Cataclysm Rogue Preview

As you should already know, we were given a preview of Cataclysm talents for a few select classes, one of them being us rogues.

I could try and analyse these to death but since it's only a preview and Blizzard is looking for early feedback on them, I'd rather wait until I can try them out myself when I get into the Beta (Ssshh, it's a strategy *hint blizzard: gief beta inv*)

Anyway, the talent trees are being juggled with a bit, some talents move across the trees, others just move up and down tiers within a tree. Hunger For Blood is gone, as was announced, and we get a new skill that smells of Hunter's Mark (First we get a misdirect and now a hunter's mark, hmmm ...).

There are some talents that beg for attention, though. For example ..

Improved Expose Armor (3 points)
Gives a 33/67/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability.

Deep in the Assassination tree. With this talent Expose Armor only costs 25 energy to apply. Probably intended for PvP, but who knows.

Venomous Wounds (3 points)
Each time your Rupture or Garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 15/30/45% chance to deal with 616/619/621 additional Nature damage.

Also deep in Assassination tree. No more Ruptureless cycles for Muti rogues, I suppose *sadface*

Vendetta (1 point)
Marks an enemy for death, increasing all damage you deal to the target by 20% and granting you unerring vision of your target, regardless of concealments such as Stealth and Invisibility. Lasts 30 seconds.

The replacement for Hunger for Blood. No cost given at the moment, half the duration of Hunger for Blood. At the moment it's even more powerful than the previous incarnation of Hunger for Blood, so I suspect that 20% to go down.

Reinforced Leather (5 points)
Increases your armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 10/20/30/40/50%.

A strange talent in the middle of the combat tree. No PvE use whatsoever unless we're going to be tanking so I suppose this is to make combat rogues more able to go toe to toe with plate wearers without feeling like a naked clothie.

Other than that, Honor Amongst Thieves is getting reworked, looking a bit like a mix between an improved version of what it is now and Leader of the Pack:

Increases the ranged and melee critical hit chance of all party and raid members by 5%. When any player in your party or raid critically hits with a ranged or melee ability, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point on your current target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 4/32/2 seconds.

I'm baaaaack

Okay, wow. The last time I posted here, my guild did Ulduar for the first time ... that has been a while, to say the least.

Character progress

What have I been up to ? Well, you can check the armories of my characters, of course, but the TL;DR version is that my guild is 10/12 in ICC25 and working on Lich King in ICC10, and I've had a chance to give him a poke as well.

Personally I'm a big fan of Icecrown Citadel. The atmosphere is Black Temple-flavored grimness all over again, but with the added touch of ice cold blue/cyan. Setting foot on the Frozen Throne gave me a small loregasm... and fights like Saurfang or Festergut are just great to test our DPS potential since, for melee at least, it's pretty much tank 'n spank.

Guild birthday

Immortalis recently celebrated their 1 year anniversary, and we did it by marching through Stormwind and Ironforge, basejumping off the Purple Parlor, and raiding the Horde faction leaders.

Some screenshots here.

Cataclysm spoilers

As with most blogs, I'll add a spoiler tag somewhere to warn you when I'm about to spoil stuff for you.

Minor glyphs and fun

Pewter from The Mental Shaman asks in her post about Cataclysm professions (spoilers, obviously!) what Minor Glyphs should be about. In my opinion, we have a fun minor glyph (Blurred Speed for temporary waterwalking), a few useful ones (Safe Fall and Vanish) and the rest is mostly useless. Now, if we compare our useful minor glyphs with other classes, we could still think of them as 'more fun' - speeding up when vanishing is a pretty unique way of adding value to that skill, while removing a reagent is more of a convience thing.

Not dead yet

Hello dear readers!

Just a message to confirm that I'm not dead yet - real life is quite busy (exams and now resits) and so is WoW (finally raiding Ulduar 25!).

I bought a new computer and it took me a while to find my photoshop install CD so this post doesn't have a proper pic to accompany it.

Recent Achievements

Some noteworthy achievements I obtained since my last post... let's see...
We finally got around to downing the city leaders again, so I got a black war bear.
I noticed I only needed a few more heroics for it so I did the right heroics and got the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title.
I worked towards the Argent Tournament dagger and got the title Aeltyra of Stormwind in the process - not particularly something I was aiming for, I use it as my PvP title but meh.

