the squishiness of cloth, without the range or compensation

There’s a lot of debate on the forums about the state of rogues in the game, and without considering every complaint, here are my thoughts on where rogues are right now. This isn’t a plea to developers, as once again more changes have come to the PTR, and rogues have gotten… nothing. No changes whatsoever. For the 3rd or 4th week in a row. I think it’s probably fair to say that rogues haven’t gotten any attention or consideration. So I don’t expect anything new, and I’m just operating based on what I see now.

PvE

In PvE, rogues are competitive, but they are not compensated for their disadvantages versus other classes. In PvP, rogues are easier to kill than even cloth classes, and the cooldowns that we once relied upon for our survival are no longer effective in WotLK.

Let’s talk about PvE first. Ultimately, rogues are fine in PvE, I think. Not optimal, and certainly not balanced versus hybrids (or even ranged), but in my experience, a well-played rogue that focuses on maxing dps and time-on-target can hold his own.

The Hybrid problem

The devs have already posted that pure dps classes should deliver the highest dps for most fights, at similar gear and skill levels. And yet I can’t help but notice how much damage hybrid classes still do (elemental shammies/ret pallies doing comparable damage to rogues on almost every boss, despite being able to heal, etc. Feral druids are pretty high on the charts given that they can heal and tank. The list goes on…). Despite repeated claims that raids should bring the player, not the class, I can’t help but wonder why anyone would choose to fill their last raid spot with a high-dps hybrid rather than a rogue.

For example, let’s say a 10-man raid has formed and has one spot left for a dps. There are two players of equal gear and skill available — an elemental shaman and a HfB Mutilate rogue. The raidleader knows from experience that these two players do approximately equal dps, within, say 1-200 dps. I think the raid leader is a fool if he doesn’t take the shaman. In addition to bringing Heroism, the shammy can emergency heal and cleanse poison/disease, all while putting out dps comparable to the rogue’s. The rogue brings…. tricks of the trade and the ability to remove enrage from Gluth. Slam dunk for the shammy, in my opinion.

What’s the solution? That developers actually spend some time on the rogue class (and theoretically on other pure-dps classes), rather than just talking about dps hierarchies. But I don’t expect much, because of…

The Ranged Problem

Of the four classes that are considered “pure-dps” classes (see above link), rogues are the only melee class. This means that rogues require an extra dps boost over other dps classes, given how often we have to stop dps or interrupt rotations, whereas ranged dps classes simply don’t have to deal with anything of the sort in Naxx.

Before people go nuts on me for that comment, consider that Locust Swarm on Anub’rekan only affects melee (by “affect”, I mean, we have to run away from the boss while ranged classes continue to spam their macros). Running to spores on Loatheb requires melee to completely stop dps, unlike ranged. Tail swipe when a ranged class takes aggro affects melee, not ranged. Get webbed by Maexxna? If you’re a melee, you’re doing 0 dps until you run all the way back. And optimal positioning of Kel’Thuzad is simple for ranged classes, but melee classes have to stack properly and adjust constantly based on voids near the tank and teleports. Not to mention that ranged get a nice shiny platform to stand on for Heigan, while melee get to lava dance the whole time — oh, and ranged can dps during the lava dance anyway. I could go on and on.

The point is that even when if the developers set pure dps above other classes, rogues will still suffer from a melee disadvantage, without compensation for that disadvantage. Nothing I have seen in Ulduar will change this, vehicle fights excepted (which are a horseshit gimmick in terms of class balance, by the way).

PvP

In contrast to PvE, I absolutely don’t think rogues are okay in PvP. And I’m not talking about random word pvp where a rogue can still win one-on-ones by burning offensive cooldowns. I’m talking about organized pvp, primarily arena, where heals are to be had and rushdowns among skilled players are rare. Unfortunately, WotLK dynamics eliminate rogue survivability, which has always been tied to cooldowns which are no longer effective. Evasion is useless against almost any class. DKs do more magic/disease damage than physical damage, and therefore evasion is just as ineffective against them as it is against ret pallies. Other rogues (rare as they are in arena these days) can at least shiv through evasion, warriors have new tools to deal with evasion, in addition to increased survivability that makes evasion rushdown nigh impossible. For the same reason, dismantle is also dismal against any classes other than hunters, rogues and warriors, and again, these classes have ways to deal with the brief dismantle duration.

