A few new talents have found their way into the tree and a lot of things have moved around.

Assassination

Deadly Momentum After killing an opponent that yields experience or honor, gives you a 50% chance per talent point to refresh Slice and Dice or Recuperate to their original duration.

PVE/levelling talent, possibly of some use in BGs/5v5 but I’d rather skip it.

Blackjack Even after your sap wears off, its effects linger on enemies, reducing their damage done by 25%/50% for 5 seconds.

50% damage reduction for 5seconds after your sap wears off. With a lot of my saps going onto healers/classes that will start CCing as soon as sap wears off, this feels pretty pointless.

Improved Expose Armor Gives a 33%/66%/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability

3pts for free expose armor – even if EA remains a single level ability with a 20% armor reduction, this could well be worth investing points in.

Murderous Intent When you backstab an enemy that is at or below 35% health, you instantly recover 10/20/30 energy

Hmm…. nice for hunters using deterrence, but I don’t see this being better than mutilating with 3pts spent elsewhere, especially when you take the positional requirements of backstab into consideration.

Venomous Wounds Each time your rupture or garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 45% chance to deal X additional Nature damage

Supposedly deadling 1k+ extra damage after lvl82, this doesn’t look too impressive since it won’t scale with gear.

Vendeta Marks an enemy target 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 of invisibility

30 seconds of +20% damage, wow. The ability to ignore stealth? Double wow. HfB on acid, this looks like the ultimate rogue killer, especially since we won’t be able to instantly FoK rogues out of their vanishes anymore.

Unless you want to put points into Blackjack or Remorseless Attacks (meh to both), you’ll need to put at least two points into improving eviscerate. With Improved Expose Armor, I can’t see this being a bad thing.

Combat

Reinforced Leather Increases your armor contribution from cloth/leather by 10/20/30/40/50%

Interesting, but pointless vs magic damage and weak against ArPwhoring warriors/rogues. *
*Ñotorious points out that ArP is becoming a thing of the past in Cata, so with this talent physical damage will be mitigated more noticably than I’d thought (while poison damage will still hurt).

Restless Blades Your damaging finishing moves reduce the cooldown of your Bladeflurry, Killing Spree and Sprint abilities by 0.5secs per combo point.

This is going to make estimating the CD of Killing Spree a bit tricky.

With another two new talents in this tree that improve Recuperate plus the increase in armor, the survivability of combat rogues will be slightly buffed – a viable replacement for preparation? Time will tell.

Subtlety

Energetic Recovery Empowers your Recuperate ability, causing its periodic affect to also give 1 energy

Extra energy for when you’re in trouble. Perhaps the energy gained will be enough to get off a defensive gouge or stun. Could be used offensively with Overkill for some nice burst potential.

Dagger Specialization Increases crit chance with daggers by 1/2/3/4/5%

Freshly moved from the combat tree, this could be a nice boost to Focused Attacks.

Sanguinary Vein Increases your damage dealt to targets with a bleed by 2/4/6%

A passive HfB (I’m betting 10g that Blizz will be using this as the easy way to buff/nerf subtlety damage in future patches).

Serrated Blades Your eviscerate has a 4/8/12% chance per combo point to refresh your Rupture on the target to its initial duration

Combine with Sanguinary Vein for a potentially constant damage buff.

Initial Thoughts

It will be very interesting to see whether the large health pools promised in Cataclysm, combined with Recuperate, will negate the need for a rogue to take Preperation to stay viable. If rogues end up being forced to take x/x/23+ to be able to survive, it looks like additional point allocation will be very flexible.

My money will be on 51+/x/x Assassination specs taking over (Vendetta+either prep or combat pts). A more sturdy rogue is a more attractive/viable rogue, and this will possibly increase their representation. My feeling is that if there are more rogues in arenas/BGs, then Vendetta will become a priceless talent for scoring kills on other rogues. Since a buffed vanish that doesn’t instantly break on dmg/bugs will hopefully become quite a nice survival tool. I’m guessing that being able to cancel that out, and hit 20% harder to boot, will be a VERY strong way of spending talent points.

However, all of this is pure speculation so far on my account, and the trees may change as well. Regardless, it looks like the rogue class in PvP will be in for quite a shake up – a lot more so than TBC>WotLK.

The following is a breakdown of the more troublesome hunter abilities.

DEFENSIVE ABILITIES

Deterrence

While at first glance deterrence might appear to give a hunter 100% immunity to damage, they are still vulnerable to a couple of attacks.
Firstly, it is impossible to parry a rogue’s opening moves. Ambush, cheap-shot and garrote will all hit through deterrence, so if the hunter uses it at the very last second, there’s still a chance of a kill. It’s usually best to open with a cheap-shot since a stunned hunter is unable to parry your attacks, regardless of the deterrence buff. Unfortunately, good hunters will cast flare when they use deterrence, stopping you from restealthing. If this happens, you can use backstab to continue attacking, since its positional requirements seem to over-ride the chance of being parried. The other attacks that the hunter is vulnerable to are an engineer’s Hand Mounted Pyro Rocket and your shivs.

Disengage

Unless the hunter is BM spec, the cooldown on disengage can be as low as 16seconds with talents and a glyph. It’s common for a hunter to jump just before they cast it, so try and use this early warning to land a gouge just before they disengage. It may break early due to a dot, but every second that you can slow a hunter down will help in the long run.

Freezing Trap

This is the trap that turns you into an iceblock. Cloak of Shadows can protect you from this, but be careful using it since it will not stop you from triggering the graphically identical Frost Trap.

