One Rogue's Journey

Does anyone else miss drums?

I miss drums.

Ba-Boom Boom Click

Another two-fer today. Boy am I being generous. I wonder why? Maybe it’s the phase of the moon or maybe it was a post by Ghostcrawler saying that they owe rogues more dps. Oh GC, you wily crab, how did you know I liked presents in the form of big numbers?

Here’s the comment everyone’s favorite crab for those of you who hate visiting the forums:

1) I think this is totally valid and we owe rogues some dps. We have been cautious because we can’t afford to give them any more PvP dps and those crafty rogues tend to use PvE dps for PvP.

2) This is not a big concern of ours. The goal is not to make every dps class equal on every single encounter. Mages, locks, ele shamans and boomkins (and possibly hunters) have great AE. Not every class needs great AE. We want rogues, DKs, ferals, warriors, enhancement shammies and everyone I have forgotten to do decent enough AE that they don’t feel dumb standing around on AE pulls. Every pull currently feels like an AE pull. It won’t always be that way.

3) I think this falls in between 1 and 2. Classes aren’t supposed to have buffs so good that you always want to bring them. We built a lot of redundancy into the system. However we are taking a hard look at cases where someone’s buff comes easier or more reliably than another class. Saying “every raid has a warrior” isn’t very compelling in our mind. Saying “their buff is a passive ability while ours is a proc that takes 5 talent points” is a bigger deal we need to fix.

Now on to business.

Everyone knows Vanish can be a little finicky at times (I personally don’t have a lot of trouble with it but every now and then it just doesn’t take). This is little macro is just a little bit of extra insurance.

A little bit of love for you Sub rogues out there. Since Preparation resets the cooldown on these abilities why not fire them off before you use it? Just don’t spam it or you’ll waste your second use.

So I have big announcement/surprise set for next week. Are you excited? I’m excited.

Two questions, two answers today. I know…I know…I’m too kind.

Berserking or Mongoose? I’d like to know which enchants are best for PvP & PvE situations, given the 25% reduction in armor on Berserking.

I personally have Mongoose on my weapons for PvE. However, for PvE Berserking is the superior DPS enchant. On my server Abyss Crystals are ridiculously expensive so I went the cheap route. If you have a best in slot weapon or just one you don’t plan to replace for a long time and can afford it, go with Berserking. Otherwise, Mongoose is a perfectly acceptable substitution.

Now, on to PvP. If the question is Berserking vs Mongoose, I’d have to go Mongoose since the loss of armor from Berserking seems less than ideal. However, if you’re looking for the best weapon enchant for PvP I would be inclined to suggest Exceptional Agility. On-proc events like Mongoose shine the longer the fight lasts and PvP has become rather bursty and a flat, constant Agility boost feels, to me, to be the stronger choice. Now, I’m not a PvP expert so take that with a grain of salt…perhaps someone in the comments can confirm or deny my assumption?

what is the best rotation for mutilate pve raiding rogue..thx for the help

Let me preface this by saying that I am not Mutilate. I have, however, done a significant amount of research on the subject (as I will likely be going Mutilate someday) and I believe I can speak knowledgeably on it.

Let me post-preface (making up words is fun) that by speaking on the concept of rotations a bit. Please remember that rotations are not set in stone (especially with Mutilate) and you should always be aware of your situation and adapt to it.

First, I like the idea of a nice little Cold Blood Macro to always make sure you’re using it whenever it is up:

Before the fight begins get yourself 3 stacks of Hunger for Blood (HfB). Your number one priority is to make sure this never, never, never drops. Having to reply 3 fresh stacks (at the cost of 3 global cooldowns and 90 energy!) is a huge DPS loss. This is a big balancing act, you don’t want to reapply it too early because you’re wasting time on it but letting it fall off is even worse so err on the side of caution with this one. Hot Tip: Always refresh it before a stun effect like Maexxna’s Web Wrap.

Cast Tricks of the Trade on your tank and open the fight with Garrote (EDIT: Some commenters -thanks all!- mentioned that Ambush would be a better opener due to the fact that it adds 2-combo points. I had totally forgotten about his change and that’s a excellent choice.) followed by Slice and Dice (SnD). SnD is your number two priority. Luckily for you, thanks to Cut to the Chase, Envenom restores SnD to it’s a full 5 combo point stack but don’t let it fall off or you’ll have to reapply it manually. Like with HfB, try to refresh it before a stun if possible. Hot Tip: Always refresh SnD with Envenom before you have less than 2 global cooldowns (GCD) remaining (3 seconds) – particularly if you are below the expertise cap. A boss dodging your Envenom means no refreshed SnD which makes you a sad panda.

