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. =)

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