Thus far, we’ve not paid too much attention toward Cataclysm since our focus remains firmly upon progression through the current content, Wrath of the Lich King and Icecrown Citadel. However, we now know that very few changes are likely to come out between now and Cataclysm’s release therefore our thoughts naturally have the chance to begin wandering towards the future developments being discussed.

As we already know, Cataclysm is an expansion that is spending the greater resource of its development effort on replacing the ‘classic’ content that was present in the game before the first expansion (The Burning Crusade, aka: TBC) appeared as much of that content is now so dated in tone and style that new players struggle to enjoy it and older players are loathe to repeat it.

The degree of focus on the old-world renovation means that Blizzard are only offering a further five levels of new content for existing players versus the customary ten levels that the previous two expansions have taught us to expect. It is a strange conundrum – on the one hand, Blizzard notes as defence against detractors that would rather see more high end content that players find having to play through ten levels tiresome when they have multiple characters yet at the same time are essentially encouraging all players to consider creating entirely new characters to experience the bulk of the new/revised content being generated with the old world update meaning that players would have to progress through a full eighty-five levels for each new character.

In fairness, five new levels at the max-level is understandable when the expansion’s focus is on renovation of the original game but would be a large disappointment in a subsequent expansion should Blizzard not provide some other similar diversion.

There are no new classes for Cataclysm but all existing classes are being overhauled in terms of their repertoire of existing spells and talents with the talent-trees receiving the majority of the changes. The degree to which the talent-trees are being changed in tone and focus means that most players will need to undergo a significant amount of relearning simply to play their existing class or classes with the same degree of proficiency.

Over the past week, Blizzard has begun to release the core ideas they are working on per class with regard to spells, talents and basic mechanics. Today saw the release of the proposed rogue changes which we’ll discuss below.

Three new rogue abilities have been announced. We’ll cover each one in turn and give some instant reactions and thoughts.

Redirect (Level: 81)

Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cool-down and no other costs.

Thoughts: Switching targets is a problem that surfaces far more obviously on encounters where the rogue is working on targets in a team (read: party/raid) environment that die quickly before the rogue can complete or maintain a rotation cycle. Such situations reduce the DPS output of the rogue significantly. (Example: The trash killing on the Valithria Dreamwalker fight in Icecrown Citadel or the add killing on the Lady Deathwhisper fight in Icecrown Citadel.) If the ability to ‘transfer’ combo points from a previous target to the rogue’s current target has either a low or zero energy cost, this could be a very much appreciated tool for keeping rotations running in a busy raid environment.

Questions: Will the rogue also be able to maintain CPs on prior targets whilst doing damage to another target or will the current mechanic that CPs on prior targets are lost once the rogue begins doing damage to the new target remain? If so, the rogue will need to ‘Redirect’ their CPs onto the current target as their first action.

Conclusion: This could be a fairly solid ability and one that is frequently used. Energy cost and whether it is included on the GCD table will influence its attractiveness. On balance though, it sounds like something a rogue could find good use for.

- Good for PVE levelling and questing. (Regular usage.)
- Good for PVE partying and raiding. (Frequent usage.)
- Good for PVP. (Regular usage.)

Combat Readiness (Level: 83)

Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and the timer will be refreshed whenever a new stack is applied. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped to go toe-to-toe with other melee classes when Evasion or stuns are not in play. This ability lasts 6 seconds and has a 2-minute cooldown.

Thoughts: In a PVE party or raid environment, rogues traditionally should not be taking damage. That’s what the mentally-challenged (err, we mean ‘battle hardened!’) tanks are for, being smacked about a bit! Thus, this ability is more likely to see use in a levelling and questing scenario where the rogue has to manage their own adds.

In PVP, this is likely to be quite a handy ability to pop. Rogues will need to go toe-to-toe and manage their incoming damage and this provides something toward that goal.

