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Encrypted Text: Rogue Is

(Chase Christian) — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 15:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: Readiness gone, Preparation next?

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 09:00:00 EST

As part of the pre-Mists patch 5.0.4, in August 2012, hunters were given Readiness as a baseline ability. Readiness is a carbon copy of Preparation, which has been a rogue workhorse for years. While I am typically hesitant to give hunters any more ink, there's something interesting for them in the patch 5.4 PTR notes. Readiness is being removed from hunters entirely, and their cooldowns are being rebalanced to compensate. An ability that was considered so crucial that it was made baseline is being pulled completely just a year later.

Cooldown management has been an integral part of the rogue class since day one. Preparation has been our go-to PvP ability since its inception. The entire World of Roguecraft video series was predicated by how amazing Preparation is. A rogue with full cooldowns is a deity, a rogue without cooldowns is a pushover. When Preparation was made baseline in patch 5.2 (January 2013), I was certain that the once-optional ability would be a permanent part of our arsenal. Now, I'm wondering if Preparation's next on Blizzard's chopping block.

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Encrypted Text: Patch 5.4's new Killing Spree and rogue glyphs

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Rogue tier 16 set bonuses reviewed

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 12:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Combat and the GCD

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:00:00 EST

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 three rogue specs share many common mechanics. They all follow the same formula: generate combo points, use finishers, activate your cooldowns when they come up. The real differences between the specs only show up once you start playing them. Assassination is well-known for being more relaxed and favors pooling energy over spamming attacks. Subtlety rogues have a knack for massive burst damage via their complex cooldown, Shadow Dance.

Combat is arguably the simplest of the three specs, and is often characterized by its fast-paced gameplay and high actions-per-minute rate. Adrenaline Rush, which has been combat's signature cooldown for years, is designed to let you push buttons even faster. Assassination's Vendetta lets you hit harder, subtlety's Shadow Dance lets you use openers, and Adrenaline Rush doubles the numbers of buttons you can push. Unfortunately for combat, the concept of "push more buttons" can't scale forever.

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Encrypted Text: We'll always be the bad guys

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Rogues and RPPM

(Chase Christian) — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Mastering Tricks of the Trade macros

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Five macros every rogue should know

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Why mobility doesn't matter

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Stealth, openers, and the 5.3 nerfs

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: An interview with Pathal, Shadowcraft's unofficial lead dev

(Chase Christian) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: Swirly Ball and a bag of coins

(Chase Christian) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: The true cost of Feint

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Learning the rogue calculus

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Adjusting your rogue to patch 5.2

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: The incredible, indestructible rogue

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: How to play a rogue in patch 5.2

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Examining our tier 15 set bonuses

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Blade Flurry math in patch 5.2

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:00:00 EST

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 new Blade Flurry that's on the PTR is by far the most exciting update for combat rogues in at least a year. The current version, which still isn't finalized, allows 40% of our melee damage to be cleaved onto up to 4 targets at once. It's a significant step up from the old Blade Flurry when we're facing a handful of targets, but what about in a regular cleaving situation?

In order to do the math for Blade Flurry, you have to figure out what you're gaining and what you're giving up by activating it. Blade Flurry increases our melee damage by 40% per target, but not all of our attacks are replicated. Our autoattacks, Shadow Blades, Main Gauche, and most of our other abilities are all affected by Blade Flurry. Notably, BF doesn't apply to Deadly Poison or Rupture. While many combat rogues are ignoring Rupture today, it will likely be worth using once we have our 2-piece tier 15 bonus, which extends its duration.

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Encrypted Text: Examining assassination's AoE rotation

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:00:00 EST

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.

Deadly Poison is everything to an assassination rogue. It makes up between 35-40% of our single-target DPS. Our mastery bonus, Potent Poisons, increases our poison damage and causes mastery rating to be our best stat by far. Our primary finisher, Envenom, is designed specifically to increase the amount of Deadly Poison procs we see. Mutilate, Dispatch, and assassination's other abilities are all minor players compared to Deadly Poison.

Deadly Poison is also the key to assassination's AoE performance, as it makes up over 50% of our overall damage. All of our AoE decisions have to be seen through the lens of maximizing Deadly Poison's damage. Fan of Knives is the key to applying Deadly Poison to several targets at once. When there are more than two targets around, we replace Mutilate and Dispatch with Fan of Knives as our main combo point builder and work from there.

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Encrypted Text: What would make you play a rogue?