Gearing up

I also worked on my reputations and such a bit to get my gear up - the bracers from Wyrmrest Accord and the boots from Argent Crusade.
We did Naxx and the loot gods granted me two fist weapons (Calamity's Grasp and The Hand of Nerub) so I am combat specced now, and the badges got me a new ring.

Raiding Ulduar

Immortalis (the reincarnation of Athanatoi) ventured into Ulduar25 for the first time last week, and I was there. Due to a lot of people already having done most of the fights on 10 man, we downed the bosses from the siege of Ulduar without much of a hassle. The sunday team got down the antechamber (I wasn't there) and yesterday we had a few attempts on Thorim and Freya (no kills sadly).
Still lots of fun, though.

Non-rogue stuff

I tanked some normal instances on my death knight and I quite enjoy it. She is now 74 and I'm hoping to have her ready to do heroics by 3.2
With the badge change, a lot of people will be wanting to do heroics for them, but they won't need the gear anymore - so I can tank for them, roll on all plate gear I want, and get badges of conquest while I'm at it.

Because my healer was a guildie with a fairly high level alt (77 is high for Nexus and UK) he was bored throughout most of the pulls and thus we upped the pace a bit.
Eventually he just kept pulling stuff himself, and I still managed to pick it up. It was chaotic, but fun! The first boss pull in UK was borderline suicidal (pulling the room and the boss with it) and a few of our PuGed DPS died (sorry guys) but the runs went smooth and quite fast otherwise.

Digging up old screenshots

When I'm bored, I like to go dig up old screenshots in my WoW folder and rack up those old memories. The contrast between my early Horde days and what I am now is big ... and there are a lot of people on these screenshots that I miss.

It's odd, though. When I first started playing, I was on EU-Defias Brotherhood (RP-PvP) and I mostly RP'd. In fact I was so focused on roleplaying that I didn't really get on with leveling. The highest character I got on that server is a lv 47 Troll hunter. It's not that I sucked at leveling, but there was always RP to be found, and I rarely chose leveling over RP.

Then I rolled Alliance on an RP server and I consider myself a raiding/PvP hybrid player. I'm not even interested in RP anymore (unless I'm in a really poetic mood maybe). And it's kind of hard getting both of those things done on this server, because we are one of the lowest ranked realms on the raiding progress list (#239 of 255 on wowprogress, I would guess the only ones behind us are newer realms) and our battlegroup isn't exactly balanced either as I said before.

Anyway, some of these things are memories that will stick for a very long time.
Stuff like massive RP guild meets, or doing stealth runs with a few druids and a rogue, epic tanking moments (misclicking and getting shifted out of bearform as Azgalor hits me ... err bad example.). The opening of AQ. A lv 1 Hogger raid.

I also found some even older screenshots in my Fraps folder. Terribly old screens, because they're not even from WoW - they are Guild Wars screens. Screens of my lv 10 elementalist, with a christmas hat, watching the new years fireworks in a city I can't even remember the name of.

I'll leave you with a GM chatlog that I found on these screenshots ...

Comparing combat & mutilate

Yes, dear reader, back to the less emo posts (for now). First of all I'd like to test something I added when adding the new header, so I'll quote the Overkill nerf that is planned to hit us next patch.

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

So yeah, there you have it (that should look like a Blizzard quote). I won't say too much about this, other blogs have already done their predictions, I'd prefer to wait and see the impact on PvE. It's obviously meant as a PvP nerf mainly, and we knew it was coming.

Combat vs Mutilate
I'm still without a WoW subscription at the moment, but that doesn't mean I don't have stuff to write about! I dug up a few screens in my WoW folder. Right before I left I respecced my PvE spec back to Mutilate, and before I did that I ran some tests on the target dummies. I used the same gear except for the weapons (Greed/LPC for Combat and LPC/LPC for Mutilate). For the exact gear, glyphs etc used, check these chardev profiles: combat / mutilate.