After SnD is up, Mutilate up to 4 or 5 combo points (In 2 Mutilates there is a strong chance that Seal Fate will proc and in the first rotation Cold Blood will guarantee that it does, so you will very likely have 5 combo points, but if you only have four don’t sweat it) and then Envenom to give SnD its full duration.

Mutilate again up to 4 or 5 combo points and Rupture.

At this point the rotation comes down to repeating these steps while keeping track of your top four priorities, which in order are:

• Stay Alive
• Keeping Hunger For Blood Up
• Keeping Slice and Dice Up (with Envenom)
• Keeping Rupture Up

Other Tips:
Generally you want to Envenom with 4 or 5 combo points but if SnD is about to drop go ahead and throw one with whatever amount you have.

Use Vanish whenever it is up and Garrote. The extra damage from Garrote is nice but the real purpose of this is to take full advantage of Overkill.

I say again, remember that no rotation is set in stone. Just relax, watch your timers and trust your instincts (they will get better and better with time and practice).

Have a question you’d like answered? Leave a comment or drop me a line.

Remember, follow your heart and stab your enemy in theirs.

So it’s Monday, and you know what that means. Zaltu has blurry eyes from lack of sleep, a Dr. Pepper to feed his caffeine addiction and perhaps a lame pun or two in his bag of tricks? Oh, oh, maybe he’ll say something off the wall silly for lack of anything substantial to say? To that, I reply…blast, I’m being predictable, it’s time for a change, time to shake things up around here…eh..screw it. Have I mentioned that I like robots?

Sideish-note: Sleep is a good thing, don’t skip out on it.

A good week overall for me, I finished off higher learning (thank you constant server crashes — see, always look on the bright side of life) and I’m currently just a Gundrak run away from my Elder title. Running around and grabbing the Elders can be tedious, but it can also be fun. I recommend grabbing a few friends and making a day of it (Hot Tip: Take a taxi cab mage with you for lazy easy travel). The friends are particularly useful for the opposing faction cities and world PvP is always good for a laugh. Like when a Death Knight decided he would grip what he thought was a nice squishy priest all by herself. Guess what buddy, there was a rogue and mage right around the corner. He wasn’t laughing but we sure were. You really shouldn’t touch our priest. Seriously.

Let’s do this thing, shall we?

Last Week’s Results

• Reputations

Alright you slimy fish people, we’re exalted now, so you best drop my mount when I open my egg today or else…or else I’ll be forced to buy another one and wait another week. You don’t want me to do that, trust me.

• Professions

I thought long and hard about leveling fishing but in the end I decided that running figure eights around random people in the Horde bank of Dalaran would be a better use of my time. Boy was I ever right.

• Battlegrounds

I hate AV, but I stuck to my guns and much to my surprise we actually won one. I still need 11 more marks for my Howler so, 11 more games to go I suppose.

This Week’s List

• Achievements

Get that Gundrak run and finish off my Elder title. No sense in putting it off.

• Battlegrounds

Grab those 11 marks and be done with AV forever!!! Just kidding, I’ll still need more to grab other PvP mounts. Oh how I loathe that place.

Gonna be a relaxed week for me. What’s everyone else up to?

Today is a two for the price of one day. And with the price of one being free, this is clearly a win-win-win situation. No need to thank me, though I will accept all manner of gifts.

Before we jump into the macros I’d like to take a moment to rant about patch 3.0.8…just kidding, everyone has already done just that so I’ll go against the grain and say something positive (I’m such a rebel). No cooldown on Fan of Knives is awesome. That is all.

A little something for the combat rogues out there. A single button that will cast Adrenaline Rush or Blade Flurry depending on whether you’re pressing ctrl or alt. In addition to that, if you have no modifier, it will use castsequence to cast Blade Flurry on the first press and then Adrenaline Rush on the second press. The sequence reset whenever you change targets. I find this particularly useful on boss fights.

This one is a bit silly but it’s a quick little spammer macro to use when you’re out hunting pests for the new achievement, Pest Control. I suggest checking wowhead a list of locations.

Have a macro suggestion, request or question? Let me know.

Happy hunting and enjoy your weekend, I know I will. I plan to spend it spamming fan of knives for the annoying sound.

As you can see, I picked up my Albino Drake last night. Isn’t she ugly as sin pretty? This achievement is actually relatively easy to do. Granted you have to find yourself exalted with several factions but there are achievements for these as well so you are firmly in two bird/one stone territory.

