Posts with tag rogue-cataclysm-talents

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 Cataclysm questions you have!

There was once a time where rogues were one of the worst soloing classes in the game. We have never had any tanking or healing abilities like the hybrid, and our fellow pure DPS classes have the advantage of ranged attacks. Rogues were simply wrecked by their enemies. While we had decent levels of dodge, our survivability depended entirely stunlocks to control our opponents. Against anything immune to stuns, we were pretty much worthless.

Times have changed. Rogues have reached levels of survivability that were previously fantasy. We remain the single best DPS class for toe-to-toe damage, and now we can actually last long enough to get the job done. Each of the three rogue specs has a purpose and a direction, and the title for top DPS spec is still up for grabs at level 85. Blizzard has already tweaked the mastery system for rogues several times to ensure that no spec is left behind. I'm looking forward to our bright future in Cataclysm.

I can't say that our talent preview arrived in good company. Blizzard released a first look at our new talent trees alongside the new trees for three of the four healer classes in WoW. I would have liked to have seen a few of our DPS brethren's trees alongside ours, but at least rogues were in the first batch of previews released. I remember being the very last class to receive its talent review in vanilla WoW, so being first in line is definitely a cause for celebration.

Each of the three talent trees received some pretty significant changes, including a few potential rotation changers. Blizzard stated that their goal was to consolidate some of the mandatory DPS talents to allow for more flexibility and utility, and to reduce the number of simple damage increasing talents. In addition, each tree needed to be fleshed out a bit, to give us somewhere to sink the five additional points we'll receive at level 85. Finally, they also had to add in some flavor to each tree, making any given spec a bit more unique from the other two.