Questions: Is the trigger for this proccing and stacking limited to special abilities of other classes or also their ‘auto-attacks’? Does the 6-second timer refresh upon each subsequent hit or is it 6 seconds of protection from the first hit to the last, meaning it’ll rarely get to stack to the full 5-stacks and fifty percent damage reduction unless the rogue is being attacked by multiple enemies – in which case, this probably won’t save the rogue.

Conclusion: Damage reduction is damage reduction. A rogue could always find a use for it and it is a PVP inspired ability. Personally, it’s of little interest to me beyond very situational circumstances and we need more info on how a 2-min CD, 6-sec ability actually works in practice. Feint provides about the same level of protection from some types of damage already and has a 10-second CD. Cloak of Shadows provides a 90% level of protection against magical damage and is on a 90-second CD. (It also ‘almost’ fixes Vanish.)

- Average for PVE levelling and questing. (CD too long.)
- Mostly superfluous for PVE partying and raiding. (Limited usage.)
- Good for PVP. (Regular usage.)

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 game-play, 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 cool-down.

Thoughts: The most interesting ability by far. None of the new abilities really offer interesting and exciting ways to do DPS, which frankly is the main thing most ‘normal’ rogues would want to see most. This ability however does offer the sort of cool “interesting” promise that rogues do also greatly appreciate. There would seem to be more potential here for finding creative uses of the ability.

In a party or raid environment, it could serve to assist with “line of sight” pulls in open territory. Get a hunter to MD the tank (or ‘tricks’ the tank yourself), drop a smoke bomb on the tank and then pull. The mobs should run to the tank in order to be able to target him or her.

Questions: Does a player that has a rogue targeted ‘lose’ their target when the rogue drops a smoke bomb on them self or does the rogue remain targeted and is simply ‘un-attackable’ via ranged single-target abilities for the duration? This question will probably inform a great deal on how the PVP rogue makes use of the ability.

How will the ability be manifested graphically? It’s unlikely to graphically shield the players within it so we can more likely expect some form of transparent or translucent shell akin to the DK’s anti-magic shell. Something we can see but are not visually blocked by.

Conclusion: Want to bet that a boss can target the rogue with any ability regardless of the bomb? This is really just another PVP ability that the PVE rogue will find occasional utility use for but will rarely find ‘front-line’ use for – front-line use being perhaps abilities key-bound to the most commonly used keys for sake of argument. Something for the ‘toy-box’ but otherwise not much more than a novelty.

- Okay for PVE levelling and questing. (Utility pulls.)
- Average usefulness. (Utility pulls, occasional oh-crap moments.)
- Good for PVP. (Regular usage.)

New Abilities – Summary Conclusions:

Overall, Blizzard have announced three new abilities of which two are defensive PVP-oriented abilities with perhaps only limited occasional appeal to end-game PVE players. The ability with most appeal in a PVE context is an ability which one might almost wish was a standard feature of the game anyway. Consider how one might “explain away” the mechanic of combo-points at a story level anyway. Discrete levels of a rogue’s heightened ability as each subsequent ability increases the rogue’s potency? Why then, if that potency can be transferred should it be a manual process that likely costs the rogue energy or time?

There are no new directly damage-dealing abilities – the last ‘proper’ damage-dealing PVE ability for a raiding rogue was probably Mutilate that came out in the last months of 2006 prior to the release of TBC. It’s now 2010 and we have Shiv and Fan of Knives, situational poison applicator (PVP mostly) and energy-intensive AoE, of no real usage outside of the Onyxia “Many Whelps!” achievement.

The new abilities therefore are probably going to feel quite underwhelming for the PVE raiding rogues out there. PVP rogues may be more intrigued by the potential for these new moves but only time will tell.

Let’s move onto the changes being made to the rogue abilities and mechanics next.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics:

Here’s what Blizzard has announced.

In PvP, we want to reduce the rogue’s dependency on binary cool-downs and “stun-locks,” and give them more passive survivability in return. One major change is that we’ll put Cheap Shot on the same diminishing return as other stuns. The increase to Armor and Stamina on cloth, leather, and mail gear will help with this goal as well.

