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Encrypted Text: Reflecting on our Cataclysm abilities
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 love October. While any baseball fan will tell you that there's a special feeling in the air during October, I couldn't care less about the World Series. I know plenty of football fans who enjoy spending their Octobers obsessing over their fantasy rosters, but my team has cruised to a 5-and-0 start already. I'm not even particularly excited that my birthday falls in October, as another event takes priority. October is BlizzCon month for me, and I can't wait to hear all about what's in store for rogues as we learn about next year's expansion. When thinking about what cool abilities rogues might see in the next WoW expansion, I started reflecting on the new spells we received in Cataclysm. For our new high-level spells, we picked up Combat Readiness, Redirect, and Smoke Bomb. Recuperate was added to our low-level spells to help make leveling smoother and to provide rogues with a healing option that didn't involve bandages. How useful have these spells proven themselves to be over the past year?
Encrypted Text: Designing the ultimate rogue quest chain
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. In preparation for researching the upcoming pair of legendary daggers for rogues, the Fangs of the Father, I have already copied over several rogues to the PTR servers. Unfortunately, it's impossible to start the quest chain just yet, as not all of the new dungeons are accessible. I will have more information on exactly what's required to obtain our upcoming orange weapons once I'm able to actually start working on it. The black dragon Wrathion will be giving us orders, and we'll be completing his missions in return for the legendary weapons. Some information has been datamined on a few of the quests that we'll be completing. While we don't know much, we do know that there will be at least one Pick Pocket job and a Stealth mission, based on both the datamined info and Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler's own statement on the rogue-themed quest line. Picking a few mobs' pockets for a ring and sneaking into Ravenholdt doesn't seem to that challenging, but obviously we don't see the whole picture yet. I have been mulling over ideas for what pieces of quintessential rogueness could be introduced to make our quest for legendary weapons that much more memorable.
Encrypted Text: Blackfang Battleweave, or Deathwing is the Joker
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. Blizzard has been posting previews of the upcoming tier 13 sets, allowing us to see what our new sets will look like visually. When describing the tier 13 set for rogues, Blackfang Battleweave, it was said that the armor is bat-themed. When I think of bats and bat-themed armor, I immediately think of the Caped Crusader. Not to worry, as the preview also claimed that they "were careful to skirt the more obvious inspirations." Oh, that's good news -- so they're not designing our next tier set in such a way that it would warrant a cease and desist letter from DC Comics. The only real similarity between our gear and the Dark Knight's is the pointy cowl; I don't see any shaped abs on our leather tunic. As soon as I let my guard down, the WoW Facebook page posts an image of a rogue soaring through the night air on a pair of dark wings. Our new legendary daggers, the Fangs of the Father, apparently, give us wings. You can't see this picture and not immediately see the resemblance to the Masked Manhunter himself. I can only think of two possibilities: Either I accidentally started playing DC Universe Online at some point without realizing it, or Frank Miller has replaced Samwise Didier as Blizzard's art director.
Encrypted Text: Welcome your new legendary-wielding rogue overlords
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. World of Warcraft is alive. The game is dynamic, always churning and changing. Guilds rise and fall, chapters of lore are closed, and new challenges are introduced. The balance of power shifts like a scale at sea. While the developers do their best to steer the ship through the rough waters of chaos, players are exploiting even the slightest imbalances to gain any advantage over their peers. The constant struggle to maintain order and balance has been fought for years, with neither participant yielding to the opposing side. As the developers are tweaking class mechanics and players are finding new ways to break them, there is one force that silences everyone -- the legendary weapon. With their orange text and powerful attributes, legendary weapons are capable of raising a class out of the war zone of balance and elevating them to the pillar of dominance. The wielders of legendaries are above the laws of balance and fairness; they get to define their own reality. Rogues have been named as the next recipients of this power in the form of a pair of legendary daggers, the Fangs of the Father. I couldn't be more excited. Even in my glee, I still wonder: Why would the devs introduce weapons so powerful that they undermine their own attempts at balance?