Cloak of Shadows was stealth nerfed and fears and snares still land. Vanish is bugged from what it should be, now requiring other cooldowns + macros to work correctly… and it still bugs and fails. Blind remains the only cooldown that retains the same power that it had pre-WotLK. Even stuns have been nerfed, and the devs have stated that this is by design. So where does that leave us? With a class that doesn’t effectively burst from 100 -> 0 anymore, but still doesn’t have the survivability to succeed after the “burst window” is over.

I know that it’s not fun to be stunlocked. I know that it’s not fun to be ambushed for half of your health. I have an 80 mage and an 80 warlock. The mage is fine, as long as I’m not afk. I can react to an ambush CB eviscerate unless I’m completely drunk, and either control the rogue or reset the fight. Rogues can tear apart my warlock if they don’t make mistakes. But both my mage and my warlock have ways to take control of the fight from most rogues. And once they do, they have the upper hand.

I dunno what the result of this rant is. I guess my main complaint is that rogues are no longer a burst class. If there were no burst classes, I could live with that. But burst still exists in arcane mages (ice block, sheep, slows, roots and huge burst), feral druids (huge burst from energy pooling, heals, ridiculous bear-form mitigation, snare removal, cyclone and spammable intercepts) and ret pallies — burst magic (unmitigated) damage with bubble, heals, snare immunity, stun removal, plate armor and a ranged execute. So it’s not that they have removed burst, it’s just that they have removed it from the one class that requires burst the most.

What can you do about it? Nothing, apparently. Other than some long overdue glyphs, 3.1 doesn’t bring rogues anything (other than revamped DKs/Paladins/Priests/Druids/etc to fight against). In the mean time, take advantage of whatever you can. For instance, the bugged backstab glyph. Of course, as Aedak once famously stated:

It is a bug. If it helps you, it will be fixed. If it is detrimental to you, it will most likely not.

Take advantage while you can, as this may be hot-fixed very soon. In the meantime, some people are trying HfB for PvP, eschewing a second-set of ineffective cooldowns in favor of trying to get a fast kill. Your mileage may vary. Otherwise, just focus on your timing and decision-making and hope for the devs to give some love to rogues instead of working on World of DeathKnightCraft 3.2.

/rant off

the stubborn underachiever, part 3

This is the third part in a series discussing class mechanics for raiding rogues. In part 1, I described my experience with an underperforming rogue who refused to listen to my offer of advice. In part 2, I discussed the differences between PvP and PvE for purposes of gear and talents. In this post, I will discuss a few different mechanics that will maximize rogue dps in raids. Again, I’ll list the mistake the rogue was making, then explain what he should have done differently.

To many of you, this information may seem trivial. But to newer rogues and casual players, I hope this information helps.

• Using eviscerate instead of envenom

This is a common mistake that newer rogues (and some experienced ones) make. On the surface, eviscerate looks really good. It certainly does much higher base damage than envenom. But if you measure their actual performance in Naxx, envenom does more damage. How is this possible?

The answer is actually quite simple. Eviscerate does physical damage, which is mitigated by armor, whereas envenom is poison damage and ignores armor completely. So while eviscerate may get huge numbers on bunnies in Elwynn Forest (how you apply deadly poison and generate combo points on the bunny is your problem, I’m afraid), Nax25 bosses aren’t bunnies. They have lots and lots of armor, which means your eviscerate damage will plummet. Meanwhile, envenom ignores armor, and surpasses eviscerate dps. Told you it was simple.

• Using the wrong poisons

The rogue I ran into was using wound poisons. On both weapons. That’s a definite PvP trait. Let’s talk about the right poisons for raiding. There are three.

