WotLK Rogue Developer Q & A

Just a brief foreword. I know I normally put all of my commentary at the top, but I think I’m going to try a new point to point analysis breakdown. Blizzard text, like always, will be in blue, and my commentary and analysis points will be in green.

Like what you plan to do with sub?
We recently made some changes to boost it, such as moving Dual-Wield Spec to tier 1 combat.

Sub is a very interesting spec right now. It still feels quite a bit weaker than combat or mutilate, but it’s got a lot of potential I think, especially if used in the correct environement. I’m very interested to see how the build preforms at 80 with all the new abilities and a full 71 talent points.

Why is hemo so bad?
It has a great debuff that boosts raid damage. It’s not intended to be Sinister Strike.

Hemo is not bad, this is a common misconception many rogue players have. With a 51 point sub build you’re looking at a 30 energy move vs. sinister strike which is a 40 energy move. The damage to energy ratio is appropriate, especially considering the debuff.

Why is Shadow Dance dagger only?
We agree with the above comment that it can do a lot of different things. You may just be focusing too much on it as a +dps cooldown.

I agree 100% with the blue poster here, this is another common misconception of shadow dance. Players focus so much on the spam ambush aspect of it they forget how powerful an extra garrote or premed cheap shot can be during a fight. I’ve been playing the build (with swords) since 3.0.2 went live and I’m loving this talent for this aspect. I’ll have a more complete write up on the build later this week.

Whether you feel rogue mobility is fine?
Rogues have a lot going for them in the way of stuns, damage avoidance and “get out of jail” cards. When you get up on other classes, they do have a tendency to die. We’re not sure we want rogues to also be zipping around the battlefield like warriors.

Yes…(sarcastic), we shouldn’t be “zipping around the battlefield like warriors.” 15 second intercept is broken beyond all belief, particularly for arena. Any scrub can successfully play a warrior with mobility like that. I’d trade mobility for lockdown any day.

What is happening with Lightning Reflexes?
We mentioned this as a possible change (or perhaps we even promised it — I don’t recall) but it didn’t materialize because we found other knobs to turn in combat that felt better during playtesting. Because LR is a passive talent, the side benefits would also end up being passive.

Nothing to say here, who cares about LR, I haven’t picked up this talent in years.

What is the deal with the Glyph of Sprint?
If I understand the qustion, I think it’s just a tooltip bug. The glyph was made before the base cooldown of Sprint was lowered from 5 minutes to 3 minutes (2 min talented). If that’s not the issue, can you elaborate a little more?

The dev is wrong, the glyph is bugged, but it’s an irrelevant question as they are changing the glyph of sprint anyway to increase speed at which you sprint and reduce the duration, effectively making it worthless.

Why is there a major glyph of feint?
Basically, rogues have relatively few abilities, and we were desperate for something that wouldn’t have serious PvP balance ramifications. I agree this might be a good candidate for a minor glyph. Remember that we are going to be adding a lot more glyphs over time. You shouldn’t view this as one of your very few useful glyphs is less useful, because you’ll eventually have a lot of choices.

Yet again, another pointless glyph.

Why is Fan of Knives so weak with daggers, and even weak with swords?
It’s designed to give you a button to hit when you want to AE. It’s not supposed to turn you into an AE class, if that makes sense.

See my notes here on fan of knives changes.

Are you happy with Hunger For Blood being horrible for PvP, and like the old Rampage for PvE?
No, not completely. We understand that CC + a short duration limit how often you can benefit from it. Obviously, we think removing MS and Hamstring was a little too good, just because those are generally hard debuffs to get out of.

Nothing really to say here yet, I haven’t personally played the build on live. I’ve heard these complaints before and they appear to be justified, but I’d like to get some experience with the build before I start talking about it’s flaws or successes.

How exactly are expose, mind numbing and wound major raid utility, when they so obviously are not?
Couple of things here, and forgive me for being a little brief.

First, I am reading between the lines a little here that it would be really nice to have a unique buff or debuff. Everyone asks for that, but it defeats the whole point.