The defining characteristic of a rogue was to stun, debuff and control an opponent. Arena PVP (frankly: the cancer that ate the best features of WoW from the inside out) has forced Blizzard to remove all “rock/paper/scissor” relations and homogenise all classes. Stun-locks have been difficult for them to accommodate because Blizzard had to give all classes the means to escape a stun-lock (because it’s not fun to be stun-locked, clearly) and the means to create a stun-lock of their own. Perhaps not ‘quite’ as good as the rogue but enough that rogues don’t get to define themselves by their stuns to the same degree.

This change will affect PVP only with the exception of the third fight in the Trial of the Crusader/Grand Crusader raid instance because DR only exists in these PVP environs. Thus, if you play PVE, it’s hardly going to notice and if you play PVP, you’ll notice your early and mid-fight rhythm will need to change slightly to accommodate the reduction in your stun-lock duration.

In PvE, even accounting for active modifiers like Slice and Dice and Envenom, a very large portion of the rogue’s damage is attributable to passive sources of damage. Yes, they are using abilities for the entire duration of a fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of rogue damage that comes from auto-attacks and poisons. More of their damage will be coming from active abilities and special attacks.

Blizzard are driving towards a model where most of the damage comes from a player’s “special abilities” instead of their passive abilities. Currently, one of the most notable differences between an average Assassination rogue and a good one in PVE raids is the awareness they have of the power of the Envenom buff and their success in achieving the maximum uptime of that buff. It is rather surprising how many rogues are outperformed due to this by players of lesser gear.

This is one for the ‘wash’ – we need to see how they balance their mechanics to understand the impact of the change and what avenues are then opened for more skilled or knowledgeable players to differentiate themselves.

We would like to improve the rogue levelling experience. Positional attacks and DoT-ramping mechanics will be de-emphasized at low levels and then re-introduced at higher levels for group game-play. We are also providing rogues with a new low-level ability, Recuperate, to convert combo points into a small heal-over-time (HoT).

The biggest slow-down for a questing and levelling rogue is downtime needed to regain health. If this helps reduce that, it’ll be welcomed across the board. Let pots, less bandages, just CPs!

In PVP, the value of this will depend on the size of the heal but it’s likely we’ll still need to foster good relations with our healer friends!

To complement the change to combo points, non-damage abilities such as Recuperate and Slice and Dice will no longer have target requirements and can be used with any of the rogue’s existing combo points, including combo points remaining on recently killed targets. This will not affect damage abilities, which will still require combo points to be present on the specific target you want to damage. To coincide with this, the UI will be updated so that rogues know how many combo points they have active.

SnD almost worked this way in the past. If you had (say) three CPs on a mob and it died, you could use up those CPs with SnD before attacking the next mob. It appears we’re going to get that type of ability back which is a nice-to-have as far as rogue mechanics are concerned. Will rogues be allowed to ‘store’ CPs on multiple targets other than the one they currently attack or just on one other target? Guess the latter, hope for the former!

Ambush will now work with all weapons, but will have a reduced coefficient when not using a dagger. When opening from Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose from burst damage, DoT abilities, or a stun.

Excellent. It was inconsistent with the ‘rogue story’ not to be able to ‘ambush’ a target with any weapon. Much like being able to “Mutilate in the face”, this is essentially Blizzard correcting an oversight.

As we’ve done recently with some of the Subtlety abilities, we want to make sure more rogue abilities aren’t overly penalized by weapon choice. With a few exceptions (like Backstab), you should be able to use a dagger, axe, mace, sword, or fist weapon without being penalized for most attacks.

Again, this is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with having abilities be able to be more weapon agnostic nor is there anything wrong with an ability becoming empowered if one specific weapon is used. A backstab with a sword should be possible for example, but one might imagine daggers would be faster when used to stab. Let’s see how Blizzard models this ambition.

Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in the ranged slot. In addition, we hope to allow rogues to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.

