throw them off a cliff or into fire. I remember when rogues simply didn't play combat when fighting Magmaw. Killing Spree on Garalon? Only if you had a death wish. The Glyph of Killing Spree fixed most of these errant deaths, but didn't fix the root problem: Killing Spree takes away control from the rogue. We're not capable of choosing our targets or our destination when using Killing Spree, which makes it a liability in high-stakes situations. The new PTR version of Killing Spree looks to change that. The normal Killing Spree will turn into a powerful nuke on a specific target, while Killing Spree under Blade Flurry's influence will result in the random attacks we're used to.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tier 16 set bonuses reviewed
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 or tweet me with questions or suggestions of what you'd like to see covered here. Set bonuses are the perfect time for Blizzard to experiment with fun class effects. They're in use by a limited set of players, they can be tuned specifically for a particular tier, and the bonuses are ephemeral. Class changes are much harder to implement quietly and they're even more difficult to roll back if undesirable. Tier set bonuses are a cultured petri dish for new ideas to grow, or to be sterilized. Our new tier 16 set bonuses are just such an experiment. The two-piece bonus saves us energy on our combo point generators, and has some very interesting interactions with each talent spec's mechanics. The four-piece bonus also changes based on our spec. Killing Spree's damage ramps up significantly, which will pair nicely with its new Blade Flurry interaction. Vendetta's mastery-stacking bonus will add some teeth to assassination's burn cycle. The Backstab/Ambush combo pack, however, is easily the star of the show, and the start of an important conversation.
Encrypted Text: We'll always be the bad guys
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 remember the first time I ran into a warlock in vanilla WoW. We were both around level 40, and I met him in an Uldaman run. I didn't even know the class existed until he responded to my advertisement in trade chat. During the dungeon, he was constantly Fearing mobs into other groups, accidentally tab-targeting and tossing DoTs on patrols, and letting his pet steal aggro from the tank. My first impression of warlocks was a negative one, and it took a long time for that prejudice to subside. Most players' first experience with a rogue will be on the receiving end of our daggers. Whether it's in a battleground or in the open world of a PvP server, rogues are killing thousands of players per hour. If a rogue gets the opener on an unsuspecting player, it's not a pretty sight. The target will be ambushed from nowhere, stunned, slowed, interrupted, poisoned, and bled to death. Being killed by a rogue isn't a fun experience. You're hit with the shock of surprise, denied control of your character, and incredibly restricted. It's easy to see how a player's first experience with a rogue could leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Encrypted Text: Rogues and RPPM
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 have any questions about what gear you should use or about your specific DPS stat weights, you should use Shadowcraft to get the answers. WoW is a game with dozens of different mechanics and complex intersections. There's no way to guess or intuit what's right for your rogue. Every rogue has different access to gear, and you're always limited by what actually drops. You shouldn't focus on trying to theorycraft in a gear vacuum, because the gear you currently have is important in planning the proper upgrade paths. That said, there's no reason you shouldn't understand some of the underlying mechanics that determine what gear and stats are good for you. The newest mechanic in WoW is the Real Proc-Per-Minute (RPPM) system, which affects several proc-based effects like our weapon enchants, trinkets, and the legendary meta gem. RPPM is a very different system for procs than we've seen in the past.
Encrypted Text: Mastering Tricks of the Trade macros
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. Tricks of the Trade is a strange ability for rogues. Why would we sacrifice our own damage (by spending energy) to boost the damage of someone else? Aldriana and Pathal have both spoken out against TotT's misguided benevolence and its boring mechanics. Rather than being a situationally-useful ability that we pull out when the time is right, TotT has become a set-and-forget chore that we just auto-cast on the second-highest DPS in raid. Lore issues aside, Tricks of the Trade is a pretty good ability. Used properly, it can greatly accelerate the rate that tanks pick up aggro, which makes dungeons and raids just a bit easier. While it's a DPS loss for the rogue casting TotT, it's a net gain for the raid's DPS, and that's a sacrifice that we'll have to make. It's also incredibly potent in PvP; granting an ally a 15% damage boost is a pretty big deal.
