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.

The noob went raiding

First of all, hooray I got Greed ! Got some guildies to run CoT with and it dropped on the first run. I then spent the weekend leveling Unarmed skill (because a huge fist tool to smash faces with is obviously not a weapon) and respecced Combat so I was ready to raid as combat.

Sartharion and two drakes
My first time doing this encounter on 25-man and with any drakes up. It took a few attempts (I guess the healers had to get used to nub rogues taking damage all the time, ahem) but we got our focus back and downed him.

I did roughly 2100 DPS on the final attempt, which is not bad if you consider I was running Anesthetic Poison instead of Wound to help ease the elemental adds. However, I am not really satisfied with my overall performance here because I died several times on the other attempts due to not noticing the void zones. It's a bloody purple circle on a red-ish background! Though like one of my tanks pointed out, I might also have been misjudging the range of them. Evil voidzones.

Malygos
Now here's a (to me) more familiar fight.
First phase went fine. Did a Killing Spree during the vortex to get some extra damage in on Malygos and avoid damage from the vortex.
Second phase I still ran from bubble to bubble for quite a long time. Still no hoverdisk achievement.
Third phase ... well. I, uhm. Messed up. Started up the rotation well. Got targeted. Pressed FREAKING SPEED BUFF instead of Flame Shield. Watched the entire phase from a corpse PoV.

Arachnid Quarter
Quite useful that I can compare these with my last run.
Anub'rekhan: last fight 2312, this time 2277.
Faerlina: last fight 2773, this time 2594.
Maexxna: last fight 2417, this time 2589.

Well, at least one fight improved (I wasn't wrapped this time)... Perhaps this is also because of my party composition - I was in the melee group with two other rogues, a warrior and a DK. I don't know what group I had last time, but yeah.

Sapphiron
Carrying on with our dragon killing spree, we fought the guy that should be on the Frosties Cereal Box ... I died at the iceblocks here, but not because I didn't manage to jump behind an iceblock. No, I ran to the other side of Sapphiron to avoid his Blizzard, and I suppose I was out of range from the healers there, so I took quite a bit of damage from the frost aura (we went for the achievement so 75 frost resist max). When I came back to the other side I wanted to hit my healthstone because I was about to die, but I was frozen as an iceblock.

Can you guess what happened next ? Frost bomb, iceblock canceled, frost aura tick. Dead rogue. No time for healing, potting, etc. Oh well.

Kel'thuzad
And then the last guy on the list. We first did two attempts at the achievement, but people died for some reason, and we were five minutes from raid end, so we decided we'd rather see a kill without the achievement than no kill at all. Focused and got the kill in. I didn't do all that bad on interrupting either, though the more experienced rogue was faster a lot of the time.

Anonymous WWS to be found here. I am Gojushiho.

Screenshot of my UI here, should you want to see it. (Might take a while before it is 'made public' so check back later if it doesn't work the first time.)

The noob goes raiding again

I see I have been put in the raid line-up for tonight, and on the menu are Malygos, Military Quarter, Frostwyrm Lair, and Sartharion 2/3D.

I'm sure I'l do better on Malygos than last time now that I've gotten a feel of the fight, and while I haven't really done Frostwyrm Lair on my rogue yet I have retroraided Naxxramas before it floated towards Northrend, so the mechanics aren't really new to me.

The big obstacle for me is Sartharion, which sounds quite complicated (what with lava tsunamis, twilight realms and all that crap). Not only that, but we will be doing him with two drakes up, three if we have enough time, so it's also the hardest fight I would face so far.

Now I'm still not that fantasticly geared, but there have been some improvements since last time. I'm now sitting at the poison hit cap. I'm working on expertise (got a Trollwoven Girdle crafted and smacked a belt buckle with an expertise gem on it).

We'll see how it goes. Loot-wise, I don't have a lot of KP, but there is only one rogue that can outroll me on rogue stuff (in this line-up ...) and he has basicly everything you'd ever want (4T7.25, Webbed Death/Murder, etc) so on that regard I'm safe.

Of course, there's still all other classes that want those Tier tokens, and melee competition for trinkets/jewelery, and so on.

Anyway, doesn't matter that much. I'm just gonna try my best for the raid (already got my flasks and food!) and see how things turn out.

The noob hits Naxxramas 25

As I said in my previous post, I was signed up for a raid thursday. I made it into the line-up, so I bought me two flasks and got some buff food, and off we went. This was a split run, where we first went to kill Malygos and then went to Naxxramas to clear the Spider and Military quarters.

Malygos
Fun fight, sadly my WWS isn't really saying a lot of it. I did okay in the first phase, managed to keep up HfB and SnD most of the time. I didn't manage to chain ToTT on the tank due to being out of range too much, and somehow I could not judge the distance to a power spark so I failed at power spark killing (also, no death knights in this raid for some reason).

The second phase I usually stood around doing nothing except for running from bubble to bubble. I had proposed the other melee DPS (the better geared ones) to take hoverdisks first so it was quite late into phase 2 until I was airsurfing.

The third phase, well, I hate it. It's very chaotic, my unit frames don't show the combo points made by the drake abilities, and counting them is suprisingly hard when you have to watch your stacks, watch Malygos so you don't get caught out of a bubble when he focuses you, and stay with the flock of dragons. I guess this is a matter of practice too, and it did go better as we tried the second time.

Arachnid Quarter
We went for the achievements on Faerlina and Maexxna, so that basicly means we AoE'd every trash pack (hello Fan of Knives) and rushed after we killed Anub'Rekhan.

According to the WWS, my DPS on the fights:
Anub'rekhan: 2312 DPS
Faerlina: 2773 DPS
Maexxna: 2417 DPS

However, I was wrapped on Maexxna right after our Heroism and my Potion of Speed, and the ranged DPS was slacking in freeing me. I was wrapped for a full minute / 11 ticks and the fight only lasted for just under 2 minutes and a half.

Military Quarter
We had two new priests practicing Mind Control on Razuvious, so we had a few bumps until the fight was under control (nonetheless they did a good job).

Razuvious: 2714 DPS

On Gothik I was fairly slow in getting to mobs despite being specced into Fleet Footed (can't compete with charge) so I kinda sucked on that fight.

Gothik: 1135 DPS

The Four Horsemen fight really didn't work out for some reason. Our ranged tanks kept dieing, people (including me) were plagued by frequent disconnects, etc.

So in summary, as expected I was sort of carried through. I didn't completely suck (at least I stayed above the tanks) but my lack of decent gear (half of my gear are blue quest rewards that don't suffice for the Superior achievement and I lack Expertise and to a lesser extent hit), decent buff food (I used Spicy Hot Talbuk and Dark Desire) and in the Malygos case, experience with the fight really hurt my DPS.

Due to not having any KP yet I only got one piece of loot, Dislocating Handguards. I will probably get an expertise enchant on that.

Also, getting Trollwoven Girdle crafted will help in getting some more expertise - in any case it is an upgrade to my current PvP one (Eviscerator's)

EDIT: Post edited and pic added. I would also like to add two things I forgot to say in the first place, namely that you can hear a mail sent in by me on Episode 77 of The WoW Insider Show, the podcast of WoWInsider, and that I added Gone Rogue as a link into my blogroll. Definitly check it out!

EDIT nr2: a nice guildie told me how to use anonymous WWS reports, so here it is. I am Heian.