Frost Trap

Personally, I absolutely hate being kited. As far as raging goes, I’m always a lot calmer when I’m CC’d than when I’m walking through a Frost Trap at a fraction of my normal speed. There’s not much you can do about this snare, cloak won’t affect it and the aura lasts for 30seconds (enough time for it to come off cooldown again). Grin and bear it, though try to take the fight away from the aura if possible.

Freezing Arrow

A ranged version of freezing trap which shares the same cooldown as the hunters other frost traps. In arenas this will often be used immediately after a scatter-shot on your healer. Ideally when my healer is hit by scatter-shot, I try and move ontop of where the trap lands so I get to eat the freezing trap instead – most of the time it either breaks cause I’m dotted/autoshot. Easier said than done, especially when you’re on the other side of the map, so try and convince your healer to stay close to you.

Snake Trap

In arenas, this trap can be a blessing as well as a curse. If the snakes spawn and switch to your partner, the deadly poison that they inflict can function as a cc-breaker (very useful for negating wyvern sting, freezing traps and scatter shots) and will give mana back to shamans through their water shield ability. The snakes have poisons similar in ability to your crippling, deadly and mind-numbing poisons.

Feign Death

This ability is easily the biggest cause of lost combo-points I’ve encountered. If activated during a snake trap, or when their pet is attacking you, you’ll probably lose your target and start mutilating the wrong enemy. The fastest way to recover from this is to either bind your tab key to “target nearest enemy player”, or rely entirely on target macros (arenas only).

Flare

Flare is another spell that is available for use the second it wears off. CloS will not protect you from losing stealth – getting a cheapshot through a flare when the hunter is standing in the aura’s middle is extremely risky (though possible). I might be mistaken, but flare doesn’t seem to work on ticks/pulses. If you need to vanish after being caught, watch the flare debuff icon – it can stay up a few seconds longer than you’re in the flared area.

Scatter Shot (Survival, Marksmanship)

While this is in the Survival tree, it is also taken by Marksmanship hunters (BM hunters skip it and take Aimed Shot instead). There’s nothing you can really do about being scatter shotted, other than hope there are dots ticking on you. Take care if you’re hit by this on the edge of a bridge/platform, you’ll come out of the scatter-shot facing a random direction.

Wyvern Sting (Survival)

A 10 second CC on the same diminishing returns as freezing trap. Both WotF and Stoneform racials will remove this sting if available.

Readiness (Marksmanship)

Preparation for hunters, well, Marksmanship hunters. Annoyingly this resets the cooldowns on both Disengage and Deterrence, and there’s no Hypothermia-type debuff to stop hunters using them straight away.

Hunter’s Mark

I always like to activate stealth just after the gates open, but the one potential downside to this is that a hunter may be able to drop their Hunter’s Mark onto you before you can stealth. You can cloak the mark off (get out of line of sight to avoid the 10% chance the hunter will reapply it), vanish it (terrible waste of a cooldown) or have it dispelled by a priest, paladin or fellhunter. The last time I can remember being caught out by this was on Nagrand Arena – luckily the hunter sent his pet in to attack me so we nuked it behind a pillar before he could pull it out of combat…

Concussive Shot

Yet another snare, this time undispellable (with the exception of vanish or a paladin’s Hand of Freedom spell).

Wing Clip

Another 60% snare, though luckily it does not stack with the freezing trap debuff.

Track Hidden

Hunters do have a slightly higher stealth-detection level than other classes (for a breakdown of stealth/detection levels, read this post). Be extra careful when moving around hunters when in stealth and stay behind them whenever you can.

OFFENSIVE ABILITIES

Kill Shot

Evil 10k+ crits at the worst possible time. With a 30k health pool, you’re in danger of Kill Shots at the 6k hp mark. If you have a glyphed Cloak of Shadow, you can perhaps survive the hit long enough to LoS the hunter or receive a heal. Perhaps.

Aimed Shot

An undispellable healing debuff. You can try and time your evasions so that they are activated just before aimed shot runs out, but there’s only a 25% chance the next aimed shot will miss.

Steady Shot

A hard hitting shot with a short cast bar. Try not to embarrass yourself by kicking it (especially if using a kick-announcing addon… whoops) as it is uninterruptable. It is however a good time to stun/gouge/disarm, since the hunter is unable to dodge or parry any attacks while the cast bar is ticking away.

The Beast Within (Beast Mastery)

Ten seconds of CC immunity on a 1min40 CD. The only way of cutting down their damage is through a disarm. Positioning is vital so make sure you either get behind them before you try, or catch them in a steady shot if they start casting one. While it would be funny if Anesthetic poison dispelled Bestial Wrath/Beast Within, it doesn’t.

PET ABILITIES

Web, Venom Web Spray and Pin

Two ranged snares and one melee snare, on 40-second cooldowns (or 27-second cooldowns for BM hunters). These count as magic effects and can be dispelled or cloaked if needed.

Intimidation (Beast Mastery)

Limited to only BM hunters (thank god), on a one minute cooldown.

Additional Tactics for Rogue vs Hunter

Rogue vs Hunter is one of those encounters where it’s worth using double wound-poison. You’ll struggle to keep crippling poison on your target otherwise and the chances of keeping deadly poison ticking on a hunter is pretty low. Also, using double-wound will let you gouge when needed. Keeping crippling applied is a necessity – if it does drop off you can use Deadly Throw as a temporary replacement, though it’s not a great alternative since the movement reduction of Deadly Throw is less than that from Wing Clip/Frost Trap. In a BG/duel situation, do whatever you can to stay in range of the hunter, up to and including the use of blind as a gap-closer.