Second, Expose is one of the strongest debuffs in the game. The dps increase can be 30% or more. So I suspect what you’re really getting at is that “we’ll always have a warrior with us doing that debuff.” The whole point of the revamp is we can’t assume you have anyone but we still want you to be able to get the buff. Mind Numbing is a cast speed debuff that is only offered by one other class (that doesn’t even exist in the game at the moment). Granted, it doesn’t offer the benefit of Expose. Wounding Poison offers the strongest debuff in the game for PvP, and also offers some dps to not over-penalize rogues who are balanced around poison damage.

Third, ultimately we still want raids to want rogues because they bring good dps. We just don’t want it to feel that only the rogues (hunters, mages and locks) are doing the group’s dps.

This massive block of text sounds more like a complete cop out for…”just kidding, we aren’t giving rogues real raid utility, see you in the next expansion!”.

Will there be a mutilate/HFB/cold blood/Assassination oriented glyph made before release?
Probably. We do want to add more glyphs over time, just like new gems started to show up in BC.

Rhetorical, why do players waste the dev’s times with questions like these? Side note: is it ironic that I would respond rhetorically to a rhetorical statement?

Overkill - why is it the pre-req to mutilate?
It’s always a hard call to decide what prereqs to what. We do like talent prereqs, and it seems like a good talent regardless. Are you wanting to skip it?

Quite ironic that mutilate rogues would be crying. Assassination is decked top to bottom with kick ass talents, most which would be 5/5 stars…so the 4/5 star talents just seem like filler now.

2. It has been stated that there is a plan to still have some poison immune mob/bosses in WotLK, what can a mutilate rogue do during these situations. Mages were helped with frostfire to combat the fire immune/frost immune mobs, but the poison requirement on mutilate still exist and when dealing with poison immune mobs, we’re(for the lack of a better term) seriously screwed in our dps. I still don’t understand why our signature move(for assassination) still has this requirement when it still cost 60 energy.
Poisons are what the rogues are balanced around, so we need to be pretty careful about that now. I can’t promise there won’t be any poison immune bosses — resistance and immunity are things we can change on a boss to make the fight play out pretty differently from the previous boss. But there won’t be a lot of them.

This is a valid issue, but one which I think blizzard understands and is fully capable of balancing encounters and talent specs around. I don’t expect mutilate rogues will have many issues dealing with poison immune encounters.

WotLK Warrior Changes - Build 9038

All in all very minor changes, not unlike the other class changes for beta build 9038. I like the change to sudden death, which should certainly help to further solidify the talent as a key choice for arms warriors. The rage kick back will really improve its utility in arena, as dropping to zero rage without an assured killed is rarely a worthwhile.

More than anything I’m very excited to see the final result of all these protection buffs, specifically from a PvP view. The increase in taunt rage from 5 to 20 yards should really make for some interesting arena and world PvP situations. I haven’t heard any major feedback regarding protecting PvP specs, but theoretically it looks like it may be a viable solution for more defensively oriented warriors.

Warrior

Arms

• Strength of Arms - Increases your total Strength and Stamina by 2/4% and your Expertise by 2/4.
• Sudden Death - In addition, you keep 3/7/10 rage after using Execute, was added to the description.

Fury

• Unending Fury - Increases the damage done by your Slam, Whirlwind and Bloodthirst abilities by 2/4/6/8/10%. Changed from reducing rage cost.
• Execute - All ranks had a slight damage increase. Max rank: Attempt to finish off a wounded foe, causing [1456.0 + AP * 0.2] damage. Up from [1266.0 + AP * 0.2].

Protection

• Taunt - Now has a 20 yard range. Up from 5.

Major Warrior Buff - Berserker Rage Changes

Warriors around the world are going to be drooling when they see this…

Ghost is out for the rest of the evening so I thought I would make a quick post regarding a new warrior change. Berserker Rage will now be usable in all stances.(source)

While this change isn’t “major”, it’s still pretty big in my book. This will definitely help to further solidify the potential PvP protection spec, as well as offer tanking warriors extra rage throughout a fight.

Most PvP and DPS warriors are going to be in berserker stance anyway, basically meaning nothing…but for those few times when you’re in battle or defensive stance and need the extra rage in addition to the fear / sap immunity from this buff should be a dramatic improvement.