I used the stopwatch and clicked to start it while I used a keybind for my opener. After 4 minutes (sharp :p !) I took a screenshot to record my current dmg done and average DPS on Recount. In retrospect I should probably have done both spec tests multiple times - I only did Combat once, and then did two tests for Mutilate because I thought I had to get used to the changes a bit (I hadn't played with the new HfB yet and such).

Anyway, the results:


Number one is my combat test, two is the first mutilate test, and three is the second mutilate test. As you can see, my second mutilate test had the highest average DPS, and the first had the highest overall damage done.

The numbers are very close together though, which is nice, people can just pick whatever they want to play, or play with whatever weapon is best for them.

I'd like to try this revamped mutilate in a raid now that I've raided as combat a few times. With the changes they made to poisons etc, I will probably be able to use my Rolfen's Ripper with Berserking (originally purchased for PvP) as my OH.

Just gotta run some Heroic HoS for that dagger there and I'll be set for some mutilating.

Shocking news

Aeltyra lets out a hacking cough.
Suprise! Yes, dear reader, I have a small confession to make.The picture you see on the right is an accurate depiction of my character. I had a sex change. Now, Out of Character this is easy to explain: I was tired of the male character animations and wanted something more visually appealing.

But In Character? (For the people unfamiliar with RP, imagine yourself being an actor. Your in-game avatar is the character you act out. Thus, In Character is things your character would do / think etc) I don't think Azerothian technology, or magic for that matter, is advanced enough to pull this off (besides blaming magic is way too cheesy). Even if it was easy to explain HOW I did it, explaining WHY I did it is still a riddle.

There are other options of course. You could just treat it as an entirely new character, which is probably what I'll do. The womanising behaviour of my character cannot be transfered to a female version of that character, or she'd be some kind of weird, obnoxious lesbian. I think I will explain that this is the twin sister of my male character, or something. Input on this is welcome however - make those brain cells work!

Remind me to change the header image to reflect these changes.


In other news I was taken into an Ulduar progression raid yesterday evening. Our target was XT-002 Deconstructor. I am horribly undergeared for this fight, but I guess they just wanted to do me a favor since I don't raid a lot anyway.

It's a pretty straightforward fight for us rogues: nuke the living daylights out of him. You can CloS both the Light Bomb and the Gravity Bomb, but since the last is more dangerous I prefer to save it for that one and just run when I have the Light Bomb. Other than that it's a good idea to keep an eye on your back, if a lot of scrapbots are coming dangerously close it might be a good idea to get in there and throw a Fan of Knives at them.

We lacked a bit of a punch to really down him, but we definitly improved over our attempts - while we could barely hit 30% on first attempt, the last few attempts were 10%, 8%, 12% ... etc depending on how many scrapbots he consumed before he faceplanted all of us.

DPS-wise I have no idea how I did, because I had disabled Recount for some reason and there is no option to take a WWS yet if I remember correctly. This was also the first fight in which I have exchanged Tricks of the Trade with another rogue, giving some very nice numbers on the Heart phases when combined with Heroism, Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush.


As a final note I've been doing more PvP now that I don't have to worry about respeccing costs, and one noteable thing is a Warsong Gulch match in which I was given the Iron Man achievement as a little present from my guildies (thanks guys!). I'll be happy to spend some time in there helping the others that were present to get the achievement as well.
The way we did it was pretty simple really. I stayed in defense in our flag room (a bit risky but I have a lot of 'oh sh-' options). I had to stay alive the entire match, so if a Horde attack didn't look safe, I stayed in stealth. Meanwhile my guildies bulldozered through the Horde as one block, and with a protection warrior and a bit of dedicated healing, they got the flag to our flag room and handed it over to me so I could cap it.
Let's just say it's pretty stressy when you have one flag left to cap and you have to stay alive no matter what :p

PS: If you have found this page because Google found the words 'sex change' and 'lesbian' and concluded this was some kind of obscure site: HAHAHAHAHA
Aeltyra points at you.
Aeltyra cackles maniacly at the situation.

Rogue fashion, dual specs.

