Warriors will be affected by a lot of changes in today’s patch, something the class does not seem too happy about. One effect of the patch will be an increase in the number of Fury warriors you’re likely to run into. While a lot of PVPing warriors are staying arms for the control/survivability, others will be attracted to the high damage potential that Fury offers. However, this damage can be controlled to a large extent by dispelling the mechanism that gives them their burst – enrage. Whenever your target enrages, a gentle shiv will instantly calm them down (and may even transfer the rage to the player IRL instead).

There are several enrages that you need to keep an eye open for, a couple of which are available to both Arms and Fury specs. Either keep checking their buff bar, watch their character animations, or run a third party addon like Afflicted3/Parrot/IceHUD/Natur to track the procs.

Berserker Rage

Berserker rage grants the warrior rage and gives them immunity to fear. This may not sound too dangerous for a rogue, but it does allow them to use abilities that rely on them being enraged. Enrage effects allow the warrior to use Enraged Regeneration for some impressive non-dispellable self healing, as well as the hard-hitting Raging Blow (if they have a Fury spec). Enraged Regeneration can’t be dispelled, but you can try and stop them from using it in the first place.

Death Wish (Fury tree)

The 20% damage buff from the fury talent ‘Death Wish’ would put this ability on a par with Vendetta, if it wasn’t for the longer CD, 5% increase in damage taken and the fact it can be dispelled with a 20-energy shiv.

Enrage/Wrecking Crew

Both Fury and Arms warriors have access to talents which can proc an enrage buff. Arms warriors rely on Mortal Strike crits, while Fury warriors have a chance-on-hit. Regardless of how it is generated, you may wish to dispel it (especially vs a Fury warrior).

Recklessness (not dispellable)

The increase in damage taken during Recklessness cannot be negated through glyphs or talents. Recklessness cannot be dispelled through shiv, so you will need to control the warrior with stuns/disarms instead.

Enrage effects aren’t limited to just warriors and tanks – Feral Druids and Unholy Death Knights also have buffs that you can remove.

Unholy Frenzy (Death Knight)

As well as providing an increase in damage output, Unholy Frenzy also prevents the Death Knight (or whoever they cast it on) from being sheeped/blinded. I’ve seen some DKs cast it onto their pet during Dark Transformation – if you see the ghoul suddenly flash red/purple you may want to throw a shiv at it to take some pressure off your healer.

Enrage (Druid)

It seems common for feral druids to put points into King of the Jungle – dispelling their enrage will remove the 15% buff this gives them and also reduce their energy regen.

Frenzied Regeneration (Druid)

While a warrior needs to enrage before being able to use their undispellable self-heal, a druid’s self heal is actually an enrage effect in its own right. Get rid of it quickly.

Savage Roar (Druid)

Savage Roar is a finishing move – wasting five of the druid’s combo-points for the cost of a 20 energy shiv is a worthwile exchange.

Battleground Addons

PvPness & Deadly Boss Mods

 

As well being the best named mod I’ve seen, PvPness gives you easily readable objective timers, health reports on SotA/IoC gates, and FC information. The only complaint I have about this addon is that it lacks arena timers for Shadow Sight and the countdown to the gates opening.

Despite primarily being a raiding addon, Deadly Boss Mods has PVP modules that will display objective timers in Battlegrounds. DBM lacks the gate health reports given by PvPness, but if you have DBM installed for raiding purposes you might want to use it for PVP as well.

REFlex Battleground Historian

REFlex won’t directly help you during games, but it does offer the most detailed reporting tools I’ve seen so far. If screens of detailed stats and match reports rock your boat, give this addon a try.

SaySapped

A very lightweight addon that simply does a “/say Sapped” whenever a rogue saps you. I find this pretty useful in pug BGs – the DK you’re guarding a flag with is probably staring blankly at his screen and drooling, rather than keeping an eye on his team mates.

BG Defender

BG Defender gives you a small movable window with buttons to announce the number of incoming enemies at the base you’re defending. There are also buttons to call for help or announce the base you’re defending is safe. Fingers crossed you’re not the only one in the BG who reads /bg chat!

Arena Specific Addons

Gladius

 

When the Proximo addon died, it was Gladius that filled the void left in our hearts. Gladius adds enemy unitframes in arenas which will keep track of trinket timers, CC duration, diminishing returns and will even report enemy specs and warn you when enemy players start to drink. This addon is still being updated for Cataclysm (DRs don’t seem accurate and spec detection is a little….. suspect at times), but with almost 5000 downloads a day I’m confident there’ll be enough feedback to iron out any persistent bugs.

General Addons

Wintergrasper Advanced

 

This mod adds a small frame to your screen which tracks timers for both Wintergrasp and Tol Barad. You don’t have to be lvl85 for it work (great for when you’re levelling an alt) and it also shows the timers during dungeons and battlegrounds.

Spell Alerter

Spell Alerter is a useful addon that provides cast warnings for enemy players. This is pretty useful in BGs and 3v3/5v5 games since it shows incoming spells from players who you don’t have focused or targeted. The message produced takes the format ” [spell icon] ENEMY –> ENEMY TARGET” but this can be altered to give the spellname as well (great if you never realised that the Chaos Bolt icon seems to look a bit like a turtle vomiting – well, to me it does).

IceHUD

 

One thing about WoW that always irritated me was how the unit frames were positioned at the top of the screen. A lot of serious PVPers move the frames to the middle of the screen (I’ll link the macro later), but unless you’re playing by MLG rules, you can use a unitframe or HUD addon instead. There are several addons that offer this functionality, but I’ve found IceHUD to be the most configurable/stable HUD addon out there.

IceHUD does need a bit of time spent configuring it, but it provides several class specific bars that you might want to turn on (Rupture/SnD timers). You can also add custom bars that track enemy buffs.

Until I got used to seeing the Combat Readiness buff on enemy rogues, I had a bar setup that would appear as soon as they popped it. By default it puts health bars on the left and mana bars on the right of your screen, but I prefer to configure it to show my bars on one side and my targets bars on the left.

In the screenshot above, the bars on the left show my health and energy, with the bars on the showing target HP, target mana and a cast bar. If I had turned those two combo points into a SnD, a bar would have appeared to the left of my HP bar, but I forgot…

XPerl & ag_Unitframes

If you prefer the tradional layout of the Blizzard unitframes to a HUD, XPerl or ag_Unitframes may be worth considering. Both offer a high level of customization and can replace target, focus, party and raid frames.

