Broliant Writes…

In a series of raids where our guild ran progression attempts on Deathbringer Saurfang, I had the opportunity after numerous other recent trials to run the last remaining tests on my ‘work-list’ so that I could conclude how well the different Assassination (Mutilate) specs operate at the moment and with what weapon combination I could maximise my DPS. All the collected data from my recent tests is available to all via our World of Logs reports for the next calendar month or so.

The two specs being debated at the moment are the more standard 51/13/7 spec and the more haste-oriented 51/18/2 spec. In the latter, we sacrifice some of the energy regen and damage boosting talents in the first tier of the subtlety tree to gain additional crit and haste for our standard attacks in the combat tree.

The second debate being held concerns whether it is currently better (all other things being equal) to use a slow main-hand dagger and a fast off-hand dagger as normal or to use a fast dagger in each hand. Faster equals more white melee damage attacks and generally lower damage from specials like mutilate but offers an increased number of Instant Poison procs which can more than compensate potentially due to the good damage it does currently.

With these questions in mind, I have therefore now fully modelled and subsequently raid tested to satisfaction the following combinations:

1) 51/13/7 with Slow-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
2) 51/13/7 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
3) 51/18/2 with Slow-MH and Fast-OH weapons.
4) 51/18/2 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.

Please note, ALL of these specs are using a rupture-free cycle because there are no circumstances with assassination builds now where rupture does damage worth its energy cost in normal rogue usage. There is a very slim possibility that the use of rupture could offer a DPS increase where the rogue is off-target so often that the ticking DoT of Rupture is a benefit. However, I’ve tested the rupture-inclusive builds and none of them were really even close in the DPS stakes. Instant Poison is far more potent at the moment.

Of the above specs tested, with MY gear, the best combination was…

4) 51/18/2 with Fast-MH and Fast-OH weapons.

Again, please note that this was with MY gear and the balance of which of the two specs is more powerful for you will be gear dependent. However, in both cases, I found the 51/18/2 spec was more DPS whatever weapon combination I used. But, to any rogues going down this route, once you’ve gemmed for this spec, it’s simple enough to use your Dual Talent Spec option to have each spec available in a raid, run some real world tests (the ONLY kind that really matter) and see for yourselves.

The other very important point is to attempt wherever possible to maintain the uptime on the Envenom buff. Thus, if you have Classtimer or a similar mod, I suggest adding a custom buff-timer/monitor for “Envenom” (that’s the buff’s name as well) so that you can more easily keep track of it.

I’ve also tested the CP variations and can report that the best DPS lies with the use of 4CP and 5CP envenoms and that the use of 3CP envenoms is normally a DPS loss – the only exception to this is during a Heroism if you are trying to keep/put-up the Envenom buff to take advantage of the burst period.

Rotation from the opening of a fight is roughly:

1) Begin in Stealth. Garotte.
2) Put up Hunger for Blood and Slice and Dice.
3) Mutilate to 4+ CPs, Envenom. Repeat this basic cycle throughout the fight.

4) As soon as the initial Garotte is complete, work another Vanish/Garotte into the rotation.
—- Pool energy via Overkill if you have the chance, it’s 30% improved when stealthed.
—- Use Cloak of Shadows if needed (eg: You have a debuff like Mark of the Champion) to get the garotte out.

5) Hold Potion of Speed for Heroism. Keep Envenom buff up during Heroism without question.

If you can do that, you can easily run consistent high DPS on many fights that favour rogues. Now that weapon swapping is no longer needed, you have plenty of time to get every detail of your rotation correct.

-B-

First, let me start by saying that if any of you reading this have already done the Hodir rep-grind to get your revered or exalted shoulder inscription, please simply stop reading this post right now to avoid getting really annoyed. For the rest, I’ll see you in the next paragraph…

Being the type of player that does not mind the repetition of raiding (an activity of my choosing) but that hates with incredible intensity the enforced labour-mechanic of rep-grinds to get things like the Hodir shoulder inscriptions (an activity NOT of my choosing), Broliant had never pursued the Hodir rep for the new shoulders and simply “made do” with the Aldor enchants of TBC. Even when the venerable ‘Relic of Ulduar’ became BoE and purchaseable, I still could not find within myself the justification to spend around 1000g+ on the relics needed.

