Filed under: Rogue

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

Throw out everything you know about rogue poisons. No, we need to go deeper than that. Throw out everything you know about rogues altogether. In the past few days, we've seen more blue posts on the official rogue forums than we'd seen since Cataclysm's launch. Poisons have been at the heart and soul of the rogue kit from day one. Even though parts of the poison system have changed over the years, the general concept has always remained the same.

Let me blow your mind: In Mists, you can have two poisons on each of your weapons at once. Let me do it again: All poison proc rates will be percentage-based. And a third time: Poisons are no longer applied to your individual weapons but to both weapons at once.

What does it even mean to put your poisons on both hands at once? What in the world am I supposed to write this column about if nobody's asking which hand to put Deadly Poison on any more? I'm going to slip and tell some new rogue that IP/DP is the best, and he's going to laugh and call me an old man.

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're frequenting any of the rogue community sites, you've seen the question: Should I be using No'Kaled? While assassination and subtlety rogues can blindly equip the legendary quest daggers at each stage, combat rogues have to make a decision. As I've said for years, rogues spec for their weapons. You need to round up all of your available weapons, and then mix and match to find the right combination.

There are three different levels of No'Kaled, and there are also three stages of daggers we receive from Wrathion. Between all of these weapons, there are nine different possible combinations that you could have today. Your personal arsenal of weapons is dependent on your Elementium Gem Cluster acquisition rate and your luck with Madness of Deathwing drops, but chances are that you have at least one version of both the quest daggers and No'Kaled.

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 start looking into the history of the rogue class, you end up reaching several dead ends. The reason is that a rogue who's easy to track or trace isn't much of a rogue at all. We specialize in disappearing, which makes rogue family trees notoriously difficult to map. Garona Halforcen is often considered to be the mother of the rogue class, executing one of the earliest and most daring acts of assassination and regicide in Azeroth's history.

The truth is that if we want to find our spiritual beginnings, we have to look back even further than Garona and even further away than Azeroth. The true ancestor of today's rogue class first found life eons ago, in another realm, known only as Sanctuary. There, the assassin class stood against the three Prime Evils, defeating the Burning Hell's greatest powers with elegance and subterfuge. The rogues of WoW were inspired by the assassins of Diablo II, and that influence can still be felt today.

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 being prepared. I always like having the right tool for the job. My desk at the office is covered with spare parts and manuals, and my junk drawer at home is filled with cables and loose screws. And when I say junk drawer, I mean junk cabinet. I won't throw away something that could be useful later, which has me worried that my next TV appearance will be on Hoarders.

Luckily, I can't be judged for all of the goodies that I keep in my rogue's bags. One of my favorite threads on the official rogue forums is the Ganker's Kit of Ganking. It's a very robust list of items in WoW that can help you kill your targets and avoid being killed yourself. I find that we're usually so focused on our normal gear that we forget about all of the other items in our inventory that can make playing a rogue fun.

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 are all about DPS. You've heard my spiel about us being the only pure melee class, which makes DPS the only thing we bring to the table. SportsCenter can claim that Tim Tebow is a great quarterback, in spite of his shortcomings, because of his "intangible" benefits. Rogues don't have that luxury. If you parse poorly, then you get labeled as a bad rogue.

I was in the Raid Finder last week, and a warrior from another server tried calling me out for using Cloak of Shadows to stay in during Morchok's Black Blood phase. "Hey, that rogue didn't run out, that's not fair," he complained in raid chat. The last time I checked, all is fair in love, war, and the DPS meters.

However, there is one higher calling than DPS, and that is the success of your raid or party. Even though it's against our nature, we occasionally have to sacrifice some of our personal DPS in order to benefit the raid.

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.

Last week, a rogue obtained the very first pair of legendary daggers, Fangs of the Father. The spelling of the rogue's name is Имбос, and I can only imagine it sounds like the words "borscht" and "gulag" combined, because those are the only two Russian words that I know. You might recognize Имбос's guild, Exorsus, as the guild that achieved the world-first Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider. Thankfully, I can actually pronounce Exorsus. How could one guild win both the Glory achievement and legendary dagger races?