Parrot & MSBT

MSBT is a replacement for the ingame scrolling combat text. It is much more configurable and shows a small icon for each non auto-attack that you make or receive. Damage you receive is shown on the left hand side and any of your spells that come off cooldown are posted to the middle of the screen.

Parrot is a good alternative to MSBT and also offers a Trigger-system to show warnings on certain enemy actions (such as Combat Readiness or Icebound Fortitude). If you’re new to PVP or the rogue class, this addon will definitely help until you’re used to constantly checking your targets buffs, but careful you don’t end up relying on it too much.

SnowfallKeyPress & Speedy Actions

Instead of having a spell cast when you remove your finger from the key, these addons will cause your ability to cast as soon as the key is pressed. It won’t noticably increase your DPS, but it may help you to kick spells with fast cast times.

Bartender4 & Dominos

If you do nothing except PVP, the default Blizzard UI gives you enough space on your bars for all your spells/macros. If you also like to PVE (or have a penchant for mounts/pets/emotes) you may find yourself running out of space. These addons give you full control of your bars and enable you to display more than the standard five. Bartender4 also emulates the functionality of SnowfallKeyPress.

OmniCC

OmniCC is an addon that adds text to item/spell/ability icons that are on cooldown to indicate when they’ll be ready for use. When your team mates ask how long it will be until you can blind, “15 seconds, stop nagging me” is a much better answer than “Soon©”.

Ketho CombatLog

Ketho gives you useful combatlog info in your chat window. I only really use this for keeping track of my Destructive Shadowspirit Diamond spell reflects, but the addon does have several other uses.

Misc

Vanas KoS

Vanas KoS is a kill-on-site notifier that lets you track specific enemy players. Once a player is being tracked, this addon will warn you whenever they are detected in combat-log range. You can add a note to the player, so keeping track of old scores that need settling has never been easier.

Cyanide Poison Reminder

Yes, I know I go on about it a lot, but CPR is a small addon that can be configured to warn you several minutes before your poisons run out. Useful for forgetful, sleepy and drunk rogues.

Petleash

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always thought non-combat pets were pretty cool. Not only does Petleash randomly summon a pet whenever it detects you don’t have one, it also dismisses your pet automatically when you enter stealth. How cool is that!
If you’re paranoid about it bugging out during matches, you can even disable it during BGs/arenas. Silly, but fun.

Leatrix Latency Fix

Not an addon as such, this program improves your connection to the game servers. A full explanation is given here.

Elgrey from Shadowmoon has put together these notes for Combat PVP.

If you are looking at reworking your bindings, there are a couple of basic tricks that can help you come up with an efficient and comfortable layout. You may be doing this already, but hey it might be of use to someone!

Firstly, you obviously want to keep your important abilities bound to easily reachable keys/combinations. Assuming a normal sized keyboard and a lack of mutant/pianist hands, ’6′ through to ‘=’ are pretty hard to accurately hit unless you take your fingers off WASD. For PVE that’s fine, but unless you’re fighting in TB you’ll need to rebind them to other keys. If you play with your little finger (or thumb) sitting near the shift-key, you’ll be able to hit shift-modified keys as easy as an unmodified key – I don’t find left-ctrl as comfortable to use, but it’s still reachable.

Secondly, if you haven’t done this already, it’s a big help to bind reply/re-whisper to a different key (I use ‘T’/'shift+T’). ‘R’ is too easy to hit in combat – if you accidentally hit it you can really mess things up (a’la Dark Legacy Comics). I also use ‘shfit+C’ instead of ‘C’ for my character pane, but bringing that up accidentaly isn’t nearly as deadly as whispering somebody with 1112wwwwwwa.

Thirdly, I find it helps to try and keep some continuity with the keys, especially when trying out a new layout. For example, I use ’2′ and ’3′ for my finishers. In Subtlety spec, ’2′ = rupture, ‘shift+2′ = SnD, ’3′ = eviscerate and shift+3 = recuperate. When switching to Assassination, rupture/snd/recuperate remain the same, but ’3′ changes from envenom to eviscerate with the previously unused ctrl+3 becoming eviscerate. Similarly, ‘E’ is used for my combo generators and ‘Q’ for interupts. Out of stealth, ‘E’ is backstab/muti, shift+E is hemo and ‘Q’ is kick. While stealthed, ‘E’ becomes ambush and ‘Q’ becomes garrote.

If you’ve rerolled as a rogue, it would make sense to try and replicate the keys on your other characters. Hitting ` makes my rogue vanish, my DK lichborne + /target self (for the OP coil spam), my mage iceblock and my hunter feign death. It’s all about muscle memory – when things suddenly go wrong you don’t want to have to think about where your panic button is.

There are some abilities that don’t need to be used in PVP, but if you need them on your bars for PVE it’s worth getting Bartender4, or a similar bar addon. This will give you several extra bars to drag non-essential abilities onto. Bartender4 also replicates the functionality of the SnowfallKeypress addon, but more on that later.

If you have extra buttons on your mouse you might not be able to bind them from within WoW. My Logitech 518 (awesome mouse!) has 5 extra buttons that aren’t recognised ingame, but they can be remapped through the mouse software to wierd combos like ‘alt+[‘. This will let you use them within WoW and also let you modify them with shift/ctrl.

I was asked about the bindings I use in Cata – I’m not on a PC with WoW on it at the moment but I’m 99% sure this list covers everything! Here’s a picture of the keys as well – blue indicates there’s no modifier, green means it’s also used with Shift and red means it’s used with both Shift and Ctrl modifiers.


I’m currently using a UK keyboard, so have the ‘\’ and ‘z’ keys underneath the ‘a’ key. The last US keyboard I used had a large shift key under the caps-lock, which meant a little bit of rebinding keys was in order.

To use stealth I hit shift+spacebar – once stealthed, shift+spacebar becomes distract. Another basic trick is to bind ‘A’ and ‘D’ to strafe left/right. I have ‘shift+A’ and ‘shift+D’ set to rotate, so I can still fly around one handed if I’m eating.
I know a rogue who has ‘S’ unbound – it’s a nice way of breaking the habit of backpedaling, but there should be enough easy-to-reach keys on the keyboard to bind actions to without needing to do this.

Lastly, I always try and keep blind off the keyboard – shift+V for trinket, mouse thumb button for blind. This lets you hit both simultaneously without having to create a trinket/blind macro.

When put together, it looks a little something like this -screenshot.

Please post if you have any more tips/tricks for keybindings!