So, there I was on the eve of patch 3.3’s release chatting to the guys on vent and I mentioned one neat thing I’d heard that was supposedly in the patch – the fact that all top-level Arcanum (Head Enchants) and Inscriptions (Shoulder Enchants) were now BoA (Bind on Account) items, meaning that you could do the rep-grind on one char only then buy the Arcanums and Inscriptions you needed for all your characters. “Pretty sweet” I said, “I may even do the rep-grind now, it almost makes sense!”

Then one of my fellow officers said something along the lines of “you can buy rep-tokens with badges, don’t you know” and so off I went, straight to the Badge of Triumph vendor in Dalaran, to check it out. I’d already confirmed the “BoA” status of Arcanum at the Ebon Blade vendor in Icecrown. Now I was also able to confirm what my team-mate told me… and so I bought one “Sons of Hodir Commendation Badge” for a cost of one “Emblem of Triumph“. Normally it awards 520 rep with the Sons of Hodir… but I’m Human so add 10% and I got 572 rep. And went from having “no standing at all” with Hodir to being somewhat “Hated”. Ooops.

Hmm, I thought. Even though I have many Badges of Triumph which I have no other use for, this will take some doing. Maybe I should do the quests first. Off to Stormpeaks I went, spent a couple of hours doing all the quests leading up to the Hodir quest-line and eventually there I am standing in front of Thorim ready to hand in his two main quests – the main “Mending Fences” quest and “A Spark of Hope”… and hahahahahahaha… see the image below…

That’s right – each quest hand-in awarded me with 31,460 rep with the Sons of Hodir. I went directly to revered with that nice jump! I then ran back to Dalaran, bought around 35-40 more of the “Sons of Hodir Commendation Badge” and hit exalted. I then went straight back to Dun Niffelem and bought an exalted-level Arcanum for Broliant and another for Balgardner.

So, the instances might be borked entirely while we wait for the “new patch smell” to die down a litte… but there are still some nice discoveries to be made.

-B-

Following the recent release of patch 3.2, many rogues have been playing with various forms of weapon-swapping macros in order to attempt to gain a small boost to their DPS. The premise is that whatever spec you are raiding with, and currently this should really be a standard Assassination-Mutilate build or a standard Combat build, you’ll typically be running with Deadly Poison (DP) on your off-hand weapon.

Now, DP has an uptime of 12 seconds and can stack up to five times on a single target. The idea therefore is to begin a fight with an off-hand weapon coated with DP, wait until DP has stacked five times and has a full 12 seconds or so of uptime remaining and then to switch your off-hand weapon to a good alternative/equivalent that has been coated with Instant Poison (IP). You then continue as normal until your DP stack has about 5 seconds of uptime remaining at which point you perform another weapon-swap to reequip the DP coated weapon so that you can refresh the stack before it drops.

If all goes well, you’ll have gained some additional DPS due to the extra DPS that IP can provide on top of the DPS that DP is already providing as it continues to tick. This whole concept relies very much on you being able to stand relatively still and maintain DPS on a single target only – it does not work on mobile fights or on fights where you are required to switch targets regularly.

Depending upon your spec (Assassination or Combat) and what gear you have will determine how easy it will be for you to perform the weapon-swapping due to the 1 second enforced cooldown (CD) that occurs after each weapon-swap. Additionally, you ideally should have a second off-hand weapon comparable in terms of DPS and speed to the normal weapon you use in your off-hand so that when you switch you don’t lose a significant amount of DPS through raw weapon-stat reductions.

We’ve included a trio of simple macros below and to use them, simply replace the “Dagger of BLAH Poison” with the name of the weapons you are off-handing in each case. And no, they don’t have to be daggers! Once you have some macros, we’ll assume you can cover the basics of keybinding them and of using a simple addon like class-timer to track the points when your DP stack is full and refreshed and when it’s getting close to expiry such that you need to swap back. If you pop on over to Elitist Jerks (EJ) then you’ll find some people there are creating automated weapon-swap macros that run in addons like Outfitter.

The Deadly Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Deadly Poison

The Instant Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Instant Poison

The Wound Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Wound Poison

However, we’d suggest that if you can’t at the very least track your DP stack yourself and manually select when to switch weapons using macros like these, then you’re essentially letting the addons make your decisions for you and frankly you then neither deserve nor should you be swapping weapons. Do it manually by yourself or leave well alone. Blizzard already made their position clear on who should be thinking on behalf of your character when they locked addons down previously, meaning decursive users had to learn to do more than simply stab a single bright red button labelled “Decurse the cursed person please!”

