Oranges taste delicious

Here they are, in all their legendary glory.

Golad, Twilight of Aspects
Tiriosh, Nightmare of Ages

The proc takes forever to build (as the stacking agi did in the previous stages) and if you don't pool energy properly in certain specs at the proper time you can waste a few seconds of an already short proc.

I haven't PvP'd much since season 5, which was during WotLK, but I do find the occasional battleground fun. PvP is particularly fun when it resembles vanilla WoW where you could gear people to death and 3 shot them; or stunlock them to death with or without mace specialization.

After the 25 man last night I hearthed to Hinterlands, flew for 15 seconds and turned in. Ravenholdt manner was in flames! I won't ruin the ending for anyone else doing the line though. So I turned in, got my goodies, used my landslide scrolls and pre-cut queen's garnets, and invited a few people from guild to do an AB (BG weekend). I of course hadn't PvP'd in a while, as I mentioned, so I solo queued (oops), got in, and no one else did, and all was ruined. Afterwards I did an AB with Levik and Skone and we destroyed everyone but still lost 1550/1600 or round about.

If you haven't seen the video of Eclipsy-Darkspear (he has since xferred) it is quite hilarious pvping with the legendaries. I would kill most anyone within 3 seconds if they didn't burn their trinket quickly. I should note it is considerably more fun to kill clothies who are rolling around in Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest form.

I'm quite curious what kind of damage increase it is going to be in a raid since I am PvE focused typically, I might hop in an LFR or two before next week's raid and see how everything is rolling.

As always thanks for reading, please leave comments or questions below!

-Ochiru

Edit: Fixed html coloring for legendaries, can't get the TGS java roll-over to work for some reason. Removed introduction.

Clarity

Just to quickly explain in case there was any confusion in the previous post; I would only recommend using the Deadened Nerves spec in Zon'ozz heroic and Ultraxion reg/heroic, due to the inability to backstab throughout the entire fight on Ultraxion, and due to the inability to stay behind Zon'ozz during black (for group heals and survivability). That spec will however help greatly if you are staying Assassination since it gives you an extra 10% damage reduction and +20% healing recieved, the other option would be of course to have one of your specs be Combat. If you have a second set of gear with forging to haste/expertise (if not capped or close) Combat dual would be smart to use.

-Ochiru

Dual Assassination

Other than the obviousness of the title there is good reason for being dual Assassination spec in my opinion, especially if you're main spec is Assassination anyway. There is a less obvious difference in my main spec from most traditional Assassination specs, but I'm sure if you looked for a minute you'd see it.

I was browsing Elitist Jerks a while back and checking some work of mine with their Assassination guide, and it turns out they have very little math actually shown on their reasoning for choosing certain aspects to a spec or BiS list. I've said before and I'll say again I appreciate Aldriana and Antiarc's theorycrafting and I think they're very good, and great with mods and math. As for other people who post guides on Ej, I find them less credible and less reliable. An IRL friend of mine who is a highly skilled rogue (in both theory and execution) also used to do some major theorycrafting with his own spreadsheets and math told me that one of the guide writers was not very good and to not really trust his word without my own testing. Most of the time I do my own testing, but since Cataclysm I've had/put in less time doing my own testing. I do still test a decent amount, but nothing like I once did. My friend hasn't been playing in t13 so I can't really bounce anything off of him anymore either. With that, I'll get back into my Assassination dual speccing with reasoning you will probably not find elsewhere.

There are two fairly common Assassination specs, one is 31/2/8 the other is 31/3/7. For my "main" raiding spec I do the 31/2/8. The adjustment in my main spec is that I use the Vendetta Glyph ever since I obtained 4pc t13, and I drop the Backstab Glyph in its place since it is the least valuable. For those who don't know, the Vendetta glyph's 20% bonus is factored after the 4pc so you may think it is 30 (base) x1.2 = 36 + 9 (4pc bonus) = 45 seconds, however it is 30 (base) + 9 = 39 x 1.2 = 47.8s; so roughly a 20% damage bonus for 48 seconds.

