the stubborn underachiever, part 2
February 27, 2009
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:
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.