WotLK Tanking Change - Major AoE Buffs

There’s been a lot of discussion recently regarding tanking, specifically how each tank in the WotLK will be able to effectively handle AoE pulls. Druids in particular are probably the worst off in this respect, but a major change to druid’s swipe ability should help quell some of these concerns.

Swipe Limit Removed - Ghostcrawler

We are going to remove the target limit on Swipe.

Swipe should not be limited by targets. This goes for Thunderclap too.

Any LK encounter really. We know the BC encounters were not designed to be tanked by any tank.

Wrath of the Lich King Warrior Changes

It was only a matter of time before warriors finally started to get their turn along the buff table. Blizzard poster Gamnin made a massive post regarding some of these changes that are expected to be introduced in the next beta build.

Overall most of these changes are very reasonable. The very nature of the warrior class always seems to lead down the same road though…without gear it’s pretty miserable, but with proper weapons, itemization, and ideally a good healer the class becomes one of the highest pvp damage dealers in the game.

Finding a way to balance this is no easy task, but I’m hopeful Blizzard will find a happy medium. My only major concern with the class at this point is titan grip. While this talent makes fury a great substitute to traditional mortal strike builds I think it’d be difficult to find the gray area where it could be good enough to convince some warriors to change from arms without making it insanely overpowered.

But this point has been the underlying problem with WoW talent builds from the beginning. There is always going to be “the” spec you have to be if you want to participate in X, be it PvP, Raiding, etc. This type of min / max theorcrafting has certainly helped players achieve their goals much quicker, but it’s very sad to see so many talents, skills, play styles and hybrid builds go unused for the greater part of WoW existence.

Hello Warriors,

I’ve got a sneak preview of things coming up in the beta for you to discuss. We still have lots of polish and bug fixing to do and we’re still wrestling with a few elements of the warrior abilities and talents so do not consider this an exhaustive list. As always, post any concerns or suggestions you have.

General

• Enraged Assault redesigned, now Enraged Regeneration: You regenerate 30% of your total health over 10 sec. This ability consumes all Enrage effects and prevents any from affecting you for the full duration. Must be enraged to use. Cost 15 rage, 3 min cooldown.
• Slam – We’re working to change this ability to suspend the swing timer when you are using the ability. In other words, if you’re .5 sec away from swinging your weapon when you start using Slam you’ll be .5 sec from swinging your weapon after Slam goes off.

Arms

• Improved Charge now generates 5/10 rage.
• Mace Specialization now ignores 3/6/9/12/15% of target’s armor.
• Sudden Death and Trauma swapped locations.
• Bladestorm now lasts 6 seconds, causing a whirlwind every second.

Protection

• Toughness now also reduces duration of movement slowing effects by 10/20/30/40/50%.
• Improved Sunder Armor renamed Puncture, reduced to 2 ranks for 1/2 rage cost reduction.
• Improved Disarm reduced to 2 ranks, now reduces the cooldown of Disarm by 10/20 sec and increases damage taken by disarmed targets by 5/10%.
• Improved Defensive Stance reduced to 2 ranks, now reduces spell damage taken by 3/6% and any block/parry/dodge has a 50/100% chance to enrage the warrior causing 5/10% more damage for 12 sec.
• Vigilance will soon transfer the 10% threat lost to the warrior. It will also have 3 charges to curb using it on targets that are being hit constantly. We’re still polishing this element to get it to feel right.
• (NEW) Warbringer is a new one point talent on Tier 9 that allows Charge to be used in combat. Did I mention the change to Improved Charge?
• Critical Block now also increases your chance to critically hit with your Shield Slam by 5/10/15%.
• Sword and Board no longer triggers when Shield Slam is used, but the chance to trigger has increased to 3/6/9/12/15%. Note these are not final numbers.

Fury

• Intensify Rage and Precision swapped locations.
• Enrage now increases damage done by 3/6/9/12/15%, limitation on number of attacks removed.
• Improved Whirlwind now increases damage of Whirlwind by 10/20%, no longer reduces cooldown.
• Focused Attacks changed to use PPM (procs per minute) to make it trigger at the same rate regardless of weapon speed. Note that dual-wielding and haste still improve your chances.
• Titan’s Grip still needs a counterbalancing element, but what it will entail and how severe it will be is still being evaluated.