Poison Proc Basics

Your poisons can be split into two categories depending on how their proc mechanic. Crippling, mind-numbing and deadly poisons have a %chance to proc on all your hits. Instant and wound are limited to the number of times a minute they can proc (PPM) and are normalized around a 1.4 speed weapon. With a typical 1.8 speed dagger, Instant poison will proc around 25% of the time from auto-attacks alone and wound should be proccing 65% of the time. For this reason, you want to put the %chance poisons on a fast weapon and the PPM poisons on a slow weapon (the slower the weapon, the higher the chance of applying poison with hemo/mutilate/etc).

Subtlety

Unless you’re playing with a frost mage and have the Waylay talent, it’s best to use crippling on your offhand and either crippling, mind-numbing or wound poison on your mainhand.
Most subtlety rogues I’ve spoken to are finding either mind-numbing/crippling or crippling/crippling the most reliable choice in PVP, with wound/crippling being viable for duels. Running with double crippling may sound like overkill, but you’re almost guaranteeing that your target will be waddling around, unable to break away and get too far from you. As your role in the team is to provide massive control with the occasional burst, the lack of sustained damage from wound procs shouldn’t cause you too many problems.

Assassination

There’s not much debate about which poisons to use with an assassination spec – with the buff from Improved Poisons instant poison outdamages wound poison even when taking the 10% MS into consideration. Damage wise, the obvious choice is to run with instant on your mainhand and deadly on the offhand. The downside to this is that you won’t be able to shiv instant poison onto your target (which would then proc crippling poison through Deadly Brew).

The alternative is to have deadly poison on your MH dagger, but this would result in fewer deadly poison procs. What could work well is to get the best of both worlds via a 1.4speed mainhand dagger from PVE. This would let you play with deadly/instant, giving a normal rate of deadly procs plus the ability to shiv crippling poison. The reduction in mainhand mutilate damage isn’t worth worrying about as it no longer forms a large part of our damage output. I’d love to test this out, but I won’t be able to unless Blizzard make the PVP shivs usable in either hand. I’m not even sure if there are any PVE MH 1.4 daggers available yet…

Thrown Weapons

Being able to apply poisons to a thrown weapon is a pretty nice change to the rogue class, especially for assassination specs. As subtlety, crippling or mind-numbing are the usual choices. If you don’t have mind-numbing on your mainhand, you can distribute it via a well-timed Fan of Knives.

For assassination, mind-numbing is a strong choice for arenas and rated BGs. Another alternative is to put deadly poison onto your thrown weapon. FoKing in BGs and Tol Barad can be insanely powerful – thanks to Vile Poisons I’ve seen deadly poison hitting for a combined total of 60000 damage every tick.

Season Progress

On a personal note, so far this has been the most disasterous start to a season we’ve had yet – our 3s MMR hasn’t gone past 1.9k yet due to combinations of really bad target calls, over-aggresive playstyle and awful connection problems (last night our warlock had DCs in exactly half the games we played – we clawed a few wins back thanks to Blizz letting him rejoin, but meh!). We’ve played multiple chars together for a long time so we’re far from giving up – we’ll get there, it’s just pretty frustrating at the moment! Resto-druid/affliction/assassination seems to have potential and I can see it becomming pretty strong as Cata progresses.

Oh totally unrelated but easily my ‘Tip of the Week’ – don’t try and clear your AFK flag while waiting for the gates to open – being teleported back to Orgrimmar will affect your dps/control and may cause Skype to hurt your ears.

Additionally, if anyone complains to you about recuperate being overpowered (yes it is), the perfect answer I’ve come up with for comedy value is – “It’s not overpowered, you have to remember to use it”. It gets interesting reactions…

Blind now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

Combat Readiness now lasts for 20 seconds, down from 30 seconds, but the Combat Insight stacking buff lasts 10 seconds, up from 6 seconds.

Crippling Poison now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

Garrote now costs 45 Energy, down from 50.

Sap now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.

Smoke Bomb now lasts for 5 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Stealth is no longer broken by enemies using Demoralizing Shout or Demoralizing Roar.

Assassination

Deadly Momentum critical strike bonus now lasts for 15 seconds, up from 10.

Combat

Blade Flurry is now a toggle that can be turned off by pressing the button again.

Main Gauche (Mastery) now provides a chance to deal an attack for 100% of main-hand damage. This attack can trigger Combat Potency.

Restless Blades now also reduces the cooldown of Redirect.

Revealing Strike now increases finisher effectiveness by 35% (45% glyphed), up from 20% (30% glyphed).

Vitality now increases attack power by 25%, up from 20%.

Subtlety

Elusiveness now reduces the cooldown of Cloak of Shadows by 10/20 seconds, down from 15/30 seconds.

Executioner (Mastery) has been increased from 2% to 2.5% per point.

Find Weakness now grants 35/70% armor reduction, up from 25/50%.

Preparation no longer resets the cooldown of Evasion.

Sanguinary Vein now gives a rogue a 50/100% chance for their own Bleed effects to not break their Gouge.

Shadowstep’s cooldown has been increased to 24 seconds, up from 20 seconds.

Sinister Calling now grants 30% Agility, up from 25%, and increases Backstab and Hemorrhage damage by an additional 40%, up from 25%.

Glyphs

Glyph of Garrote now increases the duration of Garrote by 1.5 seconds, down from 2.

Seriously? An increase in Shadowstep and CloS CDs? I wish I could hear the conversations that go on at Blizzard during PTR meetings…

Prime Glyphs

There are two essential choices for Assassination prime glyphs, two strong choices and a fifth option that can be worth considering with the correct talents.

Glyph of Mutilate

For some reason I really hate taking this glyph, but every time I try and find an excuse not to, I can’t. It’s a reliable 5-energy discount on your main combo builder, which should be more beneficial this season than previously (thanks to longer combat duration).

Glyph of Rupture

Even though rupture causes pretty embarrasing damage, it is still very useful for generating procs from Venomous Wounds and a longer duration will definitely be beneficial.

For a third prime glyph, the choice is pretty much down to either improving or Slice and Dice. I’m opting for Slice and Dice at this stage, as I’m yet to have a 30second Vendetta run out without either my target or myself dying, or the opportunity for a kill being wasted completely. An extra six seconds isn’t too game breaking when it’s often unnecessary. Increasing the duration of Slice and Dice, if only by three seconds, gives greater opportunity to turn a single point of S’n'D into a full-blown one.