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST

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?

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Encrypted Text: Cat and mouse in rogue PvP

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Cat and mouse in rogue PvP originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Encrypted Text: Rogue basics in patch 5.2

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: Smoke Bomb's new trick

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:00:00 EST

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.

Kick will cost zero energy in patch 5.2, bringing it in line with most of the other melee interrupts in the game. Ghostcrawler indicated that as PvE utility ability, Kick should be free to encourage regular usage. In PvP situations, Kick was already the straggler in the process of becoming free, not the forerunner. Blade Flurry's new 4-way 40% cleave allows us to deal 260% of our normal melee damage to 5 targets. Combat's cleave is still quite potent against two targets, but now excels when facing small groups.

In addition to these improvements, Smoke Bomb is learning a new trick. In patch 5.2, Smoke Bomb will reduce damage taken by our allies inside the Smoke Bomb radius by 20%. While Tricks of the Trade has always been a valuable addition to our arsenal and we have several buffs and debuffs, the new Smoke Bomb is our first true raid cooldown.

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Encrypted Text: The rise of the ranged rogue

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Subtlety doesn't need a buff

(Chase Christian) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: It's time to eat cake

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:00:00 EST

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.

Preparation has always been our most controversial ability. From the early episodes of The World of Roguecraft, to the chart-topping AR/Prep days of BC, to our recent Prep vs Step conundrum, Preparation has always been the focal point of rogue cooldown discussion. Many rogues have advocated removing Preparation altogether and adjusting our cooldowns to be potent without it. Several other classes don't see the ability as a fair technique, lending itself to our image as a cooldown-reliant class.

Blizzard clearly has other thoughts on the matter, as the ability will become baseline and available to all rogues at level 68 in the upcoming 5.2 patch. If I was making a list of rogue talents that might become baseline abilities, Preparation would've been all the way at the bottom. Many vocal rogues have been asking for Shadowstep to be added to every rogue's repertoire to resolve the Prep vs Step debate, but I don't think anyone saw the reverse happening. The decision to baseline Preparation is a clear buff for rogues everywhere.

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Encrypted Text: Santa Ghostcrawler kills Blade Flurry

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:00:00 EST

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.

Apparently rogues haven't been getting the message. Year after year, as punishment for our evil deeds and shady dealings, we've only received coal in our Winter Veil stockings. We were not deterred, as we simply pickpocketed good presents from everyone else. A frustrated Greatfather Winter, tired of our shenanigans, finally turned to his manager. Santa Ghostcrawler, with the rumored Naughty List tight in his grasp, set about enacting a Winter Veil surprise that rogues would not be able to ignore. A 75% nerf to Blade Flurry in patch 5.2 did the trick.

Melodrama aside, Blade Flurry was broken. While I would've preferred to see the ability spread to all three rogue specs and balanced appropriately (back to a cooldown?), Blizzard went in a different direction. Blade Flurry remains firmly a combat-only ability, but the edge it held over assassination and subtlety has waned significantly. Combat is no longer shackled to purely two-target gimmick fights, and assassination and subtlety rogues no longer need to respec and reforge multiple times per night to flex for Blade Flurry. The net effect is incredibly positive for rogues as whole, and we should be embracing this change.

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Encrypted Text: Rogues, spam, and haste

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Rogues, spam, and haste originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Encrypted Text: Rogue questions, rogue answers

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 09:00:00 EST

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.

Why don't our poisons last forever, like death knight weapon runeforging?

New rogues have no idea how easy they have it. Back in my day, rogues had to hike uphill in the snow to a special poison vendor hidden deep in the bowels of the capital cities. Once there, we had to look at our shopping list of obscure reagents to figure out what to buy and in what quantities. Rogues had to combine these ingredients in vials, creating one poison dose that faded every time we zoned. Vanish also consumed a vendor reagent, and we had to farm up ~~Blindweed~~ Fadeleaf ourselves in order to use Blind at all. Once you've died because you didn't have any Blinding Powder in your bags, you see class reagents differently.

The fact that poisons no longer consume bag space in Mists of Pandaria was considered to be a boon. Poisons are easier now than they've ever been before.

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Encrypted Text: Rogues in theory vs practice

(Chase Christian) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: What does a rogue look like?

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:00:00 EST

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.

