Broliant Writes…

Single Minded Focus is an occasional series of articles offering players an insight into the supposed master of the single-target melee DPS classes. Today we look at raiding as a combat-ss (sinister strike) specced rogue in the post-patch 3.1 world of WoW.

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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Talent Specs for a Combat-SS Rogue:

At the moment, due to the way Wrath has been itemised, it is most likely that most rogues will have collected at least one good fist weapon for the main-hand and a dagger for the off-hand. That being the case, the best general combat spec is currently this (15/51/5) spec.

If you’ve collected swords instead of fist weapons and daggers, then the equivalent spec for sword rogues would be this (15/51/5) spec.

Both of these specs seem to be working best for those who are early into Ulduar, toting mostly Tier 7 level gear farmed from Naxxramas, EoE, VoA and OS. Once you’ve collected a bit more of your Tier 8 gear (4 pieces or more for both set bonuses) you’ll probably begin to find that you’ll then be able to squeeze out a bit more dps if you then adjust to using this (18/51/3) spec in order to leverage the benefits of improved DoT damage talents.

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Glyphs for a Combat-SS Rogue:

Glyphs go hand-in-hand with talent specs and the choices for a combat-ss rogue are fairly straightforward. For major glyphs, simply get one each of the following:

• Glyph of Sinister Strike
• Glyph of Rupture
• Glyph of Killing Spree

Some rogues preferentially choose to take Glyph of Adrenaline Rush in place of the Killing Spree glyph if they spend a lot of time in fights where the multi-target nature of Killing Spree would be disadvantageous. As always, check your mileage and choose appropriately. In an open fight though, the Killing Spree glyph offers the best contribution towards your overall DPS.

The situation with minor glyphs is exactly the same as it was when we wrote about raiding with an Assassination-Mutilate spec therefore we’ll simply repeat the same advice again which was… “Minor glyphs are less influential on your performance therefore you do have reasonable freedom to choose whichever you prefer. However, in order of raid usefulness, you might want to consider the following:”

• Glyph of Safe Fall
• Glyph of Vanish
• Glyph of Blurred Speed

Of these, the Glyph of Safe Fall is the only one that offers regular benefit in raids since there are a number of bosses that throw you into the air. Anything that can add to a rogue’s inbuilt Safe Fall ability and thus help us to avoid taking further damage is a gift to your healers and an opportunity to continue fighting and doing dps.

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Gear for a Combat-SS Rogue:

Unlike Assassination-Mutilate rogues that require two daggers for their spec, the life of a Combat-SS rogue is much more varied since you can mix and match pretty much whatever equippable weapon-types you like. There are three weapon specialities for a rogue: Close Quarters Combat (CQC) for the fist and dagger weapons, Sword Specialization for the sword weapons and Mace Specialization for the maces.

Essentially, it is preferable to try and avoid needing to either invest points in two weapon specialities or lose some benefit from having differing weapons in each hand and only one speciality. However, somewhat indicative of Blizzard’s game design in the Wrath expansion, the CQC speciality covers the two best itemised weapon types for rogues.

Thus, most rogues heading into Ulduar on the back of a few months of Naxxramas raiding will likely have been able to collect the best in slot (BiS) CQC weapons, namely;

• Main Hand: Calamity’s Grasp
• Off Hand: Webbed Death

Note also that it is a little easier to allocate the low-end combat tree talent points if you are going with “CQC” weapons. To get the Sword or Mace specialisation, you’ll probably need to take a point or more in Endurance etc to get down the tree to the specialities.

Aside from these two weapons though, you’ll once again just want to gather the best gear you can depending upon where you are running, what your looting chances are and so forth and therefore simply reference theShadowPanther.net site as the primary resource for understanding of how each piece of gear stacks up against other pieces of gear for the same slot.

And to repeat ourselves again… If you’re feeling especially brave and are technically competant, you should also lookup the main rogue spread-sheets available from the dedicated thread at Elitist Jerks which gives you a much more detailed insight into the effect of each item of loot against your overall wardrobe and typical raid composition.

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Poisons for a Combat-SS Rogue:

Now that poisons have had their fundamental mechanics changed, the selection of poisons for a combat-ss rogue is as follows:

• Main Hand: Wound Poison VII
• Off Hand: Deadly Poison IX

Both poisons will contribute nicely to your DPS although with a combat build, your melee and SS attacks will of course form the greater bulk of the DPS that you do. A typical parse for a few early Ulduar bosses can be seen here showing the breakdown of damage done by ability when combat specced. (Click the “Damage by Spell” button after the page loads.)

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Rotations for a Combat-SS Rogue:

A combat specced rogue essentially has two aims during any “boss” type encounter. Keep Rupture ticking and keep Slice and Dice activated. After that, it’s about getting in any extra DPS you possibly can and thus you’ll see most articles on the subject of Combat-SS rogue rotations talk about an xS/xR/xE rotation.

What this means is:

• Perform an ‘x’ combo-point Slice and Dice.
• Perform an ‘x’ combo-point Rupture.
• Perform an ‘x combo-point Eviscerate.