In fact, how could any rogue have obtained the Fangs of the Father when they take eight weeks to acquire, at the very least? If you're keeping track, there have been seven raid lockout periods since patch 4.3 and Dragon Soul were released. If you examine Имбос's armory, you'll notice that there are a combined nine kills of Yor'sahj listed (three normal, six heroic). Lockout resetting is a known issue for progression raiders, but since it hasn't been declared an exploit by Blizzard, there's nothing stopping players from spending some cash to get ahead. I'll be waiting to congratulate the first rogue to acquire Fangs of the Father in a mathematically possible timetable.

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 an economics expert, and in fact, I never even studied it in college. World of Warcraft is what drove me to stay up late at night reading articles on Wikipedia about game theory and the invisible hand of the market. A plethora of interesting mathematical models are at play in WoW, spanning everything from zero-sum DKP systems to diminishing returns on tanking secondary stats.

Energy capping is a big deal for combat rogues right now, as our shiny Dragon Soul epics have us swimming in more haste than ever before. Both of our current tier set bonuses further exacerbate the issue by reducing our energy expenditure and extending our energy regeneration cooldown. There's an economic solution for the problem that we're facing, and understanding what an opportunity cost is will help us make the right decisions.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

There are a lot of names for a simple raid encounter in WoW: tank and spank, churn and burn, rush down, the Raid Finder. In a rogue's perfect world, every raid boss we face would simply be Patchwerk (or two Patchwerks, if you play combat). It's our prerogative to deal the maximum possible damage, and we perform at our best when we can tunnel-vision and focus solely on managing our own energy, abilities, and cooldowns.

In spite of our preferences, bosses in WoW are rarely that simple. No two bosses are exactly alike, and even as we see the developers reusing ideas or abilities, each new fight is different from the last. One of the most common mechanics we deal with in a raid encounter is the addition of extra enemies, or adds. Any time a rogue switches targets, they lose some of their overall damage output. Redirect and Sprint are our two tools to minimize any lost damage, and yet they're woefully underutilized.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

There's a fairly simple way to make gold without professions: Sell summons to a pick-pocketable Hagara to rogues looking to get their legendary quest starter daggers, Vengeance and Fear. These are the most accessible rogue weapons, because aside from picking the pocket of the fourth boss in a raid instance, the quest can be easily completed with a 10k gold and a minimum amount of help. These daggers are the best entry-level options for rogues who PvP or PvE, available as soon as they hit 85 and are capable of completing the quest.

If players are raiders, they'll probably get it for free just by being in a raid that gets to Hagara; however, if all they do is PvP or casual PvE through the Raid and Dungeon Finders, they won't be able to get the first leg of the quest finished. Within a few weeks, most rogues who want to start the quest will have started it. Until then, I've heard of non-raiding rogues paying as much as 25k for the opportunity to pick Hagara's pockets.

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, like how to sneak around wearing a gaudy sweater.

With 2010 fading fast, rogues apprehensively looked forward to Cataclysm and how it would shape 2011. We were the crowned kings of Icecrown Citadel, with armor penetration and attack power as our top stats and both assassination and combat battling for first place. Mutilate rogues still tied down by Hunger for Blood, and combat rogues were spamming Blade Flurry on cooldown for the attack speed increase.

Looking back, we have grown since Wrath. Each of the rogue specs has evolved and found a niche, and even subtlety can make a reasonable claim for a raid spot now. With the massive talent system revamp, the developers struggled initially to balance each spec against the others. Rogues entered into 2011 and Cataclysm with a whimper, as the loss of armor penetration and the conversion of attack power to agility was not as smooth as Blizzard would have hoped.

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.

While death knights have only been around for a couple of years and retribution paladins are tasked with rediscovering themselves every few months, rogues have remained consistent throughout WoW's entire lifetime. We've obviously received tweaks and changes along the way, but the rogue of today looks an awful lot like the rogue of the past. Over the years, the rogue class has been dissected from every angle, and our studious brothers and sisters of the shadow have discovered its secrets.