The final option worth looking at is Glyph of Backstab. The only reason you should ever use Backstab (apart from spamming it through a hunter’s deterrence) is if you have chosen to take the talent Murderous Intent. I’m yet to fully experiment with this (due to holidays I haven’t even had the chance to get our 3v3 team rolling), but it could be a pretty sweet boost to an attack that already out-damages mutilate by roughly 50%. Assuming your target is below 35% health and you’re standing behind them…

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Garrote

This is by far my favorite glyph of all. Diminishing returns on our stuns have really weakened the potential of Cheap Shot as an opener, but a glyphed garrote can now lock down a caster for a full second longer than a Cheap Shot. It even has advantages when used against Death Knights and Warriors, as several of their abilites are restricted through silencing effects.

Glyph of Blind

This is another very useful glyph, especially when combined with trigger-happy warlock team-mates in rated Battlegrounds. Using a glyph slot for this should help prevent targetting mistakes – there’s not much worse then throwing a spur-of-the-moment emergency blind onto someone, just as a SW:Pain lands. I’d like to experment more in 3v3 and 5v5 before declaring this as an essential glyph, but I’m guessing it will open up more chances of being able to make target switches without making it too apparent that we’re letting dots run out on our fake target.

Glyph of Sprint

With mobility being such an issue for Assassination rogues, anything that can boost your movement speed should be valued. The extra 30% from this Glyph will help you close gaps even faster than before, hopefully before you’re hit by yet another Frost Nova type effect…

Other interesting choices for major glyphs are Glyph of Fan of Knives (nice in large-scale PVP when combined with Vile Poisons), Glyph of Tricks of the Trade (for boosting partner damage at the cost of just a GCD), and Glyph of Gouge. The gouge glyph is a strange one – I’ve been in a couple of situations where it may have been nice (rooted in place next to a Paladin with Aura Mastery up), but I’ve not generally had many problems with the positional requirement of gouge. Useful, but I wouldn’t want to miss out on the sprint Glyph to get it.

Glyph of Kick may be nice at low ratings, but any competent healer will be juking your kicks – being locked out of kick for an extra four seconds is not going to make you popular with your team mates.

Minor Glyphs

In WotLK the only minor glyph of any use to rated PVP was Glyph of Distract. With the arrival of rated Battlegrounds (and hopefully an increase in World PVP*), the two other minor glyphs are definitely worth the potentially extortionate price they sell for.

Glyph of Distract

While Distract may not seem to be a terribly useful PVP ability, it’s not one I’d risk playing without. I’ll happily admit that I played from the opening of AQ40 to the last boss of Tempest Keep without realising Distract can be used outside of stealth – I used to think I was so pro blowing vanish and running off to distract the incoming patrol, until I saw another rogue doing the same without using vanish.
Distract has three uses in PVP. As well as being able to briefly stop a running/mounted target, it can also be used to interupt drinking healers. The third use is something I found last season, but always forget to use. If your target is out of combat and starts casting on you, you have a small window of opportunity to drop a distract behind them, spinning them around before the spell completes (at which point the target will enter combat). Very situational, but potentially game breaking.

Glyph of Safe Fall

Being knocked off high ground (like the cliffs at the Lumber Mill) is sometimes unavoidable – the fall isn’t likely to kill you, but taking this minor glyph can heavily reduce the damage you take.

Glyph of Blurred Speed

While not as useful as a DK’s Path of Frost, this glyph still comes in useful in many Battlegrounds.

I’m currently using Glyph of Poisons, but this is down to constantly forgetting to check the auction house for Safe Fall glyphs. This glyph can reduce the aggro you’ll generate from team mates if your poisons run out, but if you’re that forgetful (and believe me, I am), it’s easier to use the Cyanide Poison Reminder addon I wrote.

*I’m hoping lots of people read the post Akrios made at roguerogue.com before retiring and are looking at World PVP with the consideration it deserves!

There are so many useful first tier talents in the Combat and Subtlety trees that ideally you don’t want to spend more than the required 31pts in the Assassination tree.

Assassination Tree Choices

 

I count the talents highlighted in red as essential -by not taking them, you’ll be heavily damaging your spec. I’ve seen arguments about whether Ruthlessness is definitely needed, as it only gives a 60% chance of proccing. I wouldn’t put points into it for a Subtlety specced rogue, but as an Assassination rogue you won’t be generating crazy amounts of combo points through HaT or Premeditation. Being able to turn a single point of Slice and Dice into a full five points worth (by getting a Ruthlessness proc and envenoming) is not to be sniffed at!

Since a lot of classes are either unsappable, healers, or have a ramp-up time on their damage, I can’t see Blackjack being useful in more than a handful of games, so I haven’t included it as a secondary talent.

With Expose Armor failing to stack with other armor reducing talents (not to mention 70-80% of your damage bypassing all armor), I also can’t see any need to invest points in Improved Expose Armor.

Point Allocation

Essential talents: 22
Secondary talents: 9

The following secondary talents are available;

Coup de Grace and Lethality
There’s not a massive difference between these two talents as neither will give a jaw-dropping increase in damage output over the other. At the moment you’re not going to be critting that often, so unless you plan on taking Murderous Intent further down the tree, I’d put 3pts into Coup de Grace and 2pts into Lethality. If Blizzard do decide to make the crit rating stat more appealing to Assassination rogues, then Lethality is likely to become more valuable than Coup de Grace.

Deadly Brew
The number of points to spend in here depends on the bracket you’re playing in and your team. For battlegrounds or arenas played with snare-heavy partners (such as frost mages), you won’t really need to worry too much about staying on top of your target and one talent in this will be fine. You could theoretically get away with zero points in Deadly Brew and rely on Fan of Knives to apply crippling poison instead, but there are better ways of spending 30 energy than having to FoK every 6-12 seconds. Weapon swapping to crippling poison is also an option, but it’s a rather clumsy method of applying poison unless you want to spend two seconds on GCD and also have to shiv or wait for a poison proc.

Deadened Nerves
If you find yourself being the primary kill target, putting three points in this will give you an extra 952 resilience. Useful if you’re the ‘weakest’ link in your team, not so useful if you’re playing 2v2 with a Shadow Priest!

Murderous Intent
With my current gear, spamming 30 energy backstabs gives roughly 50% extra damage compared to spamming 55 energy mutilates. There will be fewer Seal Fate and poison procs, but the damage is still higher with backstab. You won’t benefit from this extra damage too much of the time, but when your target is low health they’re likely to proc defensive cooldowns – Murderous Intent can really help bypass these. However, you will have to deal with the positional requirement of backstab. I don’t tend to take this talent, but if I was to join a team with decent lockdowns, I probably would. Backstab is still useful for putting damage through a hunter’s Deterrence, so blowing a hunter up with 30 energy backstabs does have extra comedy value. If you do put talents into this, using Backstab glyph will take your backstabs down to 25 energy which will give an even greater increase in damage.

