~chron

In a move that surprises exactly nobody, the vanish fix as originally described isn’t going to go live, but maybe someday they’ll think of something. Mmhmm.

Since Azuba has been away from wow for the last few weeks while he studies for his finals, my rogue has been team hopping around helping people gear up and trying new comps. I’ve played most of the “viable” rogue comps now, and it’s been fun learning the pros and cons of each one, even if some of my partners have been enormously mediocre. I know nobody cares about 2s any more, but I think MP rogue + IS resto druid is one of the best comps you can play right now.

(but maybe that’s just me, I always did love outlast and ridic cc chains)

My priest has caught up on gear, and is now sitting at around 1050 resil and 2700 sp with 2/5 relentless and the t1 wep + oh. Still a few deadly pieces to replace, but at least now when I die I feel like it’s my own fault and not my gear!

The thing I love most about priests is the fact that sometimes you’re at 30% health with no hots and casting mind blast is still the right decision. You have a lot of choices to make at every stage of the match, though the flipside of that is you can get punished pretty badly for making the wrong ones.

Speaking of bad choices: rogue/dk/disc. What a spectacularly shit comp that is. Let me know if anyone has a serious non-cleave 3v3 opening for a rogue :3

chronic Priest, Rogue

I’m a firm believer in customizing your spec to your playstyle, but I’m also intensely curious about the current flavor of the month in rogue specs. There’s a few interesting filler choices in the prep/mut build, and people’s builds tend to shift around with the differing metagame of each patch.

Recently I had a look at some Reckoning armories. There’s 44 rogues in top 200 2v2 teams currently, with 41 mut/prep specs between them.

This is the most popular prep/mut spec, which accounts for ten of the 41 specs. It takes Imp Kidney Shot, 2/3 Find Weakness, and (surprisingly to me) Initiative.

I experimented for a while with taking bleed talents in an attempt to make a dent in plate teams, but it never really worked very well. Even fully talented, rupture is a fairly small component of your damage.

The second most popular spec, used by 4 rogues, trades Imp KS for Focused Attacks (which would be my preference for 2s) and Initiative for Serrated Blades. Then there’s 3 with Imp KS and Serrated, 3 with FA and Initiative, and the rest is a long tail of people trying out weird stuff like Deadened Nerves, which I’m still very much in love with!

So it seems like the only arguments people are having are Imp KS vs FA, and Initiative vs Serrated Blades, which are both about 50/50. Glyph selection looks much the same as ever:

Your cookies, I cut them.

chronic Rogue specs

Today Blizzard posted the rogue Q&A. They’ve all been pretty marginal since the shaman one, I suppose because shaman are getting a lot of interesting changes this patch so there was more immediate stuff to talk about. Rogues are in a good place for both PvE and PvP, so a lot of the answers were along the lines of “yep it’s fine bro, no we’re not changing that”. Also, are people really still complaining about “stunlocks”?

Anyway, yeah, it’s all pretty bland. The only thing I couldn’t believe was that it seems like they’re happy with 90% cloak:

Q. Cloak of Shadows is an incredible ability; it helps rogues avoid most incoming spell damage and effects. However, how do we feel this ability stacks up versus classes that possess both melee and spell damaging abilities? Do we still feel the 90% avoidance is sufficient to aid Rogues in PvP encounters against spell casters and hybrids?

A: It’s meant as a tool that’s part of a toolkit, not an I-win button. It’s sufficient, and extending it to 100% would make rogues largely immune to interesting PvE effects they shouldn’t be (e.g. Mimiron’s Shock Blast).

It’s not supposed to be an I WIN button except that 94% (or whatever) of the time it is, and 6% of the time it randomly fails and you die. I’m usually fighting to maintain some level of RNG to keep things interesting, but this is just too stupid. I have faith they’ll eventually come around like they did with heartbeat sap resists and other stupid crap.

It’s a shitty answer to the question anyway, which explicitly mentions PvP and hybrid damage.

