One Rogue's Journey

See what I did there? Rhyme. I am some kinda wordsmith. I’m not here to talk about my mastery of the English language though – no, I am here to talk about Ulduar.

Ulduar is not easy. Yes, the place has been cleared and a few guilds have even taken down some hard modes but still.

Ulduar is not easy.

It is time to put on your “A” game folks. Luckily for you, I, Zaltu, have some tips and tricks (see what I did there?) for you as you progress through this not so easy (but very cool) new dungeon. These tips will use specific examples up into Kologarn because that’s what I’ve seen but many of the concepts can be applied to later bosses (and really any boss). Let’s do this thing.

Cloak

Cloak of Skill Shadow. Oh how I love you.  Without you, without you everything just falls apart, without you it’s not as much fun to pick up the pieces. Nine Inch Nails references aside, Cloak is one of the best tools in our arsenal and the best rogues use it to make their lives easier and the healers love us (or love us more in my case). Let’s look at some examples from our new playground, Ulduar.

1. Ignis’ Flame Jet

This ability causes a large amount of initial damage and then a rather nasty DOT to the entire raid. You, however, are a rogue and if you pop Cloak right before the jet goes off you will take…wait for it…ZERO damage. This is (including the initial and the DOT) ~24-25k of healing that can be saved for one of the other poor non-cloak-having raiders (like the tank for example). You won’t be able to cloak out of every Jet but you should make it a point to cloak out of everyone you can.

2. XT’s Light and Gravity Bomb

So this is a very familiar mechanic (and a great one for determining who in your raid can’t pay attention to even simple things). You get a debuff, now run away from everyone else. Unfortunately XT is a DPS race and running away causes you to lose time on target which is less than ideal (of course if you stayed in and killed the rest of the melee that probably wouldn’t be looked too kindly on either). Luckily for you, you can cloak out of both of these debuffs. If you’re unlucky you might still have to run out but generally you’ll only get targeted once or twice a fight.

Feint

Remember back in December when I said the changes to Feint were going to make it useful? Well it appears that once again my predictive powers were right on the money. For those of you unfamiliar, this is what the new highest rank of Feint does:

It also does a small reduction in threat that is so small as to be absolutely useless. Now, when this was first released (3.0.8) it was widely considered not so useful and the reason for that is that most of the Area of Effect attacks in the current raid content were avoidable and, as such, should have been..well..avoided. Enter Ulduar and unavoidable raid-wide damage.

1. Ignis’ Flame Jet

Remember how earlier I said you can’t cloak out of all the flame jets? Well, when you can’t cloak, feint. Timed right, you can save yourself from taking about 8k worth of damage and again, that’s 8k worth of healing that can go to somebody else.

2. XT’s Tantrum

This spell hits everyone in the raid for 10% of their health every second for 12 seconds. So, basically, it is guaranteed death if you don’t do something. Cloak won’t help us here but feint will. Pop Feint right after the first tick of tantrum for the maximum effectiveness and – voila! – suddenly 12 ticks of 10% of your health becomes 6 ticks of 10% and 6 ticks of 5%. You’re still going to need some healing if you weren’t topped off but it takes some significant pressure off the healers during a rather heavy raid healing fight.

The Tank

The tank is your friend too. He gets hit in the face so you can stab in the back.

1. Razorscale’s Adds

So you have a nice Tricks of the Trade rotation going with the other rogue in the raid. That’s great, as long as you two are doing comparable DPS it’s a net gain for our fair city raid. Put that button aside for a bit because the adds on Razorscale need heavy AOE and with a little help from your Tricks and Fan of Knives you can make sure that AOE can happen just a little bit quicker, which means they go down quicker and the tanks take less damage and the healers use less mana and so on and so on…everybody wins.

2. Kologarn

This one is really simple. Stand on the tank and you won’t get targeted by the eyebeam. Spell casters can’t do this because they will get interrupted and thus spell locked but you can and thus all you have to do is DPS your little heart out.

I hope you all are enjoying Ulduar. I for one am relishing the challenge.

Side Note: I’ve gotten a lot of email’s with questions lately and I’m doing my best to answer them all, tomorrow I’m planning a marathon “Ask Zaltu” post that will attempt to answer as many questions as possible.