Encrypted Text: Five macros every rogue should know
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. Macros are designed to allow a player to combine commands and modifiers (targeting, non-GCD abilities) with regular abilities in a quick and efficient manner. Macros can't make decisions for you. There is no macro that will automatically switch between Mutilate and Dispatch for you on the fly. There is no macro that will use Revealing Strike when it fades and Sinister Strike otherwise. Macros aren't intelligent – they have to be told what to do. Pure classes tend to have fewer abilities than hybrids, and after the merging of spells like Envenom and Eviscerate, our action bars are sparse. The average raiding rogue might only need a dozen or so abilities per encounter, and that's including defensive cooldowns. A typical assassination rotation consists of Mutilate or Dispatch, Rupture and Envenom, and a few Feints or Cloaks per fight. Rogue macros tend to focus less on day-to-day rotation assistance and more on strategic abilities and cooldowns.
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: An interview with Pathal, Shadowcraft's unofficial lead dev
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 Aldriana decided to give up the title of master rogue theorycrafter, nobody knew who would take up his mantle. A handful of rogue champions worked together to develop Shadowcraft's engine for Mists of Pandaria. As time has marched on, many rogues faded away, but one has risen to the top. Pathal has been the lead developer working on the Shadowcraft back-end for several months now, tweaking the numbers as patches and hotfixes drop and working on exposing more options and expanding SC's capabilities. I had the opportunity to speak with Pathal about his history as a rogue, what he thinks of the class and its mechanics, how he got started in rogue theorycrafting, and what working on Shadowcraft has been like.
Encrypted Text: Swirly Ball and a bag of coins
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. When Blizzard reintroduced Detection via the Glyph of Detection, I was ecstatic. Trap detection had been baked into the class when Detect Traps was originally removed, but that didn't stop rogues from waxing nostalgic about Swirly Ball. Warlocks wanted their green fire, warriors were trying to use Titan's Grip with polearms, and rogues begged for Swirly Ball back. The Glyph of Detection is the perfect minor glyph because it's fun and it's purely cosmetic. Or is it? Balarak, who is unfortunately a hunter, discovered a secret rogue event while infiltrating Ravenholdt Manor. Nobody expected what he found there. Ghosts and spirits, a hidden tribute to the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, a rogue-only item with amazing capabilities, and the implication that maybe, even in this age of data mining, we haven't found everything WoW has to offer.
Encrypted Text: The true cost of Feint
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 used Feint once while leveling up in 2004. I was in Razorfen Kraul, attempting to duo Agathelos the Raging for a shot at a Swinetusk Shank. While fighting Agathelos, the great boar focused on me. With Evasion down, my life was dwindling. My brother of the shadows told me to use Feint, which would lower my threat. It didn't reduce my threat by enough, and I died. I learned then and there that Feint was not my friend. Luckily there was a dagger on the boar's corpse, so my run back was ever so sweet. After Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection entered the scene, I put Feint on button without a hotkey -- the action bar equivalent of Siberia. For nearly five years, Feint went unused. Rogues already have potent passive threat reduction. Patch 3.0.8 changed all that, and now I'm pressing Feint as often as Mutilate or Envenom. Feint is now a core ability of the rogue class.
Encrypted Text: Learning the rogue calculus
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 don't have to be good at math to play a rogue. Anyone can log into WoW and create a rogue. You can get all the way to level 90 and into raids without ever having to do any addition or long division. You can do dailies and dungeons simply by using the highest ilvl gear available and ignoring everything else. Rogues are played with a keyboard and mouse, not a pen and paper. However, if you want to wring every last drop of DPS out of the class, you're going to have to get your hands dirty with numbers. I love when a class' design forces the player to make tough choices. The choices that we make as rogues, when you think about it, are really just math problems. The secret to making good choices is to do the math ahead of time. You don't want to be faced with an unexpected set of fractions in the middle of a tough raid encounter.
Encrypted Text: Adjusting your rogue to 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. Patch 5.2 only came out three weeks ago, and there's already talk about what's coming in the next patch. While the new PvP gear changes are interesting, we still have to deal with what the last patch dealt us. Rogues typically receive fewer changes than the other classes, for better or worse. When we have a patch like 5.2 that introduces several updates and new additions, there's naturally a period of coping with the changes. Marked for Death is an amazing talent for chewing through mobs, if you remember to use it. I tend to use it to dispatch a few enemies while doing dailies, forget about it for 5 minutes, and then I remember it, and wonder how I forgot in the first place. With the Glyph of Deadly Momentum, I feel that rogues are the most efficient solo class in the game. We can keep Slice and Dice up permanently, and with Rupture applied immediately, we're dealing full damage right off the bat.