Combat and Subtlety Tree Choices

 

Point Allocation

Essential talents: 5
Secondary talents: 3

The Subtlety tree brings three highly useful talents into your spec – Night Stalker, Relentless Strikes and Elusiveness. This leaves you with three points to spread out over Opportunity (10%/20%/30% increase) and Recuperate. For a hardcore damage spec, three points in Opportunity will give a nice boost to your sustained damage. For a more defensive play style, two points in Recuperate will see your self-heals ticking for over 5.3k in PVP gear.

In 2v2 with a Shadow Priest, I’ve given up on Subtlety and am playing 31/2/8. Playing with 3/3 Puncturing Wounds, 2/2 Deadly Brew, 2/3 Deadened Nerves and 2/2 Improved Recuperate seems to work well as I’m rarely ever the kill target. I may change specs when we start playing 3v3 with a resto druid – the extra point for Deadened Nerves probably coming from Puncturing Wounds.

Blizzard have magically addressed the several aspects of PVP that almost everyone seems to feel are inbalanced at the moment (with the exception of the feral and mage communities on mmo-champion). Hats off to them for listening to their player base! Warrior damage and feral bleeds are likely to be nerfed (quite rightly so!) and priests should become more viable outside of Shadow Form. A reduced duration for Frost Nova and Ring of Frost should bring Mages back into line as well. What’s also nice to see is the horrible change to the cooldown of Every Man for Himself could be reverted – I’ve already faction changed my human rogue (part of the mass PVPer migration from Alliance to Horde on Terenas) but it’s nice to see that humans won’t be penalised in PVP any more. If I was feeling cynical I’d say that Blizz have just reached their ‘lets nerf humans so we get the big bucks out of Worgen race changes’ goal, but my New Years resolution was to be less sceptical and grumpy

The full class changes are as follows – these were posted a couple of days ago, but unfortunately I’ve been slacking in bed with broken ribs, ManFlu(tm) and a tooth infection. Several posts are lined up for this week, so the post-drought should be at an end Snowboarding in Germany was awesome, thanks for the well-wishes! Take care everyone!

PvP

The larger health pools, decreased impact of Mortal Strike debuffs, and slower healing are all having the desired effect in PvP. Burst damage has its place, but doesn’t determine the outcome of every encounter. There are several individual abilities that we aren’t happy with in PvP.

We’re keeping a close eye on dispels. We still like the design of making dispels more of a commitment rather than liberally sprinkling around dispel resistance or consequences for every class. Defensive dispels (removing a debuff) generally feel good, but we think offensive dispels (removing an enemy buff) feel too powerful, especially for DPS specs. In particular, Purge and Spellsteal will probably get nerfed.

We’re also looking at crowd control, interrupts, and self-healing in PvP. It’s possible we’ll reduce the durations of some crowd control effects, especially the area effect ones, and decrease the duration of interrupts.

Priests are a little weak in PvP, especially at mobile healing. We have made some changes to glyphs and talents to enhance their survivability and instant healing.

We also want to make sure the epic PvP gear isn’t too easy for just anyone to obtain, given that the PvE endgame content is more challenging than it was in Lich King. We don’t want the player base to just migrate to the most efficient epic delivery mechanism; we want you to participate in what you find most enjoyable.

Stats

We’ll make a pass to make stats that aren’t attractive (but are supposed to be) more attractive. For example, we don’t want Assassination rogues to dismiss crit or Feral tanks to dismiss haste. We are considering making some physical attacks such as Lacerate, Steady Shot, and Slam scale with haste.

Mastery is a new stat for us, and there are a few specs that don’t value it enough. In some cases (e.g. Combat rogues), the design for mastery is fine and we just need to buff the effects to make it more desirable. In others, we don’t think it’s possible to buff mastery enough in its current form. For example, the Retribution mastery, Hand of Light, is fun, but it doesn’t contribute enough damage. To make it contribute enough damage, the proc would need a very high chance, which then can cause paladins to devalue other sources of Holy Power. Instead, we are redesigning Retribution mastery to add a percentage of the damage of Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm as Holy damage (which also plays better with Inqusition). Because Hand of Light is fun, however, we are going to change Divine Purpose as a chance to proc Hand of Light instead of a chance for extra Holy Power (which will also remove a little of the randomness from the rotation). Unholy DKs are another spec for whom mastery just isn’t working out. Our current intent is to redesign their mastery so that their attacks cause more damage to diseased targets (in a similar manner to the Restoration druid mastery).

Potpourri

Some additional class-specific tweaks (keeping in mind this is not the full list):

Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.

Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don’t have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.

We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it’s a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.

For Holy priests, we’re increasing Chakra’s duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now benefit from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.

We’re making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.

We’re buffing Wild Mushroom. It’s a cool spell that isn’t getting enough play.

Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We’re also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.

We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don’t account for too much mana savings.

We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.

Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.

Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.

We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.

Censure will no longer break Repentance.

As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.

To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.

We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.

We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.

We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.

Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.

For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.

We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.

We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we’ve seen more PvP.

Hope Greatfather Winter brings you everything your rogue wants (a baseline shadowstep would be nice), see you soon and take care! (Hopefully I won’t have a repeat of last year’s boarding….)

Patch 4.0.6 will be coming soon – this will bring several changes to the Subtlety tree. Content here is not yet updated to reflect the changes it will bring.

Unless Blizzard dramatically alter the viability of the Combat tree, rogues currently have the option of chosing between their two other trees – the ‘mindless no-skill tunneling’ spec of Assassination and the ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a errr butterfly’ spec of Subtlety.

Despite lacking in damage, the Subtlety tree does offer a lot of utility and mobility as well as high survivability through Cheat Death, Preparation and Shadowstep. The alternative to Subtlety is the Assassination tree, which gives huge burst damage but severe mobility issues. Not too bad if you’re playing a Goblin Rogue alongside a Holy Paladin, but potentially very damaging for the rest of the time.

I plan on playing both trees this season – Assassination in rated battlegrounds and Subtlety in arenas. Here’s a quick guide to speccing into Subtlety.

Subtlety Tree Choices

 

There’s not much to debate about the essential Subtlety talents highlighted in red – there isn’t much flexibility with this tree and I’m yet to think of or hear a valid argument against taking them.