Hopefully some of that information will be of use – there’s no magic pve-style rotation to ensure a kill on a hunter, it’s more a case of perseverence and keeping your fingers crossed. Try not to get too frustrated when being kited (damn I need to practice that) and if you’re in an arena, try and look at the situation as a whole before deciding it’s pointless to chase the hunter and making a switch to another player. It may look and feel that you’re having no impact, but by sticking on the hunter you are limiting his damage and hopefully letting your partner/s work miracles

Footnote

I have an 80 hunter but haven’t tried to play it seriously in arenas so I’m only really aware of one side of the fight – if I’ve made any glaring mistakes please let me know!

I’m currently swapping my deadly-poisoned offhand for one with anesthetic. Swapping weapons does trigger the GCD, so make sure you don’t swap with full energy – use it as a way of pooling energy instead. With a 50% proc rate, you (hopefully) shouldn’t need to have it equipped for too long before swapping back to your normal offhand.

There are several buffs you can dispel with anesthetic poison, with the most important being the following;

Savage Roar

A 30% damage buff is pretty impressive, and being able to dispel it is a nice way of wasting a feral druid’s combo points. You won’t be able to put out much pressure using wound+anesthetic, but it can be a nice way of helping out your partner to survive a feral druids initial OTT burst. As well as reducing their damage you’re also keeping them free of dots to allow a defensive gouge. Switch back to wound+deadly when you’re back on-top of the situation.

Berserker Rage

Dispelling their Berserker Rage isn’t too devastating to a warrior, but removing it stops some of their rage generation and leaves them vulnerable to gouge, fears and even saps. It will also dispel their enrage buff, though that is likely to be reapplied immediately.

Hunger for Blood

You’ll probably never see a HfB rogue at all nowadays (unless they forget to respec before a BG or arena match). You may want to switch to wound+anesthetic for the comedy value – watching them energy-starve themselves as they spam HfB is kind of cute.

Anesthetic Poison isn’t a necessity for PVP, but it can be pretty useful at times. I’m currently playing 2v2 with a low geared priest – being able to slow down a feral druid’s opening burst on him can really help.

After a bit of playing around, I’ve combined both the targeting and focusing into a single macro for each arena target. I’m sure I had a smoother way of doing this before, but this seems to work just fine. If anyone has a less messy way of writing the macro, let me know please and I’ll update it.


/focus [mod:shift,@arena1][] %f
/target [nomod,@arena1][] %t


The above macro will target arena1 by default – holding shift will change your focus to arena1. The modifier can be changed from shift to ctrl (or even alt if you’ve got wierd thumbs).

If you’re playing a burst setup (such as rogue/ret, rogue/destro/offensive healer etc) you’ll be able to get away with low levels of resilience. Since the aim is to score a kill as quickly as possible, you’ll be blowing all of your defensive cooldowns to limit damage intake. If your opponent survives this 45second burst, it’s likely to be a lost game for you regardless of your resilience. With two evasions and a cloak, you should ideally be able to mitigate the amount of damage you receive to avoid having to rely on the passive damage reduction from resilience.

Having 1415 resilience (the current cap) when nobody ever tries hitting you means that you’ve just wasted a lot of stat points. You need to think about how often you find yourself on the receiving end of damage. As a guideline, if you’re playing in a setup where you’re the easiest kill (or the easiest target to switch to after you’ve used cloak/trinket) it’s suicidal to neglect resilience. However, if your warlock partner is getting trained hard every single game, then it’s a good idea to start switching out PVP gear for PVE gear. The class of your healer will affect the situation as well. Druids for example can throw out insane healing, but if they don’t have HoTs on you, you’re initially vulnerable if the enemy makes a switch to you.

The amount of resilience gear you take isn’t a decision you can make once then forget about. At different arena ratings there’ll be different concentrations of setups. This is most noticable in 2v2, but also evident in 3v3. On Cyclone-EU for example, 1500-1800 sees countless random/bursty teams, while 1800-2000 has a lot of RLS/TSG/Beastcleave and destro teams. 2000-2300 seems to be entirely wizard-cleave/caster teams for some reason. Different classes will have different tactics for beating you, so if all you’re facing are beastcleaves, ride through it by gearing appropriately.

If every team is making a beeline to you, it’s also worth increasing your survivability in other ways. A Battlemaster’s trinket, Corroded Skeleton Key or a Glyph of CloS can save your neck in a pinch much more reliably than an extra couple of hundred resilience.

The other consideration is the PVE/PVP gear that you actually have. Taking a heroic Geistlord’s Punishment Sack instead of the Deadly Gladiator’s helm you picked up a few seasons ago is a no-brainer, but don’t underestimate the stats of Relentless/Wrathful set pieces. For example, compare the T10 Shadowblade Helmet to the Relentless Gladiator’s Helm. Taking the 264ilvl T10 will improve your stats by 22 attack power at the cost of 80 resilience – not too impressive a gain. If you’re wanting to play in PVE gear, ICC offset pieces are ideally suited, but with the exception of some heroic ToC25 pieces you’re better off sticking to the honor-bought items. Also consider the gems/enchants and make sure they’re suited to PVP.

A useful site for gear comparrisons is http://shadowpanther.net, which uses AEP values to calculate the value of an item of gear. Simply speaking, AEP (Agility Equivalence Points) is a way of assigning values to different stats – the current formulas are here. It’s not a perfect way of comparing gear for use in arenas (for example, it doesn’t take into account hit caps) but it’s definitely worth a look at.

Looking at the amount of resilience taken by high-rated 3v3 rogues this season, the average seems to be around 1100. This is based on current armory data, so it’s not very accurate (they might be in 2v2/5v5 gear when logging out for example).

