Current State of Rogue

It has been a while since I last posted and rogues have gone through some iteration. I decided I want to post up a quick (is that even possible for me?) blog regarding my thoughts on some current issues with the rogue and suggest possible fixes to them. I understand that some of these are big mechanical changes and it’s probably too late to for them to be added to the game.

Combat Off Hand In Warlords And the Problem With Main Gauche

I wanted to use this blog as a forum to address a problem I have with the current state of tuning for combat rogues in Warlods of Draenor. As I have suggested in previous posts, the changes to Main Gauche and Killing Spree have very serious implications in how we gear our combat rogues in the future. Because Main Gauche now strikes with the off hand weapon and because Killing Spree has had the damage buff removed (and its damage reflected in the direct weapon strikes), this puts more emphasis on the off hand weapon’s damage in Warlords. Before moving forward, I’d like to offer my speculation on the reason for these changes.

Marked for Death vs Anticipation for Combat

I decided I want to go into detail about the choice between these two talents. I understand that anticipation feels pretty mandatory for most rogues, and I felt that way too until late into Siege of Orgrimmar. I have since switched to Marked for Death due to a variety of reasons. I think one compelling (and perfectly valid) reason for choosing anticipation is that it simply frees up a keybind. I do not, however, think that makes it simpler to use than Marked for Death. Marked for Death is pretty simple to use, too. With this post I am going to go into detail on exactly how these two abilities impact your dps and your damage breakdown.

Just this morning I decided to run 7 simulations with simulationcraft-548-8 build. Note that this is the most recent live MoP build, not a WoD beta build. That said neither Anticipation nor Marked for Death has changed in Warlords, so the conclusions on these two talents SHOULD be equally valid for the upcoming expansion. You can, however, put this information into practice now.

Combat Profile Improvements for Warlords SimulationCraft

Given that I don’t have beta access to Warlords of Draenor, all of my rotation testing has to be done in a theorycrafting tool and not in-game. I also have to trust those theorycrafting tools are modeling things correctly as I can not log into the beta to verify them myself.

That preamble aside, last night I decided to build the WoD version of Simulationcraft to see if I could tweak the combat action priority list for an improvement, and to get some more insight into some mechanics.

Itemization Budgets and Upgrades in WoW.

I wanted to get a little bit away from rogue talk and give some detailed explanation on how itemization works in WoW and how you can use this knowledge to determine which pieces to upgrade first. This is going to be technical so if you are not comfortable with differential equations, you may want to skip over the mathy parts.

Rogue AoE in Warlords of Draenor

I wanted to take a couple minutes to share my thoughts on the AoE-related Draenor perks. It’s easy to see they’re still iterating on the design, so these thoughts may be invalid next week but I’m going to go ahead and put them out there anyway. As a preamble, I am going to warn you that I won’t be talking much about the changes to Fan of Knives and Crimson Tempest for Assassination rogues. The reason is that I don’t believe much needs to be said. I haven’t thought about them much because they work perfectly well with the spec’s theme and toolkit. Nor are they all that strong or weak. I think they nailed the design on the AoE perks for Assassination.

Bandit’s Guile Mechanic in Warlords of Draenor

In my previous posts I was taking a qualitative look at the Mists of Pandaria iteration of the rogue talent tree. With this post I am going to go into a more mathematical analysis of one specific Draenor Perk for Combat rogues: Empowered Bandit’s Guile. Before I get into the nitty gritty, however, I should explain what exactly bandit’s guile is and how it does (or does not) fit into the combat rogue playstyle.

Bandit’s Guile is a specialization passive for Combat rogues that leads to a cyclical damage profile. As the rogue performs combo builders the mechanic gains a hidden stack, increasing damage at every 4th attack. At the start of combat the rogue does base damage, after 4 Sinister Strike or Revealing Strike casts, this advances to a 10% damage increase (shallow insight) for 15 seconds with the duration refreshing with each cast. After 4 more casts, the damage bonus is extended to 20% (moderate insight), then after 4 more it is extended to a 30% damage increase (this is deep insight). The 30% damage increase persists for 15 seconds without refreshing. Once it expires, the cycle starts over.

To the Point: Level 90 Talents

Ok. So I got lazy and didn’t do the level 90 talents right away. So sue me. Anyhow, with the realm downtime and LotRO (another MMO which I play very casually) patching, I decided to spend this time finishing up the talent overhaul and to explain what I had in mind for the level 90 talents.

So far we’ve had a talent row dealing with stealth, one dealing with stealth, survivability, mobility, non-lethal poisons, and control, all iconic aspects of the rogue toolkit. This leaves one class defining mechanic to enhance/change up in some way: Combo Points.

A Stunning Row: Level 75 Talents

Stuns. I have two thoughts that come to mind when considering stuns. While we were doing heroic Nazgim last night, I was getting very frustrated at my 8 sec Prey on the Weak-enhanced kidney shot being DR’d by shorter duration stuns that don’t buff raid dps on that target. Rogues are THE iconic stun class and they should return to that. There are too many stuns in the game and many of them have utility that eclipses that of a slight damage taken debuff and duration increase (if Combat). I think Rogues need some stun utility so I decided to dedicate level 75 to enhance the rogue’s control.

Filling a Gap: Level 60 Talents

Ok, so by now I’ve described the revisions of the first three rows of talents as you level. Cannibalizing the level 45 talents for level 30 left level 45 with a hole, which I filled with what used to be  the level 60 talents. Now that we’re still at level 60, all we’ve done is move the hole down a row. So, let’s fill it.

By now your character is at the original level cap of the game, so gameplay at this point needs to be more robust. By now rogues have Cloak of Shadows, Relentless Strikes, all of our openers, all of our poisons, our alternate combo point generators, and Combat even has a dps cooldown in the form of Adrenaline Rush. Lets look at the list above for just a moment though and reflect on what it means to be a rogue, what makes a rogue what (s)he is. When people think of rogues they think of stealth, well, we covered that at level 15. They think of a tool for every situation. Well we handled the survivability toolkit at level 30 and the mobility toolkit at 45. You may notice that one of the major iconic rogue abilities that is missing is poisons. Yup, level 60 is going to enhance our poisons since we now have all of them.