Encrypted Text: Rogues do it from behind
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 best way to improve your DPS is to attack more. I'm not talking about stacking haste so that your attacks are swift as lightning, but rather about not missing any opportunities. In order for a rogue to deal maximum damage, he needs to be in melee range of something that needs to die at all times. Staying in melee range can be difficult, as bosses are always tossing out pools of fire and knocking us back into the walls. Rogues need to be tenacious; we need to be vicious dogs that won't let go of our prey for any reason. We need to hustle between targets, minimizing the amount of time we see "Out of Range" at the top of our screen. In order to ensure that we're on our targets at all times, we need to learn about how melee mechanics work.
Encrypted Text: Finesse in 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. World of Warcraft is more than just a game. Over the years, an entire ecosystem surrounding the game has developed, created by the gaming community. I've read a few WoW novels and comic books, seen fanfics and fan art featured on the community portal, and I've enjoyed so many awesome pieces of WoW machinima. It's actually quite common for the community to influence the game itself, as we've has seen countless changes implemented after community demand. The fan-created Leeroy Jenkins video, for example, still represents WoW for most of the world. When I first started playing the rogue, I watched a lot of rogue-centric machinima. Boss encounter videos weren't very popular then, and so most of the machinima was based in PVP. I watched in awe as Grim annihilated everything in his path. I laughed as Happyminti stomped on characters who were 10 levels higher than himself. I sat agape as Hector leaped off of the tower of Karazahn after a mage who tried to escape. My style of rogue PVP has always been colored by the finesse and grace of these rogues, and that still holds true today.
Encrypted Text: Leveling your rogue in Cataclysm
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 I was selecting my first class, back in the early days of WoW, I chose the rogue for its awesome killing potential. Mindlessly grinding mobs used to be a valid way to level, especially since questing in the past involved so much travel and downtime. Our unique mix of stuns and damage allowed rogues to chew through enemies quickly and efficiently. My strategy was to find an area populated by caster-type mobs and then simply burn through them all day long. Over the years, rogues have continued to evolve, and we're now one of the strongest leveling classes in the game. Our past weaknesses were our lack of self-healing and our difficulty against elite mobs, but Recuperate and the near total removal of any quest-based elite mobs in Cataclysm has solved both of our problems. Leveling a new rogue today is an enjoyable experience, as we have the finesse to avoid unwanted encounters and the brawn to handle any combat that we do have to engage in.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 5
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 first time I faced Ragnaros, I was invited to soak up gear in a Molten Core run. The only reserved item was Perdition's Blade, as one of the guild's veteran rogues had been waiting for it for weeks. Of course, as soon as we Ragnaros packing, that infamous dagger was left behind. The master looter tried assigning it to the experienced rogue, but his name didn't show up in the looting console. He had fallen asleep during the Majordomo encounter, and because he didn't participate in the Ragnaros kill, he was ineligible for the weapon. As the only other rogue present, I was given Perdition's Blade by default. Drunk with power, I killed hundreds of priests and warlocks over the next few days, just because I could. When I heard that we'd be facing Ragnaros again, I immediately started salivating at the thought of scoring a Perdition's Blade 2.0 from his fiery corpse. When I found out that Rag still drops a Sulfuras for the warriors but doesn't have a single dagger on his loot table, I was pretty upset. He's had like six years to forge a new Perdition's Blade for me, but apparently he spent all of his time building an army instead. Forgetting to make a new dagger will be Ragnaros' biggest mistake, as I will have my revenge by sharing all of my tips for killing him with you.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, 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 your favorite ganking stories or dictionary definitions of the word "griefing." The best part of playing a subtlety rogue has always been Shadowstep. Warriors have been blessed with Intercept since day one, and feral druids have Kitty Leap built into their default specs. Rogues, on the other hand, are forced into subtlety to match the mobility of our leather-wearing brethren. Shadowstep could be such a powerful tool for maintaining our uptime in raid situations, if only every rogue had access to it. Subtlety rogues don't want Shadowstep to become baseline, because then subtlety loses half of its attractiveness. Even without Shadowstep, rogues have plenty of buttons to push in Firelands. There are plenty of adds to test our AOE potency, utility encounters that stress precision instead of damage, and plenty of nasty spells to interrupt. While we're not fighting against Lucifron and Golemagg again, we can use our experience against Ragnaros' former entourage to help us combat the new crew hanging out around his castle. Just remember to have your Volcanic Armor and Helm of Fire equipped; I hear Rag likes to keep his thermostat set to "crispy."