Could this be the end of rogues carrying bows, crossbows and guns? It depends how much we want to use those two abilities – in a PVE raid rogues are still more likely to favour stats over those PVP-centric abilities. Some rogues have a little fun with FoK on trash. In a boss fight, it’s incredibly rare to waste energy on FoK. FoK with DP on both hands in Onyxia was the one exception when killing ‘Many Whelps’ thanks to the energy-regenerating properties of certain talents and DP combined. The ranged weapons will need to be able to have poison applied to them otherwise rogue functionality will be diminished. In ways most PVE rogues won’t be too bothered about.

We are very happy with Tricks of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to give rogues more group utility, but we don’t want it to account for as much threat transfer as it does now.

Since classic end-game WoW, only Gurtogg Bloodboil in Black Temple has challenged rogues to watch their aggro versus the tanks. In all other situations, a good tank has been able to generate way more threat than the rogue meaning rogues did not need to feint. An occasional ‘tricks’ plus the ubiquitous Vanish, which rogues have been using anyway in an offensive capacity, has been enough to manage threat.

If TotT transfers less threat, the ability will be less appealing to use – without a T10 2-piece bonus the energy cost for some rogue specs means it won’t get used – it’s DPS increase for the target is over-mitigated by a greater DPS loss for the rogue.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics – Summary Conclusions:

It’s very early days and some of these changes are interesting whilst others are more or less “change for change’s sake”. There seems to be more focus on PVP again but that’s hard to judge until we see final updates.

We’ve now looked at ‘New Abilities’ and ‘Changes to Abilities and Mechanics’. Finally, let’s look at what Blizzard has announced for rogues regarding ‘New Talents and Talent Changes’:

New Talents and Talent Changes:
The following quotes were made by Blizzard at the close of this early preview:

Assassination will be more about daggers, poisons, and burst damage.

Combat will be all about swords, maces, fist weapons, axes, and being engaged toe-to-toe with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without needing to rely on Stealth and evasion mechanics.

The Subtlety tree will primarily be based around utilizing Stealth, openers, finishers, and survivability. It’ll be about daggers, too, but less so than Assassination.

No word on whether there will be any effort by Blizzard on pushing certain trees towards specific activities, such that one tree favours PVE, another PVP and so on. Subtlety got to go raiding via Honor Among Thieves (aka: HAT). Personally, I’ve really enjoyed being able to go raiding with an assassination build and daggers and HAT was a huge amount of fun in a raid environment (and horrible outside of a raid!) but the variety was appreciated. Let’s keep fingers crossed that all tastes can be accommodated to a reasonable degree here. It has been done before.

In general, Subtlety rogues need to do more damage than they do today, and the other trees need to have more tools.

Ideally, I want to be able to go PVE raiding with investment in each talent tree and have comparable potential performance (ie: super-high DPS!) but a distinctly different flavour and play-style through different abilities. If I spent a lot of time PVPing, I’d want the same for my arena and BG play, such that my enemies would react quite differently depending on which tree I’d most heavily placed my points into.

This could help that as part of the overall ambition.

Weapon-specialization talents (for all classes, not just rogues) are going away. We do not want you to have to respec when you get a different weapon. Interesting talents, such as Hack and Slash, will work with all weapons. Boring talents, such as Mace Specialization and Close Quarters Combat, will be going away.

As noted before, the only real problem for rogues with weapon specs came with ranged weapons. Levelling any melee weapon was incredibly easy and the concept fitted well with the story of a rogue, or any melee class character for that matter.

Blizzard have stated that they strongly dislike the “power dial” effect of talents like Hunger for Blood that they’ve created and used to help balance the trees and the class. Need to nerf the class because it’s a bit overpowered? Dial down HfB from 15% to 9% and it’s job done. Rogues return into the pack from their earlier loftier position.

In Cataclysm, we’re losing these power-dial talents because they’re boring. Now, every tree just gets one single un-selectable power-dial. It looks like class balance in Cataclysm will be achieved by tweaking the mastery stats. There’s no shame in that.

