Sealfate builds in PvE

Whenever I see a thread about the efficiency of Sealfate rogues in raid PvE it's a big argument. Some claim they are number one damage dealer with it, others say its a pure PvP build and that there's no way it could reach the efficency of a Combat-Dagger or Combat-Sword builds.

How can people have such different opinions about the viability of Sealfate specs in PvE?
Who is right? Is it okay to use it in PvE or are you gimping your raid?

Combat dagger builds have a lot higher dps with standard attacks and a higher crit rate whereas Sealfate builds generate more combopoints and have Coldblood. The builds different strengths mean that there are situations that benefit a Sealfate build, and others that benefit a combat dagger build.
Combat-dagger is better in low hp trash clearing as well as long static boss fights like Ebonroc.
Those situations however where you have a couple of seconds fighting and then a forced break are perfect for sealfate rogues, especially if you don't lose your cp.
In the breaks you will regenerate energy but you won't do melee damage. So the balance of how your finishers, backstabs and melee dps contribute to your total dps will shift. Melee dps will be less important and so the gap between SF and combat-dagger melee dps will shrink. It might become so small that a SF builds benefits over a combat-dagger build (for example more cp, a broader choice of finishers and coldblood) might not only close it but push the SF builds dps over the combat builds dps. The trash packs between Twin Emps and C'Thun or Chromagus are great examples for that kind of fights.

So when ppl are argueing over what build is more effective in PvE they might just think of the builds in different situations. But another important reason is that some players just don't know how to take advantage of the Sealfates faster combopoint generation and broader range of finishers.

The golden rule of playing a combat build is this: Have S&D up as much as possible. You will spend all your cp's in Slice&Dice. When it has run out trigger a new one and voila you're playing the build to it's fullest.
But if you change your build to Sealfate and continue to play like that you are wasting dps. Lots of it. For Sealfate rogues S&D is not the only viable finisher anymore to buff your dps.

Let's say your white damage does (without S&D) 150dps. An average 5pt Evi does (for me) about 1200 dmg. A 5pt Slice&Dice with 3 points in Imp S&D will hold 30 seconds.
To make a 5pt S&D as effective as a 5pt Eviscerate you need to use 27 seconds of it.
Even if you consider an Eviscerates higher energy cost (10 energy are 1/6 backstab or about 180 damage) you have to use at least 23seconds of your Slice&Dice to make it superior to Eviscerates.
There are a LOT of fights where you can't guarantee that so S&D is not the best option.

Some guidelines:

• For a Seal-Fate rogue it's often better to be half the fight without S&D but get a couple of extra Eviscerates off than to go for full S&D at all costs. When you can't guarantee that you will be able to melee most of the time of a S&D don't use it.
• In non static fights S&D is best used with about 3cp(*), Eviscerates however should always be 4-5cp so the damage per energy is worth it.
• Don't waste the cooldown on your Coldblood if it's ready. Go for an Eviscerate at all costs!
• When you fear you won't get to do another finisher on the current mob stop backstabbing. Let your energy regen and switch targets when you are almost full energy and ideally before the old target is dead. So even if the kill speed of your raid is high you have full energy now and some extra seconds before the raid dps focuses on your new target. That should buy you enough time to gather enough cp for finishers.
  
• In static fights where S&D is well worth it a SF build generates more cp then you need to maintain it. So do a 4-5pt S&D and spend the next 4-5cp for a different finisher. If that results in little gaps in your S&D uptime it's acceptable.
  
• Why do i write 4-5 all the time? If you have 4 cp on a target spend it and don't backstab again. You just risk to waste a cp if you do it and that's never worth it.

Learning when to trigger which finisher is the big challenge of a Sealfate build. Master it and you won't be far behind your combat-specced guildies.

Last but not least i feel it's important to remember that dps is not all that is important. Having a fast cp generation can also help the raid in other ways. Take C'Thun as example: In phase 1 where rogues are the only class meleeing him I'm usually keeping Xpose armor up in addition to S&D wich is a big dps plus even if it won't show on dmg meters. In phase 2 I can kidney eye tentacles a couple of seconds faster than any other rogue. Both will help the raid a lot.

*) I said S&D should be used at about 3cp. Why not 5cp? Why not with 1cp? This is a bit complicated and you can read about the maths in my post Finisher Efficiency: Slice&Dice.

Things you should know

There are a couple of things that are very handy to know as a rogue but not necessarily common knowledge. I try to list what comes to my mind now and if you have something to add post it as a comment.

- A sitting opponent will stand up when you hit him, however the first hit is guaranteed to crit. So even if you don't have improved Ambush you can score nice crits on drinking casters.

- Attacks from behind can't be parried or blocked. So even if you are not using backstabs it's wise to attack from behind.