Personally, I take the following resilience on the two rogues I’m currently playing. Admittedly I haven’t raided since my ex used to force me into the first wing of ICC25 (no heroic ICC gear for me!), but my resilience levels and current mmr are roughly as follows;

2v2 rogue/priest = 1000 (1900 mmr)
3v3 rogue/mage/priest = 1000 (1800 mmr)
3v3 rogue/dk/priest = 1150 (1700 mmr)

2v2 rogue/shaman = 847 (2050 mmr)
3v3 rogue/shaman/lock = 1200 (2200 mmr)
3v3 rogue/shaman/spriest = 927 (2300 mmr)

My thoughts here are based on a typical assassination spec – I couldn’t possibly comment on combat specs, as the only combat rogue I’ve seen this whole season was in full BiS PVE gear. Thanks for killing my 1100resilience rogue in a single Killing Spree Ashvael, /sulk.

This week I finally transfered off Terenas to move to the green pastures of Stormscale-EU. Along with the migration, I faction changed to horde as my human racial felt pretty weak (being able to equip a PVE trinket in PVP only works when you actually have a decent PVE trinket to use!). After a relaxing evening of Shaman/Rogue 2v2 I went to bed, looking forward to starting up a new RLS the next day.

Unfortunately, the next day I was unable to login – “You cannot login until the character update process you recently initiated is complete”. Checking the account page, everything seemed to have gone through ok, so I gave Blizzard a call. The woman I spoke to said my account wasn’t ‘clean’, and my payment had been declined. I then had to login to WoW and empty my mailbox so they could undo my faction change (I was warned that failing to do so immediately could result in my account being permanently locked). Five minutes later Dcruize was human again.

After waiting a short time, I tried the faction change again. This time, I was given a message saying that the process had failed. Strangely enough, the faction change icon appeared next to my character on the selection screen. Rather than use it, I raised a GM ticket asking for help.

I received the following email the next day.

Thank you for your ticket. Following an investigation into actions taken against this account we believe this account may have been accessed via a Proxy Service.

We appreciate there are circumstances when use of a Proxy can be beneficial however such services are routinely used to attempt to hide the actions of Online Trading companies and users attempting to use exploitative third party programs. As such, we do not support the use of Proxy services and if you continue to use these, we regret that this will likely prevent your use of the Paid Faction Change service and may result in suspensions placed on your account.

I made a forum post here and after a few posts from a blue, the matter seems to have been sorted out.

To cut a long story short, if you plan on transfering/faction changing, don’t use a proxy service for a while. I’ll be playing without mine for a week or two to keep Blizzard happy – if anything it means I’ve got a good excuse for getting sapped in mirror games

Additionally, appologies for the slackness between posts! I’ll be posting as soon as my workload drops. In the mean time, if anyone has ideas for useful articles or questions, drop me an email/comment and I’ll take a look.

With envenom putting out massive damage in comparison to eviscerate, you may be tempted to rely entirely on envenom as your finishing move. With 100% armor mitigation you should be hitting cloth and plate targets for similar amounts, but a couple of classes have abilities which will reduce this damage. The following guide assumes 3/3pts in Vile Poisons (essential talent).

Deadly Poison Doses (DPs)

While an envenom with 5DP does more damage than it does with 1DP, the difference is not horrendous and in most cases it can still output more damage than an eviscerate. The duration of the envenom debuff is based on the number of combo points you used, rather than the number of doses, so a 5CP envenom with 1DP will give you six seconds of +15% deadly poison application. This will help you reach 5/5DP doses faster, at which point your damage will hopefully shoot through the roof.

The following tests were done on a 0-resilience, unbuffed stationary target (ok, 30mins of hitting a training dummy while I watched TV). While the numbers themselves don’t mean too much, it does show the differences between doses/attacks, and why opening with a 1DP envenom can be more beneficial than eviscerating.

Eviscerate
Normal: 2548
Crit: 5377

Eviscerate with 3pts in Improved Eviscerate
Normal: 3058
Crit: 6452

Envenom with 1DP
Normal: 3183
Crit: 6550

Envenom with 5DP
Normal: 4314
Crit: 8904

Envenom with 5 doses of Deadly Poison, minus Nether Protection
Normal: 3020
Crit: 6232

Even with three talent points spent improving the damage, an eviscerate was not hitting harder than a 1DP envenom.

Eviscerate beats Envenom when….

Death Knight

Anti Magic Shell. Not exactly hard to miss – any target under this purple dome will take 75% less damage from your envenoms. Spamming envenoms onto the DK will cap his runic power, so either pool your energy or try another finishing move (bear in mind that a 1.2k eviscerate probably won’t stress his healer too much).

Destruction Warlocks

Despite a lot of forum posts saying the opposite, Nether Protection DOES NOT proc from your envenoms or poison applications. The only time Nether Protection could be an issue is if you have a partner casting nature spells onto the warlock (which could trigger a 30% damage reduction on envenom).

Rogues

With most rogues playing with 3pts in Master Poisoner, your deadly poison needs to be reapplied every six seconds before it drops off. Combine this with their stuns, evasions plus cloak of shadow, and you’ll have problems keeping a stack alive on any decent rogue. While this DPS loss is annoying, what can be even more fatal is not being able to shiv wound/crippling poison (unless you’re playing with deadly on your main hand, which requires a 1.4speed mainhand dagger to be truely viable). Not being able to shiv wound poison onto a rogue with evasion can cancel out the dps advantage of your envenoms. If you can stunlock the rogue then deadly poison/envenoms are useful, but once the rogue leaves the stun it’s worth weapon-swapping to another offhand dagger with wound poison applied.

Appologies for the slackness with updates, the last month has been chaos with barely enough time to play. Things are quietening down now and our new 3v3 seems decent enough (despite having scary amounts of furious gear!).

Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

Talents

Subtlety

• Filthy Tricks: Now Reduces the cooldown by 5/10 seconds and energy cost by 5/10 of Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities, and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 1.5/3 minutes.
• Ghostly Strike: If the rogue has a dagger equipped, this ability now deals 180% weapon damage instead of 125%.
• Hemorrhage: If the rogue has a dagger equipped, this ability now deals 160% weapon damage instead of 110%.
• Slaughter from the Shadows: Now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks in addition to its current effects.
• Waylay: The debuff from this talent can now be caused by Backstab in addition to Ambush.

Interesting stuff I’ll have a play around tomorrow when I’m less sleepy, but this may add a bit of variation to the standard 44/2/25 builds. Hemo looks a bit weak still (if you factor in the 4 talent points needed to spec into it), but in RS/RLS where I get focused a lot, putting a point into Ghostly Strike looks a bit more tempting.

With Slaughter from the Shadows giving the same DPS gain as unglyphed HfB and Waylay replacing crippling poison, maybe this will breathe life back into subtlety PVP?

Arena Historian

This is a very detailed addon that stores a lot of information about every game you play. As you can see from the screenshot below, it’s packed full of features and lets you create very specific searches, even down to your performance on individual maps.

ArenaLog3

While this doesn’t produce the detailed reports that Arena Historian does, it’s pretty light-weight. It doesn’t record the specs used by your opponents, just the class. However it does have a couple of nice features, such as being able to easily produce a summary of the last games you played (“/arenalog history 2v2 20″ for example).

Both tools are useful in their own way, you may even wish to run the two addons side-by-side. While you may initially think “oh, I know what I struggle against”, it can be quite surprising to find that certain setups are dominating you without you realising. Looking through the reports before making this post, I realised that we’ve gone 0-5 against Rogue/Shaman/Spriest without even realising it. I guess that’s one setup we really need to work on our tactics for

The best way of doing this is with focus macros. Firstly you need to focus the enemy that you plan on controlling. The most basic way of doing so is by binding a key to the ‘Focus Target’ ability in your WoW keybindings page. While this works fine, it can waste time (especially if the target you want to focus starts the game in stealth). If you need to change your focused target during the fight, you will have to go through the process of targeting/focusing the correct enemy.

A much smoother way of doing this is by using the arena1 arena2 arena3 notation. If you create a macro containing “/focus arena2″, when you press it your focus will automatically change to the second enemy target (use either Gladius or the ingame arena frames to see the order of your opposition).

Once you have sorted out a way of marking a target to be focused, you need to change your spell macros to take advantage of this. The syntax for casting on your focused target is;

/cast [target=focus] SPELLNAME

You may want to create focus macros for the following abilities – sap, blind, kick, dismantle, maybe even gouge if you have the space.

So, that’s another four buttons you need to bind to keys, several more if you include the /focus arena1 etc buttons. The least confusing way of binding these macros to keys is to bind them onto the same key as the non-focused versions, but using a modifier key. If your kick ability is set to ‘4′, then bind your focus-kick macro to shift+4 (you could use alt/ctrl instead, but shift is easier to hit with your little finger).

If you want to save space on your action bars, you can combine both the non-focus and focused spells into the same macro. Going back to the idea of using ‘4′ for kick, swap your kick spell for the following macro;

#showtooltip kick
/cast [mod:shift,target=focus] kick; kick;

“Mod:shift” refers to using the shift key as a modifier – replace ’shift’ with ctrl or alt where needed (or even rctrl/rshift/ralt for the version of the keys on the right-hand side of your keyboard).

I use shift+F1 for /focus arena1, shift+F2 for arena2 and shift+F3 for arena3. Not only does this let you continue to use the F-keys to select members of your own group, but it also lets you swap to a new focus then quickly blind them, without having to take your finger off the shift key.

You may want to experiment with using focuses in battlegrounds first. While focus techniques do offer a large advantage over manually targeting players, they do take a while to get used to. However, don’t let this put you off – it’s an invaluable tactic that will really make things easier for you. As well as being able to quickly interrupt/blind targets, you’ll also be able to see your targets cast bar, giving you a better idea of what’s going on around you.

I spoke to a rogue a while back who was using focus to let him ‘easily’ put Tricks of the Trade onto whoever he was doing arenas with. No no no no, please don’t! Create a macro targeting your partner through their name – such as “/cast [target=Lylla] tricks of the trade” – and use your focus for greater control of the opposition.

PVP Hit Mechanics – The Basics

All of your special attacks (mutilate, envenom, rupture etc) have a 95% chance to hit a target when you’re standing behind them. Increasing the amount of hit you have by 32.79 will increase your chance to hit by 1%. You initially need to have 164 hit rating just to make sure that you have no chance of missing your target with special attacks.

Hit Reduction Talents/Racials

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are several talents/debuffs/racials that affect your chance to hit;

• Quickness Passive racial skill of Night Elves, -2%
• Insect Swarm Even though this is a talent in the Balance tree, it’s not unusual to see Resto Druids with this ability, -3%
• Scorpid Sting Hunter ability, -3%
• Arctic Winds Mage talent, not widely used, -1% upto -5%
• Heroic Presence Draenei passive buff, +1%

In a worst-case scenario, you could be trying to hit a Frost Mage with insect swarm and a sting on you (they do stack) – without any hit rating you will have a 16% chance to miss. You could ‘fix’ this by taking 524 hit rating, but this would nerf your damage/survivability in the majority of games.

How Much Hit Rating for Rogues?

Ideally in 3v3 I like to run with between 6% and 7% as this is enough to counter some hit modifiers and also help lessen the impact of some of the more noticeable ones. In 2v2 there’s less chance to bump into a racial/class that will debuff your hit rating, so you may want to stick to 5% and trust your luck.

