Tremble in fear, Saurfang!

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

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.

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!

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!

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.

Our match history is a total rollercoaster of 18 minute ret/druid games and queueing into hard counters six games in a row. Still, we persisted, and these glowing pieces of (virtual) pointy metal represent the fruits of our labor:

That wasn’t the only milestone we hit last night, either. Inamorata took some time out of his busy schedule crushing rets in trade chat to carry our RLS to 2216, currently realm #1. It’s also already worth way more points per week than our 2v2 is, whee rating curve rebalancing.

Massive thanks to Azuba for being an absolutely fantastic teammate and rising above his troubled class and our somewhat questionable comp by basically outplaying the shit out of everybody. If this was a Steam game there’d be a series of achievements for HoJs grounded and you’d have all of them! <3

I don’t have a 5s at the moment, but Arena Master is looking more doable by the day. Fifty (oblig) whole nerd points, that’s hard to pass up.

PS: No, I’m not going to stop calling it BoP.

Looks like cloak has emerged as the popular option for the contested third glyph slot. It’s what I’m using, and it seems pretty strong, especially for surviving double DPS and tanking Death Knights. I do miss 35 energy gouges though!

EDIT: As usual the graph is based on rogues in top 200 2v2 teams on US-Reckoning.

EDIT2: Kiru of Frostmane is the guy using the spree glyph in his assassination spec. Hoping it’s just armory update lag :\

So here’s the new version they’ve come up with:

Overkill: Talent redesigned. Now increases energy regeneration by 30% while stealthed, and for 20 seconds after breaking stealth.

I think I like this, although it’s only marginally more energy regen than the combat talent Vitality and will have significantly less uptime¹. I haven’t crunched any real numbers on it, but let’s have a look at how it affects a typical mut/prep opener.

Assumptions: mut glyph, vigor glyph, no FA (for simplicity), no ruthlessness, full RS, dirty deeds.

Old-style Overkill

New-style Overkill

So basically your damage is spread out more over the 10 second period now than it used to be, and the second set has one less mutilate. However, the new buff persists significantly longer than the old overkill after leaving stealth, so in terms of sustained damage you’re trading a potential saving of 60 energy over 6 seconds (if you use an ability every GCD during overkill, which is not really realistic anyway) versus a potential generation of 60 energy over 20 seconds (+3 energy per second, but does nothing if you’re capped). Sounds fair.

It’s a bit different for openers versus rogues but cs->rup->mut->mut->ks depends on Relentless Strikes and Seal Fate RNG to a large extent anyway. It’s a definite nerf for swap sap -> cs openers, but I die in cheapshot as much as I kill other rogues in cheapshot so, well, let’s hear it for symmetrical rebalancing. And it seems much easier to take advantage of in PvE now.

Even if it was a massive nerf I think I’d still be looking forward to this patch, though, when you take a gander over some of the other things that are going in:

• +5 seconds on charge CD. Maybe I’ll actually be able to peel a warrior briefly?
• DK PvP glove bonus reworked to a runic power energize. Small mercies.
• Frost Presence and Tree Form armor toned down. Although they added some armor to barkskin, I really don’t mind that. Barkskin is for dispel resist, and if they use it for anything else then that’s just fine with me.
• Eye for an Eye damage decreased. Hells yeah, one step closer to not soloing myself on afk ret paladins.

Freedom nerf I’m still on the fence about. Six seconds is probably enough, it sounds balanced on paper, but I’ll have to play with (and against) it to see.

You can see Zarhym’s post about the patch notes here.

¹ Unless you can end games in 60 seconds reliably, in which case it could possibly have identical uptime!

It’s a good change. I never felt like wearing the goggles gave me an advantage – everyone has them, so I had to wear them just to be competitive. And especially now that the furious gear is out, giving away 32 ilvls of stats is a hard sell when a lot of opposing teams don’t include rogues.

I did like the model though! :[