Last Rogue » 3.2.2

Master Poisoner, Deadly Poison and Weapon Speeds

Dcruize — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:24:33 +0000

I’ve finally been able to properly play with the new Master Poisoner buff and it’s looking strong indeed, despite my weapon speed not being ideal. Getting a stack of 5 deadly poison on a plate wearer seems to really put out massive pressure – the only issue I’ve had has been with getting 5 doses applied and keeping them there. Druid and Paladin cleanses can keep the stack down to only 1-2 doses, and unlucky procs can see your full stack of 5 drop away to nothing.

I’m missing relentless weapons at the moment (playing with 1.8 speed daggers), but soon I’ll be swapping to the 1.4 speed Relentless Gladiator’s Shiv. Hopefully this faster weapon will help to keep deadly poison stacked – unlike wound/instant, deadly procs aren’t normalized to a certain number per minute.

For a rough idea of PPM with the different weapon speeds, I spent 30mins auto-attacking a training dummy with three different weapons. The test is far from ideal as it doesn’t factor in time you spend kiting, (and I didn’t use Slice’n'Dice or Mutilate) but the results are enough to make me consider swapping my Mutilator for a Murder. The faster the speed the better, as your shivs will cost less energy and Focused Attacks will proc more often from the extra chances you get to crit.

1.4 speed – 12 procs per minute
1.6 speed – 9.2 procs per minute
1.8 speed – 6.8 procs per minute

If running with a 1.4 dagger means not having to shiv at all, it might be worth main-handing deadly and keeping wound on the offhand instead. This would give back the ability to shiv crippling when you’re peeling (or chasing form-switching druids), but unfortunately this is probably something better suited to high-level raiders, as there are no fast mainhand daggers available from PVP. If someone is able to try this out, please let me know how you get on with keeping 5/5 deadly doses applied!

All in all, I’m more than happy with the buffs to Master Poisoner and Envenom – with a full stack of deadly and plenty of combo points you can really burn peoples HP. Who needs ArP when you can put out 7k crits on plate!

Apologies for the wierd post I made earlier today – I was playing around with Spotify and accidentally created a tweet for a random album, which was picked up by WordPress and inserted into this blog……

Brewfest/3.2.2 Weapons (Updates)

Dcruize — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:47:20 +0000

This week has seen the release of another two weapons suitable for Rogue-PVP (thanks Flair for the heads up on the Rondel), neither of which would need a raiding guild or a 25man PUG to get hold of.

The first is a BoE mace from Brewfest, Tankard o’ Terror. Judging by the amount of them in the AH the drop rate isn’t too harsh. While Combat-Mace spec isn’t as strong as Swords/Close-Quarters-Combat, this is still a hard-hitting lvl226 weapon. So, if you fancy giving combat a try without raiding Ulduar/ToC for high damage mainhanders, (and if you don’t mind missing out on selling this mace for a couple of thousand gold), you might want to give this a try.

Secondly we have a new drop from The Black Knight in Trial of the Champion Heroic, Black Knight’s Rondel. The drop rate isn’t too horrid and the dagger isn’t unique – it has nice stats and http://shadowpanther.net has calculated it to be almost on a par with Sinister Revenge, without the hastle of clearing Nax25. For a 41/5/25* or HfB build, these daggers would be an excellent starting point if you’re unable (or uninclined) to raid.

* The new Master Poisoner spec (44/2/25) is looking like it needs a fast offhand dagger to really shine.

Buff to Master Poisoner in 3.2.2

Dcruize — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:56:10 +0000

The new PTR notes have come out, showing a very nice buff to Master Poisoner. This is supposedly a PVE buff, but I can see this making HfB attractive to PVPers as well.

Master Poisoner – Increases the critical hit chance of all attacks made against any target you have poisoned by 3%, reduces the duration of all Poison effects applied to you by 50%, increases the bonus chance to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 45%, and gives Envenom a 33/66/100% chance to not consume Deadly Poison.

The ‘massive’ buff that has got me feeling pretty hopeful for HfB in PVP during S7 is the little amendment to the end. 100% chance to not consume deadly poison!

I play as HfB at the moment since it makes a very big difference against plate teams. Not only will this new buff mean more damage from having DP tick (and hopefully let you envenom much more often), all those doses of DP should help your wound poisons avoid being dispelled.

To make this even more attractive, damage from envenom is also being buffed a little as well.

Envenomâ€™s scaling has been increased from 7% to 9% of attack power per combo point.