FL!

4.2 is live, first raids are tonight for us so I'll keep you posted on how it goes. I'll step by step some bosses and/or video some in the near future as well.

WHERE AM I UGH!?

If you know where I am, you are more than likely making massive amounts of gold.
Talk to you soon.

-Correct

Quick intro on Assassination

Testing out FRAPS and Video editing in Windows Live Movie Maker. Here is a short guide on how to intro as an Assassination rogue for PvE, and how to maintain the rotation. Pretty simple, feel free to comment or msg/mail me if you have any questions about Assassination this did not address.

-Correct

Updated

Since MMO is back up and functional I was able to finish the previous post with the actual item list for Assassination. Enjoy. I'll be doing combat and sub hopefully sometime soon. Right now I'm working on learning to FRAPS and video edit. Should be a video of a firelands boss or two from rogue PoV a bit down the road unless I run into too many complications.

Best in Slot. Firelands.

MMO-Champ is down and they have the most comprehensive loot list I've seen so I'll edit this up with the proper items and links as soon as curse stops having issues.

I need to do this for myself anyway so I might as well post on it and share. I'll start with Assassination because it is what I hope to be playing in FL, however I might play combat if it is better. Though I'll do that one another time. Non-base stat priorities are still the same as far as I know; yellow hit > spell hit > mastery > haste > expertise > crit > white hit.

Recently Rectangle (SW rogue) told me that Combat is currently outperforming Assassination on Patchwerk. I don't know what tools whoever is using to test that. It seems to me it would be hard to have all of the BiS gear even on PTR and do that kind of testing? Anyway he said they're quite close still, and it will of course be fight dependent. If there are adds or cleave ability, target swaps etc. We'll see when we get there I imagine, I'll build all 3 sets and test all 3 specs eventually as I always do.

4pc is going to be quite incredible so I would recommend getting that as quickly as you are able.

Helm - Dark Phoenix Helmet
Neck - Choker of the Vanquished Lord
Shoulders - Dark Phoenix Spaulders
Back - Dreadfire Drape
Chest - Breastplate of the Incendiary Soul
Bracer - Flamebinder Bracers
Gloves - Dark Phoenix Gloves
Belt - Flamebinding Girdle
Legs - Dark Phoenix Legguards
Boots - Treads of the Craft
Ring1 - Viridian Signet of the Avengers
Ring2 - Splintered Brimstone Seal
Trinket1 The Hungerer
Trinket2 - Matrix Restabilizer
Weapon1 - Feeding Frenzy>
Weapon2 - Entrail Disgorger
Ranged - Morningstar Shard

I find it odd that The Hungerer says equip proc, but also says 2 minute cooldown, was that a mistake or are they coming out and telling us the ICD for once? I'm going with the former.

For thrown, if you don't need to fan there is a FL trash bow that is considerably better.

If you have the Sinestra belt it is largely better than the new one from trash in FL one. At least until you get the item to upgrade it to its heroic version.

I'm also not sure what "random enchantment" the wrists off Alysrazor will be, so those may be added into the list over the current. I really hope these are for us since our other option is crit and expertise, vomit.

Now the 4pc + chest can easily be subbed with 4pc + Cinderweb Leggings if you can't manage the chest and happen upon the legs rather easily. The tier legs are better for Assassination than the chest however. Tier chest has expertise where as the tier legs have hit, that is the only difference really. Both "off" set pieces have mastery haste and red/red, red/yellow with +20agi bonuses. Depending how lucky you are it might be easiest to get the tier chest to make your 4pc fastest so just aim for 4pc however you can. After 4pc fit in your off piece choice once it is convenient to optimize. Another suitable substitute for your off set piece could be the crafted gloves, Clutches of Evil, but those take mats to craft, and a raid pattern drop perhaps. The gloves are mastery + haste with an agi bonus on a red socket so they are quite nice as well. Once you get into the heroic loot though the gloves don't have a heroic version since they are crafted.

I didn't take the item choices from anywhere, I used referencing from wowhead and mmmo-champ for the item stats and did my own evaluations.

-Correct

Edit: grammar, added items names in, removed roll over comment, added roll over links, thx Lega. Found a 2nd ring. Added trash bow for "thrown".

Coming soon!

Hopefully I'll manage to post tomorrow, sorry for the delay in new posting, it has been really busy here.

Something Wicked + Assassination in upcoming 4.2

I am happy to report today I was accepted into the guild Something Wicked. I look forward to many enjoyable raids. During my application process they downed their final 25 man boss on heroic mode, Al'akir. Congratulations to them for finishing all current content. Moshne, thanks for taking care of the application, I know how busy you must be.