The alternate spec I use is specifically for Ultraxion, and it would be great for heroic Ultraxion if I were doing that in my 1-night-a-week semi-pug group. Since you cannot Backstab on Ultraxion anyway, there is no point to have the Backstab Glyph or Murderous Intent. When you drop the 2 talent points you need to typically put into Murderous Intent you can also drop the 1 point in Deadly Brew (a typical filler talent people take), and use all 3 of those now available talent points into Deadened Nerves x3 which reduces all damage you take by 10%. Now you might be thinking, "Well Sub gets Enveloping Shadows alternatively which is 30% reduction in AoE + feint and that is 80% reduction every third Hour." True, except you get the debuff each time you stay out on an Hour in heroic so you have to Heroic Will two of every three anyway. Sub also loses FAR more damage with the inability to Ambush during Shadowdance, and losing Backstab in their main rotation, so that isn't a positive at all for a fight with such a severe DPS requirement and enrage timer.

While you're alternating Cloak/Feint and staying out every third hour you take 135k instead of 150k each Feint and of course nothing when you Cloak. I was hoping the incoming damage would only be 120k instead of 135k, however the damage reduction is of course of the original value of 300k making it 270k/2, 135k. The frontal damage of Assassination is quite high due to the current value weight on Expertise; and most rogues of all specs shouldn't have trouble getting close to the Expertise cap. Additionally having Vendetta glyph instead of the "normal" Backstab glyph improves the frontal/single target damage by even more. Something less-experienced Assassination rogues also might not know is that once you're 2pc t13 and a boss is below 35% you need to weave Mutilates with Backstabs depending on your energy generation. When you have Heroism, or Overkill, or Tricks of the Trade active (6s every 30s) you will need to weave, drastically lowering the bonus you get from Murderous Intent anyway. As as side note: fights like Zon'ozz where you need to be in "front" during black phase for AoE heals and damage reduction it also helps possibly dropping Murderous Intent for the damage reduction, since you need to be in frontal below 35% quite a bit anyway, and of course....the weaving issues.

Quick Recovery is something that a lot of people forget about. When you're pushing heroics or in a progression oriented guild it helps quite a bit to have some of these things that are standard in Assassination, but unavailable in other specs. People often, especially lately, think Assassination is a poor quality spec, hopefully this post will change some peoples minds about the benefits it has.

Now I'm only 396 item level (as of tonight) and I hadn't put my Synapse Springs on my newly turned in 397 vanq gloves, but for people who think Assassination damage is low...this is for you.

Now in fairness World of Logs has Combat and Sub still parsing higher, even on Ultrax, but those guys are all 400il+ and 4-5 item levels can make a pretty massive difference.

Edit: changed link colors.

Well!

Clearly my judgement was off on my first post of 4.3. My "guess" for which specs would be most successful was completely opposite of what is true. According to Simcraft, and most logs, it goes Sub > Comb > Assass for single target, Comb > Sub > Assass (probably) for a 2-3 target fight, and I would expect Assass > Comb > Sub for a frequent 5+ target encounter since it has the best aoe but not the best "cleave".

I still value Assassination much higher than Simcraft does since I feel you get more benefit out of 2pc/4pc than other specs might, I think sub benefits immensely as well, but combat I would anticipate nothing but more energy capping issues, especially as the gear progresses.

Sub has a large dps drop if you can't backstab / ambush on an encounter, which currently Ultraxion you cannot do either at any point in the fight, but most others you can. It is more difficult to do so on Zon'ozz during black phase when he faces the raid and you are "supposed" to be grouped up, but with feint and perma recup you can probably stay out and not get yourself killed, but you may irritate your healers. Someone told me you can't backstab on spine originally and I guess they meant tendons specifically, but I vanish garrote and I tested backstabbing and it works so that wasn't accurate.