The reason that the number of combo-points is not stated directly is because the ratio varies subtlely for every single rogue – depending upon the quality of the gear they have, the skill they have, the equivalent gear and skill of the rest of their raid, the buffs you all can access, the ratio of time “on-target” vs “running out of fire” you need to do and the vaguaries of the Random Number Generator (RNG) in the game.

Since you want SnD active at all time, attempt to activate it with at least enough points to stay running until you’ve done a full rupture. I’d recommend from personal experience that a 3CP SnD is sufficient to get a 5CP rupture running and have a bit of time left to do a 3-5CP Eviscerate, depending upon your luck with CP and energy procs, before you’ll need to get another 3CPs for the next refresh of SnD.

Simply experiment to find the best ratio that works for you. Remember that Rupture does more damage per tick and for longer the more CPs you use therefore always prioritise a full 5CP rupture once SnD is running. Then just squeeze in whatever you can in the way of Eviscerate damage to puff the DPS a little.

On top of the basic rotation, you also have Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry and Killing Spree. You can play with these abilities to find their best use in any given fight. In some, you’ll be seeking to use each as often as possible and in others you’ll want to keep them for special situations – for example, the Heart phase on the XT-002 Deconstructor fight in Ulduar.

Note the tooltip of Killing Spree though, while it’s doing it’s thing all other damage that you are doing is increased by 20%. You do not have control of your character whilst Killing Spree is in effect therefore this really means ensuring that as many damage over time (DoT) effects are in place first. Principally, this would mean your deadly poison from your off-hand weapon should be fully stacked (max=5 stacks) and that you have a Rupture DoT ticking throughout. However, if you’re especially crafty, you could also hit Vanish followed by Garrote immediately before Killing Spree. And if you are even more crafty and dealing with multiple mobs, you could also hit Blade Flurry as well before Killing Spree so that each ‘hit’ Killing Spree does hits two targets instead of just the normal one. Consider hitting Tricks of the Trade first too, so you can dump a heap-tonne of aggro on the tank (or the mage you like least) at the same time! Got that? Okay, here’s a summary of things you could try to sequence before launching Killing Spree.

1. Get a full 5-stacks of Deadly Poison on the target.
2. Get a full 5-CP Rupture ticking on the target.
3. Hit Vanish and immediately follow with Garrote.
4. Hit Blade Flurry.
5. Hit Tricks of the Trade.
6. Hit Killing Spree.

And if you do manage to pull that sequence off, a chorus of angels appear to sing heavenly music to you for the remainder of the fight!

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Showing Off – Secrets of the Spec:

Like most specs, the way you take advantage of your abilities certainly determines not only how much good DPS you will be able to churn out – and let’s not cross our wires here, the sole reason to take rogues raiding these days is the quality of their melee DPS given Blizzard’s “Bring the player, not the class (excludes Shaman for everything and priests for Razuvious!)” mantra – but also how well other people perceive you to be performing as a player.

Killing Spree is an ability that is unique to combat specced rogues and it is something of a strange ability. Speaking from personal experience, it’s not an ability I particularly admire, because it takes control away from the player, leaves the player in an unpredictable position and state upon its completion and is simply random in the manner in which it selects targets.

However, all that aside it’s very good DPS so it’s really worth getting to know and understand how the ability works. Furthermore, it has some notable uses that the tooltip for it does not mention. Best of these is its ability to protect a rogue from being feared if it is used at exactly the right moment. As a character with the ability to interrupt spell-casting, you’ll likely be asked at some point whilst preparing for the Auriaya fight in Ulduar to interrupt her Sentinel Blast spell. Immediately before casting Sentinel Blast she (Auriaya) casts a fear spell called Horrifying Screech. And everyone runs around waving their hands in the air screaming “waaaaahhhhh!!!”

Sure, you can trinket out of her fear once every two minutes if you have the right kind of PVP trinket or you can use the racial Every Man for Himself ability if you are a human. You can’t use both though since they share the same cooldown. This is where Killing Spree comes in. With the Glyph it’s normal 2 minute cooldown is reduced by 45 seconds and most importantly, if you can ensure that Killing Spree is active when her fear effect is cast, you’ll be unaffected by it, leaving you next to or near to her and ready to interrupt her Sentinel Blast spell the moment your Killing Spree completes. “How’d you like them apples?”

Again from my personal experience, I’d recommend using Killing Spree on her first Horrifying Screech which will leave your Every Man for Himself or PVP trinket available for the second screech. And if the gods are in your favour on that day, you might just have Killing Spree available for the third again. Sometimes it’s available to me, other times it still has about 1 second left on its cooldown when the third screech goes off. In which case I simply hope one of our other ‘interrupters’ is on the ball.

There’s lots of other good tricks you can perform with Killing Spree. How about a quick Tricks of the Trade + Killing Spree pull to aggro a bunch of mobs directly onto your tank? All this and more is yours completely free, so long as you’ve specced as a combat rogue!

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Summary:

And that’s about it this time around the block for our summary of how to go raiding as a Combat-SS specced rogue post patch 3.1. If you’ve got questions, simply throw them into the comments below and we’ll see if we can find you an answer.

-B-