In light of this, how about we replace the ‘boring’ talents with super-fun ones instead then? Let’s see some real imagination brought in.

The Assassination and Combat talent trees currently have a lot of passive bonuses. We plan to dial back the amount of Critical Strike Rating provided by these trees so that rogues still want it on their gear.

This point is academic. If we get it passively, we won’t want it on gear. If we don’t, we will. Unless another stat benefits us all. You could pontificate on this point all day long. We won’t.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Assassination

Melee damage
Melee critical damage
Poison damage

Combat

Melee damage
Melee Haste
Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety

Melee damage
Armor Penetration
Harder-hitting finishers

That all appears as one might expect. Poisons are the speciality of assassination rogues, speed of attack of the combat rogues and finishing moves of the subtlety rogues. Not sure on the last one but it’s acceptable. We’d have thought subtlety’s main feature was … subtlety, which a big finish pretty much is the opposite of.

New Talents and Talent Changes – Summary Conclusions:
Overall, we like the seeming ambition to remove dull damage-boosting talents from the trees and only wonder if Blizzard have the imagination left to come up with some good fun replacement talents instead. It is starting to feel like they have begun to reach the end of their creative well-spring on this subject.

There are plenty of things to be interested in from what we’ve read in Blizzard’s announcement and very little of such note that we should have any real concern. The talent changes represent the largest sea-change on how we’ll spec, equip and play our rogues in whatever endeavours we prefer, be that PVP or PVE. All classes are in a boat like this one though so we are not alone.

For players at the end-game, it would appear that Cataclysm will offer them about 50% of the content that previous expansions brought plus the ability to fly around the continents of the original game. (Question: Will we be prevented from flying in the content zones for levels 80-85 as per Blizzard’s preference to keep us grounded for levelling? No idea yet, but we’ve never objected to the concept in the past, only the silly prices.)

For those players willing or keen to run through the whole levelling experience once more, the newly revised levelling process may be suitably new and rewarding to make the journey worthwhile. From a PVE raiding rogue’s perspective though, there’s not too much to be excited about just yet.

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-

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-

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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!

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-

In a previous edition of Cheapshots we defined a focus macro for using our Tricks of the Trade (TotT) ability on a friendly target that we’ve set our focus target upon. This macro works well and does exactly what it says on the tin (to use a somewhat cliched expression) but there are occasions when our focus target is not set to the character that we wish to use TotT on. Today’s improvements to our TotT macro should help to address that problem.

The original TotT focus-macro:
/cast [target=focus,exists] Tricks of the Trade
/ra Broliant cast Tricks of the Trade on %f.

It only takes a few seconds if we’re quick to target another character, set them to be our focus target and then switch back to our previous target but it’s still time we have to stop doing DPS and therefore that’s time we would be glad not to waste.

Our macro can be improved fairly simply to become a little bit smarter about the way it works and that extra “smartness” might just help us to save a few precious seconds of on-target DPS time. Here’s how the improved TotT macro looks:

The new and improved TotT macro:
/cast [help] [target=focus, help] [target=targettarget, help] Tricks of the Trade

As you can see, this is slightly more than a straight-forward focus-macro. Let’s explain what it’s trying to do:

• If your current target is friendly, use TotT on your current target.
• Else, if your focus target is friendly, use TotT on your focus target.
• Else, cast TotT on the target of your current target if friendly.

Note: The last condition here essentially causes TotT to be cast on your tank typically in a group situation or on yourself in solo/rogue-tanking situations – not that you get any benefit when you’re the target sadly.

Hopefully, the end result of this improved TotT macro is the ability to use TotT in more situations without having to spend DPS time setting a suitable target on which to cast TotT.

You’ll also notice we’ve removed the “/ra Broliant cast Tricks…” line from the macro. It’s not really that important to be spamming raid chat with such a notice and we’ve not quite learned the required macro-mojo yet to know how to select the name of the character on which our macro ultimately casts TotT.