There are plenty of ways to get yourself 50 mounts but here is how I did it:

• 3 Skeletal Horses (Regular) from Undercity Exalted
• 2 Skeletal Warhorses (Epic) from Undercity Exalted
• 3 Wolves (Regular) from Orgrimar Exalted
• 3 Wolves (Epic) from Orgrimar Exalted
• 3 Raptors (Regular) from Darkspear Trolls Exalted
• 3 Raptors (Epic) from Darkspear Trolls Exalted
• 2 Kodos (Regular) from Thunderbluff Exalted
• 3 Kodos (Epic) from Thunderbluff Exalted
• 4 Chocobos Hawkstriders (Regular) from Silvermoon Exalted
• 3 Chocobos Hawkstriders (Epic) from Silvermoon Exalted
• 8 (!) Talbuks (Epic) from Mag’har Exalted
• 1 Armored Brown Bear from the vendor in Dalaran
• 1 Black War Bear from the For the Horde achievement
• 1 Ice Mammoth from Sons of Hodir Revered
• 3 Wind Riders (Regular)
• 1 Wind Rider (Epic)
• 1 Red Drake (Epic) from Wyrmrest Exalted
• 5 Netherdrakes (Epic) from Netherwing Exalted

And your done! Ta da!…? You’ll notice I took the brute force buy your way into it approach (and thus ended up with 8 Tabulks which I plan to never summon ever) and there are certainly other (slightly cheaper) ways to go about this. Namely the PvP mounts and some of the rare drops.

Damn achievements…they make me do crazy things.

Either way, I love my Albino Drake…I don’t care what anyone says, she’s pretty damnit.

Hurray for patch day!

Zaltu- have you figured out yet what the ideal amount of hit, crit, should be balanced out with agi?

I think my hit might be a little low, I am at 215, with my crit at something like 31-33% (of course all these stats are unbuffed) with like 1040 Agility… I’m wondering if I need to increase my hit?

Hit is a bit of a tricky question nowadays and I’ve been recently re-evaluating my stance on it. Everyone can agree that it is the most valuable stat – until you hit the poison hit cap. The poison hit cap with no buffs at all is 315. If you have access to improved faerie fire or misery then the cap drops to 237 and if you happen to be Alliance and have a Draenei around the cap drops again to 210. (All of these numbers assume you have 5/5 Precision).

So the question is, which of these two poison hit caps should you be shooting for – 315 or 237/210? If you’re a long time reader of my blog I believe my answer will surprise you (it surprised me). You should be aiming for the latter, 237/210.

Why?

Well, more often than not, in a 25 man raid, you will have access to one of these two buffs. With that in mind, the loss in DPS from not having the buff is less significant than being over-capped when you have buff. In the former situation at least you have more agility/attack power/crit to compensate. Ideally it would be great to have two sets of gear, one of each cap that you could change depending on the situation but that is a timely and expensive endeavor that’s probably not worth it for most people.

As for what to do when you hit the cap?  I would just gem straight Agility because it’s delicious and provides both attack power and crit.

Edit: All of that being said, it should be noted that caps are not overall goals and most of this advice applies to gemming and enchanting. Gear should be looked at on an individual basis through use of a spreadsheet.

Side Note: Happy 3.0.8 day everyone. I’m most looking forward to no more diminished returns on reputation gains from killing mobs! What are you all looking forward to?

Side-Side Note: Since moving my feedburner account over to google (Google bought them) I’ve seen my subscriber numbers drop about 50%. I hope this is just a statistical error and you all didn’t lose the feed.

Have a question you’d like answered? Leave a comment or drop me a line.

Remember, follow your heart and stab your enemy in theirs.

Ah, another week, another list of arbitrary goals. Since I’m well known for being easily distracted (particularly by shiny objects…pretty…) these lists actually really help me stay focused, which is a good thing…probably. I finished up For the Horde this week which was great fun and got a nice mount that I’ll never use. Add it to the stable, 29 and counting. Speaking of counting, below is a picture of me with my latest pet, pet number 44. Interesting side note, this is the last picture taken of me still wielding my Warglaive. I replaced it with a paper cutter a few minutes later. I cried a little, I mean, no I didn’t I’m not a wuss…yes I did and it was a lot.

On to the list:

Last Week’s Results

• Reputations

So the walrus people love me now…awesome? I picked up my pet and flew away never to return again. In a surprise to even me, I also hit exalted with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, which in turn was my 15th exalted faction (yeah, I’m a little weak in the exalted faction department). I’m down to needing just the Kirin tor for the meta-achievement and boy is their tabard ugly.

• Professions

Ha! I must have been delirious when I wrote up this. Me, farm when I don’t absolutely need to? To quote a classic: “Yeah, and monkeys will fly out of my butt.”

• Random

I ran Strat 3 or 4 times, nothing too spectacular here. I hear they are raising the reputation gained from killing mobs in there come 3.0.8 so maybe I should hold off a bit before I burn myself out.

This Week’s List

• Reputations

Exalted with the Oracles. I haven’t been giving these cute slimy fish people a fair amount of attention since I got revered and have been able to get my egg, which is really just laziness on my part since their dailies are super easy and quick. Really though, they have yet to give up the rock on my mount so it’s actually more their fault. I’ll hit them up everyday this week and be done with it.