Where Should +Hit Come From?

You can reach 148 hit from the Season 8 PVP gear and a weapon chain;

• Wrathful Gladiator’s Pendant of Victory 60
• Wrathful Gladiator’s Cloak of Victory 60
• Titanium Weapon Chain 28

One of the following two rings can help increase your hit further;

• Ashen Band of … Vengeance 53 – 59
• Relentless Gladiator’s Band of Victory 50

If you’re really struggling, a Titan-Forged Rune of Accuracy will give a massive 95 hit rating. Also from Wintergrasp are the Furious-quality Titan-Forged Leather Legguards of Triumph.

Other options involve hitting the PVE content (or buying a Wodin’s Lucky Necklace if you’re rich), and as a last resort you can get another 12 hit by enchanting your boots with Icewalker.

Your Blind Missed?

Missing with your 5pt envenom can be annoying, but what can often be game-breaking is when your blind misses. Blind counts as a ranged attack, so if you’re planning to blind a target, there are a couple of additional modifiers. Retri Paladins can gain a -4% modifier from Divine Purpose and many rogues spec into heightened senses, which also gives the same hit reduction against your blind. That’s not too bad, it’s just one of those things you have to live with. However what some people don’t realise is that evasion works against blind, giving a 25% hit penalty. More likely than not your blind will hit rather than miss, but it can pay to remember the extra miss chance that evasion gives (especially in 2v2 when a double-dps team is bursting down your healer and trying to keep you CC’d).

There are plenty of ways of reaching the hit-cap, you just need to find a balanced way of doing so without hurting your other stats too much. If all else fails, maybe convince your partner to reroll as a Draenei!

Finally Season 8 has begun I’ll be playing rogue/destro-warlock in 2s and hopefully rogue/affliction-warlock/shaman in 3s (if we can find a willing shaman). We’re both pretty fresh to double-dps in 2v2, but it feels viable – just a case of sorting tactics out and getting used to being freaking fragile without a healer.

A lack of new PVP dps trinkets was a major disapointment – despite enduring several months of engame raiding I still didn’t get a replacement for DMC:Death so will be running it for the 4th consecutive season, swapping to a Pyrite Infuser for 3s. It’s also a shame there’s no new Battlemaster trinkets available as well – both the warlock and myself are still using the one from last season. When combined with a health stone it’s quite a life saver!

/use battlemaster’s rage
/use health stone

Depending on how rogue/warlock turns out, I might invest in a Corroded Skeleton Key, but spending 60 frost emblems on a trinket for 2v2 (when we’ll be focusing on 3v3) might be overkill.

Good luck to everyone this season, may all your vanishes be successful and none of your gouges be dodged

*UPDATE* Loving R/L/S at the moment – we’re still a bit squishy resilience wise, but the games are really enjoyable. We’re still at the stage of finding what works/what doesn’t work as far as tactics go, but there just seems like a huge amount of potential. Rated at 1892 atm, we’ll see how it goes. The team name comes from the mouse-over tooltip of ‘Arena Points’ in your ingame PVP tab. Fabulous darling, fabulous

Patch 3.3.2 is bringing about a change to the way healing functions in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp. We have applied a debuff to all players in these zones which will decrease the effectiveness of all forms of healing by 10%. This includes heals from items such as Healthstones and potions, however, it will not affect defensive shields or auras. This change is being made to balance the effectiveness of healing against the recent buff we made to the damage reduction component provided by resilience. Rest assured that we will be closely monitoring the effects both the healing and resilience changes have on Battleground, Wintergrasp, and Arena PvP game play to ensure that fights last a reasonable amount of time without overtly skewing the effectiveness of any class, role, or team combination.

A 10% zone debuff is a clumsy way of addressing a problem that hasn’t really been tested in a serious arena environment, but at least Blizzard seem to be trying to fix things (rather than ignore problems until Cataclysm).

Rogues have escaped the nerf bat for the time being – that almost makes up for 5yrs of bugged vanish

Full patch notes are here.

I searched around for ages, looking for a way of making three macros that would let me reliably swap. Unfortunately it just doesn’t seem possible, as equipslot/pickupitem macros failed to distinguish between them.

However, there’s an easy way I’d overlooked at first – the ingame equipment manager. This seems to be able to tell the difference between identical weapons; you just need to create sets where you only have the dagger selected for change (so you don’t have to recreate the sets when you upgrade your head etc). Do this for each of the weapons, then you can drag/drop the equipment-set icon from the manager onto your toolbars. Easy!

Mainhand Daggers

For the freshly dinged 80

Blood Weeper (Heroic Forge of Souls) Heartshiver (Normal Forge of Souls) Black Knight’s Rondel (Heroic Trial of the Champion) The Fleshshaper (Heroic Halls of Lightning) Traditional Flensing Knife (Kalu’ak reputation – revered)

For the 10-man Raider

Bloodsipper (ICC10 – Queen Lanathel) Icefall/Nemesis Blade (ToC10 – Twin Valkyrs)

Offhand Daggers for Envenom Spec

For non-mutilate spec, any of the mainhand daggers are suitable.

For the freshly dinged 80

Unsharpened Ice Razor (Trash drop in the ICC 5mans) Krick’s Beetle Stabber (Normal Pit of Saron) Balanced Heartseeker (Hierloom Weapon) Lightblade Rivener (Kirin Tor reputation – honored)

For the 10man Raider

Flesh Carving Scalpel (ICC10 – Putricide) Orcish Deathblade/Dirk of the Nightwatch (ToC10 – Jaraxxus)

The general rule of thumb for envenom rogues is to use a 1.8 speed dagger in your mainhand, with a 1.4-1.5 speed dagger in your offhand. Very high level 1.4 daggers work fine for your mainhand, but you would need an equal level offhand to make it work. If you’re not playing with the Master Poisoner talent, two 1.8 daggers are preferable.