Ghostcrawler recently described the rogue class as "slippery". He was met with a backlash of rogues arguing every side of the argument. I have personally struggled with my mental image of the rogue class. What does a rogue look like? Are we lightly-armored thieves or toughly-bound brawlers? Let me get this one out of the way early: "A rogue doesn't look like anything because you can't see them!" While I appreciate Stealth humor, the quip doesn't answer my question.

Appearances have always been an important aspect in WoW. Players used to gauge their opponents' strength based on what shoulder armor they were wearing. Transmogrification is easily the most important feature of the past few years, as it has breathed life into content both old and new. The rogue class draws from several diverse archetypes, such as the thief, the assassin, and the brawler. Each source archetype contributes flavor to the class, but the end result can look like a confused mess.

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Encrypted Text: Why does Kick cost energy?

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 09:00:00 EST

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 always been the premier interrupters of World of Warcraft. Back in the day, druids and paladins didn't have any interrupts, much to their chagrin. Warriors couldn't interrupt from Berserker Stance, which left them unable to interrupt effectively. Up until recently, death knights and monks didn't even exist. Shamans have been valuable in the past with their short-CD interrupts, but the main job of locking down a target always fell to the rogues.

Rogues have been tirelessly interrupting spells since WoW's launch 8 years ago. Individual mobs use spells quite frequently. You're bound to find an array of dangerous casters in a dungeon. Interrupts have been a crucial raid mechanic from the days of Molten Core. Other players are also notorious for trying to cast spells at rogues. Kick has been a featured part of the rogue arsenal for years. So why has it failed to evolve alongside the other interrupts?

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Encrypted Text: Why does Kick cost energy? originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Encrypted Text: Stabbing your way through Mogu'shan Vaults

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:00:00 EST

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 tier 14 raiding system is a new experiment by Blizzard. I actually see Mists' first batch of raid content as three sub-tiers underneath the tier 14 umbrella. Mogu'shan Vaults is the introductory raid that can be done in mostly blue gear. The Heart of Fear requires purple-equipped raiders and a skilled roster. Finally, the upcoming Terrace of Endless Spring will be a challenge even on normal difficulty. The early heroic bosses have already been toppled, while I expect it will be weeks before we see the difficult Terrace cleared on heroic.

Everybody has to start somewhere, and chances are that you're starting in Mogu'shan Vaults. If you're equipped with a mix of heroic blues and an epic item here or there, you'll be fine in MV. Rogues are performing quite well in MV, in spite of being a melee class. We have several tricks that allow us to maximize our damage against the first six bosses that we face in Pandaria.

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Encrypted Text: Breaking the rogue rules

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: Rogues rotations by the numbers

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:00:00 EST

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Encrypted Text: Shuriken Toss' unlikely popularity

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:00:00 EST

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.

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Encrypted Text: Rogues are reluctantly leading the melee pack

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:00:00 EST

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 were to ask a random rogue how the class is doing, you would receive one of a dozen answers. Many rogues are frustrated with the class' transition to passive damage and the meager number of actions we perform to maintain our rotations. I have met rogues that are both extremely disappointed and incredibly enthusiastic about how we're competing in PvP. For every subtlety rogue that longs to have Preparation back, there's an assassination rogue that is praising Shadowstep's usefulness.

If you take an empirical look, like our friend Rfeann suggests, you'll see that rogues are doing quite well in Mists of Pandaria. Assassination rogues are sitting at the top of the melee DPS classes in Mogu'shan Vaults, and of course we're untouchable on the combat-friendly Stone Guard encounter. We're not at the same ridiculous level of DPS as we were in patch 4.3 with our legendary daggers, but we're still making a name for ourselves against raid bosses. Why are so many rogues discontent when we look to be doing so well?

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Encrypted Text: Combo points, chi, and your slow rogue

(Chase Christian) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:00:00 EST

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 official rogue forums are one of the last places that I expect to find a blue post. The community managers tend to avoid the class-specific boards, and our rogue nook tends to have a poor signal-to-noise ratio. However, the recent thread titled "Why we are energy starved" was graced with several blue posts from Daxxarri. The original poster, Cloake, was lamenting on the fact that our finishers cost both energy and combo points to use.

Several posters commented on how our cousins, the windwalker monks, have solved this by having their chi finishers only consume chi and not energy. Daxxarri commented that Jab, their version of Sinister Strike, isn't exactly a great damage-dealer like our generators, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. Rogues aren't monks, and monks aren't rogues. But the question remains: why does the windwalker monk rotation feel so much more active and engaging than a rogue rotation?

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