STILL LOOKING FORWARD TO AXES THOUGH GUYS.

PS. Let me cloak scourge strikes if you’re not going to let me mitigate their damage!

chronic Rogue

Oh, hey. It’s been a while!

I always seem to neglect the blog when I’m on holiday, there’s too many other fascinating things to occupy me, such as bear-style hibernation and re-released Lucasarts adventure games.

Arena-land has been busy as always. We’re deep into season six now, and Azuba and I are gradually climbing the ladder in an attempt to de-throne our realm’s current #1, a cleverly named horde-side DK/Druid team. I think they might be sitting on their rating at the moment, since they haven’t moved from 2527 in quite some time. At least we’ve built up a lead over our closest alliance competitors, Dues’ holy/unholy team.

I’ve been tempted to start writing a rogue/shaman strategy guide since over the last few weeks there have been a phenomenal number of “how do I shot it” posts on AJ about the comp. I’m no expert by any means, but it’s a very underplayed comp, and the dearth of reference material is unfortunate to say the least. A lot of the (primarly PvE-focused) rogue blogs I follow have also mentioned arena in some capacity, and It’d be nice to have something introductory to be able to point people to. Having played close to a thousand 2s games this season, we’ve picked up a few leet tricks too.

Actually nah, I’m pretty bad, but I couldn’t think of a better excuse for linking that picture.

We’ve also been playing RLS a bit, up to about 2330. Partly because Azuba was interested in playing elemental more seriously (it’s been his PvE mainspec for some time) and partly because our warlock only logs on about 10% of the time, we started a second team with a discipline priest to play “lightning RMP“¹, with some success. We were using a second charter for it at the beginning, just in case it turned out to be an awful comp, we didn’t want to tank the rating too much. Besides that, we also thought it would be quite amusing to fill up the Eldre’Thalas 3v3 ladder with team names of the form “Azuba is %s”, hopefully getting sillier and more elaborate each time like a kind of space goat Chuck Norris.

ANYWAY. The comp is actually really fun, and plays a fair bit like RMP does. Although a shaman doesn’t have the control of a frost mage (they do have some), they bring a lot of other defensive options to the table like shocks, grounds, and off-heals. Their DPS isn’t as reliant on freeze effects either, which gives you an edge killing hard-to-snare classes like druids or paladins. And you can’t forget lolthunderstorm off BEM!

And just like with a destruction warlock, you can get some fantastic 100-0 gibs if the shaman is left alone to freecast.

Eventually we got bored of switching teams twice a week and losing our PR (turns out a 2400 3s team is worth a lot of points) so we have merged the two teams into the latest charter, and we’re currently working on grinding Inamorata’s PR up on that team.

My gear is almost done now; just gloves next week and then throwing weapons the week after, then I’ll finally be able to start saving for some combat weapons. Possibly even axes, depending on when the season-end announcement happens.

Apart from that: I’ve been duelling a lot of rogues (Garotte is not as good an opener as you think, Splakken), accumulating fans, and fighting with people on the realm forums about whether PvE is harder than PvP. My priest is still 74, but I did grind inscription at least!

¹ There’s probably a better name for disc/rogue/elemental. Depending on how fixed you consider the ordering rules, you can abbreviate it as RPS!

chronic Arena, Rogue Arena, rls, Rogue, rps

I wanted to see if there was a correlation between number of talent tree respecs and arena success, so here’s a scatter plot for high-rated 3v3 rogues on Reckoning:

Thinking about it, though, the number of respecs doesn’t tell you enough by itself. It’s a function of how rich you are, how much you raid, how long you’ve been playing, and whether or not you have dual spec, as well as how much you like experimenting (which I guess is what I really wanted to measure). Still, it’s more interesting than the “emblems of conquest looted vs 3v3 rating” graph I did along with it.

My rogue is at 71 respecs currently.

chronic Data Mining, Rogue gchart, graphs, World of Warcraft