They haven’t released information of the stats just yet (or indications of what will be coming from Wintergrasp) but seeing the graphics is a good start at least.

Good to see that after 3 tiers of crap looking PVE gear, Blizzard are still making pretty mean looking PVP armor, without having to fall back on recoloring previous sets.

As I’ve talked about previously, if you’re having random lag or high latency try running through a proxy.There’s more information about that here. I’m down to 70ms now in arenas – compared to 250ms it’s ~very~ noticable (a good test is to use Fan of Knives and check the delay between the keypress and the animation/sound happening).

Once you’ve got your connection running as smooth as possible, it’s worth trying out a very useful addon called SnowfallKeyPress. By default, when you press a key you have a spell bound to, nothing happens until you release your finger off the key. This addon changes that, so as soon as you press a key the action takes place. We’re not talking about massive time savings here, but hey, every little helps!

Nice to see envenom has escaped a nerf (at least temporarily), though for some reason balance/elemental/destruction are getting increased damage buffs to several of their spells.

Like, but this with ice

Frost Mages. One of the thorns in a rogue’s side since TBC, these icy vending machines still prove to be a worthy counter to our class. Arguably a skilled mage will be able to take down an equally skilled/geared rogue, but with a bit of luck and focus you can still score kills. As well as mastering your own class, you do need to understand the mage class and be able to anticipate their actions/cooldowns.

The following is a breakdown of a typical frost mage’s repertoire.

PASSIVE ABILITIES

Ice Armor

Expect this self-buff to be active all of the time – as soon as you start unloading damage onto the mage you will be affected by the chilled debuff. Due to unusual game mechanics, this will happen before your Deadly Brew procs crippling poison, so remember to keep running forwards to try to compensate for this.

Frostbite

Unless the mage forgot to assign their talent points, expect them to have this tier1 talent. Any spell that puts the ‘chilled’ debuff onto you has a 15% chance to freeze you in place for 5 seconds. Spells that can trigger this are Ice Armor, Cone of Cold, Blizzard and Frostbolt.

Ice Barrier

With decent spellpower plus the Ice Barrier Glyph, this will absorb 5-6k of your damage. The mage will reapply this when it wears off, so expect to see it a couple of times. If you are lucky enough to be able to pick the moment of your opening move, don’t attack until the moment the mage reapplies this (you want to smash through it quickly, leaving it on cooldown for as long as possible). Keep an eye out for the buff icon, it’s the same one as Cold Blood.

Shattered Barrier

As soon as you put out enough damage to destroy the Ice Barrier, you will be frozen in place.

DEFENSIVE ABILITIES

Brrrr

Ice Block

If a paladin’s bubble is the mother of all defensive cooldowns, Ice Block is its crazy middle-aged auntie. Unless you lock them out of their frost school by kicking a frost spell, this can be used to cancel all CC (except cyclone) and silencing affects. With the right glyph, this will reset the cooldown on Frost Nova. I’ll come back to Ice Blocks later, there are a few things you should/shouldn’t do when faced with one.

Frost Nova

Another AoE snare. If you’re chasing down a mage who you’re expecting to cast a frost nova, try to jump just as you get in range. You’ll still be snared, but you’ll continue to travel through the air, maybe ending up a few more feet. The phrase “Nerf gravity!” has appeared in a couple of frost mage threads on forums for just this reason

Blink

A very self explanitory spell, and the reason why you shouldn’t open with a cheap-shot. Only use your cheap-shot/kidney-shot when this spell is on cooldown, or if you wish to force the mage to use this. Wasting 5 combo points on a 0.2sec stun is a good way to lose a match/duel. Using a 1combo point stun when the mage is facing a wall/side-edge of a bridge can occasionally cause them to waste their blink (quite common to see in games played at low rating).

Invisibility

Similar to vanish, but with a slight delay before it takes effect. This will break on damage, so dots/fan of knives will cancel the invisibility.

Cold Snap

Preparation for mages – resets frost spell cooldowns, including Ice Block (but hypothermia will prevent a double iceblock for 30seconds).

CROWD CONTROL

Polymorph

Sheep, pig, rabbit.. the effect is the same no matter what you’re turned into. I asked a mage-playing friend if the chosen animal symbolised any sort of sexual preference – apparently it does, but I need to level a mage before he’ll tell me.

Deep Freeze

Only usable when you are frozen, which unfortunately is hard to predict (due to the random nature of frostbite procs).

AoE

Arcane Explosion

A mage’s number #1 anti-sap spell – makes getting a sap risky, but the longer you can keep a mage using this the better. I like to drop a distract behind an AoEing mage as soon as he sits down to drink, as it tends to keep him on his toes (and hopefully encourages him to waste a bit more mana with some more arcane explosion spam).

Cone of Cold

This is a decent retaliation to your vanish – better than an arcane explosion as it will reapply the chilled snare that your vanish just removed.

OFFENSIVE ABILITIES

Mirror Image

One of a mage’s more confusing spells (especially when combined with a 180° spin+blink combo), this can cause targeting problems if you’re not paying attention. It’s a good habbit to change your keybindings – I have tab set to ‘target enemy player’ and shift-tab to ‘target enemy’. If you do this and clear your current target with the escape key, you’ll be able to cycle through enemy players without having to flick between the mirrors/totems/pets.

