zeroinitiate - A World of WarCraft Rogue Blog

I should be raiding, but I have no power at home due to a nearby blown transformer. Some birthday week this is turning out to be. Anyway, moving on.

You’ve all heard about the Cataclysm raiding changes by now. The most glaring one is the loot and lockout integration of the 10- and 25-man content. This means that the 10-man version of Cataclysm raids will drop the same items from the 25-man. And once you commit yourself to the 10-man, you can’t do it again on the 25 due to the shared lockout. Blizz says that the 25-man version will simply drop more loot.

This begs the question: what is the incentive for 25-man raiding? I can think of two things: better loot and “easier” fights. The first one is self-explanatory so we’ll skip that. What I mean with fights being easier is that there’s more room for error. If you lose one or two DPS during a Festergut-25 fight, it doesn’t automatically mean a wipe. If the same thing happens with the 10-man version then you can say hello to a higher repair bill.

The upcoming changes just removed the first incentive. The loot is going to be the same, which leaves us with the second. I don’t think potentially easier fights are strong enough reasons to still do the 25. It then takes us to the incentive that Blizz presented. They say that more loot will drop in the 25, so the next question is how much more is “more”? ICC 25 bosses currently drop 3-4 items. Given the current itemization scheme, you’re not really fighting against 24 people for them. If you’re a tank, your chances of getting a drop are 50%, because your only rolling against the other tank. If you’re a healer, it’s you versus 4-5 other players. The chances to win are lower if you’re DPS since there’s more of us in the group, but that also varies per class. If you’re cloth, well, I tend to laugh in your general direction when it comes to winning rolls. Trying to win against 5-6 people? Seriously, good luck with that.

Now, compare those numbers with the 10-man. There are 2 drops per boss. For tanks, it’s still 50% since you’re only rolling against the other tank. For healers, it’s you against two other people, maybe. For DPS, the chances are definitely a lot better. The point here is obvious, and has blatantly been from the moment the changes were announced: given the way things are right now, no one is going to run the 25-man raids when Cataclysm hits. With that said, what’s your guild going to do?

My guild decided to do an alt ICC 10 run today so I brought my undergeared DK. I seem to recall posting recently about trying to improve his gear and there I was in ICC. I knew I had no right to be there. I knew I was going to embarass myself.

I don’t think I need to write about what happened in there. Needless to say, I got carried and I don’t like it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that my guildmates brought me along knowing that I would contribute nearly nothing to the run, but it’s still uncomfortable to be a freeloader. What happened today just solidified my thoughts on gearing him up. It’s either that or I delete him altogether.

On a side note, it’s my birthday today. I’m still considering if I should get the Celestial Steed as a present for myself. I’m also wondering if I should get an actual gaming mouse to match my keyboard (it’s a Logitech g15). Or a new hard drive! I’m always running out of space. Or maybe I should just sit back and try to solve my Vent problem instead. It won’t detect my microphone. The mic is functional in Windows but not in Vent. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. At least I have a working Internet connection now.

“Sayang” is a Tagalog word (that’s my native language, by the way) that expresses dismay, usually over something that is a waste or was wasted. When you find yourself saying “too bad” or “what a waste”, whatever situation you used it for would be within the appropriate context of the word. Boherrac and I were chatting in-game and he asked how my DK was, to which I answered that he was stagnating and that I was too lazy to do anything with him. He dropped the word then: “sayang”.

It was enough to send me thinking.

It was sort of a wake up call. Nothing groundbreaking, mind you, but it did make me want to gear my DK again, which I did earlier by giving him a couple of gems. Well, it was more than a couple, but I realized yesterday that I haven’t even bothered to put a meta on him for his DPS set. Seriously, WTF. I also switched to Blood DPS for the heck of it. I’m already dual-wielding with Sin so I figured that using a two-handed weapon would be a good change. It’s too early to tell if I’ll actually stick to it.

…and broke my Internet connection. Fortunately, I have a laptop that can use to share its Internet with my computer so that’s a workaround for now. Obviously, it would be preferable if I could find a way to make my PC be the one doing the sharing—which is how it was set up before, by the way—but we’ll just have to wait and see how that will turn out later on. For now, I’m still in the process of rebuilding my installations. Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age are both out of commission. WoW is fully functional, thanks to it being able to run simply by existing in my hard drive.

