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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 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 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 topic requests.

Back towards the end of Wrath, Blizzard shared with us a lot of information about the then-upcoming Cataclysm expansion. The new 31-point talent trees were unveiled, along with the mastery bonuses for each tree. The mastery bonuses were heralded as the ultimate balancing tool: Developers could tweak these numbers without touching a tree's talents. Mastery would ensure that any given spec could be tuned independently of the other specs.

The concept made sense, as buffing individual talents had a tendency to cause players to just cross-spec into those newly powerful talents. The other option at Blizzard's disposal is buffing talents that are deep in a talent tree, which works well since we can only go 10 points deep into our secondary trees.

In order to buff rogues in the upcoming patch 4.2, the developers have used both approaches. Our assassination and combat masteries are both being buffed by 5%. Deep talents in each tree, like Vile Poisons, Savage Combat, and Sanguinary Vein, are also being improved. Finally, subtlety rogues will see Hemorrhage's base damage improved by 40%, although it remains to be seen how this change affects the spec's viability.

Even with these buffs, combat and assassination rogues are still slated to be well behind most other classes. Rogues are generally middle-of-the-pack in DPS for most tier 11 bosses, and these changes will just make us "less behind." Other classes might ask us why being "average" is so bad. Average might be okay for a hybrid, but rogues need to top the meters -- not for our egos, but by design.

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.

I'm sure you've been following along with the recent pre-Cataclysm class information posts that Blizzard has been releasing to the public. I will admit that I was a bit blindsided by the info, as Blizzard is usually reluctant to give any details of their upcoming plans and generally prefers to use vagaries. But not this time! We actually have some serious, meaty details of what the devs have planned for the rogue class, and let me be the first to say, I like what I'm seeing. A lot. Let me introduce you to my new best friend: Improved Distract. Wait, I mean Critical Vanish. Wait, I mean Smoke Bomb.

Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

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The goblins haven't even joined the Horde yet, and already we're seeing the fruits of their labors. Instead of the trashy Flash Powder we used back in vanilla, we rogues of tomorrow have evolved to use the most powerful smoke generators available on Azeroth, courtesy of our engineering buddies. Who needs to Vanish when you can literally become untargetable? This is what we've been waiting for: now when Vanish is down, we won't have the "deer in the headlights" look on our face when the mage begins their Shatter combo. We'll disappear.