Frostbolt

Nothing too special about this spell other than its ability to apply the chilled debuff.

Ice Lance

Forming part of the deadly ‘Frostbolt/double ice lance shatter combo’, this instant spell is lack-lustre until you find yourself frozen (at which point you’ll suddenly see over a third of your health vanish). You can be kited with this spell, which is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t cause a chilling debuff.

OTHER ANNOYANCES SPELLS

Time for a Gouge

Evocation

Interrupt, interrupt interrupt. This is a channelled spell, but do NOT rely on just your damage breaking it. If the mage has Ice Barrier up at the same time, he will absorb all the damage and the spell will not be interrupted. Gouge is a life saver here, even blind can be used in an emergency. With the normal combination of PVP glyphs, evocation will also restore 60% of their HP… interrupt it!

Summon Water Elemental

Not a massive source of damage, this 45-second summoned pet has one outstanding ability – Freeze. This is another freezing snare, but with the added bonus to the mage of being able to cast it from 45yards away using his pet as the point of origin.

Arcane Missiles / Fire Blast

An instant cast and a chanelled cast that you will sometimes see. Arcane missiles cannot be LoS’d once the spell begins, so ducking behind a pillar will not prevent you from taking damage.

Additional Tactics for Rogue vs Mage

The Opener

In a situation where you can decide when to start the fight, wait until the moment that the mage reapplies ice barrier. You want to destroy it and leave it on cooldown for as long as possible.

If you can safely avoid the inevitable arcane explosions, a well timed sap can help you move in close to open with a garrote. Due to the unusual mechanic of the Deadly Brew talent, your crippling poison won’t proc immediately, meaning you will be effected by the ‘chilled’ ice armor snare before the mage is slowed by your poison. To counter this, try and run through the mage in anticipation of him also running forward.

Your garrote will give you three seconds to put out as much damage as humanly possible. A double mutilate+coldblood eviscerate (with pyro-rockets if you have them) will smash through the Ice Barrier and cause at least some damage to the mage. By this point you will most likely be frozen in place from either Frostbite or Shattered Barrier – this is the mage’s cue to blink from you. In a duel/1v1 scenario you will need to vanish as soon as possible, otherwise you will eat a Deep Freeze.

Now that blink is on cooldown, you can open up with a cheap shot. This is likely to trigger either a trinket or an Ice Block.

The Ice Block

With the mage tucked safely away in his block of ice, you will need to reassess the situation. Are you clean of dots, and don’t have his partner/pet hitting you? If so, dropping from combat to restealth will possibly give you another opportunity to open up with a garrote/ambush. Bear in mind that if you run off, you might find the mage cancels Ice Block early and lands a Fire Blast on you, keeping you in combat. If you can’t drop out of combat, you need to position yourself infront of the mage. If his Water Elemental is shooting at you, don’t be tempted to switch to it and start attacking. Ignore the damage and wait for the Ice Block to expire.

By now the cooldown on blink will have worn off, so the mage will want to use it the second Ice Block wears off. While they can blink out of cheap-shot and kidney-shot, they cannot escape from a gouge. If you land your gouge at the right moment, they will blink through it, and appear on the other side of the arena in a gouged state. Even with the ‘chilled’ debuff, you’ll have time to catch up to the mage to unload more damage (unfortunately, you’ll have to beat through another Ice Barrier as the cooldown will be off by now). Ideally you’ll still have Cloak of Shadows / PVP Trinket / Preparation / Sprint available – use them to apply more pressure when needed.

Gouge the Blink

When trying to gouge a blink after an Ice Block, the best technique for this I’ve found is to focus on the actual mage character on the screen rather than watch his Ice Block buff timer. Regardless of whether the Ice Block expires normally or is cancelled prematurely, the mage has to sit through a split-second animation of it fading. You need a decent conenction, but it is when the ice turns from white to blue that you need to quickly hit gouge. If the mage doesn’t blink, wait until you’ve got your energy back from gouging before launching into an attack (ice block will clear any dots, so it will be a full duration gouge) . Fighting good frost mages is all about maximizing the damage you can do to them during the brief moments you get to sit on them, so pool your energy!

It’s also possible to gouge after your initial garrote, but only if you manage to get infront of the semi-snared mage before the garrote silence wears off (harder than it sounds).

Footnote

I hope that is of some use – if there are any glaring mistakes, please let me know and I will fix them or add anything useful that’s been missed off.

We are currently in the process of applying a hotfix to buff resilience. While some modifications may be made, we intend to have this buff in effect for the remainder of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The change will double the value of resilience in reducing damage done by players. So depending on their current amount of resilience, characters might experience a 10 to 20% decrease in damage taken from other players. The critical strike chance and critical strike damage reduction components of resilience will remain unaffected by this change.

We are also aware of the possibility that this change will make healing in PvP too difficult to counter. While we are not making any immediate changes to address this issue, we have prepared some further changes that will allow us to quickly deploy a PvP-only healing adjustment if we feel it is warranted.

We will be applying this change very soon while we are between Arena seasons so we can evaluate how it works in multiple PvP scenarios for the upcoming Arena season, and as we continue to prepare for Cataclysm. As we have mentioned previously, one of the goals for Cataclysm is to have a PvP environment where it is harder to regularly achieve so much damage and healing in relatively few global cooldowns compared to what we currently have in the game.

Not quite as subtle as some of the proposed changes (like 1resil also giving upto 10hp), but this should force some of the more PVE dependent classes (mages/warriors etc) into PVP gear, at least until heroic ICC25 opens. It will be interesting to see if some of the new gear will come with stats like ArP to cover this shift from PVE>PVP equipment. At least we know why Blizz have been dragging their heels over releasing info of the new sets!