Rogue Fashion
First, a bit of character progress news. We did Malygos 25 yesterday (due to the two tanks that could tank Sartharion having their PCs wrecked ... we suspect voodoo is involved) and I got Frosted Adroit Handguards (for the minimum KP bid .. gotta love no competition). I think I will keep this as my non-Tier piece, instead of the usual Chestguard of the Recluse, since I have Heroes Bonescythe Chest already and it would break my two piece Tier bonus if I rolled on that chest.

After that I went into a 10-man Naxx run that was almost full melee DPS (only one hunter). Grobbulus was interesting with this setup as one might suspect, but we did get him down. I also got a nice piece of rogue fashion (Scourge fashion?) in the Cloak of Mastery. Not that I'm complaining, but I had the Ice Striker's Cloak crafted a few days ago /sigh.

I was quite satisfied with my DPS on that run, though. Using Zaltu's macro recommendations and Dinaer's weapon switching comment I setup my Sinister Strike and FoK with Closetgnome gearset switching. On the trash I was second on damage done and DPS until late in Naxx, below the hunter and above all the death knights.
For every FoK I would automaticly switch to double Broken Stalactite for some big FoK numbers. As soon as I hit Sinister Strike, I would switch to my usual Greed/LPC combo for max single target DPS.

Dual specs
With patch 3.1 nearly upon us, what will you do with dual specs? Will you buy it at all? I will probably (when I get enough money ... I got my bronze drake so I'm balancing on the verge of poverty at the moment) go for a PvE combat and a PvP Muti/Prep spec.

I'm just happy I'm not playing my druid as my main at the moment. Trying to decide between Tanking, Moonkin DPS, Cat DPS, Resto, Resto PvP, Feral PvP, Moonkin PvP ... dual specs would almost make you depressed when you think of it that way.

Sure, I could come up with a few more rogue specs, but there is a difference between choosing combat PvE or muti PvE and cat DPS or moonkin DPS.

Back to combat

While I still haven't had the chance to test the new patch (I have no DVDs to burn that anime on so I'm a bit stuck at the moment), the constantly updating patch notes have assured me of one thing: I will respec combat.

First of all, I don't like the Hunger for Blood changes. As it stands now, it's a self buff, costs 15 energy, and lasts one minute, but requires a bleed on the target. This means a 15% damage nerf on trash. (Unless someone else applies a bleed or we open with garotte.) Combat was already stronger on trash, now it's just clearly better.

Second, they've added some talented melee haste into Lightning Reflexes. 3 ranks means 10% melee haste. This works even better with the recent buff to Slice and Dice.

And third, Mutilate isn't that much better as one would like. While it is potentially better in a tank and spank fight where you just stand around and DPS, there's a lot of fights out there (and in Ulduar as well I guess) where a lot of crap is happening and that's just not possible. Worse, there's a lot of abilities out there that can make your HfB and SnD drop (like Maexxnas Web Wrap), severely nerfing your damage until you can get them up again (especially with SnD having been buffed to 40% and HfB having been buffed to 15%, it's even more of a blow when they fall off).

And last but not least, bigger weapons just look cooler than small daggers, k?

So I'm gonna have to nag at my guildies to run Heroic CoT with me, so I can pick up Greed for my Main Hand. With my Mongoosed Librarian's Paper Cutter in the off-hand, that should make for a fairly decent combo to start the combat life with.

As a final note I'm getting closer to my epic flying mount again. I had reached 3500g, but made some investments in the AH, and currently only some of them are selling. Perhaps I can sell them during the weekend.

Then I can start spending money on enchants and the likes :p

Rogue buffs, Forsaken professions

Short post here, but after reading Jessica's reply on my mail, I have decided to take Skinning and Herbalism on my Forsaken rogue when I revive him from the dead (I deleted him a few months ago). At 80 I will switch to Alchemy. My Death Knight bank alt will be going Inscription and Enchanting, so I can make my own enchants and glyphs.

This also means that I will have Lifeblood and Master of Anatomy at my disposal while leveling. Free crit and heal, hooray !

Also, the blue tracker of MMO-Champion had some insight in what Blizzard may have in store for us:

Hunger for Blood
We think it can be a little annoying to try to keep it up all the time. We have a plan to make it a little more usable and interesting (and buff rogues in PvE at the same time). (Source)

Do you plan to buff the Combat talent tree?
Yes. (Source)

Assassination and rogue DPS in PvE
Assassination is doing too much damage relative to other rogues. Rogues as a whole are still too low in PvE and we have plans to bring them up. (Source)

Aside from a general PvE buff for us, it will be interesting to see how they plan to change Hunger for Blood.