First, deadly poison should be used on your offhand. First, you’ll need deadly poison on your mob to use envenom, and we’ve already agreed that you should use envenom, haven’t we? The important thing to note here is that you should use it on your offhand. Why? In previous patches, there was a bug that gave you two offhand poison procs on mutilate, but that is no longer the case. That was the only time when you saw mutilate rogues with deadly poison on their mainhand, and the reason they did that is because 2 X instant poison procs on mutilate were a significant boost. However, now that the bug has been fixed, you want to move that instant poison to your main hand dagger, so that it can proc on other specials (primarily envenom). Since you need deadly poison stacks and instant does more damage on the main hand, put deadly on your offhand. A side benefit is that you can shiv to instantly apply deadly poison for an envenom (you should almost never need to do this, however — with the build I described in my last post, your poison application shouldn’t concern you).

Mutilate rogues should use instant poison on their main hand. As discussed above, instant poison has more chances to proc when it’s on your main hand, since it is involved in all special attacks (except shiv). Instant poison does tons of damage and scales with attack power. In the WotLK world, instant poison will constitute a large part of your damage — in fact, poisons will constitute about 17% of your damage. Parse your damage on a training dummy if you don’t believe me. WotLK emphasizes poisons in a way that classic WoW and BC never did.

I don’t want to get into World of Mathcraft, but there are reasons why some builds would use wound poison on their mainhand rather than instant. Combat rogues, for instance, can do more damage with wound poison because it procs more for them, even though it does less damage per proc. This is never the case with mutilate pve builds, because you should always have 5/5 Improved Poisons, which causes your instant poison to proc more often. With this talent (and easily attainable amounts of attack power), instant does more sustained dps. If you want the mathematical analysis, the best explanation I’ve seen so far is this writeup at oneroguesjourney.com.

Anesthetic poison is a purely situational poison. It does less damage that instant poison, which makes it inferior for most circumstances. You can ignore the threat-reduction aspect of anesthetic poison. Between Tricks of the Trade, Vanish (and even Feint, which you almost never need), you shouldn’t have threat problems. The part of anesthetic poison we care about is that it removes frenzy from its target. It should be applied to your mainhand weapon for one fight in particular, Gluth. If your hunters are on the ball with tranquilizing shot, you don’t even need to do that.

I’ll repeat that last bit for emphasis: anesthetic poison does less damage than instant, so you should only use it for fights where you can remove frenzy. Gluth is one of these (very rare) fights. In this respect, you are sacrificing your dps for the good of your raid. It’s pretty rare that rogues do anything other than dps. Enjoy the righteous sense of doing something for the greater good. This is what other classes always brag about. Kind of sucks, though, doesn’t it? I agree wholeheartedly. That’s why we play rogues!

Gluth down? Good job! You should be reapplying instant poison to your main hand immediately. Poisons are cheap and you got what you needed out of that anesthetic poison. Don’t forget to reapply! I do this myself, and end up kicking myself when I realize it.

• Not using rupture/not maximizing rupture uptime

I often see rogues that don’t use rupture for bosses, which is a shame. This is once again a dps finisher that is not mitigated by armor, so it does great damage against bosses and other high-armor targets. Furthermore, unless Blizzard wakes up to how rogues work, the next patch will require a bleed effect on your target in order to use Hunger For Blood, so you may as well get used to using it now. I always rotate envenom and rupture one bosses and high-hp mobs. The only fight where I don’t use rupture is Loatheb, since that mechanic is based around the +50% crit buff you get from his spores, and rupture can’t crit. So there I spam envenoms to benefit from the crit. Note that Thaddius != Loatheb. The buff you get from polarity on Thaddius increases damage, not crit chance, so make sure you’re maxmizing rupture uptime again.

• Not starting fights in stealth

I’ve heard a lot of rogues say that they prefer to start fights out of stealth so they can start dpsing sooner. And sure, it’s frustrating to move into position slowly. Furthermore, some bosses will knock you out of stealth anyway (I’m looking at you Saph.)

However, for trash, it’s a big dps boost to start in stealth. Why? Because of Overkill. 10 less energy on fan of knives means you can Fan four times in four globals. You might get in a fifth FoK on spider packs, but probably not because the pack is dead. Meanwhile, you’ve done 10k dps on that pack, without fear of aggro because of Tricks of the Trade. That’s a lot of damage. That’s a lot of healer mana saved. That’s a decent savings in time between bosses.

