Posts with tag cataclysm-rogue-abilities

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

I love October. While any baseball fan will tell you that there's a special feeling in the air during October, I couldn't care less about the World Series. I know plenty of football fans who enjoy spending their Octobers obsessing over their fantasy rosters, but my team has cruised to a 5-and-0 start already. I'm not even particularly excited that my birthday falls in October, as another event takes priority. October is BlizzCon month for me, and I can't wait to hear all about what's in store for rogues as we learn about next year's expansion.

When thinking about what cool abilities rogues might see in the next WoW expansion, I started reflecting on the new spells we received in Cataclysm. For our new high-level spells, we picked up Combat Readiness, Redirect, and Smoke Bomb. Recuperate was added to our low-level spells to help make leveling smoother and to provide rogues with a healing option that didn't involve bandages. How useful have these spells proven themselves to be over the past year?

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we discuss the new abilities that we'll see as we level up in the upcoming expansion.

As I've mentioned several times before, rogues are often thought of as the "cooldown class." We've got a plethora of abilities, with nearly one (or two) for every situation. We're then regulated via cooldowns attached to each abilities, limiting how often we can use them. This gives the rogue class incredible potency in short fights, when our cooldowns are able to be used in quick succession. However, we have often stumbled in longer encounters, when our cooldowns are only active for a small percentage of the overall fight. Blizzard has been working on resolving this by reducing both the potency and the cooldown of a few of our moves, like Sprint, to give us more flexibility.

The DPS model for rogues hasn't change at all since The Burning Crusade. The only real addition was the creation of Mutilate and Envenom, which have been staples for rogues for years now. While Fan of Knives was a fun addition at level 80, its use on anything but trash has been limited at best. It's unsurprising that even though we're receiving three new abilities in Cataclysm versus BC's two, they're still all cooldown abilities. However, our new spells are actually incredibly fun and useful. They also take some skill to use properly, which is something that the rogue class needs desperately to get back to. Using your abilities wisely should yield a large reward -- and with that thought, I will now introduce the 2010 graduates of the Rogue Ability Academy.