- Stunned targets can't dodge. When fighting a rogue it's a good idea to counter Evasion with as many stuns as possible. Other classes know that too so beware stuns when you depend on your dodge rate. (be it in PvP or v.s. Razorgore and some Drakonids in BWL)

- Hunters camping a frosttrap seem impossible to beat in duels. Get the Barov Peasant Caller trinket and your servants will take care of the trap for you.

- With epic gear come epic repair bills. Currently I pay about 1.50g per death wich makes a bit trickery worth the effort. If you die by your own hands you won't get durability damage.
Demonic Runes and Dark Runes are perfect tools to commit suicide if death is inevitable.

- If you have improved Gauge you can gauge a player and drop out of combat right when gauge ends. The same is possible with blind. This allows you to get multiple openers in a duel without wasting vanish. It doesnt work in PvE though.

- The talent Opportunity affects not only the weapon damage component of Backstabs like the tooltip suggests but also the fix bonus-damage (210 on level 60).

21/20/10 anyone?

I'm a dagger user since the very beginning. Even though WoW offers countless talent combinations most dagger using rogues sooner or later end up with one of three basic approaches: Preparation build, Sealfate build or Combat-Dagger build. What these builds have in common is that they focus on high crits and moves performed from behind (Ambush, Backstab), thus they all have points spend in Lethality, Improved Backstab and Opportunity.
Apart from that there are big differences in what the builds focus on.

Preparation build

This spec combines the two powerful talents Preparation and Coldblood. It focuses on openers and cooldowns. In PvP you have large breaks between fights and thus your cooldowns including Preparation will be ready most of the time when you need them. Combined with your powerful openers they will help you win a fight. This spec enables you to perform great stunlocks and get off two critting Eviscerates per fight, when you are prepared. The fact that Eviscerate is mostly independant from gear makes this spec very powerful even if you have weak gear.
In raid situations however a Preparation build is comparably weak. You won't get to attack often out of stealth, so half your points are wasted. You won't have many breaks between fights so your cooldowns won't cut it for you either. You will have access to great epic items, however this spec doesn't buff white damage which profits the most from obtaining better equipment.

Sealfate Build

The Sealfate dagger spec acknowledges the fact that backstabs have a very high crit chance by putting 5 points into Sealfate. That way you have a very nice combopoint generation without being dependant on openers like a prep build is. Especially with weaker gear the frequent finishers, be it Eviscerate, Rupture or Slice&Dice, result in a good bunch of extra dps.
However, as mentioned before, finishers aren't really scaling with better gear. On a certain gear level combat heavy builds will outdamage this build.
And there's another problem: SF builds are weak if the individual fights are too short to really build up CP.
Still this build does a bit better in most PvE situations than a Preparation spec while it's still quite powerful in PvP. 110 Energy allow you to do powerful opening combinations like Ambush-Gauge or CS-SS-Gauge. Coldblood, Imp Eviscerate and Imp Ambush all buff your burst damage potential which is especially useful vs casters.

Combat-Dagger Build

Combat-Dagger specs were non-existent when the game was young. This changed when more and more players were doing end-game raids.
As said before, finisher efficiency is mostly independant from your equipment, and Backstabs also derive large portions of their overall damage from a fixed bonus which is not affected by weapon damage. So the only source of damage that scales perfectly with better equipment are normal melee attacks: A better weapon or increased attack power is raising your weapon damage which is directly reflected by a proportional increase of your white damage. The same holds true for crit and hit bonuses. With a certain gear level the best way to deal highest possible damage in raids is to have Slice&Dice up as often as possible and invest talent points into Dual-Wield spec and Precision to make sure you score as many melee hits as possible. The remaining talent points are usually put into Dagger spec and Blade Flurry.
This means incredible high sustained dps, but it also means no Coldblood, no Imp Eviscerate, no Preparation, no 50 energy Cheap-Shot, awful cp generation... Combat-dagger builds lack burst damage and stunlock ablities, making them pretty weak in PvP.

Now many dagger rogues are in a quandary. They spend lots of time in raids, and they get invited as main dps. But while speccing combat dagger is the best you can do for the raid (or that's at least the common opinion), it's really giving you a hard time when you want to PvP which is also an important aspect of the game.
Isn't there a dagger spec with higher sustained damage than the Sealfate spec but with more viability in PvP than a combat dagger spec?
Well, I think this 21/20/10 build might offer a solution to rogues that can't decide between topping damage meter and PvP viability. Compared to a classical Combat-Dagger build you lose 4% crit and Bladeflurry, but you get a longer Slice&Dice duration and Coldblood and have 3 points left to either buff your poisons or go for Improved Eviscerate.