That’s it for beginner rogue PvE mechanics. I’ll be posting more on specific mechanics and playstyles in the future. Please come back and check the blog. And don’t be shy about sending this blog to your friends. =)

the stubborn underachiever, part 2

In a previous post, I wrote about a pick-up rogue that was struggling to contribute in Naxx 25 but refused to accept some basic advice on how to improve. He was underperforming for various reasons, and most of them could have been addressed if he has simply understood his class. In this post, I’ll talk about the things he was doing wrong and the class mechanics that he didn’t understand.

To many of you, this information may seem trivial. But to newer rogues and casual players, I hope this information helps.

• Showing up for raids with PvP builds

This is a cardinal sin that still surprises me. Usually it’s not too much of an issue because most raids won’t invite people with PvP builds and gear checks. For rogues, it’s inexcusable, since we are almost 100% concerned with offensive damage. I’m going to talk primarily about mutilate because I’ve always played as a dagger rogue.

For starters, the mechanics of PvP are very different from PvE. In PvE, sustained dps and energy/combo point generation are your primary concerns. In PvP, it’s often the opposite; you simply want to burst dps to kill someone before they escape or get heals. It doesn’t matter if your dps drops off after you burn your cooldowns, because your PvP target is dead. In PvE however, you can burn all of your offensive cooldowns and be left with a boss that still has 19.5 million hit points left.

PvP builds also have a lot of utility, but that utility is useless in raids. You won’t be sapping anything in Naxx 25. You won’t be using cheap shot except in a few desperate situations. Spending talent points on utility that you can’t use is equivalent to not spending those points at all.

Here’s a good mutilate pve build. There are a few talents that you might change a point or two in, but most 3.09 mutilate pve builds will look like this:

51/13/7

I’ll break down the talent choices in a future post, but looking at the talent spec is a good start. The key PvE-specific talents here are Hunger For Blood, Blood Spatter, Cut to the Chase, Focused Attacks and Precision. Most PvP builds don’t include those dps-specific talents.

For now, the important things to understand is that this build gives you flat damage increases, helps with energy and combo point generation so that you can perform more special attacks, and removes the need to spend combo points on Slice and Dice, assuming you maintain a proper rotation.

I’ll discuss the rotation in detail in a future post, but for now, I’ll just briefly cover it. You want to start combat with 3 stacks of Hunger For Blood (+15% to all damage). Spend your first combo points on Slice and Dice, then begin the following rotation: 4 or 5 point rupture, 4 or 5 point envenom, repeat. Refresh Hunger For Blood as needed (don’t let it drop, or you’ll lose all three stacks), and make sure you envenom (or eviscerate on poison-immune mobs like slimes) before Slice and Dice expires, since one of the major benefits of this build is that your envenoms and eviscerates refresh your Slice and Dice duration. That’s it for now — as I said, I’ll cover it in depth at a later date.

• Showing up raids with PvP gear

As for PvP gear — it’s not optimal for raids because of the way it is itemized. PvP gear emphasizes different attributes than pve gear. In particular, PvP gear has more stamina and, of course, it has resilience a stat that is very important for PvP but completely useless in PvE. Dodge is another defensive stat that is almost entirely useless in PvE, but WotLK has a lot fewer +dodge items than previous expansions, even for PvP gear.

To understand the difference in effectiveness of PvP and PvE gear, we should briefly discuss how items are created by Blizzard. Every item has an item level, or iLvL. For instance, Nax10 drops mostly items with an iLvL of 200, while Nax25 drops iLvL 213 items. Every item also has a quality — epic, rare, uncommon, etc. For any item in the game, the iLvL and quality of the item determine the item budget. Every stat that gets added to the item by the game designers reduces the available budget.