Thanks for reading!
To answer a few questions:

- Yes, I meant Furious Attacks, not Focused Attacks.
- Some notes are already in the beta, some are not updated yet on the calculator so wanted to give additional visibility to anyone else reading the forums.
- Warbringer: What we don’t want to see is Charge becoming part of a tanking rotation. At the moment it will remain usable only in Battle Stance. An experimental idea to be sure.
- Stance Dancing: The short answer here is we want just the right amount of it. :)
- Final numbers are not in yet for the various talent trees. We want all trees to be viable in PvP and PvE so expect further number tuning across all classes/specs.
- The important upcoming change to Vigilance is the threat transfer. 10% of the target’s generated threat will go to your threat total.
- Bladestorm consuming rage every second is a bug that’s been fixed.

Rogue / Rogue Vs. Warrior / Paladin 2v2 Arena Strategy

Rogue / Rogue vs. warrior / paladin 2v2 is going to give you a headache, and has a very heavy advantage over you, even if you play 100 percent perfectly you still might get a loss, don’t let this cookie-cutter get you down. There’s two strats you can apply do whichever you feel most comfortable with.

Strategy Number 1

Rogue #1(the one with improved EA)

Bust out on the paladin with your first set of cooldowns, you can do a Cs==>Ks combo, or SnD. Honestly with the huge amount of armor a paladin has, SnD would simply be the better use of points here. Pop Evasion + GS(if the warrior is locking you down) and interrupt as many heals as possible. Hit the warrior with a blind. Once the pally pops bubble run away and reset the fight via vanish(try your best to LoS the warrior during bleed effects so he can’t charge and screw you over. Also keep in mind warriors have a 8 yd. dead zone so stay within that you can evade the intercept) Bandage if you have to, and when you can. Once bubble fades down the paladin.

Rogue #2

Get on the paladin aswell, hit the warrior with a quick sap first. Your choice of opener doesn’t matter as much in this phase of the fight. Pop GS + Evasion(If the warrior focuses on you) and cycle through interrupts with your partner, once the paladin bubble pops get ready to reset the fight. Heal up a bit if you have to, and go in with a garrote opener on the paladin snuff ‘em. Hit the warrior with your blind, during the paly blow-up phase(your partner forced his trinket with his frst blind earlier on in the match).

Strategy Number 2

Rogue #1

Get on the paladin, and manage energy for interrupts. Keep up SnD as it will help damage pressure. Evasion +GS if the warrior gets to you. Once the pally bubbles reset the fight and down him once his bubble is up. Be ready to CC the warrior when going for the kill

Rogue #2

Lockdown the warrior with CS going into KS. Keep him off your partner in anyway you can. Be ready to use Evasion + GS yourself as the warrior might get aggravated and attempt to down you. If the warrior pops his trinket on anything hit him with a blind, and help your partner force the pally bubble. Once the pally’s bubble is up snuff ‘em. Again be ready for a CC train on the warrior when you’re going for a kill on the pally.

Looking for more rogue / rogue action? Check out Scyth’s the full strategy guide, rogue / rogue 2v2 arena strategy!

Wrath of the Lich King Class Information

Over the weekend at the World Wide Invitationals Blizzard sat down for a bit of Q and A with the fans that went out to see the event. As a result, additional information was added to the growing archive of Wrath of the Lich King archive and even more was verified.

Death Knight

• People playing a Death Knights will see the original voice of their race slightly modified to make it sound more … Death Knight-ish.
• Tanks will be interchangeable in 5-man dungeons but tanks will have a speciality in 25-man raids. Death Knights will be best against casters and shouldn’t be too far behind on other encounters.

Rogue

• Dagger specialization will be improved for rogues in Wrath of the Lich King.
• Rogues will get a talent called “Fan of Knives”, an AoE ability allowing them to attack all enemies within a short range. It will be some kind of “emergency” ability and you won’t be able to spam it.
• Sap will now work on more targets, humanoids, beasts, dragonkins, demons. “Anything with a skull and a brain inside of it”.

