Filed under: Rogue

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Yes, more hotfixes. What do they entail, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. Here's just a few highlights from this latest round of hotfixes. There are quite a few class changes, some of which I highly approve of (the ones that buff warriors) and other changes as well.

• Death Knights see Blood Boil's damage reduced by 33.3%
• Sacred Duty, formerly granting 5% additional haste from all sources, is heavily buffed and now grants 30% haste from all sources.
• For you enhancement shaman, Stormstrike sees an 11.1% damage buff.
• Gladiator Stance now only increases damage by 5%, down from 20%, but just about all damaging abilities for protection warriors see buffs - Thunder Clap, Deep Wounds and Revenge were buffed by 40%, while Devastate and Shield Slam both got 20% buffs.

There's a lot more, so head on over to the official site and take a look for yourself. Just about every class but monks saw some adjustment.

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• There's a new section called Secondary Stat Attunement that basically comes right out and tells you what stat you're expected to want for each specialization. Fury warriors, you'll notice it's still crit. Fire mages? Same thing. We're still angry and hot. We both still love crit. We should totally form a band.
• Other new sections include the Self-Sustainability section (which explains how your ability to not die has been changed) and the Tooltip Clarity section, which explains why they've made changes to various tooltips. Of extra import is the mention that, just because the tooltip has changed, that doesn't mean the ability has, unless the patch notes say it has. So keep that in mind.
• There have been several changes to the Ability Pruning section - Death Knights lose Blood Strike and Necrotic Strike, druids see a mountain of changes (seriously, if you're a druid, go check that out, it's crazy) - paladins, priests, rogues and especially shamans have gotten some significant pruning as well (I'd put shamans just behind druids).

Head on over to the official patch notes and take a look for yourselves. If you're playing a class like a shaman or druid that just saw a lot of change it's especially a good idea to read up on the current state of affairs.

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Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

It is a lament that we, the ever-beleaguered players of the ever-shunned, ever-maligned, ever-misunderstood rogue class, often turn to when we're feeling glum.

Nobody plays a rogue.

We're WoW's most-hated, least-popular class. We never get the changes we need, so the class just continues to decay, month after month, patch after patch, year after year. If Blizzard hates us so much, why don't they just remove the class entirely already? Monks and ferals already have all the stuff we want anyway.

Nobody. Plays. A rogue.

... Right?

You guys should know me well enough by now to know my answer.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and& subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

When a WoW game designer sends out nearly two dozen tweets in an hour about a talent, you know he's really excited about it.

Such was the case last week with Technical Game Designer Chadd Nervig (@Celestalon), WoW's torch-bearer on class design issues since Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street's departure from Blizzard late last year. Celestalon treated us to an epic twitversation about the upcoming Level 100 rogue talent Shadow Reflection -- one of the most involved, intricate discussions any WoW designer has ever had with us regular folk on Twitter. "It has pretty crazy potential," he said at one point in the conversation.

Celestalon is clearly psyched about what Shadow Reflection will bring to the rogue class. The question is: Should we be as pumped?

In a word: youbetterbelieveit.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

"Should I reforge for mastery or haste?"

If you're a rogue player who raids, reading that question probably generated one of two emotional reactions:

1. Curiosity, because you wonder that yourself.
2. A seething, bubbling cauldron of hatred and violent fury, because questions like these are asked endlessly -- even though, for a long time now, the answer has consisted of two words.

Shadowcraft it.

What Shadowcraft Is

Shadowcraft is a modeling tool for rogues. It takes a snapshot of your armory -- your gear, enchants, gems, talents, glyphs and everything else that affects the damage you deal -- and then it allows you to modify that snapshot in a host of different ways. As you tweak the snapshot -- for instance, swapping out one piece of gear for another, changing your reforges, turning on or off certain buffs -- Shadowcraft keeps track of each change you make, and assesses whether those changes will theoretically increase or decrease your DPS. You do the experimenting, it does the math.

Two things in particular make Shadowcraft truly special as a resource.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

My fellow rogues, it's time for an eleganza extravaganza.

For the past couple of months, you've joined me on a long, winding stroll through the state of roguedom today. We've talked about the burning questions on our minds as rogue players; how stealthy (or not) our stealth is; and what makes us (or used to make us) feel unique as a class. We've talked about what we're thankful for, as well as what we're less thankful for, as the Warlords beta likely draws near.

And finally, last week, we tagged along as three fictional rogues hung out in a fictional bar, got fictionally drunk and caterwauled over the many nonfictional (and sometimes contradicting) complaints players have about how their class works.

So. Where does all of this chatting leave us? Are we any closer to agreement on these issues?

I'm not so sure. In fact, I suspect that, while we've generated a lot of great conversation, the main thing we've done here is highlight just how tremendously varied our opinions are when it comes to the specific aspects of rogue gameplay we players would like to see altered.

But I think we're closer to getting at one of the major seeds of our communal discontent. Here's what I suspect that seed is.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Three rogues walk into a bar. ...

Mute, the assassination rogue: Man, I am exhausted.

Toetoe, the combat rogue: You're always saying that.

Mute: I just haven't been feeling very energetic lately.

Toetoe: I dunno; you seemed pretty spry during our last raid.