Here’s an example using completely made-up numbers: A game designer creates a new iLvL 200 item. This item will be epic, so it has an item budget of 400 for that iLvl. Let’s say he adds 65 agility to the item. That uses up 120 budget points, so there are 280 points left. Now let’s say he adds 73 stamina to the item, at a budget cost of 130. The item now has a budget of 150 remaining. Now he adds resilience — a PvP stat. Let’s say he adds 60 resilience to the item, at a cost of 90 budget points. He now has only 60 points left to spend on offensive stats such as attack power, hit, crit, haste, armor penetration and expertise. By adding resilience, the designer has reduced the available budget for PvE stats. Every defensive (PvP stat) like resilience or dodge uses part of item budget for stats that are useless for PvE, rather than offensive ones.

That’s the reason that lower-quality PvE gear outperforms higher-quality PvP gear in raids — even though an epic piece of PvP gear has a higher item budget than a blue piece of PvE gear, the PvE gear spends all of its budget on increasing your damage, while the epic PvP gear only spends part of its budget on dps stats. When comparing gear for its PvE value, we should only look at the item budget for offensive stats (with the exception of stamina for some fights, like Malygos). This means that for PvE content, the effective item budget for blue PvE gear is almost always better than that of epic PvP gear.

As an example, let’s take a look at two pairs of boots: Boots of Whirling Mist and Hateful Gladiator’s Boots of Triumph. To the inexperienced eye, the hateful pvp gear must be better, because it’s an epic-quality item. But in fact, the blue boots are better for PvE because more item budget was allotted to offensive stats when they were itemized.

That’s an explanation of why PvP gear isn’t ideal for PvE. But you’re probably asking, what are the rules I should use? What are the budget costs for itemization? What attributes should I prioritize? That’s a discussion for a future post, but for now I’ll just direct you to shadowpanther’s database for rogues. It has simple charts that rate gear based on itemization. There are lists for PvE sets as well as PvP, and different weapons, gems, enchants, etc. The site does the work for you in comparing gear. I don’t agree 100% with some of the ratings, and of course the actual value of the items will vary for individuals, but it’s a very good starting point for your gear decisions.

I’m realizing that these posts are rather like novels, so I’m going to split them into a longer series. Stay tuned for updates on poison application, envenom as a finisher, and rupture uptime.

the stubborn underachiever, part 1

A few nights ago, my guild was doing a Naxx 25 run and a few people didn’t show up. We’re a small guild, so that wasn’t unexpected or new. We simply grabbed a few people from LFG to save time. My guildleader tends to prefer ranged dps over melee dps because (in general) ranged dps don’t have to deal with as many dangers that melee dps do (stuns, whirlwinds, tail swipes, cleaves, etc). Ranged dps also have a lot more time-on-target — they don’t have to stop dps and run out of locust swarm, for instance. However, in the interest of starting the raid, we took a rogue along rather than waiting for a ranged dps to join.

There were immediate warning signs that this rogue wasn’t ready for 25-man raids, of course. Giant, glaring warning signs. First, he arrived with a pvp mutilate spec. Nice burst, nice utility. It’s the same pvp spec I use. However, I wouldn’t use it in a raid, and especially not 25-man. Burst isn’t as important in PvE and much of the utility is useless.

He also showed up in savage gladiator gear. PvP gear is almost never appropriate for PvE content. There are quest greens that are better than savage PvP gear when you’re running an instance. I didn’t think he had any business in Naxx, and particularly not in 25-man. However, once he was in the raid, I tried to look past his lack of class knowledge and help him improve.

He told me to leave him alone. He knew his class and didn’t need my help. He’d played a rogue for over a year.

Interesting.

We started to clear trash, and it became apparent to everyone that he didn’t understand rogue mechanics. Perhaps he was an alt. Perhaps he was primarily a pvp player. Perhaps he was just new to the game. I wasn’t angry with him for not understanding what to do so much as I was disappointed that he wouldn’t even consider advice.

We cleared 2 wings with this rogue. He died on every boss, within about 2 minutes of the start. I coudn’t help him with that — I can’t teach you to lava dance and I don’t have time to explain hotkeys during a raid. What I could help him with was the damage he was doing while he was alive — a mere 1450-ish dps. That would get you complaints in 10-man (or even heroics). In 25-man, it was apalling. Even with his gear and spec, he should have pushed out over 2000 if he would only change what he was doing.