We’ll report back again here if we find out how to announce the correct name but for now, perhaps it will suffice simply to have the improved functionality this macro-update provides.

-B-

Following our recent article on raiding as an assassination-mutilate specced rogue, we realised that we’d mentioned the use of several macros which we didn’t take the time to explain in the body of the text. Therefore we’re picking up that loose thread here today to explain how we do some of these things we spoke about.

The “Auto Pick-Pocketing” Macro:

First up, an olden but golden macro that is not really a “raiding” related macro but is perhaps one you can setup once and then use for the next two years without thinking about it. Yep, it’s the magical “pick-pocketing” macro and for it to work, you must first go into your Interface Options/Controls panel in-game and ensure that the “Auto Loot” option is ticked.

With this done, simply create a macro that you will use to replace the ability you plan to use from stealth at the start of the fight, be it Ambush, Cheapshot, Garotte or otherwise. Then either drop the macro onto your button bar and/or keybind it according to your preferences.

PP-Garrote:
#showtooltip Garrote
/cast Pick Pocket
/stopcasting
/cast Garrote

Although this macro won’t work on bosses, it won’t break anything or prevent your main action (garrote here) from being cast and when you do happen upon a mob with pockets, you’ll get some free loot and coin for your trouble. What’s not to like?!

The “Focus-On-My-Tank” Macro:

I have several copies of this macro for ease and convenience. All it allows me to do is to set my focus target to one of my raid’s tanks. This is typically a pre-emptive move on my part indicating that I plan to use Tricks of the Trade (TotT) on them.

Focus-{tank-name}:
/target {tank-name}
/focus
/targetlasttarget

* Replace {tank-name} with the name of the tank (or other player) that you want to set as your focus target. Also, don’t include the “{}” brackets.

In raids, this macro helps me apply TotT to one of my tanks but you could also set-up a macro like this if you wanted to trade TotT with a fellow rogue in your raid, hoping that he or she will return the favour, so that you both gain a periodical 15% damage buff.

The “Cast Ability on my Focus Target” Macro:

In this case, the example below shows the macro I use to cast Tricks of the Trade onto my focus target, if it exists. It’s handy to be able to do this because by using a focus target, I only lose time to the energy used to cast TotT and not for targetting my tank and then retargetting the next mob in the kill-order.

Focus-TotT:
/cast [target=focus,exists] Tricks of the Trade
/ra Broliant cast Tricks of the Trade on %f.

TotT is the ability I most commonly use this macro for but I also have additional copies for other abilities such as Blind which can me handy when fighting bosses that mind control players and turn them against your team-mates.

Summary:

These three macros are the bread and butter of what I’m currently using. The point of any macro is to speed up and simplify common and/or complex actions and I’d encourage everyone to make liberal use of macros to streamline their play. It can make a real difference to the overall efficiency of your game and that’s a very good thing indeed.

-B-

Prior to the release of patch 3.1, the highest reliable raiding specs for a rogue were the mutilate based assassination builds. These builds however were some of the more involved to play – the rotations were sufficiently tight that getting unlucky just once with the random number generator (RNG) or being forced to step away from the target to avoid a void zone, fire wall or a raging marshmallow-man could, and generally would, cause something in the rotation to drop and that was generally expensive, both in terms of the DPS lost and the time it took to restart the rotation again.

Then along came patch 3.1 and with it came a number of changes and alterations that have made assassination a much more streamlined build to play. No longer must the budding mutilate rogue buff themselves three times before every single pull and then keep one eye on the 15 second timer just to remain even remotely competitive on DPS. No more will the dagger based rogue cry to the heavens as their envenom misses causing Slice and Dice to expire. In short, no more will the assassination rogues feel like life is just too short for all this!

Hunger for Blood (HfB) is now a single-stacking buff that can be applied to the rogue as soon as the target has sustained a bleed-effect debuff. The buff gives the rogue 15% increased dps for a duration of one minute. It can be glyphed to give an additional 3% dps (making 18% in total) making HfB the most potent use of a single talent point in any of the three rogue talent trees.