Warlock

• There isn’t any plan to change the soul shard farming as it’s part of the class, but an “emergency soul shard” ability might be added.
• Demonic Circle will allow warlocks to scribe a circle in the ground to teleport to it later with another spell.
• The 51-Point demonogy talent is a Demon-Form, this will allow you cast AOE Shadowbolts

Druid

• There will be a new model for the Druid’s Dire Bear form and the Dire Cat form will be introduced.
• Nourish will be a new healing spell, healing for more hit points for each HoT effect on the target.
• There isn’t any plan to change cyclone

Paladin

• Retribution paladins will share their itemization with Death Knights and Warriors. Their group utility will be increased by making them more efficient DPS-wise.
• Retribution paladins itemization will be moved to the same item as Warriors/Death Knights
• A new reactive healing spell will be added - Hand of Purity.
• Paladin’s short-term-blessings no longer overwrite long-term-blessings.

Warrior

• The plan is to improve the warrior specs to make sure that DPS warriors would be able to tank a little, while protection warriors would be able to DPS slightly more with new abilities like Shockwave.
• Titan’s Grip is a new Fury talent and allows warriors to wear 2 hand weapons with a single hand.
• Protection Warriors are getting a spell called “Shockwave” allowing them to damage and stun all the monsters in front of them.
• Bladestorm will be a new Arms talent whirlwinding all enemies in range every x seconds for a few seconds.

Raids & Dungeons

• Sunwell Plateau is the last content patch before the expansion release.
• There isn’t any plan to nerf Kil’jaeden right now, he’s intended to be the last boss before the expansion and is meant to be hard.
• Raiding armor sets and PvP rewards sets will look different and won’t share the same model anymore in Wrath of the Lich King.
• Uldum was on the original list of dungeons to be added to Wrath of the Lich King but right now it’s still unsure if we’ll see it or not.

PvP

• Raiding armor sets and PvP rewards sets will look different and won’t share the same model anymore in Wrath of the Lich King.

Professions

• Inscription trading skill is intended to be for both casters and melees, inscriptions benefits every class. The current plan is to use herbalism as the primary gathering profession.

Source: Blizzard Staff at Worldwide Invitationals Class and and Q & A Panels.

Locking Down Warrior as Rogue

This post is in response to a question I received from a fellow rogue. It’s been posted here in the hope that it’s contents may be of assistance to other players who have similar questions.

Arena Strategy Questions…
Hey Zug, I’ve asked you questions here and there in the past, and there’s a few more that I’d like you to answer. My priest and I hit our highest rating of 2091 about two weeks ago, and since then have struggled a bit.

The warrior/healer teams that we seemed to have no trouble with have been really giving us a hard time. I find that in nearly all cases the warrior is sticking onto my priest, and I have a hard time keeping him locked down. They can break out of gouge, and I’m wondering if I should use my blind on the warr. (I feel like I should)

Another team, although rare, which we seemed to have no hope of beating, was the hunter/priest teams. Getting on the priest is out of the question, as doing that caused my priest to go OOM within a minute. We try to kill the pet, but when we can’t keep pressure on the hunter, my priest gets drained hard.

Is 41/20 the best priest spec?

Arena Strategy Answer…

As far as your first question is concerned, I find that it really is more of a 2 part solution. Generally speaking you are going to be sticking to the warrior the entire time, making it as difficult as possible to get both position and line of sight on your priest.

However, your priest needs to be very aware of both your position and the warrior’s position. He needs to constantly reposition himself in order to allow you to do your job easier.

If the warrior is just relentless to get to the priest then this really opens you up to drop bombs on the warrior. Position yourself on his back and just lay into. Beyond that, just use everything within your power…including blind if necessary to prevent that warrior from getting on your priest.

Then again, even if he does get on your priest you’ve got reflective shield going for you, further increasing the damage output.

As far as hunter / priest goes…well, it’s just a rough match man. It’s so far one sided in their favor that even winning 1 out of every 10 of these matches is a good ratio. Our typical strategy just revolves around a gig strategy on the hunter with a lot of very early CC on the druid.

It’s very fast paced and risky, but it’s still the best strategy we’ve come up with at this point.