Here is their Wowprogress and guild site.

Wow progress Something Wicked
Something Wicked Home

Recently I was trying to math out upcoming changes to Assassination for 4.2.

Assassin's Resolve damage bonus has been increased to 20%, up from 15%.
Vile Poisons now increases poison damage by 12/24/36%, up from 7/14/20%.

This looks quite massive on first glance, but then you need to take into consideration Vile Poison only effects Instant Poison, and Deadly Poison. Not Envenom, or Venomous wounds even though they are nature based damage. Envenom even says "Poison Damage" on it. Envenom is actually melee classified but nature damage, and Venomous wounds gets neither bonus, confusing isn't it? Anyway the change would actually apply 16% damage increase to your IP+DP damage. So I did some wowlog browsing (my own records and others), did the math and came up with roughly 7.4% damage increase (that includes the Assassin's Resolve math). Then as usual I read on EJ to see if any other results were around to confirm or deny my findings. What I found was that, like Antiarc, my calculations were based on Vile Poisons being multiplicative, not additive. Prior to his post on the calculations Aldriana pointed out that Vile Poisons are calculated additively. So instead of just multiplying the upcoming bonuses to your % of damage done by the applicable abilities you need to do this:

Aldriana said "Vile Poisons stacks additively with Mastery so (assuming you have ~20 mastery, which is typical for near-BIS) its a 2.06/1.9 = 8.4% boost to your IP/DP damage," - EJ

For those who don't read his math exactly well, he's assuming 20 mastery = .7 (70% poison dmg bonus increase) so 1.7+.2(current modifier for VP, 20%) so 1.9 and then add another .16 (16% VP dmg increase) for 2.06. Take the upcoming # (2.06) divide by the current # (1.9) and it is 1.0842 which is 8.42% increase. So I take that 8.42% and multiply it to my records for IP+DP % to find how much of a % increase it is with the poison change. For me it is ~3% for poisons and ~2% for melee giving Assassination a rough 5% dmg increase from now to 4.2.

I was less excited once I found out my math wasn't correct. My original findings make me happier :(

Sub Raiding PvE

The epic duel between 2pc PvP and 4pc PvE!

Happy Fathers Day those of you who are fathers and read this blog. As usual thanks for stopping by I appreciate the views. Please leave any feedback or questions in the comments section at the end.

I want to point out I don't have endless time to do all calculations possible and the data available is pretty low for Sub, especially when it comes to 4pc. The data I gather may not be perfect but should be reasonably close.

Recently I was examining the Vicious PvP gear for Rogues and noticed the 2pc bonus was 70 agility. The item level of the PvP set pieces (365) are higher than that of regular PvE pieces (359) therefore giving it more base agility as well. Since Sub has the highest agility stat weight of all rogue specs I started to math out the EP values to see what the difference was between using 2pc PvP set instead of 2pc(4pc bonus) PvE. I also calculated the PvE non-set agi leather items. This of course being an attempt to better your PvE quality in a raid situation. There are also 365 il leather boots which essentially is the same comparison, however they take 2200 rating, where as the set just takes Conquest points and are much easier to acquire.

Here is what I found when comparing:

I will be linking these items via Wowhead.com, however I'll list out the main stat comps and differences so you don't have to view each one and/or open a bajillion windows to confirm. If the socket bonus isn't a positive PvE stat I'm not going to list it. Unless the socket bonus is 20 or more agi I'm also not going to list it. You won't want to match the socket even for yellow (haste agi/hit agi) even though they are your best non agi stats, as even 20 more of either of those vs 10 agi is a loss (28 v 36 best case).

Wind Dancer's set
Vicious Gladiator's set


PvE stats v Agility PvP stats:

HELM - PvE set helm, 281 agi, blue 30 agi bonus, 168 hit, 228 crit vs PvP set helm. 301 agi, 181 mastery PvE helm with socket bonus is -10 agi overall, gain 168 hit 228 crit vs PvP helm, 10 agi gain 181 mastery. 2pc bonus consideration (70agi) for 1pc would be 35 agi. 45agi and 181 mastery gain EP is 325. Compared to 168 hit 228 crit (assuming you're already yellow hit capped since it is so easily attainable elsewhere) is worth 427.2 EP. This is pre-reforge, which in this case the PvE item would reforge higher since 40% of 228 is more than 40% of 181. This is one of the worst examples since the PvP item has the worst stat (mastery) for Sub as its non resilience stat.