Point Allocation

Essential talents: 28
Secondary talents: 3-4 (or 5-6 if you want to skip points in other trees)

The only real decision comes down to which of the following talents you’d prefer to take.

Waylay
This isn’t a replacement for crippling poison, but a complementary talent to run along side it. Failing to apply crippling poison to your target really hurts the control you have of the fight, as does having it removed while you’re being kited. However, if you’re in a team with a class with a more reliable snare (such as a mage or a warrior), taking yet another snare mechanism could be considered overkill.

Honor Among Thieves
The cooldown of this ability is affected by the number of points you’re prepared to invest in it – you’re likely to be generating a combo per cooldown regardless of the spells rank. I’d recommend taking at least one point in HaT. The one thing you’ll need to be careful of is switching targets – you will lose existing combo points on your old target if you fail to Redirect them onto your new target before HaT procs.

Sanguinary Vein
If you’re playing with the Glyph of Hemorrhage, the bleed effect caused by the glyph is enough to give you the 10% extra damage from this talent. It’s not a bad boost to the mediocre pressure you can put out through raw damage, even if you’re relying on rupture for the bleed effects (don’t get me started on how pathetic rupture looks at the moment! A mere 500 damage dot against a target with a 120k health pool is nothing more than a joke).

Combat Tree Choices

I had originally made an image for this tree, but I won’t bother with it as there’s only one talent worth investing in. Improved Gouge has been buried so deeply that it’s not obtainable and you shouldn’t even have Sinister Strike on your bars. Wasting three talent points to negate the need to gem/gear for Hit is not worth doing, so that only leaves the new Cataclysm talent Improved Recuperate. A single point in it gives the equivalent of over 300 resilience, plus the HoT it grants, so it’s quite a bonus. Having Recuperate running grants you energy through Energetic Recovery so even if you’re not being directly attacked you should be using it. With buffs this will be healing for around 6000 per tick – what’s not to love about it?

Assassination Tree Choices

 

Point Allocation

Essential talents: 2
Secondary talents: 5-6 if you want to skip Improved Recuperate

The speed and healing buff from Quickening is the main target in this tree, so to reach it you’ll need to put at least 5 points into the first tier of talents. Deadly Momentum is more of a levelling talent than a serious option for PVP (even in battlegrounds with two pet healers) so points will need to be put into Lethality and Coup de Grace. With my backstabs hitting as hard as my eviscerates, I’m reluctant to buff eviscerate damage more than I have to, so personally I’d opt for 2/3 Coup de Grace and 3/3 Lethality. However, many highly respected Gladiators seem to be playing with either full points in both or 2/3 Lethality, so I wouldn’t waste any gold respeccing just to swap numbers around between these two talents!

Remaining points can be put into Puncturing Wounds for an extra 10%/20%/30% crit chance on your backstab. There are two other talents in the Assassination tree that are reachable – Blackjack and Ruthlessness. Since a lot of classes are either unsappable, healers, or have a ramp-up time on their damage, I can’t see Blackjack being useful in more than a handful of games. Ruthlessness lost its appeal when it was taken from a 100% proc to a 60% proc – with points in Premeditate and HaT you should hopefully enough combos already without having to rely on this proccing.

Reforging for Subtlety

Getting your Haste as high as possible should be your objective with reforging for a Subtlety spec. The extra energy regen works out better than the currently pitiful Crit rating, so can be substituted for Mastery, Crit, Hit and Expertise on your equipment. If it already has Haste as a secondary stat, Mastery is about as good as you’re going to get (unless you’re under the hit cap of 5%).

Reforging for Assassination

Mastery, Mastery and Mastery. If you’re going to play your rogue like a tunneling warrior, you want your envenoms and poisons to hit as hard as possible. Potent Poisons turns 1 point of Mastery (requires just under 180 Mastery rating) into 3.5% extra poison damage. Any unwanted secondary stats on your equipment can be swapped to Haste or Hit rating.

Blue Sockets

Stamina + Agility: Shifting Demonseye & Shifting Nightstone
Hit: Rigid Ocean Sapphire & Rigid Zephyrite
Hit + Agility: Glinting Demonseye & Glinting Nightstone
Spell Penetration: Stormy Zephyrite & Stormy Ocean Sapphire

Gemming for spell penetration shouldn’t be a major concern – a cloak enchant and a gem (in either the gloves/leg/belt socket for the bonus) gives 108 – 120 penetration, which should make a difference to your raw poison damage.

Red Sockets

Agility: Delicate Inferno Ruby & Delicate Carnelian

Yellow Sockets

Haste + Agility: Deft Ember Topaz & Deft Hessonite
Mastery + Agility: Adept Ember Topaz & Adept Hessonite
Resilience + Agility: Lucent Ember Topaz

Meta Sockets

For Assassination specs particularly, Enigmatic Shadowspirit Diamond is useful to help reduce being kited. The Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond is a viable choice for increasing survivability, though if you’re looking for sheer luck-based potentially game-breaking fun, Destructive Shadowsprit Diamond is the way to go. The 10% reduced stun/fear effect gems are probably not worth taking – stuns have been nerfed more than enough to worry about, and fears can hopefully be dealt with by your dispeller.
For raw stats, the 54 mastery from the Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond is currently the best you can get (especially for Assassination rogues).

Main Hand Dagger

For assassination and subtlety specs you’ll be wanting a slow, hard hitting dagger in your main hand. There aren’t really that many great daggers to choose from for PVP – Season8 and IC25 daggers are better than the majority of what’s on offer from Cataclysm right now. The following daggers do offer a marked improvement.

When Gold is no Object – Elementium Shank

If you have gold to burn (and believe me this will cost a lot of gold at the moment), this Blacksmith-crafted dagger is the way to go. To craft one of these daggers you will need – 60 Volatile Air, 60 Volatile Fire, 60 Volatile Water, 16 Volatile Earth, 40 Elementium Bars and 18 Pyrium Bars. Ouch!

The Cheaper Alternative – Dagger of Restless Nights

A very worthy alternative, this will need revered reputation with a Tol Barad faction – Baradin’s Wardens for Alliance or Hellscream’s Reach for Horde.

For the Poor and Unloved – Windwalker Blade or Dimension Spike

The Windwalker Blade is a drop from Drahga Shadowburner in the new Grim Batol dungeon (on heroic difficulty). Fingers crossed it drops for you!

Alternatives – Lockbreaker Shank

Whilst not as good as Season 8 or IC25 daggers, this reward from the Deepholm quest ‘Question the Slaves’ is about as good as you can get for a Cataclysm green dagger.