Encrypted Text: How to run the Molten Front
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 topics you'd like to see covered. Varian Wrynn isn't happy. He sent his best and brightest men to the Molten Front to assist the Guardians of Hyjal in invading the Firelands, but all he received back was a stack of casualty alerts. The cause of death on each report was the same: several deep dagger wounds. As Varian assigned more soldiers to the Molten Front, he simply received more body bags in return. Varian confronted Garrosh about the issue, claiming that the Warchief was breaking their peace accord by using assassins in the Molten Front. Garrosh feigned ignorance and promised Varian that he'd find the perpetrator and have him properly handled. The next day, I received a post from Garrosh himself. It was brief: "Lok'tar, brother!" I've read several articles that claim that world PVP is dead and has been for a long time. The truth is that world PVP is alive; it has simply transitioned into a seasonal event. With the release of the Molten Front quest hub, Blizzard's developers directed a ton of level 85 players into a zone where they can't use their flying mounts. If that doesn't count as revitalizing world PVP, then I don't know what does. I spend every spare moment I have plunging my daggers into the questers' ribcages. There's a plethora of targets available, with new enemies zoning in every minute. World PVP hasn't been this active since the Isle of Quel'Danas, and that means I have a lot of catching up to do.
Encrypted Text: The subtlety experiment
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, or hate mail if you play subtlety. Over the past few years, I've been accused of playing favorites with the rogue specs. During Wrath, I was characterized more than once as the ArP-mongering combat rogue who neglected Mutilate builds. In Cataclysm, I'm supposedly the devoted assassin who never gives combat or subtlety a fair shake. The truth is that I don't care what spec I'm playing, and I'll play whatever gives me the best results. I played Mut/Prep, HARP, and even pure subtlety in the arena during The Burning Crusade. I've raided extensively as both combat and assassination, and I've leveled my rogues (plural) with each of the three specs, as well. I frequently swap specs. I love combat for solo PVE play, while subtlety holds a special place in my heart for ganking and world PVP. I currently raid as assassination simply because it's how I get the best results. I'm not alone in this philosophy, as most rogues will do whatever it takes, including a respec, to get the most out of their characters.
Encrypted Text: Patch 4.2 gear 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 questions or article topics you would like to see covered. If you're like me, you've been spending way too much time in the Dungeon Finder queue lately. With a plethora of new loot available in patch 4.2, we need to earn valor points as fast as possible. Patch 4.2 introduced several new gear options, including new valor point vendors, a new reputation vendor, new leatherworking recipes, and even unlockable vendors. Rather than idling around a capital city, I prefer to work on my daily quests as I wait. I want to minimize the amount of time it takes me to upgrade my gear, and multitasking is the best way to accomplish that. The most important determining factor in the gear available to you will be whether or not you are raiding in Firelands. A large subset of the new rogue gear is only available to raiders, whether that's due to requiring a certain reputation that you can only obtain by raiding or the fact that the items only drop from bosses in Firelands. Patch 4.2 brings gear for rogues at every level, including those who aren't raiding for one reason or another. Your goal should be to identify the gear that is available to you, and then to prioritize that gear and start working towards acquiring it.
Encrypted Text: A rogue's guide to patch 4.2
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 topics you'd like to see covered! Rogues have a lot to look forward to when patch 4.2 is released. If you spend most of your time in dungeons or raiding, you'll be happy to hear about the sizable buffs to all three of our talent trees. Unfortunately for rogues that favor PVP, there are some cooldown changes to Cloak of Shadows and Combat Readiness that won't be well-received. While I'm not completely satisfied with the size of our buff when compared to our relative position in the DPS pack, our potency in Firelands still remains to be seen. In addition to the slew of balance changes, we can start salivating over the new gear that will be available. Our tier 12 set has some very fun bonuses, and also some great crafted gear coming up. Our caster rivals will get access to their first legendary weapon since Atiesh, so we'll have to do our best to keep up. The duration of Blind in PVE is going up to a full minute, giving us two forms of long-term CC in Sap and Blind. As proof that rogues are designed to be the best at what they do, most other CC effects in the game are going to start mirroring Sap. Polymorph and the rest won't aggro mobs that they're used on, which should make it far easier to coordinate CC in a PUG. Plus, even if the group manages to somehow mess up CC and starts combat early, we can just use Blind as a stand-in for Sap anyway.