But he wouldn’t even consider my advice. He was using a slow off-hand and spamming eviscerates (I’ll discuss the advice I would have given him in part 2 of this post.) He wasn’t using the right poisons. I could have increased his dps by 20% at least if he would just hear me out. But he refused.

I’ve never understood this. I’ve always listened patiently to advice from people, regardless of who they were. I may not take the advice, but I listen. I research the advice if I think it even has a chance of being good. I’ve never turned down a chance to learn something that would help my performance, regardless of the source. I certainly wouldn’t turn down advice from someone who was 2300 dps higher than me. (I went back and forth on whether to post  the difference in our dps, but it was so significant that it reinforces how stubborn this rogue was.)

Why don’t some people want to improve? Is it pride? Is it a case of a pvp player looking down on pve content as easy (I must admit I’ve been guilty of this myself)? The latter could be the case… this rogue had 36 thousand honorable kills, so clearly he has ventured into battlegrounds pretty regularly. But pve and pvp are different animals, with very different playstyles.

As for pride, I don’t understand that. I wasn’t offering advice in vent, but rather in whispers during breaks. No one would have known that I had given him advice except him (or her)  and me. So I don’t think pride was the culprit (unless his pride was so extreme that he wouldn’t accept help from anyone).

Perhaps it was just apathy. Perhaps he only wanted gear and didn’t care about learning pve mechanics.

What do you guys think? How often do underperforming players refuse to listen to advice? How long do you allow someone to underperform before you insist that they make an effort to improve or leave the raid?

In my next post (or two), I’ll discuss the advice that I would have given him. Perhaps it will help someone else. It’s a shame that it won’t help him.

Rogues aren’t a strong class right now. In WotLK, hybrids do as much damage as we do — and they offer more utility. A feral rogue can dps or off-tank, and even heal in a pinch. They can do comparable damage in melee and can switch to decent dps from range. The primary reason to bring a rogue — dps — has been spread across the board in this expansion.

Furthermore, the rogue ranks are dwindling. Many rogues have rerolled as death knights. And it’s a shame to see a stubborn or lazy rogue underperform, because it damages the public perception of what rogues can do. Every rogue represents our class. Every rogue should try to represent us well.

coming out of stealth…

Welcome to the blog! I have a vision of this blog as a place for me to share some thoughts and experiences about playing a rogue in World of Warcraft. There appears to be a real shortage of rogue blogs and Web sites out there, and I couldn’t stand it. =P

As I said, the content will primarily focus on rogues, but I’m a bit of an altaholic, so you’ll probably see some warlock, mage, warrior and hunter info on here too, in addition to my general thoughts on WoW.

Since you found this blog (Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of the Internet!), you’ve invariably found the many, many other rogue-specific blogs out there on the InterWeb-Googles. Congratulations on your persistence. You may be wondering how I fit into the WoW universe. Well, let me just say right from the start that I’m not the best rogue in the world. I don’t have any gladiator drakes or anything of the sort. I  I think I’m a good rogue, of course. (If I didn’t, would I blog about it?) That’s it, just good. I know my class enough to not make a fool out of myself too often.

I suppose I should say a little about myself, too. I’m 35 years old, an avid gamer, and I’ve played WoW since beta. I’ve quit a few times and changed my play style a few times, but WoW still keeps me interested. I play on a pvp server and have a few 80s and a few alts in their 70s. In Burning Crusade, I mostly played pvp and I never raided. In Wotlk, I rarely pvp and mostly raid. My ony current raiding character is a mutilate rogue, though I plan to start raiding with my warlock in an affliction spec. I have a level 80 mage, but my guild has a few good mages already, so I don’t play him much. Outside of WoW, I’m a software developer, scuba diver, tequila drinker and occasional malcontent.

This is not a blog about me or my characters. It’s not a place for me to brag about anything or belittle anyone. If the posts help or entertain you, I’m happy with that.  If I’m wrong on something I say, please take the time to post a comment and enlighten me, so that I can learn too. One reason I started this blog is because of all that I learned from other blogs and how grateful I was that someone with more experience than me took the time to ignore his or her actual job and write about WoW.

So welcome to my corner of the Intertubes! I sincerely hope that your boss doesn’t catch you reading my posts. Good luck!