In the doc posted (ss and link) it shows you that the PvP item can be better than both or at least 1 of the PvE items as for EP value. You may lose the 4pc (if you have and are using it) for the 359 set, and this is factoring the 2pc PvP bonus gain already.



As you can see using legs and shoulders 2pc PvP perhaps would gain you a considerable amount of EP value. These statistics are all pre-reforging however so the statistical EP gain would be somewhat smaller in most instances.

It comes down to marginal amounts depending on your gear availability, and goes away once you get heroic quality gear. It may be easier for you to obtain 2pc PvP than the PvE loot depending on your luck and availability to raid/grind heroics. I felt it was worth mentioning so as a community we can keep our eyes out for something like this in the future (post 4.2 and further).

There is a much smaller pool of data available out there for Subtlety specced rogues so I had to rely on my own calculations via high end Sub raiding rogues (25 man data gathered mostly) while using Worldoflogs.com. I was doing this to try to get a gauge on the value of 4pc for Sub raiding PvE rogues, since you may or may not be choosing to not use it or lose it and use 2pc PvP instead. There would be an EP loss from whatever 4pc value is, and it may or may not be greater than the gain from your EP stats on the PvP gear.

What I found after analyzing and doing calculations on what I thought would be the most "stand still" bosses (Magmaw, Chimaeron, etc.) is that Sub rogues have very few Eviscerates during a boss fight, and a low amount of white hits comparatively. I chose stand still fight data since it would have the cleanest rotation, Sub PvE rotation is quite challenging to execute perfectly, or even properly. The average amount of Eviscerates per fight is roughly 25. From the data I was referencing about 40% of those are actually crits, even though the players crit rating is a bit lower than that. The 4pc PvE set bonus is Deadly Scheme. The average amount of "white hits" a Subtle rogue was landing on any given fight was ~300, give or take about 30. So on average 1% proc rate on 300 hits means 3 procs right? When 40% of those Eviscerates are already critting that means 60% of the 3 procs you gain a benefit from the actual proc (a 100% crit), so roughly 2 Eviscerates (rounding up). So you know, Eviscerate is ~10% of the Sub rogues damage. So you gain 2 auto crit Eviscerates on any given fight, those land for an average of 24k (above a typical hit from evi). You are therefor given ~48k dmg gain, say over a 5 minute duration fight (varrying). 5 minutes x 60 seconds = 300 seconds. 48,000/300 = ~160 dps gain from the 4pc. Unfortunately I don't know the relation between EP to DPS. The gain from 2pc PvP depending on your slot choices can be near that value in EP. You can use your personal preferences when choosing to use 2/2 or 4pc when Sub. I find it interesting and different to be using 2/2.


Credit Luisiuil for Chart Formulas.
Edited: Added chart and description of it. Removed chart w/incorrect data.

Battle Chicken!

Engineering

Gnomish Battle Chicken
This post will not only be about the poor misunderstood mechanical creature that is the Gnomish Battle Chicken, but how raid worthy Engineering is. Lets get started.

Firstly, there is some wildly inaccurate data out there on this lovely beast known as the battle chicken. Most of it is unimportant to the actual usage it has, however some actually does matter. Before we get too deep into what this does, I'll tell you a bit about it. Gnomish Battle Chicken is an engineering trinket that can be used once every 20 minutes and has a 1m 30s duration. You may swap trinkets and it stays active. While it is out it will attack the target you are engaged on, or once you engage it. It will hit for ~1-4 damage, really low I know, unless it is berserking, in which it will do a moderate amount more for ~10 seconds (still sub 100 per hit). While it is berserking it has a roughly 40% chance (I believe it to be higher but I remember 40%) to Squawk. Battle Squawk. This buff is melee only; it does not effect casting speed. It is a group wide buff so stacking other melee haste beneficial classes in a group with 1 or 2 engineers is highly advantageous to your raid dps as a whole.

The chicken itself is quite fragile and dies on nearly all encounters, especially with AoE. In addition to its fragile state, it can also attack targets you would not expect it to. If there is an engageable aggressive target, even docile ones or ones that don't have proximity aggro, the chicken will try to attack it for some strange reason. Take care and don't try to use the chicken on those fights.

The Gnomish Battle Chicken in name may be somewhat misleading as well. You may train the schematic from a Gnomish Engineering trainer, which means you need to be specified to Gnomish Engineering. What you may not know though is you can have a Gnomish Engineer craft one for you if you're Goblin, or unspecified, and you may still use it even though it says Bind on Pickup. (Note: I'm not sure if it is still tradeable, credit to Nored if it still works.) Or you could level Engineering, specify Gnomish, make a chicken, and respecify Goblin.