If Sim is correct, and it typically is, about single target fights then Sub in full t13 heroic will be topping the others, minus Ultraxion, and possibly Zon'ozz depending on your raid and what you're required to do.

I am strongly considering going back to Sub for a couple weeks to see how much better I parse, but currently I'm still nearly always the top of my 1 night raid and I rank quite well on worldoflogs.com. I have many top 10 parses.

Sub is considerably harder than Assass and Comb, I used to be able to do it successfully so I'm sure I'd be fine after a bit of practice in LFR or w/e. I'll keep you posted!

As usual if you ever have any questions for me or anything to say feel free to mail me/msg me in game on Lightbringer if you can find me or commenting here would be even better.

4.3

Here I am again, I haven't had as much to say lately and I found myself uninterested in learning video editing just to make mostly guide videos. One of these days I might actually get into it and video the new encounters in LFR/Reg/Heroic Dragon Soul, that would be nice, but it is really tough to find time and energy.

It is week 1 of the new raid (technically) and I managed to clear 6/8 with my friends/pug fillers on 25 man on Sat night. Of course I also cleared 4/4 LFR multiple times, it is a nice feature, most of the time you can do all 4 in about an hour, occasionally less. I happened to do the legendary quest line before my raid so I began collecting gem shards on boss 1. We have two rogues (who are regular) and Schiran didn't have the pre-line done so she pickpocketed when we got to Hagara. Ended the night 6/8 and 71 gem shards, depending if we do 6/8 or more it should take me 3-4 weeks to finish tier 1 quality daggers and move onto the next.

It is tough to really evaluate the damage of each spec at the current time outside of theory. Once worldoflogs has more data I'll be able to give more sound advice on which is the best. My current thoughts lean Assassination > Combat > Subtlety. The 3 specs have advantages fight dependent this tier, but there is very little for Subtlety as usual.

Some would say Morchok (reg/LFR) is a sub fight due to being able to stay in for Corrupted Earth mechanic, and they'd be right, kind of. If your healers know you're intending to stand in it then you're also fine as any spec. You take more damage without enveloping shadows, but you can still feint once you have a few stacks, cloak mid way through and feint again when it runs off to take very very little damage. The problem arises when you get to the 2nd set of corrupted earth, you won't have cloak up so all you have is feint, what I did was feint right away, wait till my stack was high then feint again toward the tail end of the cast and pop my healthstone while I had a bunch of damage hitting me, and heals coming kept me up(thanks Spiceynugget). I was lagging pretty heavily for some odd reason, low fps, delays, but I still managed 34.5k dps and a 13th world parse (mind you it is early and parses weren't being logged very long to this point). Embarrassingly enough I realized I was -1.6% hit from the cap, which is pretty huge for Assassination...I was really low on gold and couldn't reforge, it had been days since I tried and by the time raid night came around I had clearly forgotten. Oops. Hopefully I can post some better #s this week, not that it was poor by any measure in my opinion.

There are some newer things, or changes, to Assassination building and stat priorities I'll cover next post. Some of the fights are "frontal" only and not being able to backstab hurts plenty, so do the parries (except Ultraxion who can't parry).

Anyway, thanks for reading, feel free to msg me or tell your friends to msg me in game or out if you/they have questions or something they wish to address. Here's hoping to post more and see more people stop by.

It's about time

For Combat.

Fight dependent Combat can be the best spec there is for rogues. In current content (4.2) it is a fair amount better than any spec on Lord Ryolith and Majordomo Staghelm due to cleave. In addition to the cleave it also adds 4% physical dmg increase from Savage Combat (frost dk/ravager hunter pet/arms warrior also provide this). Combat is very competitive on all fights, it just excels at those two in particular.

Another advantage Combat has is that it prioritizes expertise more than Assassination, so those fights where you're highly frontal; like Rag and to some extent Domo it suffers less.