Also, happy lunar festival !

Picture: guildies kiting Omen to AQ and back, last years Lunar Festival.

Banners, Economics, and Ninjas

No, there is absolutely no link between those topics, except that I will put them all in this post, of course.

Banners
Admittedly, even I couldn't watch my screenshot banner, so I took an old screenshot of mine and some rogue pics, and made a little more effort in a header image.

Still, I'm not quite happy with how my character is depicted here. This is an old screenshot, because it is the only decent frontal screenshot. Aeltyr has a red ponytail in-game, and no beard. He's semi-naked in this picture, but there's a perfectly logical explanation for that: it is a shot from a beach party RP event, where he is sided with two Blood Elf babes.

Economics
I've asked Jessica over at WoWconomics for her opinion on a profession combo. When I get back to the game I will be starting my Forsaken rogue, and rolling a Death Knight as his banking alt. Since a lv 60 Death Knight can basicly learn Grand Master profession ranks, I thought it would be an idea to use him as a mule too. But I'm not very good at profession choices like this, so I asked Jessica what she would deem the best four-profession-combo.
Check her site later today for the answer, and check back some other time here for the concrete benefits this will mean for me.

On a non-WoW related note, I have an exam of Marketing Management coming up next week, so I'm in a real life economic mood as well.

Ninjas

Okay, let's face it. Many people roll rogues for that ninja-feeling. Sneaking, assassinating, daggers, ... gotta be a ninja right?
Well, in fact, ninjas used a far larger range of weapons. They frequently used claw-like weapons much like the fist weapons you can find in the game, or a sickle with a weighted chain attached to it, or a simple club even. There's also a 'fun' weapon called a chigiri-gi, a "breastcutter" which is a staff with two spikes around the middle of the staff, and a chain with a claw attached to it. The spikes are used to trap and break swords, and the claw, well .. to rip you apart. Other than that, smaller things like poisoned caltrops, or less stealthy things like bombs (after the Dutch brought gunpowder to Japan), were also amongst the arsenal of things you can kill people with.
I'll do a post on "Are rogues ninjas ?" some other time to compare more similarities and differences between the two. I'll leave you with a shot of myself, so you have at least a visual image of the nutcase behind this blog.

The female ninja in this blog post is Yù Jiāolóng from the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Rogue aesthetics and patch 3.0.8

Just a note that I will be working on a layout that is more appealing when my exams are done and I can get back into WoW to have a little photoshoot with my character.
For now, you'll have to do with my lazy header, which is secretly a screenshot I just smacked some text on.

In other news, I suppose this is where I talk about the new patch and what it did for rogues. Well, honestly .. not that much. (No, Ogre, that doesn't count as complaining !)

* Cheap Shot: This ability no longer has diminishing returns against anything other than itself.
* Kidney Shot: This ability now has diminishing returns against all other stuns.
* Fan of Knives: The cooldown has been removed. In addition, now deals 150% of weapon damage when used while daggers are equipped.
* Feint: Rank 8 now reduces the damage taken from area of effect attacks by 50% for 6 seconds in addition to its existing effects.

The first two work together (they switched the diminishing returns). Not that important in PvE, but in PvP it means less stun combining with your teammates stun spells (e.g. no more full duration Deep Freeze + Kidney Shot for example)

The Fan of Knives change is nice - combat rogues can use Adrenaline Rush for some FoK spamming. Mutilate rogues won't be throwing out that much AoE hurt, but still 50% more damage !

Feint .. well I guess we have an excuse to put it on our action bar now. Finish your cycle and Feint before disengaging a target that is going to AoE you to minimize the load on your healers. In PvP, not really that useful I reckon.

There's also material changes for a lot of enchants, but I'm not going to list them all and instead refer you to the post on MMO-Champion.

Aeltyr tries to find his knives and realises he left them in his other armor. Aeltyr casts Fan of Handkerchiefs, but it fails.