~chron

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

Azuba and I had a rough few weeks hovering around 2300-2340 with several excruciating losses within striking distance of our goal. Possibly the most upsetting was this precious -17 at the hands of a fairly mediocre rogue/destro that we had just beaten twice; we went into the match at 2349. I had 2.5k damage out that game, holla for wotlk burst!

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.

chronic Arena, Rogue, World of Warcraft Arena, rls, World of Warcraft

I redid my mutilate/prep glyph graph from a few weeks ago and thought it was worth sharing:

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 :\

chronic Rogue assassination, glyphs, Rogue, World of Warcraft

Frankly I’m surprised Overkill survived this long. In Season 5 when people complained about burst damage – in particular rogue stunlocks – overkill was usually the first thing that got mentioned as an obvious knob to tweak. Not only that, but PvE rogues have long lamented it being a pre-requisite for mutilate but almost entirely worthless in a raid situation where your restealthing options are limited to a single vanish (that resets your swing timer!)

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!

chronic Arena, Rogue 3.1.3, assassination, mutilate, overkill, patch-notes, Rogue, World of Warcraft

According to a blue post from Bornakk today, they have basically hotfixed stealth detection items out of the game. They’re barring the TBC goggles from arenas, taking the detection off all the engineering goggles, and reducing the magnitude of the detection on all the others. I haven’t seen any numbers but I doubt any of them will be worth using in arenas any more.

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! :[

chronic Arena, Rogue engineering