Stat priorities for Combat start the same as every other rogue spec, agility is king. Afterwards it goes yellow hit (5%) for specials (and you get 6% from precision) then expertise (26/26) and haste once capped. Haste is significantly better than any other stat at this point so drop all you can, your worst stat being white hit (post 17%) and crit.

The most common spec would be 7/31/3

There are quite a few "filler points" for combat so it is up to you if you want imp sprint/imp kick etc. This is the spec I typically do and I find to be the best overall.

Glyphs: Primes glyphs being Sinister Strike/Adrenaline rush, and usually Slice and Dice.
For Majors I would recommend Blade Flurry/Feint/Tricks.
Minors are up to you, I enjoy blazing speed, but I don't use it in all my specs, more of an occasional fun factor than useful from a PvE raiding perspective. Typically I have safe fall, blazing, and poison/lockpick. I would recommend poison if you're not crazy like me and reapply poisons at 30 min mark so you never run into a mid fight issue of no poisons.

Rotation for Combat can be semi-difficult to fairly easy. Here is what you need to know:

SnD: First and foremost is Slice and Dice, keep it up as close to 100% of the time as you possibly can, sacrificing other things to do so if you must.

Insights: Insights will increases your damage done by 10/20/30% depending on your level of insight. You gain insight by using SS (Sinister Strike) or RvS (Revealing Strike), after you use 4 of these consecutively on the same target you gain shallow insight, which is 10% damage increase for 15 seconds, the duration is refreshed to 15 seconds each SS/RvS you do within 4; at that point your insight will change to 20% (moderate insight) and will follow the same structure. When you get 12 abilities in and gain "deep insight" you'll be doing 30% more damage for 15 seconds, however as you SS/RvS your duration will not reset to 15 seconds like it had previously and the amount of SS/RvS you do will not contribute to ending the insight series, nor will it help you gain shallow insight again once finished with your deep duration. In the other insights your % of damage bonus will be longer, but less %, once those 15 seconds are up during your deep insight you'll be reset to 0% again. Once the deep insight is over any SS/RvS will contribute to you going back into shallow insight, but none during the duration of deep insight will effect it, for instance if you have deep insight and do 12 sinister strikes in 15 seconds you'll still be deep and once deep ends you will be at 0 and need 4 more SS/RvS to gain shallow.

One thing to mention is that if you change targets you lose your insight and of course cp (combo points), however if you redirect you do not, so if you need to swap targets less than once per minute it isn't as huge a loss as it would be otherwise. When you switch targets even with redirect though it will not move your poison stack or rupture.

Rupture: This one is kind of up in the air, personally I don't usually roll rupture while I'm combat. I think keeping rupture in my rotation overcomplicates it and is not much of a gain. On a stand still fight (or mostly a stand still) like Baleroc, sure I'd say use Rupture, otherwise it is up to the player to decide if they feel it is easy to maintain in the rotation or not. I would say try it out, if it is difficult or choppy for you, drop it for a while and see how you fare, I've ranked on Stag 10/25 and Ryo 10/25 as combat without using Rupture, iirc it is ~1% dmg loss? Which would be 20-30dps typically.

RvS: Revealing Strike increases the damage of your next finisher by 35%, it is not worth doing unless you are at 4 cp. So if you have SnD up, you SS to 4, RvS, Evi (Eviscerate). If you have SnD up, you SS to 3 then Glyph trigger to 5, Evi, do not RvS. It is fairly simple.

While you're doing your rotation I find that this spec is the easiest to tunnel vision. Tunnel vision if you don't know is ignoring everything but your damage and rotation, often ending up in you dying by missing a mechanic/standing in things. It isn't the most difficult rotation, but I think it takes the most "mashing". You're energy cap is 100 and has the highest rate of return than any other rogue spec, making it easy to cap out if you're not constantly bashing SS/RvS/or Evi, etc. I would suggest trying to make your ability usage fluid and watch your surroundings, don't worry about mashing until you're really good at not dying on certain fights. That could be said for all specs, and a strong tip overall, but it might be my massive Assassination experience talking here making Combat and Sub feel clunkier to me personally.