Offhand Weapon

There is currently a ~horrible~ selection of decent fast weapons in Cataclym, with ilvl258 weapons from WotLK content being more viable than the pitiful selection we have been offered. Damage output seems higher with the 1.8 speed daggers listed above than from most of the 1.4 weapons that are available. If you don’t fancy playing as 1.8/1.8 and you have no decent daggers from WotLK, you could fall back on the following choices.

BOE Specials – Trek’s Shiv & Lhakaz’s Swiftblade

Lhakaz’s Swiftblade looks pretty good (and will help with reaching the hit cap) but currently seems to be selling for 2k-3k gold. Considering the short amount of time you’ll (hopefully) using this for, you may want to give it a miss!

For Those Who Slept through WotLK – Toxidunk Dagger

This random BOE drop from BRC isn’t too shabby – I’ve ran BRC once so far and saw it drop from one of the first packs of mobs.

For The Unlucky Looter – Gilnean/Goblin Slicer

If the Toxidunk dagger doesn’t drop (or if it’s need-rolled by a hunter from Skullcrusher), this quest reward is about as good as it gets. You will need to finish the ‘Prisoners’ quest in Abyssal Depths to receive it.

Main Hand Sword/Axe/Mace

I don’t intend to touch the combat tree for PVP this season unless things drastically change, but the following slow main hand weapons would be suitable for any rogue wanting to PVP with a combat spec. If you really don’t want to use mutilate or backstab, you can try these;

When Gold is no Object – Elementium Bonesplitter

Another blacksmith-crafted item of which I dread to imagine the cost.

The Cheaper Alternative – Ravening Slicer

Baradin’s Wardens and Hellscream’s Reach come to the rescue once again with this axe (requires revered reputation).

For the Poor and Unloved – Dragonsaw Boneblade

This bearable sword is awarded for completing the Deepholm quest ‘Resonating Blow’.

*UPDATE*

I’ve just noticed The Perforator. This level 83 BOE is a crafted item from Jewel Crafting which requires six blue-level gems.

Also, thanks to Majunor for pointing out these two decent daggers. Throat Slasher can be purchased for 950 Justice Points and The Twilight Blade is a lucky drop from lock boxes. I’d like to run tests on the Twilight Blade to see whether or not the proc is enough to make up for the lack of stats.

Paladin

Paladins have been affected by several unusual changes, which seem to be causing a fair bit of drama. Retribution paladins are having survival issues (they can no longer dispel magic), while Protection is just generally terrible in PVP. Retribution/Assassination/Priest looks like it could work as a rush-down comp, but I don’t know how viable it will turn out to be once teams start stacking up on PVP/resilience gear. The general consensus seems to be either PVP as a holy paladin or reroll to a different class.

Guardian of Ancient Kings

At level 85 paladins will be getting a pet whose function depends on their spec. As Holy, the pet will assist with healing on team members and as Retribution it will assist with DPS. The Protection version will reduce the damage taken by the paladin, but you probably won’t encounter too many of these except in world PVP.

Word of Glory, Templar’s Verdict & Inquisition

Paladins can now generate a girly version of our butch Combo Points called ‘Holy Power’. This is used for several ‘finishing moves’ giving instant heals or damage.

Even though they are still reeling from the nerf to ‘Bubble and Hearth’, expect paladins to recover in time for the next PVP season.

Priest

Priests get a couple of new abilities that look quite useful in a PVP environment. Inner Will, when combined with Inner Sanctum will give a 16% movement speed – 1% faster than a rogue with the Quickening talent. Their level 85 spell, Leap of Faith is a ‘friendly’ version of Death Grip. Amongst other things this may prove to be a neat way of getting a friendly player into your Smoke Bomb aura.

Chastise

This three second stun from the Holy tree does not break on damage and does not appear to share diminishing returns with other forms of crowd control.

Additional

Inner Fire no longer has charges, so priest’s damage mitigation will remain relatively high considering their cloth armor.

Warlock

All three Warlock trees appear to be viable this season so expect to see a lot of variation. At level 81 they will pick up Fel Flame, which will enable them to extend the duration of Immolate and Unstable Affliction. Other changes to the Warlock class include;

Chaos Bolt

The Warlock’s hard hitting Chaos Bolt has had it’s mechanics changed – it can now be defended against with Cloak of Shadow.

Hand of Gul’dan

Hand of Gul’dan looks like the Demonology equivalent of Chaos Bolt. Despite looking like an AoE attack, this is a single-target spell that you cannot run away from. It goes without saying that the aura it leaves on the ground should be avoided!

Hellfire

With the Demonology talent ‘Inferno‘, this aoe can now be channeled whilst moving, so don’t be surprised if Warlocks attempt to use it to get you out of stealth.

Warrior

By the looks of things Arms will remain the primary PVP spec for warriors, as Protection is failing to put out the same levels of damage as it did in Season 8. Warriors are picking up three new 81+ abilities, with Sweeping strikes plus Bladestorm is here to stay, but with the massive Cataclysm health pools, they won’t be as devastating as before (watching Hydra instantly drop 100>0 thanks to a recklessness bladestorm was a scary sight indeed).

Throwdown

You’ve probably noticed this ability in battlegrounds since patch 4.0 went live. Yes, that Arms warrior is actually doing as good a job at stunlocking as you can do. The 45 second cooldown may be more than double that of Cheap Shot, but once you’ve added Intercept/DR, just like Cheap Shot/Kidney Shot.

Note: I was up till 5.30am in Cataclysm, so appologies if none of what I typed makes any sense! Good luck with the levelling – you’ve got a week before the new PVP season starts!

Death Knights

With Blood being the dedicated tanking spec, we’ll yet again be facing a mix of Frost and Unholy Death Knights. The way things are looking at the moment it’s likely to be Unholy spec for Arenas (due to the controllable pet) and Frost for Rated Battlegrounds/5v5 (potentially crazy AoE from Howling Blast).

On top of their new patch4.0+ spells, DKs will be getting Necrotic Strike and Dark Simulacrum. Dark Simulacrum is looking evil, but no direct threat to rogues (unless next patch they start stealing our Shadow Steps!).

Necrotic Strike

The healing absorption this gives can stack, theoretically giving upto 9 applications per Death Knight. At the moment the absorbs are in the region of 5k damage – my initial reaction to this was “oh crap, up to 45k damage absorption from 9 strikes?!”. However, it’s important to remember that health pools will be dramatically bigger than in WotLK.