In addition to the HfB change, the switch-over of staple rogue poisons to a Procs-Per-Minute (PPM) modality from their earlier ‘chance of application upon hit’ standard has had rogues revising their weapon choices whilst the improvement to Envenom that allows it to now increase both the chance and the PPM of applying deadly poison means that building and maintaining a ’5-stack’ of deadly poison on a target is now relatively easy and quick.

So, how do you setup your rogue to go raiding post 3.1 as an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue? Well, we’re glad you asked and if you settle yourself in comfortably, we’ll begin.

Talent Specs for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

There are a number of variations on the same basic talent spec but the key thing to note for any rogues that raided with an Assassination-Mutilate build before 3.1 is that Murder is now a viable talent (assuming you are moving into Ulduar where the mobs are not Undead by majority) and that Master Poisoner (MP) is now generally preferred over Turn the Tables (TtT) due to the improvements and changes made to poison mechanics and Envenom.

You can view many different specs at Talentchic’s Rogue Table but for quickness, the build that yours truly is running at the moment is this one which you’ll see has taken Murder, switched TtT for MP and dropped two points from Precision in order to invest two points in Improved Slice and Dice (Imp.SnD).

If you have not already reached the necessary hit-cap, you may benefit more from keeping those two points in Precision but since Broliant does not need the hit, the remaining options were investing the two points in Imp.SnD or filling up Close Quarters Combat (CQC) for an extra 2% crit. Although 2% crit is never a bad thing, prior experience of Wrath raiding has shown us that the melee are expected to run away from their targets on a regular basis to avoid fire and snow and all other hurtful things.

Whilst outside of melee range, our ability to maintain our self-buffs (HfB and SnD) is greatly reduced and therefore the extra margin of flexibility provided by Imp.SnD generally pays for itself by reducing the amount of energy lost when we’re forced to restart an interrupted raid rotation. As with all things, although there are the basic cookie-cutter builds, you should always evaluate them in context with your own gear and experience to ensure that you find the best mesh between the two.

Glyphs for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

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

• Glyph of Hunger for Blood
• Glyph of Mutilate
• Glyph of Rupture

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.

Gear for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:
The obvious gear requirement for an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue is that you need two daggers in order to be able to use Mutilate. At the time of writing, most regular raiders will be heading into Ulduar after having spent a few months running through Naxxramas. If you have been lucky, you’ll have been able to win the following two daggers from Naxxramas bosses which respectively represent the Best in Slot (BiS) daggers available pre-Ulduar to rogues.

• Main Hand: Sinister Revenge
• Off Hand: Webbed Death

Aside from these daggers, you’ll generally just want to gather the best gear you can depending upon where you are running, what your looting chances are and so forth. As always, I’ll recommend the inimitable ShadowPanther.net site as the resource you should use to get some understanding of how each piece of gear stacks up against other pieces of gear for the same slot.

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.

Poisons for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

Now that poisons have had their fundamental mechanics changed, the selection of poisons for an assassination-mutilate rogue is more familiar to the old-school players among us. Simply setup your poisons as follows:

• Main Hand: Instant Poison IX
• Off Hand: Deadly Poison IX

Instant poison will become one of the higher contributors to your overall DPS whilst deadly poison on the off-hand ensures that you have the ability to Envenom whenever you can work it into your rotation.

Rotations for an Assassination-Mutilate Rogue:

Ideally, you’ll begin every new encounter from stealth and with full energy. Of course, in a multi-mob fight you’ll move from target to target and simply have to adjust to ensure you preserve your rotation as best you can. Assuming the ideal scenario however, this is the standard rotation you should be looking to perform.