Rotational tip: If you wait to use KS (Killing Spree) until you have shallow insight it will always refresh on deep/shallow so you get more out of it; instead of using it immediately and then waiting until your 2nd deep to use it. If you wait until your first shallow it'll be refreshed by that 2nd deep still and you get an extra 10% out of it consistently.


Gems: Always use Delicate Inferno Ruby unless you're matching a socket for an agi bonus, in that case use Glinting Demonseye or Deft Ember Topaz. Agi is, as for all rogue specs, your best stat by a large margin.

So for combat you want to open as near to the target as possible (stealth if you can) but you don't get anything out of opening from stealth itself, I just SS. Once you SS (or SS a couple times) get your SnD up and keep pushing SS to 4/5, when hitting 4 use RvS then Evi. If you choose to incorporate Rupture in your rotation it takes priority over an Evi.

Poisons: Poisons are the same as Assassination, except ranged, you wand IP (Instant Poison) MH (Main Hand) and DP (Deadly Poison) OH (Off hand) with WP (Wound Poison) on your ranged for fan.

BiS list links take a while so I'm going to save those until a later post, but they will be coming sooner rather than later.

Hope this post provided some insights into Combat for some, or at least helped on some basics for less experienced rogues. Feel free to post or in game mail me on Lightbringer if you have any questions or comments.

-Ochiru



edit: grammar, and forgot poison.

Back

It has been a while....since I've posted. I was intending on not posting anymore, thinking that the blog was irrelevant for being named incorrectly and having the web address being what it is. Someone smart and close to me informed me that it could be taken how I want, and I can always change the title of it / pictures / names. So I was no longer demoralized about giving it up, even though it is tough to get posts in sometimes since they generally take a good chunk of time and cover a broadish topic. Anyway, thanks Lui <3 you for lots of reasons. Oh and HB!

So, I'm back, ^is me, and I'm now on Lightbringer in the guild Eternal Reign (as a friend), I run with an alt group lead by some friends who have mains in ER. The raid is 1 night per week ~3-4 hours and it is becoming more productive weekly. The best thing about this raid other than it only taking up 1 night of my week is that I enjoy myself in it, which is more than I could say about SW. Nothing against SW, some of them are exceptional players, and some are great people, but it is tough to have fun when the raiding environment is taken so seriously and you can't seem to relax. Now I'm with some good friends, who are highly skilled, and don't make me do pointless things on fights where people can't avoid simple mechanics, ie: Shannox disarm traps the ENTIRE fight, yeah that sounds productive for your 28-32k dps rogue to do, but hey we won every week right? Fun > winning. Winning is nice, and so is recognition, but I do play to enjoy myself and spend time with people I've grown to think of as close friends.

Oh and another important note, if you didn't notice by the huge armory image, IM A GNOME. I love gnomes, always have. I started as a fem NE rogue, then rerolled Human for racials, then they got nerfed and reworked and now...well they're still good but I love gnomes. Bane, I don't care if you don't like gnomes and I don't care if worgens have a "better" parsing racial, I like gnomes, and I'll parse all I want without being worgen kthxla~.

^ 38th on Shannox and 56th on Ryo last week with 373 equipped il and 2pc/2pc.

So I have a combat post outline written up, which means in a day or two or three it'll be up. Those of you who have been wanting combat rotations/priorities etc, rejoice. I also want to say thanks for coming back (those of you who will be regularly viewing again) and I apologize for giving up so suddenly. Making videos kind of sucks, I'll still do it some, but I am not focusing on guide videos at all unless I magically get a ton more free time.

For those curious, and those who want reference, the parsing from Sat night alt 25s and other occasional alt 10 groups are logged to US-Lightbringer under "ER PuG".

-Ochiru


editing: spacing issues(had to use an image to fix it).