Filed under: Rogue

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 BlizzCon 2013 schedule was released last week, and I spied with my ninja eye one notable omission: For the first time in several years, there will be no open Q-and-A session or discussion panel devoted to talking about WoW's classes. In fact, the only Q-and-A session apparently scheduled for BlizzCon expressly forbids class-specific questions.

Well, ain't that a Shiv in the pants.

On the plus side, this means I don't have to take the fall for the fact that we're about to snap a streak of three consecutive BlizzCons in which WoW Insider's resident rogue columnist boldly strode up to a microphone during a Q-and-A and asked the game designers a question about our class. (Chase Christian asked the devs in 2011 how they planned to keep rogues distinct from monks (they have); in 2010 about whether rogues would ever be able to wield something other than a dagger in their off-hand (they now do -- if they're in combat spec); and in 2009 about whether Vanish would ever be fixed (believe me, today's Vanish issues ain't nothing compared to yesteryear's).

On the minus side: What are we going to do with ourselves during BlizzCon if we can't spend our time becoming progressively more frustrated during the course of an hourlong Q-and-A session, watching the minutes tick inexorably by, never to return, as players of blatantly inferior classes take up the panel's precious time with their clearly inconsequential questions?

I'll tell you what we're gonna do: We'll create our own Q-and-A panel -- well, minus the A's, at least for now. We've got a decent audience here, right? We've got a comment section, no? Let's do this.

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.

There comes a time, in the lives of many WoW players, when they realize they can no longer delay the inevitable. Their primal urges call out to them. Though they had resisted so strongly for so long, they know, deep down in their hearts: It's time to give in to that sinfully sweet siren call.

It's time to level a rogue.

To those of you who have recently elected to join the rogue legion -- and to those of you who are contemplating this devious journey -- I have some guidance to offer as you embark. I have seen many of your ilk level rogues before you, and will see many more do so after you. I have seen the questions they ask, and the myths they wrongly believe.

I am here to stab you with truth.

Let us begin.

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 we last left our devious, poison-festooned heroes, they were assassinating the heck out of every raid boss in sight, much as they have been this entire expansion. Assassination has been the spec of choice for raiders of all stripes in Mists -- but might Patch 5.4 change the balance?

The answer may depend as much on you as on the gifts that WoW's designers wrapped up and handed us for the new patch. Combat and subtlety both are looking like perfectly good options in almost every situation. Unless you're with a group that is seriously trying to squeeze every last drop of damage out of its DPSers, and you're already playing your spec perfectly, your main criteria for which spec to use should rely on 1) whether you enjoy it and 2) whether you've got the right gear for it.

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.

Alright, then. Now that introductions are out of the way, let's roll up our sleeves, sharpen the knives we've got hidden within them, roll our sleeves back down again, and get to business.

As you may be somewhat aware, some patch or other happened a few weeks ago. All's I know is, my rogue passed out on a Monday night and when she woke up on Tuesday, her strikes felt suspiciously more sinister.

In all, nearly three dozen class-specific changes greeted us when Patch 5.4 went live (and a few more drifted down from the Azerothian heavens in the form of post-patch hotfixes). Nearly all of them were buffs, bug fixes or quality-of-life improvements of some sort.

That sounds pretty outstanding. But the real question is: What will all of these changes actually alter about the experience of playing a rogue? How many of these differences are noticeable?

Every other week, 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.

We are a strange (and deadly) brew, we who play a World of Warcraft rogue. Perhaps more than any other class, each day we log in, we face a basic truth: We can never be what we truly desire.

As a class, we spend our days in WoW defined by the terror of our stealth and the bite of our poisons. But at night, our dreams are of slinking up behind our enemy, unleashing a single, devastating, mortal attack, and leaving only silence in our wake.

Sadly, this is an MMO, and we're no Desmond Miles.

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

Word on the street is that the old rogue finally hit the dirt. Nobody is exactly sure how it happened. Did he get a little too cavalier in a duel with Rossi and eat the wrong end of a two-handed Overpower? Did Frostheim land a lucky Flare/Freezing Trap combo after seeing him slinking in the shadows? Did some hotshot mage get lucky and land the ultimate Shatter bomb while his cooldowns were recharging?

Or did he simply Vanish into thin air? Did anyone actually see the body? Were they able to identify his daggers by comparing the multitude of scrapes and scars? Was there a trace left behind to prove he was ever really here? That's the funny thing about rogues: you never know when they're dead, or just in repose.

In addition to our call for hunter and mage columnist applications, our rogue columnist position has opened! In this position, your primary duties will be the production of your column on a weekly basis, but opportunities for additional work as a news blogger may arise over time should you desire them.

You can find the full instructions on how to apply on our applications page. If you have prior blogging experience, make sure you mention that in your application along with a link to your prior work. The deadline for your application is end-of-day on Friday, August 30, so work quickly. Do not confuse that with the deadline for the hunter and mage positions, which is Friday, August 23.

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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.

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.

If you're just getting started with World of Warcraft, don't worry: you're not too late to have plenty of fun. (In fact, we think this is a great time to be playing WoW.) But getting started can be a little tricky with all the choices you have to make. Which race you select is a primarily cosmetic choice, but the class you pick -- and whether it's a good fit for your preferred style of gaming -- is a choice that will make all the difference.

But we're here to help make that choice at least a little easier by talking you through WoW's classes, one at a time. And on the menu for today is the rogue. In World of Warcraft, rogues are lightly armored meleers who use stealth to get in close and then hit their target with precision strikes. The rogue is one of four classes in the game that focuses solely on DPS: their three talent specializations only changing their preferred way of dealing damage.

If getting up close to the bad guys and always being in the middle of combat sounds like your thing, a rogue may be the ideal class for you. Read on for more about what to expect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.