One Rogue's Journey

There you have it, a quick and easy macro for weapon swapping.

Awesome, we’re done here. Let’s go eat some Halloween candy!

No can do, voice in my head, we’re not done here.

Are you sure about that?

Damn sure, we still have to explain what weapon swapping is and how/when/why to do it.

Oh, well can I eat candy?

Knock yourself out.

If you’ve had your ears open to a lot of the recent rogue chatter you may have heard the term “weapon swapping” being thrown around a lot lately.

What is weapon swapping exactly?

Weapon swapping is switching your offhand weapon when you have a full 5 stack of Deadly Poison to another weapon with a strong (Wound or Instant depending on your spec) poison and then quickly switching back to your deadly offhand to refresh the stacks.

Why would we do this? Well, the same reason we do anything: If done properly it can be a nice boost to your DPS.

Sounds awesome, how do I start? Well, you need a couple of things to be successful at weapon swapping:

• Two Similar (preferably identical) offhand weapons
• Low Latency
• Quick Reflexes
• The ability to keep track of another timer with razor sharp accuracy

These last two are really really important because if you aren’t timing it right and you let the deadly poison stacks drop off then you will actually be hurting your DPS.

So, if you have all these things, give weapon swapping a shot but remember to practice, practice practice.

Alert – INCOMING EXPERIMENTAL PATCH 3.3 PTR TIP – Alert – THIS TIP IS EXTREMELY EXPERIMENTAL AND HAS NOT BEEN TESTING – Alert

You’re probably not familiar with the weapon enchant Black Magic. Currently it causes your damaging spell to cause a DOT but on the PTR it increases your haste rating whenever you deal spell damage.

What does this mean for rogues? Well, poisons will proc this effect. Is this enchant better than berserking then? No, BUT, using weapon swapping (provided you have enough weapons laying around) you could possibly swap in an offhand with black magic, wait for the proc, then swap back to your berserking offhand and then repeat this action when the internal cooldown of black magic is up.

Sounds nifty, keep a eye out for this one.

In my quick (p)review of the T10 set bonuses I made a bit of an offhanded comment about the rupture-less cycle. Boy did I open up a can of worms with this one.

Did your offhand comment at least give you a combat potency proc?

I hate you so much. Was that really necessary?

It made me laugh.

I’m sure it did.

Was it necessary for you to mention a cycle that most people shouldn’t be doing yet, thus making them excited and possibly confused?

Touche.

Now, about this rupture-less cycle I mentioned, a lot of you emailed me requesting information about the cycle. I was hesitant to mention it earlier since, for the most part, you generally will not have the gear to support it but since I let it slip and now everyone is all curious, I’ll elaborate.

First, here is the spec for this cycle (substituting your weapon of choice):
15/51/5

So, the rupture-less cycle is really that, you drop rupture out of your cycle in favor of eviscerate. Why didn’t I bring this up is that it requires extremely high levels of gear (with lots of armor pen) before this cycle surpasses the rupture cycle.

So, when should I use the rupture-less cycle? Well, ask yourself a few questions.

Am I wearing 4 piece T8?
If yes, then no chance, rupture criting is too good to pass up.

What’s my Armor Pen?
I’m not going to give you a hard number but I will says that if I switched all my Agi gems for Armor Pen, I’d have 366 Armor Pen and I still wouldn’t be close to the number I needed to switch over to this new cycle.

So how do I know when to switch?
Well, you have to use a spreadsheet to be absolutely sure. I hear some groaning in the crowd. I’m sorry but please put your pitchforks down. Aldriana over at Elitist Jerks has created a wonderful Combat Spreadsheet that I find is very easy to use. Download it here.

So there you have it, the elusive rupture-less cycle I mentioned. Sorry it’s not as interesting as it could be. The truth is, you probably don’t need to worry about it, at least not yet. Don’t worry though, when you do, I’ll let you know.

The rogue T10 set bonus have been revealed thanks to some happy data-mining gnomes. First things first, let’s give the standard disclaimer here that this are from the PTR and may change slightly of completely.

With that out of the way, let me just say:
OMG OMG OMG GIMME GIMME GIMME I WANTZ IT!

*ahem* excuse me. As you could probably tell, I’m more than a little excited about these set bonus. After the very disappointing T9, it’s nice to see a set bonus I actually want! (In all fairness, T8 4p was just too good for T9 to really have a chance). So what are these wonderful set bonuses? Let’s look shall we:

WOW, this is just really nice. Three free combo points is lip-smackingly good. I suspect that by this point in the gear progression most of us will be moving to the high armor-pen rupture-less cycle and this will be a wonderful a addition to this, hell, it would be a wonderful addition to any cycle.

Very Nice. Very Very Nice. Placing tricks of the trade on another dps (usually another rogue) was always something that lowered our personal dps to the benefit of increased raid DPS (generally the other rogue would return the favor, thus giving up a boost as well). But now! But now my friends! Free energy! Who could say no to gaining 15 energy from an ability that used to cost 15 energy that you use on every cooldown? No on, that’s who.

Give them to me. I needs them.

Side Note: Did you see how they are fixing Vanish? What can I say, when I’m right I’m right.

Side-Side Note: Thank you for all the wonderful emails I’ve been getting. I’ve been doing my absolute best to try and get back to each and everyone but it is a losing battle overall. E-hearts all around.