• Professions

I am going to think about leveling fishing. Just think about, no promises on anything else. Wow, I’m done with this one already. This is gonna be a good week.

• Battlegrounds

Run at least one AV a day. AV is terrible for the horde on my battlegroup right now with most matches (if they start at all) being 40 – 13 or so but I really want my Frostwolf Howler.

So what is everyone else up to this week?

Let’s assume that in this space right here I have said something extremely witty and clever. Perhaps it was a pun, maybe a nice metaphor or just a funny observation. It can be anything, that’s the power of your imagination.

On to business.

This little guy (personification is fun!) will cast Blind on the target you are currently moused-over, your focus, your current target or your target’s target, in that order of precedence. If the target is your mouseover than it will focus it which will allow you to watch the debuff through addons like ClassTimer. A nifty little macro, particularly in PvP and in those weird emergency PvE situtations (you break it, you tank it).

Side Note: I’ve been very pleased with the response to Ask Zaltu and I hope to answer as many questions as possible. My plan is the run the column once a week, most likely on Tuesday or Thursday but this could (will) change depending on the number of questions I receive.

Happy Weekend.

I receive a few questions in the comments now and then and mostly I just reply inside the comments if it’s a quick question. Yesterday I received an interesting set of questions that I thought would be perfect for the start of my new Question & Answer column. Let’s not waste any (more) time.

Hey guys, love the site! Heard from a friend on some podcast actually…well I rolled sub (tri-wield with stance-set switcher) for the longest time. Dagger swap to main hand for ambushes but recently was mut for awhile…absolutely loved it.

First off, glad you like the site! Wow, I haven’t heard talk of the sub tri-wield spec in a long time. My understanding is that was a Vanilla (Pre-BC) WoW thing.

Anycase, combat was the only spec I haven’t used so I went this way and actually took some advice from a friend to use backstab. I have webbed death and titansteel shanker atm. I did descent dps 2100+ in gundrak last night but am wondering if I get instinctively good at combat will it top my mut build dps? Is backstab really not viable? When I say that…I”m not asking for opinions I’m asking for statistics…facts. Can you really not out dps a mut rogue with backstab combat?

Ahh…backstab combat, you’re really striking close to my heart with this one. Will you be able to do pretty good DPS with a backstab combat build? Yes, mostly likely. Will you be able to out dps a mutilate rogue? Well, that depends on the rogue, but given similar gear and skill levels I would say, no. As far as hard and fast numbers I can’t give you those but what I can do is highly recommend checking out some of the rogue spreadsheets where you can see how the different specs are modeled.

Is backstab really not viable as combat? It pains me, but I would say no. Correction, sure it is viable but I believe that a fist/dagger, fist/sword or sword/sword build is better. The reason for this is combo point generation. Sinister Strike costs 45 energy (40 with the talent) whereas Backstab costs 60. Without going to deep into the math of energy regeneration you’re looking at 3 Sinister Strikes per 2 Backstabs, which may not seem like a lot (just one combo point difference) but this will become 6 per 4, then 9 per 6, then 12 per 8 and so on and so forth. When you add in the Glyph of Sinister Strike, the combo point generation really begins to outpace Backstab. Higher combo point generation means more Slice and Dice uptime, more Rupture uptime and more opportunities to throw an Eviscerate into your rotation which in turn means more DPS.

All that being said, I encourage you to experiment and see for yourself, that’s half the fun!

Anycase, last thing….sub is where my heart is and would love to try out HaT again with the knowledge of doing the other specs….I feel I could either out dps my mut spec or get damn close with this….anybody have any ideas or feelings on this? Is there any *official* tests anywhere putting all three specs against each other in raiding tests…..O yea one last question =D If I do roll sub again…is backstab viable now? or stay hemo and use mace/sword in main hand or stay dagger x2 Have fun with all my questions hehe good luck all!!

Happy Killing,

Paramourn – Firetree 14/51/6

If sub is truly where your heart is than I encourage you to try the HAT build. Granted, it is said that the build is only viable because it is bugged but I’m not sure I truly believe that. Raivyne over at Rogue Chick wrote up a nice post about a HAT rotation that doesn’t rely on the exploit. She seems to favor Hemo over Backstab but it also appears that you won’t be doing either very much since, in theory, you’ll have so many combo points coming in you’ll mostly be keeping up Slice and Dice, Rupture and Eviscerating.

Also, I haven’t had a chance to play with it but you should probably check out Raivyne’s HAT spreadsheet.

So I hope I answered your questions Paramourn and remember, above all, to enjoy the game.

Have a question you’d like answered? Leave a comment or drop me a line.

Remember, follow your heart and stab your enemy in theirs.