Encrypted Text: Controlling tempo in 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. Please email me with any topic requests or questions you have! PvP is hard to discuss in writing. (I'm not talking about how to properly 4-gate your opponent on Shakuras Plateau, but rather about WoW's player-vs-player content.) It's a relatively easy task to distill a PvE encounter into a list of salient points, but that's because raid bosses aren't random. Magmaw is going to do the same thing against every single raid group that encounters him, and so our strategies for countering him are fairly unilateral. We're playing rock-paper-scissors with the developers, except that we know they're going to throw paper ahead of time. All we have to do is successfully become scissors, and the raid bosses will fall over and explode with purples -- they're just loot piñatas. PvP, meanwhile, is impossible to condense into a single strategy. In a raid setting, most classes use less than a dozen simple abilities on any given encounter. In an arena or battleground, players will be drawing from the deepest, darkest pages of their spellbooks to gain any advantage. I can't tell you what that warrior on the opposing team is going to do, because he can literally do anything. Instead of trying to make some sort of overly complicated flowchart in an attempt to remove all decision-making from PvP, you have to adjust and react on the fly. The key to surviving in this volatile environment is to maintain control of the tempo -- you need to fight on your terms.
Encrypted Text: A rogue's resumé
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 topic requests or questions you have! I feel bad for all of the guild leaders who are looking for rogues right now. As the least-played class in the game, we're already pretty scarce. The fact that we're usually invisible doesn't help the situation, either. Have you seen the frenzy that gets into people during Pilgrim's Bounty? Everyone is roaming the streets with their Turkey Shooters, looking for rogues to snipe. They start by denying that there's a rogue shortage, claiming that they'll find us eventually. After a few days of being unable to find a dwarf rogue, they get angry and start cursing us rogues for staying in Stealth all the time. Shortly after, they start bargaining, offering us large sums of gold to just show ourselves for a moment. The truth is that regardless of how well we're performing at the moment, rogues are still in demand, due to short supply. Guilds both big and small are looking for assassins and shades to join their rosters. I have personally interviewed several rogue candidates for my own guild, and unfortunately, I am incredibly strict when reviewing their applications. You might be able to trick some hunter into thinking that you're great by swapping to a combat spec and posting your Halfus parse, but that won't convince a vigilant rogue. In order to prove yourself amongst your fellow rogue brethren, you need to compose your curriculum mortem. It's like a curriculum vitae, but with death instead of life. Get it? Rogues kill stuff? Okay, I'll leave the bad puns to Christian Belt.
Encrypted Text: Troubleshooting rogue DPS
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 suggestions. Did you know that druids have four different, viable playstyles? They can heal, tank, and DPS in two different ways. While others might be impressed with their flexibility, we aren't. Rogues have learned that complete dedication is required to be the best. Do you know what else doesn't heal? A shark. Do you know what never tanks? A viper. Do you know what always attacks from melee range? A wolf. Rogues channel their predatory instincts while concentrating on a singular purpose. The only issue with being so focused on DPS is that we don't have any backup plans. What do rogues do when they can't kill things in melee range? If you're familiar with the Shazzrah encounter from the days of old, then you know that a rogue who can't attack is completely useless. My guild used to have all of us rogues light a few campfires in the back of Shazzrah's room and cook food for the rest of the guild while they downed the boss. After years of training to kill, I was stuck wearing an apron and making Savory Deviate Delights. Rogues need to do good DPS in order to validate our very existence.
Encrypted Text: Breaking down tier 12
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. This week, we'll be discussing the upcoming patch 4.2 and our new tier set. Feel free to email me with any article suggestions or feedback! In case you haven't heard, the upcoming patch 4.2 is currently on the PTR. The patch notes currently include a ton of important rogue changes. First of all, Blind is getting buffed. In PvE situations, it will now last up to a minute. Also, Blizzard is unbuffing Stealth for rogues a bit, as Stealth will start its cooldown upon leaving Stealth, not entering it. I had always assumed that was an unintentional change, anyway. In addition, most crowd control abilities are going to be just like Sap, so that the casters can use them without pulling aggro. Like I said, there's a ton of major changes coming for the rogue class! In all seriousness, I am a bit cheesed off that we didn't see any damage improvements with the patch. You've all heard my spiel about how rogues are the only pure melee DPS class and how that necessitates our having higher DPS than anyone else. Rogues are very "middle of the pack" right now, with the abominable hunters and warriors typically surpassing us in equal gear. In particular, our effectiveness drops sharply in heroic raids, where it can be downright dangerous to be in melee range. Either way, our raids need someone soak up all the rogue gear, so an analysis of the upcoming rogue tier 12 set is in order.