1. From stealth, get behind the target and Garotte.
2. Activate Hunger for Blood to buff your dps.
3. Activate Slice and Dice with the Combo Points (CPs) from Garotte.
4. Mutilate Twice. If you don’t have 5CPs, use Shiv to get that last one.
5. Activate Rupture.
6. Mutilate Twice. If you don’t have 5CPs, use Shiv to get that last one.
7. Envenom, to consume CPs and to maximally refresh the SnD timer.
8. You rotation is now primed, maintain it as follows.
9. Mutilate to 5CPs and refresh Rupture as it expires.
10. Mutilate to 5CPs and Envenom to refresh the SnD timer.
11. Monitor HfB and refresh it as it expires.
12. Repeat the last three steps to maintain your rotation. **

** The only other thing to monitor here is the amount of ‘slack’ you have after your first Envenom. In some fights, you may be able to squeeze an additional Envenom into the cycle before building CPs to refresh Rupture. This is something you’ll need to adjust according to the circumstances of the fight you are in and the specifics of your own performance, your gear, your buffs and so on.

In addition to the above, you will sometimes need to squeeze other abilities into your rotation cycle such as Cold Blood(CB), Tricks of the Trade (TotT), Feint and so forth. The following tips should help you do that in the most beneficial way.

• Cold Blood – In some fights you will want to use this as many times as possible therefore simply hold it until you are ready to do a 5CP Envenom and then use it thereafter each time it comes off cooldown. In other fights, it can benefit you more to hold it until a certain event happens.

  Two Ulduar examples that spring to mind are when doing DPS on the Heart in the XT-002 Deconstructor fight and when doing DPS on Hodir after receiving the 165% DPS crit-buff from the Non Player Character (NPC). In both of these cases your Cold Blood ensures a very nice increase in damage done. At the time of writing, a 40K Envenom crit against Hodir with the buff active is my best Envenom strike and that was made in the normal (10-man) mode. Imagine what could be achieved with buffs from another 15 players!

• Tricks of the Trade: – This is of more use to you as a means of either boosting someone else’s DPS or of building a larger gap between you and (say) your tank so that you can continue doing as much personal DPS as possible.

  On my rogue I have macros setup to set any of my raid’s tanks as my “Focus Target” at the push of a single button. I then have another macro that casts TotT on my focus target at the press of another button. With this all pre-configured, as an encounter begins I can then engage the first kill target and start to build my rotation. If energy allows within the time-frame, I then use TotT on my tank just before my first 5CP Envenom. (NB: By ‘time-frame’, we mean before the SnD timer expires. Refreshing this via Envenom is your first priority here.) If I don’t have time to put TotT onto my tank on the first time round – which is a common occurrance due to the tighter constraints that are in place as the rotation is being launched – then I simply hold off on using it until the second time around.

  Of course, in such cases I also pay much closer attention to my threat vs the threat built by the tank because if the tank happens to have an unlucky streak of misses/blocks/dodges etc, our respective threat-levels could become dangerously close.

• Feint: – There are not many occasions now in which Feint really is needed as part of a standard rotation. Gurtogg Bloodboil in Black Temple is probably the last fight I can easily remember where our tanks had sufficient difficulty building a good threat margin between themselves and the dps that feint was brought into the standard mix.

  Feint gained a new trick however in Patch 3.0.8. in that it also reduces all Area of Effect (AoE) damage taken by 50% for six seconds. During encounters where sizeable amounts of AoE are being done, slipping a quick Feint into the mix at an appropriate time gives your healers an easier time in keeping you alive and thus enables you to keep on keeping on.

  The first obvious use for this in Ulduar is in the XT-002 Deconstuctor fight when the boss does its Timpanic Tantrum effect. The first couple of times your raid group meets this effect you’ll be able to hear the high-pitched whistle of air as your healers squeal in pain at the work they need to do. Pop feint as the effect begins and you’ll hardly notice what all the fuss is about.

Summary:

And that’s about it for the moment for our summary of how to go raiding as an Assassination-Mutilate specced rogue post patch 3.1. We hope you’ve found the above information of use and as with all things, remember to have fun!

-B-