zeroinitiate - A World of WarCraft Rogue Blog

I made another rogue yesterday. Part of the reason is because I was bored. The other part is that I wanted to see how it would be like to play one with all BoA/heirloom gear. So I deleted by noob hunter to make room, grabbed all the heirloom gear I needed then made my toon. Note that I already had the chest, shoulders and trinkets courtesy of my other alts so I didn’t need to spend much. It was just about getting the daggers, really. Getting them enchanted proved to be a somewhat of a challenge because the formula required Timbermaw rep but I managed to find someone who did them for me without draining me dry.

My intent was to document his leveling progress but frankly, I’m having too much fun to pause the game do all that so it’s just going to end up as snippets of what I did in this area, then the next, etc., etc. I made several screenshots  to chronicle the experience and all I can say is that it’s been fun so far. The extra hit I’m getting from the gear is making it really easy to kill mobs and I find myself pulling one after the other just to make things interesting. I still can’t pull them en masse because I don’t have an AoE but taking them on in quick succession isn’t bad at all. Although I’m wielding dual daggers I chose to level as Combat until I have enough points to get Mutilate. Actually, I’m thinking about maybe holding off until I can get Precision because the extra hit is always useful. I guess I’ll think about it when I get there.

So, let’s talk addons. The most important thing that comes to mind right now is keeping track of one’s energy and combo points because of how crucial they are to DPS. Now, I don’t know about you, but the default UI isn’t exactly friendly in terms of achieving that. Your energy is below your health bar on the top left corner of the screen. Combo points appear as tiny dots on your target’s bar. You can also enable floating combat text to notify you about them. I personally find it a little difficult to keep track of what’s going on when your eyes are alternating between the middle of the screen (where the fight is) and the top left corner. Here’s what I do to address it.

The way I have it set up is that the left side arcs have my health and energy while the right side arcs contain my target’s information. This is also where dots appear to designate how many combo points I have on the target. It’s as simple as that. What I like about all this is that it centers my vision. I’m only looking at the middle of the screen to keep track of everything. I know when I can hit Mutilate or Sinister Strike, when to hit finishers and how much health I have left. What’s even better is that you don’t lose raid awareness. You can see where the boss is, what he’s doing and what your position is relative to him. Raid warnings are also easy to notice.

I think I have one more addon to write about that’s more or less rogue-related then it gets generic from there. How about you? How do you keep track of your energy and combo points?

I contacted Blizzard support via email and was asked three questions to verify my account. I was unable to answer all of them. One question involved providing my vanilla WoW serial number, something that I no longer thanks to Typhoon Ketsana. The rep told me to email Account Services directly and provide a government-issued ID plus a scanned printout of a document they provided in the link. I submitted what was required two days later. After nearly three days, I got a response that Blizz has removed my authenticator and I was able to login.

It was a long and arduous process. I still can’t get over the fact that the one thing that was protecting my account also prevented me from accessing it. Overall, I was unable to play the game for about a week.

Pardon the short update. Real life is getting in the way again. If you want to hear about the new talent previews, WoW.com has those covered. I was supposed to write a post about gear stagnation but this week’s heroic drops have managed to shut me up. Imagine that?

After playing around with all the talent trees, my DK finally settled on using Unholy as his DPS spec. I finally understood the rotation and, quite frankly, Glyph of Disease is simply a great glyph to have for people like me who have trouble maintaining diseases. I also switched my tanking spec to Blood since that’s going to be the spec of choice come Cataclysm. It’s working well so far.

I recently ran into this random heroic where I was tanking and our healer was a paladin. I died on the second pull, with the healer saying something like “OMG, you died so fast. I actually have to heal you.” Maybe he’s been running random groups with better geared tanks but that comment just pissed me off. Sure, my tanking gear isn’t great by any means but it’s good enough to run heroic 5-mans. There’s also the fact that he signed up as a healer. At the very least, he should be doing his job. He proved himself to be an ass by leaving the group after we pulled the first boss. Note that I’m saying after, meaning we haven’t wiped yet. Considering this was Utgarde Keep, you’d think he’d have the decency to stay and finish at least that. Anyway, end of rant.