In ideal circumstances where you are able to fit the weapon-swapping into your rotation, have an identical OH weapon to switch to and are on the ball with the changes so that you don’t let the DP stack expire, you can expect to see anywhere up to a 500 DPS increase from doing this. It’s likely going to be a smaller proportion of this figure for the “average you or me” once all non-ideal parameters are factored in but from our early experiments, it’s certainly worth doing on those “stand still and fight me” encounters.

-B-

Player versus Player is a very very very occasional series exploring aspects of the game’s PVP sensibilities from the perspective of someone that does hardly any PVP at all. Today Player vesus Player examines how patch 3.2 has killed the level 39 twinking bracket stone-cold dead.

Patch 3.2 was released in Europe on Wednesday 5th August, 2009 after being released one day earlier in the US. With it came many changes including the overhaul of the PVP Battleground system. At the core of the changes were three major new features:

1: By default players now “earn” XP in Battlegrounds when achieving the various goals of the battleground. (Thus endangering twink existence.)

2: Players can opt to turn off the gaining of XP on any character they own by paying a 10g fee to one of several NPCs located throughout the game. (Thus preserving twink existence.)

3: In battleground “matching”, players with XP gains turned off will only ever be allowed into games with other players with XP gains turned off.

On face value, the first two new features seem to add value to the game and to preserve the status quo for those players who have enjoyed twink-play in the past and would hope for that to continue. The last feature however, as feared and suspected prior to the release of patch 3.2, has proved thoroughly destructive in certain scenarios.

As noted in a previous post, my twink is a level 39 resto-druid. It was always fairly uncommon to see many twinks in a game, perhaps one or two being the most in any team. The fear was that this “twink vs twink only” idea would mean there would never be enough players to make a match has been born out.

It is now, at the time of writing, some three weeks since patch 3.2 was released and in that time, it has not been possible to get into a single PVP battleground. Admittedly, I have not been sitting still for three weeks waiting to get into a battleground but instead have been proceeding as normal, spending the majority of time in-game raiding.

However, it was always possible previously to jump onto Gosling after the end of a raid and let off some steam with a quick game or two in WSG or AB. Since the patch, nada, nil, nichts, nothing.

Most of the time, joining a BG queue (of which there is only ever one lifeless looking option available) reveals a predicted wait time of “Unavailable” and a real-world wait-time of “as long as you can bear to wait, and then some.”

Here at the towers, we’ve even logged in and left ourselves queuing for hours at a time whilst watching a movie or doing anything else around the castle ramparts while keeping a keen ear alert for the sound of a BG “popping” to absolutely no avail.

Following up our own personal disappointments within the group of people Gosling used to run through level-39 BGs with, a scan of the official forums reveals more evidence of the same problem being experienced widely across the wow-playing world.

There is no light currently in this particular tunnel. All advice from Blizzard gives no indication that matters might be relaxed to allow twinks and non-twinks to rub shoulders once more which is about the only way we can predict that the problem could be solved.

Certainly, the liklihood that a sudden influx of players wanting to join the “level-39 twink brigade” is surely close to flat-zero – who in their right mind would level and build a twink for a category for which there is no chance to play a game?

Of many disappointments, this is perhaps one of the ones that will have the longest lasting effect on those players for whom twink-BGs were a fun hobby in past times. We can’t comment here on what is going on in the 19 and 29 twink-BGs although the feeling is that they should be less affected given their greater accessibility and numerical levels of player activity. If any of you are running in twink-BGs now, how are you finding things post 3.2?

Strike 1 for Blizzard here though – a bad bad bad decision that has removed an enjoyable aspect of the game and has not replaced it with anything else of value.

Regular raiders are always on the look-out for ways to improve their raiding performance and will commonly take advantage of the output of tools such as WoW Web Stats (aka: ‘WWS’) or World of Logs (aka: ‘WoL’) to provide them with detailed reports on how much damage or healing was done and by whom, what abilities were used, who died and how and much, much more.

Typically, there will be one or two people in a given raiding team who have been given (or have assumed) responsibility for producing these raid reports and the steps they typically have to go through are generally as follows:

- Create an account with the reporting system. (WWS, WoL et-al.)
- Enable the logging of all combat data to the WoW Combat Log file at raid start.
- Upload data about the raid from the WoW Combat Log file to the report website.
- Stop logging of all combat data at raid end.