Encrypted Text: Learning the rogue virtues
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. If you have any topics you'd like to see covered, send me a stealthy email. So many years ago, I picked up a copy of World of Warcraft. It was my first MMO, although I had played my fair share of RPGs. Once I started my rogue, I found myself leaning on Sinister Strike to kill everything. Eviscerate didn't seem very potent, and Slice and Dice was just some dumb buff. Other games had taught me that damage now was better than damage later, and so I focused on simply hitting my targets with Sinister Strike as often as I could. Stealth only slowed me down, and so I would just run up to my enemies. The learning curve of WoW isn't exactly steep, and so I was able to level pretty easily even though I was playing poorly. Looking over our talent trees today, it's clear that Blizzard has spent quite some time refining the rotation of each build. In the past, we relied on diligent theorycrafters to guide our every move. Now, the talents themselves tell us how to play. How can you read Master Poisoner's tooltip and not realize you should be using Envenom? Improved Sinister Strike clearly points combat towards Sinister Strike, while Energetic Recovery makes Recuperate a staple of the subtlety builds. As I've mentioned before, each spec really has its own combo point generator and finisher priority. Figuring out what abilities go with which spec isn't rocket science; it's merely common sense.
Encrypted Text: Stabbing your way through the Zandalari heroics
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, concerns, or column ideas. Have you heard about the new Call to Arms mechanic that rewards the lesser-played roles with bonus loot? I've come to peace with the fact that my rogue is never, ever going to earn a Satchel of Exotic Mysteries for himself. DPS classes simply aren't in demand. The good news is that the CtA mechanic has shortened my queue times by quite a bit; let me know if you're seeing the same results. While the quality of tanks and healers in the system has gone down slightly, we're usually able to knock out whatever heroic dungeon we're faced with. Lately, that heroic dungeon is either Zul'Gurub or Zul'Aman, the two new Zandalari heroics. As an aside, I refer to them as The Zuls, while I imagine a sitcom starring a bunch of 20-something trolls trying to find their identities in the big city. While they're dungeons that you may have seen before, the new Zandalari heroics have received some significant changes during their Cataclysm remodeling. In addition to the generous valor point reward, there are quite a few new rogue weapons and armor pieces available. You'll be running these dungeons for a while, so learning them is in your best interest.
Encrypted Text: Breaking subtlety's cipher
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. If you're looking for information on patch 4.1's rogue changes, take a look at my previous writeup. I spent the majority of my time during The Burning Crusade as a subtlety rogue. Hemorrhage provided me with the damage I needed to crush anyone wearing cloth. Shadowstep allowed me to keep up with even the most slippery druids. The shadows were my ally, and I Cheated Death more than once. The Mutilate build that rules today's raids was still in its infancy, while combat was the only viable raiding spec. Even then, subtlety couldn't hope to compete, and our only purpose was to slaughter the opposing faction with stealth and grace. On the timeline of WoW, subtlety did enjoy one blip in the PvE spotlight. During the early months of Wrath, a bug with Honor Among Thieves made subtlety rogues the best DPS class in the game, at least when stacked in a raid environment. Once the loophole was closed, the spec was relegated back to its PvP-only jail cell. Cataclysm was heralded as the new age of True Balance, with every spec getting a slice of the DPS pie. Unsurprisingly, the rogue utility spec of subtlety is still falling behind (along with frost mages, our old rivals for the bottom spot). The meters can be deceiving though, as subtlety is nowhere near as limp and lifeless in a raid as it once was. There's talk of high-end rogues even choosing to play subtlety. The whispers of the dead spec's long-waited return have been spreading through the shadows of the rogue community like a bad rumor.