There are three main areas of rogue research: mathing out how the class works (and yes, mathing is a verb), picking the right gear, and figuring out the best specific strategies. The best and brightest rogues are constantly monitoring our DPS models to ensure their continual accuracy, compiling lists of the best gear and how to get it, and detailing their guides for dealing with players and raid bosses alike. I can say with a tremendous amount of bias that Encrypted Text is the best source for rogue info, but of course there are other sites that are useful as well.

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 half of the Dragon Soul raid consists of knocking out a few of Deathwing's commanders that are attacking Wyrmrest Temple. After toppling the first four bosses of Dragon Soul, we finally see Deathwing face-to-face at the peak of the temple. He's still too busy to attack us himself, instead sending a couple of his additional underlings our way.

Our first challenge will be overcoming Ultraxion, Deathwing's favorite twilight dragon. He's an easy target for rogues and is just about as simple for us as Warlord Zon'ozz. After that, we board an airship to face Warmaster Blackhorn and his Twilight infantry. Finally, we confront Deathwing in two separate encounters, each with its own challenges.

We fight Ultraxion from the roof of Wyrmrest Temple, as he's too massive to fit inside. He'll spend most of the encounter cleaving the entire raid, which makes Feint an amazing tool here. Use it on cooldown for the entire fight. Unfortunately for rogues, we're not able to get behind Ultraxion, due to his positioning over the ledge of the temple roof. While Ultraxion has a buff that prevents him from parrying our frontal attacks, we're not able to use any positional attacks like Backstab or Ambush.

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 introduction of the Raid Finder is one of the biggest features in patch 4.3, and so far it has been everything that we could ask for and more. The queues have been quick, the bosses are tuned just right for the demographic, and the rewards are potent enough to keep the system running. Anyone with decent gear can queue up for a raid, gaining valuable experience and gear. I think the new system is perfect for allowing new raiders to get their feet wet, preparing them for what lies ahead.

Even as a pure DPS class, the Raid Finder queues haven't been too bad for rogues. Between my own experience and the word on the street (not Greg), queue times are between 15 and 30 minutes, and groups are mostly competent. To a class that's historically had problems finding a spot in a raid group, the Raid Finder looks like our new best friend. The only bummer is that we can't start or progress in our legendary quest line in the Raid Finder. In order to maximize our random group's chance for success, we need to be prepared to do our best.

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 4.3 is now live, and with it comes plenty of new additions. You can spend your time playing games at the newly revamped Darkmoon Faire, or you can play dress-up by transmogrifying your old tier sets. The developers buckled down and cranked out three new dungeons, complete with a plethora of new gear and valor point options. The new dungeons are also bristling with new lore moments and plot exposition, giving us insight into Deathwing's madness.

But you're not here for that. You're not reading this post because you can't wait to hear what fashion style I'll be transmogging to. (A pirate, FYI.) You couldn't care less about tossing rings or commanding tonks on Darkmoon Island. Dungeon guides can wait. If you're as black-blooded as I am, then there's only one thing on your mind: Who does a rogue have to kill around here to get a pair of legendary daggers?

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 studied my Excel usage patterns, you would be able to easily predict when a new patch is scheduled to drop. As soon as the release date is relatively fixed, I start working on my gear acquisition plan. My rogue takes priority when it comes to gearing up quickly. I'll spend as much gold or as many valor points as necessary to make sure I'm ahead of everyone else.

I typically spend my holy paladin's first batch of available valor points on the BoE valor piece for my rogue. Healers don't need gear anyway, right? If I can get my gear faster, my raid will be able to down bosses faster, and I'll get my hands on the Fangs of the Father sooner. It's a win-win scenario, and so when it comes to my rogue, I spare no expense. Please note that there are now three different levels of gear available, with the introduction of the Raid Finder difficulty level. The gear is identical between all three tiers and is simply scaled up or down appropriately.