Sudden Doom

Expect to see many more Death Coils flying around, especially since the following ability relies on them.

Dark Transformation

This gives a large boost to the DK’s pet’s damage. The new abilities this grants them aren’t too scary, pretty much extra damage and the ability to Huddle without stopping attacking.

Additional

One of my favorite changes to DKs this patch is that Death Grip can now be countered with Cloak of Shadows. We now finally have a chance of not getting pulled off the edge of Dalaran Sewers.

Druids

Druids are looking as strong as ever with three viable specs. Their new abilities include Stampeding Roar and the rather bizarre Wild Mushrooms

Tree of Life

If you’ve been wondering why you haven’t seen many trees around recently, this is why. ToL is no longer a stance/form that can be switched to at will – instead it functions like a Warlock’s Metamorphosis. On the good side this means that Druids will no longer be able to start an arena match in an unsappable form, but it means that they no longer have to drop form to cast Cyclone. The mechanic has also been changed to prevent them from being banished in tree form.

Stampeding Roar

This new ability is yet another reason why Assassination specced rogues are suffering with mobility issues (as if losing Preparation wasn’t enough!). A 40% movement buff to your target is not what you want to happen when you’re slowed.

Glyph of Entangling Roots

A glyph to turn Entangling Roots into an instant cast spell with an annoyingly short cool down. This is really painful to encounter, especially when the druid is feral and throwing around instant cyclones.

Hunters

With buggy pets that follow you through vanish (still), the fatally annoying Flare ability and what feels like a massively improved stealth detection, hunters are still pretty much the anti-rogue DPS class in my eyes. Their already considerable arsenal has been enhanced by the following new abilities.

Counterattack

Wing-clip on steroids, this will snare you for five seconds. Your only defense is to get lucky and never get parried.

Camouflage

Unless the hunter is using Trueshot Aura, this stealth ability is going to make it quite tricky to guess an arena team’s comp when the gates open. This differs from Shadowmeld as it is not castable in combat. The hunter is totally immune to being opened on while Camouflage is active.

Aspect of the Fox

While I’d have loved this to have been some sort of X-Files reference, all this new aspect does is allow the hunter to run around casting Steady Shot and Cobra Shot (which have been altered to give a hunter Focus).

RIP Volley

Volley has been removed from the game, so hunters do have one less way of knocking you out of stealth. Unfortunately their improved stealth detection does seem to counter this loss.

Additional

Flare has been changed so that it doesn’t take effect until it lands, which should (with a bit of luck) enable you to shadowstep+kidney shot the hunter in between two consecutive flares.

Mages

Season 8 hinted at the end of mages only PVPing in Frost spec, and Cataclysm seems to reinforce that idea with the increased viability of Arcane spec mages. At level 80 Arcane Barrage is hitting hard enough to one-shot PVE geared players and the instant-cast nature of the spell makes it very appealing in PVP.

Ring of Frost

Mages get yet another snare in Cataclysm. While it is somewhat balanced around people being able to avoid it, this could be very tricky when slowed, polymorphed or feared. The ability to protect areas of a map with a giant freezing trap will really shine in Rated Battlegrounds. Additionally, the ability to preceed the tooltip with ‘Anal’ will keep trade-channel spammers amused for hours.

Arcane Missiles

This anti-pillar humping spell is no longer available on demand, so running out of LoS will be slightly more effective vs mages in Cataclysm.

Timewarp

Blizzard have introduced another Heroism/Bloodlust mechanic as the new level 85 mage spell. Luckily, it won’t stack with the Shaman spells.

Flame Orb

A slow-moving ball of fire or frost, depending on spec. This can be talented with Fire Power to detonate when it expires.

It’s quite a small addon that doesn’t really do anything fancy, other than pop up warnings every minute when your poisons have expired or are close to running out. It’s fairly customizable, and thanks to great feedback from users, doesn’t produce warnings in inns/cities or while you’re using flight points.

CPR can be downloaded from www.wowinterface.com, www.curse.com, or the rather excellent Curse Addon Client.

**UPDATE**

Thanks to help from Asaye-Bloodhoof(EU), CPR will now only warn about missing poisons ~IF~ you have a thrown weapon equipped. I’ve turned the feature on by default, but it can be disabled with ‘/cypr thoff’.

I don’t have time to play both my rogues competitively, so I’ll be playing Dcruize, who I transfered and X-factioned to Terenas-EU as a human (I now have 5 black war bears in my bank…). In preparation for Catacylsm I’ll be changing to a shadowstep-daggers spec until 2.2k, then most likely shadowstep-swords afterwards. The few games we’ve played since transfering have been a bit scratchy, mostly down to me being out of practice I think. There’s a scary amount of Wizard-cleave teams around now and it feels like every cleave team is carrying at least one Shadowmourne – hopefully the extra mobility, cheapshots and slight survivability from a shadowstep spec will help counter the pounding I’m taking (100-0 in a deathcoil = ouch, just ouch).

On a sad note it appears that Akrios (roguerogue.com) has stopped playing. Old news I know, but it’s still a shame that another rogue has gone, although hopefully on to bigger and better things. Best of luck Akrios, I never spoke to you, but damn you had my respect!

I started writing lastrogue.com shortly after WotlK launched, at a time when the rogue population was falling rapidly – the name for the site came about after I did a “/who rogue 80 dalaran” and found that I was the only one there. Things have picked up dramatically since then and I’m certain that Cataclysm will breathe a lot more life into the rogue class, but it’s still a shame to see the rogue population decrease, even by one (especially when that ‘one’ was such a prolific figure in the rogue community).

I’ll be posting again very shortly, so until then, may all your vanishes be clean ones! And thanks for the duel Doby

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.

Warning, pre-cataclysm content detected!

This article was written before patch 4 went live and will contain information that may no longer be relevant.

While not as troublesome as frost mages or resto druids, hunters have more than enough tricks up their sleeves to make things pretty hard for you. Without your cooldowns, rogue vs hunter is not only virtually impossible to win, it’s also mostly impossible to escape from. A hunter has a lot of defensive abilities on short cooldowns so you may need assistance from your team mates to be able to actually stay within melee range.

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!

Warning, pre-cataclysm content detected!

This article was written before patch 4 went live and will contain information that may no longer be relevant.

Wound poison and Deadly poison may be the staple poisons for a rogue, but there are a couple of situations where it can pay to make a quick switch to anesthetic poison. You will naturally need an extra weapon handy (with a weapon chain if needed), but if anything, it’s a way of getting a bit more life out of an old dagger.

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.