Encrypted Text: The incredible, indestructible 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. There used to be a saying amongst healers: "It costs less mana to rez a rogue than to heal one." Rogues were the only non-plate melee class (shaman and druids were healers), and our leather armor didn't absorb heavy blows. I remember gearing my first rogue specifically for stamina and fire resistance. I wouldn't be invited to the raid unless I could meet the 4,000 HP minimum health requirement. If I accidentally stole aggro, I would be squashed like a grape. Times have changed. Rogues are now the most durable melee class, and it's not even close. Enhancement shamans and fury warriors can't toss on a shield without severing all hope of dealing competitive DPS. Rogues are capable of dealing nearly their maximum damage while taking less damage than any other class in the raid.
Encrypted Text: How to play a rogue 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. Now that the patch is live, we know which changes made it and which were cut in development. Vitality's buff was cut in half, but combat rogues are still sitting quite pretty. Assassination had a last-minute 10% boost to its damage via Assassin's Resolve, which should ensure that the spec performs well. Subtlety's Sanguinary Vein buff also stayed put, which should increase the number of subtlety rogues raiding in this tier. Along with the purely numerical changes, we also have to factor in our new set bonuses, talents, and ability changes that arrived with the patch. Rogues received more changes than usual in this patch cycle, and I am hopeful that we'll continue to excel in PvE while also gaining ground in PvP representation. Patch 5.2 is full of cool new tools for rogues, which has me very excited for this raid tier.
Encrypted Text: Examining our tier 15 set bonuses
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 Nine-Tail Battlegear is our new tier 15 raid set, and it's beautiful. The nine-tailed fox is a famous Asian mythological creature. The animal is known in many cultures for its trickery and cunning, both of which are famous rogue attributes. They're also known for frequently running from hunters and their pets, which is another one of our pastimes. I think that our opponents are likely to find the sharp-toothed fox snout on our helms to be quite imposing. Our tier 15 set bonuses are very interesting, and much more exciting than our tier 14 bonuses. I've never been a fan of the simple "Ability X does Y% more damage" set bonuses. Our two-piece bonus is unlike anything I've seen before, and our four-piece bonus has already been the topic of much discussion between the rogue community and the developers. All three rogue specs are receiving sizable buffs going into patch 5.2, and with some fresh new set bonuses to look forward to, exploring the Throne of Thunder should be a good time.
Encrypted Text: What would make you play a 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. Everyone has a different idea of what the perfect rogue consists of. I know plenty of rogues that wouldn't play the class without its subterfuge and stealth tactics. Other rogues focus entirely on our combat mechanics and couldn't care less about our burgeoning bag of parlor tricks. There are PvP-focused rogues that will never Pick Pocket their targets, and there are PvE-centric rogues that have no idea that Shadow Walk was ever introduced. The question is what makes us play rogues? What would make new players try out the rogue class? Every player has their own reasons for picking the rogue over the other classes. What changes could be implemented that would bring in more players? Ghostcrawler has indicated that the relative power isn't correlated with our population stats. If cranking up our damage by 20% wouldn't increase the number of active rogues, what would?
Encrypted Text: Cat and mouse in rogue PvP
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 deal maximum damage when in melee range of their opponents. The new Shuriken Toss is potent, but it's still no substitute for melee uptime. Ranged classes want to keep rogues at bay, while rogues want to close the gap as soon as possible. Rogues will beat a warlock that stands still, but a slippery mage can defeat us. When it comes to PvP, it's all about location, location, location. Mobility has become a back-and-forth battle between rogues and ranged classes. We compensate for their slows and snares with our Crippling Poison, while they counter our stuns with their teleports and trinkets. Rogues can use Shadowstep to close the gap, only to be rooted in place and left out in the open. Rogue PvP has become a mobility cooldown dance, as we try to snuggle up to our targets and they try to play hard-to-get.
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.
