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.