The chicken is Power Word Shieldable but cannot be healed. It is useful to raid dps if you have a priest macro /target Battle Chicken /cast Power Word: Sheild to increase its surviveability and increase the chance you'll gain the buff. The chicken has a 20 minute cooldown so you can use it on most fights depending on how much trash or how long the actual boss fight is. The raid dps increase depends on what classes are in the group with the Squawk buff and the duration of the fight, but it is always quite a large raid dps boost and is seldom, if ever, talked about anywhere.

So, now for a few things that are incorrectly written in some places. The chicken buff DOES stack with windfury (retest credit to Putin) and survival hunters buffs. It has always stacked with other buff since vanilla, and I tested it within the past week to confirm this is still the case (it is). The buff given also used to be multi-stackable, which would mean you could get a group buff of 25% melee haste (in vanilla we had 3 or 4 engineers who used them frequently) however I also recently tested that and it no longer multi-stacks. What happens now is this: if the first chicken squawks and then the second squawks, the second chicken to squawk refreshes the buff of the personal user of that chicken. If my chicken squawks it'll buff us all, then if your chicken squawks it will only refresh your battle chicken squawk buff to full duration, but not mine.

The chicken only takes 230 engineering skill to use, but it is very beneficial to max out engineering for other reasons such as Synapse Springs, bombs, and the Goggles (unless you're clearing heroic Nef or other heroic non-tier helm dropping bosses). You can customize them to be perfectly itemized for BiS pre-heroic. For most classes it would be best to have goblin engineering, especially since shrink ray no longer works on bosses in 4.2 (I think). I'll tell you why goblin is better in a while here. Also in case you were wondering, the chicken is not a one time use; it is permanent.

Synapse Springs
Synapse Springs : These are valued at ~80agi. I value them much higher due to the customized usage. It has no random use proc which could be largely wasted like other proc based profession gains, ie: Tailoring. For example, Magmaw typically has ~2 minutes until his first exposed head slam. As you gain experience and you notice these things you can hold your synapse springs and use them during a more beneficial moment in an encounter, like this. Use them immediately on engage and then again on first cooldown, then hold until exposed (or it'll be up a few seconds into expose) therefore giving you maximum benefit compared to certain other higher valued professions which have random procs.

Bombs!

Big Daddy
There are many types of bombs you have to choose from. The reason why I said I would recommend Goblin specific is because of Big Daddy bombs. These bombs are 440 engi skill; unlike the Chicken you must be Goblin specific to use them. There is no extra utility gained by being Gnomish other than the Chicken, which once you have made you may switch specializations (or have someone else make the Chicken for you in the first place). If you scroll down in the comments for Big Daddy someone says, "Before you throw it, ask your target 'would you kindly stand still?'" Now that isn't entirely true as you will read further on.

When I leveled engineering on my alt I picked Gob just because it was a caster and I didn't expect to high-end raid so a chicken wouldn't be very useful and I wanted to use different "toys". When I discovered the Big Daddy bomb I read the text and started testing it on "unsuspecting" targets. Bane (aka Starboard-Lightbringer and soon to be IBanel, I believe) helped me test originally. He is an exceptional Deathknight and if you want to be pro DK model yourself after him. Moving on, Bane would go out to Stormwind gates and duel me, then he'd sit still, we tested throwing from behind, throwing from the front, using army, throwing in combat, out of combat, and having him mobile, etc. The bombs did 40k DPS, yes 40k dps, on him + his army when they were not targeting me. The bombs do ~5k, but are enhanced when the target(s) are "unsuspecting". The bombs do around 4 times as much when the target(s) are "unsuspecting". Oh did I mention they can crit? For 25-30k dmg, yes, yes they can. The main issue with these is that you cannot throw them while moving; where as saronite bombs (addressed later) can be thrown while moving (in case you need to not stand in fire).

One thing I do want to mention since I'm pretty sure this is not intended: Fire spec Mages get 25% bonus to bomb dmg, which can be incredibly significant. If you look at a normal Big Daddy it will say Big Daddy does 3750-6250 fire damage. If you look at it on a fire mage it says ~4087-8047 fire damage. Every other bomb pales in comparison to this one. The bombs on my fire mage do 20k self buffed non crit and 40k on a crit. This is on a target who is not targeting me, that is what "unsuspecting" means. They can be in combat, or out. They can target someone else, but just not you, they can also be mobile or immobile (credit to Ledranos for letting me bomb him a bunch). They have a 2 second cast time and a 1 minute cooldown. The damage can also be modified by a dps DK or a Boomkin (mushrooms are supposed to put earth and moon up in 4.2? They don't right now, I checked). So add on another 8% if you have that making it 21.5k reg and 43k crit respectively. I believe the crit ability of the bombs is spell based since the bomb itself is, meaning it would be less damage for a melee vs a caster, especially those who stack crit like Fire spec Mages. Big Daddy bombs also incapacitate the targets it hits for 5 seconds or until they take additional damage. Extremely helpful on Magmaw adds, Cho'gall adds, Maloriak adds, Halfus whelps, and so on.