Mute: That's just because we were buffed out the wazoo. I mean, sure, I feel better than I did back in Mogu'shan, but --

Toetoe: Ha! I remember that! You were stabbing so slowly you just gave up and started chucking shuriken instead.

Mute: Har har. Buy me a drink, will you?

Toetoe: Barkeep! Hey. Jack and Coke for me; Thistle Tea for my ever-tired companion.

Hush, the subtlety rogue: BOO!

Toetoe: And a Sneaking Potion for my little friend here.

Hush: I didn't scare you?

Toetoe: You've been standing right in front of me, Hush. Stealth ain't invisibility.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

As we usher in a new year, our thoughts inevitably turn to the single most important subject there is: our rogues. And how we wish that WoW's designers would make a New Year's resolution to give them more love and affection and hugs and presents and big happy smiley-face stickers than any other class.

But that's just it: Although you might often read otherwise in public forums or on Twitter, the rogue class doesn't objectively have less fun stuff to do within the game than other classes, nor does it receive less attention from the game's design team. The reason I think some players grumble is that rogues receive roughly the same amount of love as everyone else -- but they used to receive more.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

A couple of weeks ago, we all had a nice, long chat, you and me. I was all, "Hey guys, what's up with those rogues, amirite?" And you were all, "Totally!" And I was like, "Got questions?" And you were like, "You know it, Scott!" And I was all, "Whoa, whoa; since when are we on a first-name basis?" And you were like, "Hey man, I thought you were cool." And I ... may be digressing a little.

Point is, we've had a couple of conversations now about the aspects of roguedom we're least pleased with, and would thus like to see change somehow in the upcoming expansion. Three of the key themes I've seen recurring in the discussion are:

• Many of us want stealth to be more interesting.
• Rogues don't feel unique enough.
• We don't have enough control over the damage we deal.

Over the next few weeks, we'll talk about each of these issues in greater depth. This week, I'm all, "Hey guys, what's up with stealth? Eh? Mmm?"

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

The winds of change are howling through the mountain passes ahead. From the path on which we're walking, up a hill toward the mouth of the first pass, we can't see what's up there yet. But we know change is coming. We can hear it in the whoosh of air sweeping past those stone walls. The warlords are coming, the wind whispers. In the new expansion, rogues will not be the same.

But how will our class change? Rogues aren't utterly broken, but they do remain consistently unpopular (they make up roughly 6.5% of all level 90 toons in the U.S. and Europe, according to the latest RealmPop figures; only the still-new monk class comes in lower, and not by much), and senior designers have repeatedly expressed a desire to do something about it. Not a Warlock-level degree of change, but something.

Going into BlizzCon last month, many of us may have had hope that a solid look into our future would be offered at the convention. But we -- like most every other class -- got more of a teeny glimpse. Some of the key questions we have about the future of roguedom remain unanswered.

But, wait: What are those key questions?

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

Let's do something crazy, guys: Let's be unabashedly positive. Just this once.

Here in the world of public WoW commentary, we love us our complainin'. Be it on forums, Twitter, videos, podcasts or blogs, we enjoy chewing on the game, swishing it around in our mouths a bit, spitting it back out onto our plate and then lamenting how disgusting it looks.

Now, to be fair, we do so with good reason. If we don't let WoW's designers know what we think is wrong with the game, how else are they gonna find out? (Besides, you know, analyzing mountains of data and talking to players themselves.)

But sometimes -- just every now and then, mind you, we don't have to make it a habit -- it can be just as helpful to talk about what we do like. Not just for the designers, to help them understand what parts of WoW we appreciate and regard as shining examples of the game's successes; but for us as well, to give us a healthier perspective on this e-world we call a virtual home.

In honor of Thanksgiving in the U.S., here are a few of the things that I'm grateful for when I play my World of Warcraft rogue. Join me in the comments (or on Twitter with hashtag #thanksroguing) and let me know what I've missed!

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

Although there was no grand unveiling of mind-blowing class changes at BlizzCon -- for rogues or any other class -- we did learn a few juicy tidbits that will intrigue, delight and (possibly) confuse/fluster/enrage you. Let's take a look, shall we?

Optimizing Gear Will Get a Whole Lot Simpler
No longer will anyone ever have to answer the question, "What's my stat priority?" by saying, "First, get to the hit cap." For Patch 6.0, Blizzard plans to remove the hit and expertise from our gear, and make it so we are automatically at the caps we currently strive to reach.

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

Four and a half years. To many of you, it may feel like a lifetime ago -- and to most of the rogues we play, it probably was. My own stealthy toon, yet to encounter a certain rouged chapeau that would change her (and her humble puppetmaster) forever, was only at level 50, tripping and tumbling her way through Tanaris, oblivious to the game-shattering changes that had just been introduced. By the time she reached max level, almost half a year later, she took for granted the existence of something that many players were still hailing as a miracle.

Dual spec. Oh, how it shined! How its siren call beckoned! Never more must a beleaguered rogue trek to a faraway NPC and back again to swap from their Hunger for Blood/Mutilate raid build to their Mutilate/Preparation PvP build. So much hassle removed! So much freedom gained! A win for everyone ... right?

Let's take a closer look at how dual spec changed rogues forever -- and whether it was truly as much of a boon for our class as we might think it was.