Especially with some of the Bonescythe set bonuses in mind, Coldblood might prove handy:
4 parts of Bonescythe and you'll get "Your Backstab, Sinister Strike and Hemorrhage critical hits cause you to regain 5 energy."
Imagine a typical PvE fight: You approach the mob unstealthed with full energy. If one of your Backstabs crits, you get a 2 secs headstart on S&D worth about 50 damage. If your first Backstab is a normal hit, pop CB and you are on the safe side.
Or imagine a PvP 1on1 fight: Either start with Cheap Shot - CB-Sinisterstrike - Gauge - restealth giving you a nice headstart that wouldn't be possible with a normal combat-build - or start the fight with a 100% crit Ambush.
8 parts of Bonescythe and you'll get "Your Eviscerate has a chance per combo point to reveal a flaw in your opponent's armor, granting a 100% critical hit chance for your next Backstab, Sinister Strike or Hemorrhage."
An Eviscerate that will let the next Backstab auto crit sounds worth the cp and energy spent when you can make it crit aswell. Especially as 3 points in Imp S&D allow you to keep S&D up all the time even though you eviscerate occasionally.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the 21/20/10 spec becoming more popular over the coming months.

Biography

After I tried different classes in the European closed and open beta, the first character I created in the final version was Solfyre, a female nightelf rogue, on Skullcrusher-EU. Together with my girlfriend's druid Cayenne I played the first 30 Levels without feeling the need for a guild.


The first guild we joined was Defenders of the Realm. We had quite some fun there but the people where just too different in how they played the game. A couple of months after release the first guilds were founded that consisted exclusively of high level players, basically to do instance runs together. I joined such a guild, called Vengeful, a bunch of really talented and devoted people that sadly broke up after a quarrel between the two guildleaders. What remained for me was the wish to see more of the game, if possible before anyone else did. With that I stood not alone. A couple of weeks later a number of smaller guilds joined forces as a new guild called Fusion. You heared a lot of cool things about those guys. That they managed to kill the first trash in MC, that they got enough ppl attuned to try Onyxia, stuff like that.^^
We, Cayenne and me, joined them (ex Vengeful members had good gear and a good reputation) and after a while started to attend more and more raids. Only a handful of guilds where doing MC and Onyxia back then and it was really fun to try and finally overcome boss after boss. I think I never before took so much pride in virtual achievements. Fabulous items that I previously only read about where now in reach. The fascination of the first epics is something that I doubt will ever come back, at least for me.



I attended the first Onyxia kill after weeks of wiping, and also a couple of first kills in MC. Killing a really hard boss for the very first time is an insane feeling. Especially the first kill of Ragnaros (24th August 2005) is something I remember vividly.
After that we started trying BWL. It took us one month to down Razorgore, but after that progress was quite steady and we killed Nefarian for the first time in early november. Since then we were basically out of content, farming stuff and hoping for AQ.
Even though my share in the farming event was not above average I, like all Fusion, was anticipating AQ. We missed most of the opening event as we were so eager to get some bosses killed. We blazed through the first part of AQ and killed the first 4 bosses in the night of the gate opening. Although that particular night was something I'll never forget, I think it is a shame that the first AQ bosses are no real challenge to a halfway experienced guild. AQ isn't bare of challenges though, after Fankriss it was getting really tough. We took long for Huhuran, even longer for the Emps, and C'Thun was killed only a couple of days ago after quite some problems with overall motivation.

After almost one year of raiding my goals have changed a lot. I basically play for the rare moments in which we kill new encounters, and for improving myself as a player. Gear is something that I take when I can and I do look forward to improvements, but the impatience and drooling is long gone.
So what remains are two very hard bosses in AQ and then we will most likely wait for Naxxramas. I hope that instance will be a blast, cause otherwise I don't see me continuing the game until the expansion comes, at least not with the same level of devotion. It's all feeling a bit too much like a job today with only a few (though intense) highlights.

Yet another rogue blog

I've been playing World of Warcraft for 15 months now. Since february 2005 I have spent almost 2000 hours logged into the game on my rogue Solfyre. That immense amount of time spent on playing WoW, combined with a certain curiosity towards game mechanics and love for theorycraft, resulted in a rather big output of nerdy rants, calculations and opinions over the last couple of months. Sadly most of them were posted in the various forums or just scribbled on paper what basically means that most of it was lost after a couple of weeks.

Getting insights and knowledge about a game is as important for me as playing it. Thinking about the best way to build my character further and deciding things not only by intuition but backed up with a thorough foundation of knowledge is part of the fun for me. I hope this blog can serve as some kind of consistent repository for all kind of information as well as opinions connected to playing a rogue in WoW. I also hope it will become useful for others that share my hobby and are looking for interesting things to think and maybe learn about the rogue in WoW.

If you are playing a rogue add this page to your favorites and I'll promise that I try to make an occasional visit worthwhile for you.