TL;DR: Pally douchebag healer ruined heroic UK random run.

And by doing that, I just realized I’m on Reddit too often.

It sucks when everybody’s a Kingslayer and Sin’s not. Sometimes I wonder what I’m lacking that’s preventing me from killing the guy. It would be nice if I could score some heroic gear. Then again, when Ruby Sanctum hits the whole new loot table is going to come into play. I’m already wondering what the drops will be.

I have 3 alts that are above 60: a mage, a pally and a druid. I’ve been thinking about which one I should focus on and finally settled on the druid. The reason behind this is because it’s simply the class closest to being a rogue. I tried running a random with him and ended up really bad on trash pulls simply because I didn’t have an AOE attack. I managed to make up for it on the boss fights though so that’s a good thing. I’m just going to have to see if I can stick it out and actually get a third toon to 80.

That’s it for random musings. Raiding has plateaued for Sin so there really isn’t an update to post in that area. And lately I haven’t been the type to raid with more than one toon. The time constraints is really the killing factor.

Blood Queen Lana’thel is a straightforward fight. You have three debuffs to watch out for, two of which you’ve probably seen before.

The first debuff is called Essence of the Blood Queen, AKA the vampire bite. It usually goes to the second player in her threat table but I’ve seen it go to someone else so don’t quote me on that. The queen will bite someone in the raid and give him or her this debuff. Assuming it goes to you, you will have sixty seconds of pure DPS bliss: damage is increased by 100% and cause no threat for 60 seconds. Of course, it’s still a debuff, so here’s the catch: once that minute is over, you will receive Frenzied Bloodthirst. Your action bar will be replaced by a single button. Find another DPSer, target him or her, then hit the button. This will make you bite that person, dropping Frenzied Bloodthirst and bringing back Essence of the Blood Queen. Your bite target will also have Essence. You and your victims will eventually pass this to the rest of the raid. If you don’t bite someone, you’ll get MCed.

The second debuff is Pact of the Darkfallen. This one draws a red line that connects certain members of the raid, causing damage during its duration. Close the gap to get rid of it. The final debuff is Swarming Shadows. It’s like Jaraxxus’ fire debuff except it’s purple. You can use Cloak of Shadows to remove it even before it drops a trail. Otherwise, you’ll leave a trail of fire while it’s on you so run but try to keep your movement as tight as possible so you don’t end up making a mess in the room.

At some point during the fight she’ll go up in the air. You’ll get feared while she AOEs the raid. There’s little that you can do at this point except to hit Cloak of Shadows and hope you time it right. Once she lands, it’s back to her old cycle, minus the bite.

The gimmick of the fight, DPS-wise anyway, is managing the bite. If it doesn’t go to DPS, or to DPS ASAP, she’ll still be alive by the time everyone gets bitten.

Welcome to the Blood Prince fight. From left to right, we have Prince Keleseth, Valanar and Taldaram. The gimmick of the fight is that only one of them can be DPSed at any given time. When your raid pulls the bosses, the first target will always be Valanar.

Valanar will have Invocation of Blood. What this does is that it marks who is supposed to be the killable target. It also causes one ability to be Empowered. When you start the fight simply DPS the boss. DBM will call out Empowered Shock Vortex when Valanar starts casting it. This is your cue to turn around and run away from him and anyone close to you. It deals damage but also causes a knockback if anyone is nearby. On 10-man this isn’t much of a problem but on 25 it can be. Just stay away from fellow raid members as much as you can during this time. Once the ability is finished run back and continue to DPS.

Invocation will eventually jump to a different Blood Prince so be ready for it. If it goes to Taldaram, here’s what you should do: just DPS. The only thing that’s special about Taldaram is that he casts a huge fireball on a random ranged target. The fireballs takes a little time to form above him before it actually moves, so whoever it’s on has time to get some distance. The farther the fireball goes, the less damage it deals. Normally you wouldn’t have to worry about this since it always targets ranged, but there’s a slight chance it will if there’s some distance between you and the prince (for example, during the transition phase of going from one prince to the next), so just watch out for it. Otherwise, DPS away.