This is another example of how engineering is undervalued as a profession and can far exceed all other professions as for dps gains and raid utility.

Saronite Bombs
Saronite Bomb only do around 1150-1500 dmg, but the radius is pretty high (10 yrds) and you can use them while moving. As a rogue you can use them while you are energy pooling. This used to be incredibly effective during LK and is far, far less beneficial now, but I still occasionally do it.

Just so you don't think I've forgotten about this: High-powered bolt gun does 6800-10200 damage, does not specify fire (it looks nature-based but specifies no modifier). It has a 2 minute cooldown, a tiny radius, and it takes a reagent. I don't use it.

Hope this information was beneficial and I look forward to hearing how many of you become engineers!

Edit: My editor corrected some grammatical errors, and generally made it easier to read. The actual content has not changed. I had an issue recently in ZA on lynx trash where the bombs hit a pack of lynx but only did ~5k to each. They were not targetting me and I've never had this happen. There were no resists and I retested on multi-target and single target over all situations I previously stipulated with the normal results of 17-21k non crit bombs. I will be trying to reproduce this in time or find the error.

Hello!

After 6 years and frequent requests I have finally decided to write a rogue blog for the game World of Warcraft. Here is some quick rough background on me.  I've been playing (with 2 short breaks) since closed beta, I've always played a rogue, however that is not the only class I play.  I started hardcore high end raiding in vanilla around the time of ZG and early AQ40.  I was in the guild <Surreal> (world 3rd) after a short stint in <Risen> (world 1st).  I raided with <Surreal> until into BC when my irl took up more of my time so I lightened my raiding schedule.  Partially into BC <Surreal> and <TITAN> merged into <Premonition> (still ~world 5th?) who now reside on Sen'jin.  I am currently applying to <Something Wicked> a 12/13 PvE Alliance guild on Whisperwind, coming from my own 10 man guild <Parody> on Alleria, which I ran since early LK expansion.

This blog will be mostly to inform people about how to play a rogue, primarily in PvE, but perhaps expanding to PvP or occasionally discussing strategies and roles at least.

I would like to state right away that I feel http://www.elitistjerks.com is an incredible site, especially for rogues if you need to confirm some data or I don't go over something you need to know.  They do, however, exclude or don't cover 100% of what you may want to know, and I may have it here so please have a look periodically.

For example, it was never mentioned (as far as I know) that Reign of the Unliving , which is typically a caster trinket, was top 2 BiS (best in slot) during that expansion until 4.0 when melee spell crit and melee haste values were nerfed into the ground.  Instant poison counts as a spell, and as Assassination, while rolling envenoms, you had a very high proc rate of poisons.  How it worked was when you crit with your instant poison proc, which was incredibly often, it would give you a mote of flame charge and upon the 3rd charge you would expunge your charges to do a spell based direct damage nuke.  On paper it looked very small regardless of how quickly you could generate charges (limited to one per 2 seconds so 6 seconds per 3 stack).  You could proc more frequently than nearly any caster, if not all, and the 3 stack nuke would stack with boss debuffs to make the nuke a reasonable amount of dmg even though rogues have no spell power. As usual I did self testing and used some of my own and other rogue parses from http://www.worldoflogs.com checking proc rates of instant poison versus duration of fight and # of crits vs # of non crits to determine the DPS value of the trinket.  The passive effect on the trinket was worthless as a rogue but due to the frequency of stack generation and expelled charges it made the actual DPS gain quite significant.  It was fight dependent, as to say less useful on fights that had high mobility and lower uptime on damage, but in general it was quite impressive to those who knew of it.  That is just one example of something that wasn't addressed via ej forums, at least as I can recall.

Please feel free to let me know if any of my recalled data is incorrect, I haven't actually taken time to double check my memory versus actual patch #s and so forth.

UP NEXT:  Engineering raid utility and personal dps boost, and how it is largely undervalued. Sub in upcoming tier/heroic. 2pc PvP + 2pc PvE for Sub in current content and future.