In general it’s not a terribly hard task but there are a few caveats that can catch people out from time to time, the most common ones being:

- Forgetting to enable the logging of combat data.
- Not managing the size of the WoW Combat Log file.
- Being unable to upload combat data due to the size of the WoW Combat Log file.

As a result of these potential caveats, being the one responsible for combat logging can sometimes be a more stressful and annoying job that it needs to be. Therefore, we’d like to offer a few useful nuggets of advice to those burdened with such a task.
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At first it seemed like a random isolated incident. Our guild tends to leave the optional bosses of Ignis and Razorscale as pleasant little ‘fillers’, an easy way to round out an evening when there’s just enough time left before raid end for an easy kill. About half-way through the fight, I realised my Tricks of the Trade button was not activating. I tried my keybind, I tried clicking manually on the button. Neither worked – all I got was the “That action is not ready yet” error message. Grrrr.

We regularly run with two rogues in our raids, me and one other, and the two of us trade our tricks once aggro is settled to get a nice mutual damage boost on a 30-second cooldown. Except now I wasn’t able to oblige my rogue buddy. Got to the end of the fight and was about to send a quick whisper to explain and apologise for my ‘apparent slacking’ but received a whisper before I could send mine. “Tricks bugged. ” it said. “Mine too” I replied.

That was the end of that raid and I wouldn’t have thought anything much more about it were it not for the fact that it happened again on our most recent run. Sometime after or during XT it simply stopped working again for both of us and stayed that way until sometime during the pre-Freya trash clearance. I have no idea what’s causing it at the moment but it’s now near the top of my list of things to check up on over the weekend should I get the time.

Not only does it drop our potential DPS on fights where my rogue buddy and I would be trading the buff but it also makes every pull just that little bit more clunky because we can’t help with the aggro-redirection. I’m nowhere near a machine from which I can check the official forums as I type this but I’m hoping it’s got a decently sized collection of duplicated ‘QQ, this is bugged’ posts that will at least show me I’m not suffering this irritation alone.

I’ll update here if we find out what’s causing this issue, but for the moment venting was therapy enough.

-B-

Update: Cause found, solution pending…

It turns out that the cause of this problem with Tricks of the Trade appears to occur in certain instances where the target you expect to apply TotT to is made somehow immune to its effects. A standard example of this is when your target has been placed into the slag-pot on the Ignis fight. If you are not monitoring the status of your target closely and you use TotT on them as they are in the slag pot, they will be immune to its effects and you will be unable to use TotT again until you re-zone or relog.

Dieing/wiping generally clears the problem up but simply reloading the interface (“/console reloadUI”) does not. Logging out of the game then back in also fixes the problem generally.

It’s probably not too much to ask on a fairly static (for melee dps) fight like Ignis to check their target is not “slag-potted” before hitting TotT on them – no doubt simple laziness had been the cause of our past problems in this matter since I know I for one had not been paying such close attention – do forgive me though since it’s normally a warm-up or cool-down fight for us hence ultra-ultimate performance is not generally gut-busted for here.

Blizzard will probably hot-fix this issue away at some point but in the meantime, just pay closer attention to the combat status of your target to avoid such irritations and simply relog (or wipe/die!) if you get unlucky and do catch this nasty bug!

Player versus Player is a very very very occasional series exploring aspects of the game’s PVP sensibilities from the perspective of someone that does hardly any PVP at all. Today Player vesus Player examines the attractions of twinking and wonders how the new ‘turn off XP gains switch’ purportedly coming with the forthcoming patch 3.2 might change things.

Although Broliant has engaged in numerous PVP encounters over the years, it’s never been more than a fun diversion for him in between raiding activities and when PVP has been pursued for its loot rewards, those rewards have always been coveted for the benefit they might grant to PVE endeavours. Raiding regularly takes plenty of time by itself and these days a typical raid lasts about three hours. Within that time you’ll need to use three flasks (1hr duration each), numerous potions (healing, haste etc) and bandages and you’ll incur expensive repair costs once you get some decent gear. Perhaps as much as 150g per night on a day of progression attempts and continual wiping. Plate-wearing tanks can probably double that figure.

Thus, a three-hour raiding excursion can swallow upwards of 350g a time on the worst nights and despite the assertion that money now grows on trees, it still has to be earned somehow. Combine the responsibilities of going raiding with the additional time-costs of helping to run a guild and very little time (actually none typically) is then left to explore the PVP side of the game.