Prince Keleseth is also a tank-and-spank. There are two things that you should never do if he’s the active target: don’t hit the purple orbs. At all. Second, watch your threat. Whoever is tanking him will be busy gathering the said orbs and will rarely be hitting the boss. This means you can out-threat him easily. Throw out a Tricks on that tank to help him out.

There’s one more thing to watch out for throughout the fight: the normal, non-Empowered Shock Vortex. This appears as a swirling sphere of white light that phases in and out while it’s animating, making it difficult to see. When DBM calls out that there’s one near you, you have a few seconds to move out of where you are before it appears. If you happen to be near it, it will knock you back. If you find yourself knocked back for no apparent reason, don’t just run back to your former spot. There’s a good chance that a Shock Vortex spawned there. Recognize it, avoid it.

TL;DR: Watch out for normal and Empowered Shock Vortex. Only one prince can be DPSed at any given time. Don’t touch the purple orbs. Run away from huge fireballs heading your way.

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.

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.

Read more… »

I tend to think of this fight as ICC’s version of the Chess Event in Kara because of how easy it is. Your goal is to bring the enemy ship down using the cannons mounted on the side. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first thing you want to do is to talk to the goblin near the boss on your ship and grab a jetpack. Equip it then map it to a key in your action bar. Try it out and get an estimate of its range. Your raid leader may or may not assign you to a gun. Since you’re melee, there’s a good chance he or she will so here’s how to use it:

• Spam the first button until you get to 80-90%.
• Hit the second button. Repeat step one.

If you’re confident about your latency, I recommend waiting until you’re at 90% before hitting the second button. Shooting it as early as 80% is just a safe number for those who have relatively high lat. Since you’re basically spamming the first button it’s possible to lag a bit and then find that you reached 100%, rendering the cannon useless for a few seconds.

If you’re not assigned to cannon duties then help out with the adds that will spawn on your ship. These will spawn in the center and will be tanked by your OT. They spawn one at a time, so watch your threat. Don’t find yourself in a situation where you pick up an add that your tank hasn’t even touched yet.

The last thing to worry about on your ship is that the enemy ship will fire rockets at you. There will be a mark on the floor that will symbolize where they’ll land so watch out for it. They look like small arcane circles.

At some point during the fight your cannons will freeze. This means that a sorcerer (I know it’s a mage, but Bronzebeard keeps calling it a sorcerer for some reason) has appeared on the enemy ship. Use your jetpack to jump over and kill the mage. She’s in the center, stuck in a channeling pose. She does not need to be tanked so feel free to go all out on her. Note that Bronzebeard is the true threat here and your tank has to pick him up as soon as he lands. It’s a good idea to watch your tank and wait for him to jump over before you do so yourself. This way, you’re sure that someone’s going to pick the boss up while you make your way to the mage.

Once the mage is down, jump back to your ship and resume add-killing or cannon-shooting duties, whichever case applies. Repeat this process until the enemy gunship is down.

Obligatory TL;DR version:

• If you’re on cannon duties, spam 1 until you’re at 80-90% then hit 2. Repeat.
• If you’re on adds, DPS as you see fit. Watch your threat. Look out for rocket marks on the floor.
• Jump to the other side of the ship when the cannons freeze and kill the no-need-to-be-tanked enemy mage. Make sure your tank jumps first so he can pick up the boss. When the mage is down, jump back and resume whichever role you were doing.

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Okay, there it is. The DPS you see above is post-nerf. ICC 25, Saurfang plus a few pulls on Festergut. See anything different from the last time?

On 25, it’s not too much of a difference given that you get all the right buffs. The nerf becomes more evident on 5 and 10-mans. We did a quick TotC 10 afterwards just to get Jaraxxus down for the weekly raid and a hunter managed to outDPS me cleanly. I think the new change warrants more testing just to see how much of a decrease it really did to us. Or maybe the number’s already out there. I’m going to need to review.