Update: I wrote the top part of this post at 1:58 PM today. It is now 5:25 PM. The Internet problem has been resolved thanks to a call to my ISP. I then found out that I also lost my wireless connection, which I solved around 30 minutes later. Mass Effect 2 is currently installing. Dragon Age will be next. After that, I’m as good as new. To be honest, I was not looking forward to spending the weekend fixing my computer problems but for a while back there I thought that it was the reality that I was going to face. Disaster averted. I’m not looking forward to Microsoft’s next OS release.

Speaking of that, I wonder where I put my Office 2007 installer…

Note that this was written with new rogues in mind. I recently ran a fail group on my DK and it was tough to see a fellow rogue just suck at DPS. I was tanking Anub’Arak in AN and things were going well until he burrowed and the adds came. Recount told me that I was number two in DPS, behind the mage but above the rogue. You know that a group is fail when the tank is doing more damage than the rest of the group.

So, here’s a little something to raise your DPS in heroic 5-mans:

• Go Combat. Equip your best weapons, then spec into it.
• Set the tank as your focus target (click on the tank, type “/focus”).
• Make this macro and map it to a button:
• /cast [target=focus] Tricks of the Trade
• Doing the above will cast TotT on the tank.
• Everytime your tank pulls, hit the macro, then spam Fan of Knives.
• Profit!
• For big pulls, cast Blade Flurry, TotT, FoK. Whenever BF is up, remember to stand close to two adds or more since you’re cleaving.
• For big, prolonged pulls, cast Adrenaline Rush, Blade Flurry, TotT, FoK.
• More profit!

It’s an oversimplification and sort of a repeat post, but hopefully it should get things started on the road to better DPS. Seriously. What I just saw was painful to watch.

And now, for the nitpicking.

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

This is a nice, welcome change. We won’t be wasting time building up combo points on fights that have a lot of target-switching, which then mean that we can do finishers more often. Too bad there’s no mention of transferring Deadly Poison stacks though. It wouldn’t make sense but it would be convenient.

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Blizz has announced the upcoming changes to our class. Here are the details. My comments are going to be in a separate post.

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. Here, you’ll get a glimpse at what’s in store for the rogue class, including a look the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with the rogue’s different talent specs.

New Rogue Abilities
Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

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When it comes to holiday events the first thing I do is to check how long it’ll last, just to gauge how much time I have. Noblegarden gives us a week to do the achievements. I panicked, with as much panic as one can give to a video game (read: not much, but I did mutter “oh shit”). Holiday achievements are time-consuming, which is why I do them on weekends. Given the time limit, I estimated that I had three days to do them all.

Day 1

So I started collecting eggs, first in Razor Hill. The competition was somewhat fierce. It was mildly irritating to lose on what is essentially a click-fest but I dealt with it anyway. Considering all the egg-chasing I thought it would be better to do it in an area that no one visits: Silvermoon. Falconwing Square, to be exact.

Sin’s a Blood Elf, so I consider it shameful that I had to think about where Falconwing Square was. It’s supposed to be her hometown. When I finally figured it out (I refused to Google/WoWHead/WoWWiki it out of pride/masochism), I wasn’t surprised to find other people there. Still, the area was small enough to make hunting for eggs easier.

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Disgaea 2 is the sort of game that can be played in two ways: you can play it as it is, straightforward and true, or you can milk it for what it’s worth, min-maxing every stat until you’ve number-crunched your way to victory. You can probably guess which path I chose right from the start.

This is turning out to be a double-edged sword. The purpose of number-crunching is to get to the point wherein my party can pound enemies into submission. It means being able to fight level 50 foes using a character that’s at level 150 (more or less). That number is not an exaggeration. It’s actually pretty tame compared to the insane amount of damage that you can do in the game.

The double-edged sword part comes in the details. Disgaea 2 feels so different from the original that I’m really at a loss with some of its new features. How do Bailiffs and Felonies work? How can Specialists marry? I restarted the game because I want to unlock Magichange in Axel mode. It’s beginning to feel like a big mistake at this point because of the way my enemies are scaling. Any insight on this?

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