As a result, the continual arms-war of current-day PVP arena contesting long ago lost its lustre for this rogue since to compete at a decent level really does require the kind of time investment that can earn rankings and reward points sufficient to purchase each new season’s gear. The alternative is to soldier on with outdated gear and that becomes tiring quite quickly once you begin encountering people with the next ‘tier’ up of gear in comparison to what you own.
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Microsoft recently released what they call the “Release Candidate” of their latest desktop operating system, Windows 7, via their website. It’s a free download and can be used until the summer of 2010 completely free of charge. We won’t explain here all the many new features of Windows 7 because there are plenty of reviews already published to great effect on that subject but we will give some thoughts on why it might be a good choice for the WoW player to consider.

Here at ‘BW HQ’ we’ve been using the “Release Candidate” or ‘RC’ on our main machines for about one month now and thus far it has behaved itself impeccably. It’s definitely an improvement over its Windows Vista predecessor although when we say that, it is worth adding the qualification that our experiences with Windows Vista over the past two years have been quite excellent. Despite the many voices that jumped onto the “we hate Vista” train with claims of preference for the earlier Windows XP, we’ve preferred Vista as our desktop OS of choice at all times. We get plenty of exposure to XP in our corporate offices and with our business clients but when it comes to what we rock with on our own kit at home, it’s been Vista every time. If you understood the few basic changes between XP and Vista and could cope with that, it was no problem.

In fact, the only problem we ever truly had with Vista came towards the end of our time with it (we’re confirmed Windows 7 converts now for reasons that will become immediately clear) after we replaced the main workstation in the office with a bigger more powerful machine. As part of the upgrade, we kitted it out with a fancy 30″ screen with a 2560×1600 resolution display and it was here that some problems were encountered. Essentially, during day-to-day operation the machine worked flawlessly however it would quite regularly trip-over when running WoW (the only game we have installed onto the machine bar those that come supplied with Vista) and cause us to have to either restart the game or restart the machine. It didn’t happen often but it happened enough for us to recognise that it only happened during game-play and thus, it was never a welcome occurrance.

Since switching to Windows 7, this problem has simply disappeared. It’s not possible to tell if it’s the new OS, the ATI driver for the graphics card under Windows 7, the fact we’ve gone from running 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 or some other factor that is to thank for the improvement but any improvement shall be considered a good thing, whatever its cause. Unsurprisingly therefore, we’re firmly attached to Windows 7 now and with our experiences from Vista in hand, there are some very useful tips to be passed on to anyone considering trying the new Windows OS.
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With the mid-May release of patch 3.1.2. Blizzard have finally released the long promised Equipment Manager functionality that many have been looking forward to. It offers a basic mechanism through which WoW players can ’save’ sets of equipment (ie: armor and weapons) and create a button for each which they can then place on an action-bar. Clicking on this button then equips all the equipment saved under that set. With the option to buy an additional talent-spec for any level 40 or greater character, the liklihood that a player might wish to frequently switch equipment is now greater than ever and thus many players will be looking for a simple and easy way to do just that.

The question to be answered therefore is whether the new Equipment Manager is a good option or whether players should still be going to the established third-party addons such as ItemRack, Wardrobe, Closet Gnome and so on for their equipment swapping needs. Well, let’s find out.
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Throughout The Burning Crusade (TBC) era, the combat tree based specs were the undoubted source of maximum raiding DPS for a rogue and thus the most common raiding specs were combat based. With the release of Wrath, this all changed and combat went from #1 in the rogue charts to a lowly third-place behind both the mutilate based assassination specs and the HAT based subtlety specs.

Move forward another few months though and patch 3.1 arrives and brings with it changes that redress the balance once more. Improvements made to the combat tree and other core mechanics of the class such as the new “PPM” (procs per minute) poison systems have levelled the field slightly making combat based specs even more viable.

In fact, the balance that exists between the rogue trees is now such that it is possible for a rogue to find both assassination and combat specs to have their moments in the sun, each out-dps-ing the other. Subtlety based HaT specs are still much harder to pidgeonhole simply due to its reliance on your party members – their gear, skill, spec and so on.

The reason for this post today though is to look a little more closely at how you should be setting-up your rogue in order to go raiding with a combat based talent spec.
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