Solfyre's Rogue Blog

Are druids the better rogues?

2007-01-22T17:07:00.000+01:00

Finally Burning Crusade got released and after installing I had to make a tough choice: What to do first? Make a Draenei shammie, play my imba epic rogue to 70 or rather play my other level 60 character, a druid with just 10 days played. After seeing the quest rewards of the first quests in Outland I figured it would be more fun to play the druid and get upgrades all the time.

Now that I played him for a while in Outlands I have to say it's not only the upgrades that make playing him a lot of fun. Comparing Tumbler with Solfyre is like comparing a Swiss army knife with a dagger.

First of all with 41 points in Feral you can play as damage dealer or tank without swapping gear. And both seems to be very valid if you compare your performance to the specialists. The little difference that might exist is well outweighed by the group buffs and flexibility the druid contributes:

Someone dies? Combat ress.
Lots of low hp mobs? Hurricane AoE.
Group is on low hp? Channel Tranquility and heal each group member for 4k health.
Caster is oom? Innervate.
Untanked mobs? Offtank in bearform.
Dangerous runner? Moonfire spam.

And don't forget the buffs and debuffs:

Every member of my group gets +5% melee crit rate.
Every melee/range crit from a group member heals him for ~200hp. (more exactly: 4% of their max hp, procs at most once every 6 seconds though)
A damage shield for tanks. (Thorns)
Armor, stats and resistances for everyone.
An armor debuff that is free of cost and castable in forms. (Faerie Fire)

All this flexibility makes you survive almost any situation while questing. Where I'd be forced to use cooldowns as a rogue (Vanish, Evasion, Sprint) I have a lot more choices as druid. Often when you play as kitty and get adds, you take your time to kill the original target, shift out, pop barkskin to prevent cast interruption, heal up and apply 2 hots. Then enter bear form, pop enrage and kill the rest. If you need to heal again, you have a stun at your disposal or can just heal in bear form using Frenzied Regeneration. So far, I died maybe 3 times while questing, twice because of fall damage while being mounted. (I'm used to the rogue's slowfall ^^)
I don't think there is any other class that can handle as many mobs without dying as a druid.

Another feature I like is that there is no downtime. I never drink or eat. I can save all my mana for shifting and healing as I kill things in forms. So when I need health, I heal , shift back and while I fight my mana is regenerating. If it happens that I run out of mana, I got Innervate ready.

Lastly fighting mobs as cat is really close to what a rogue can pull off, but way less boring than SS mashing. Both the stun opener and the Gauge like incapacitating finisher don't only CC the target but deal a considerable amount of damage too. Thx to talents I can reduce the cost of the Backstab equivalent (Shred) to only 42 energy. As Mangle (a worthy 41 talent that replaces Claw in kitty form) applies a debuff that increases Shred damage by no less than 30%, I use Mangle as the basic attack and do a Shred whenever possible. So the attack pattern looks more complex than most patterns I had as a rogue. Usually I open with Pounce (stuns for 4 secs and applies an 18 secs bleed), apply Faerie Fire, Mangle and Shred. Now the stun ends and I do one or two Mangles. At 4-5cp I either use the Eviscerate equivalent to finish the target or Maim (Gauge/Evi combi finisher), regen energy and Shred. In long fights Rip (Rupture equivalent) is usually the best finisher as the target gets 30% increased damage from bleed thanks to the Mangle debuff. (Works for rogues too.)
Now that's a lot of different keys to press already, but the real-boredom killer is Omen of Clarity, a 30 min self buff that gives your melee attacks a chance to proc clear casts, i.e. reduces the cost of the next spell or ability to zero. If you are lucky and it procs while the target is still stunned from the opener, you get to do a Mangle and 2 Shreds in 4 seconds and enough CP's to do a finisher.

Well I could go on a bit about PvP but not in this post. To answer the question of the topic: As Feral druid I don't feel like an inferior damage dealer if I compare myself to rogues. The difference is not in the dps but in what the class contributes besides doing damage. My druid contributes all kinds of buffs and powerful wipe-saving abilities on moderate cooldowns. Rogues contribute better crowd control (KS was very useful in the Ramparts and Blood Furnace and, if improved, Sap is a valid CC too), can disarm traps (there are loads of nasty traps to disarm in Blood Furnace at least) and picking locks (there are locked chests containing about 5g and greens in both Blood Furnace and Ramparts).

The last month, mutilate and me!

2006-12-22T16:57:00.000+01:00

More then a month without a new post on this blog... shame on me.

So, here are the news. 2 days after I made my last post my guild managed to get some serious tries on the Four Horsemen and downed them. Sapphiron followed a week later and Tuesday, 28 November they finally got Kel'Thuzad down. These were moments where I regretted that I had to stop raiding the most.

When patch 2.0.1 got released I started to pvp a bit more serious. I did every BG and even some world ganking, played in pickups and premades and guildgroups (10 AB wins in 2 hours -> 2.5k honor after the nerf. yay!) and had some great time. Even though the overall gear level is rapidly increasing my rogue is still at the top end gearwise.

For the first 2 weeks I was playing a mutilate build which I enjoyed a lot. It's insane combo point generation and some great burst damage. I had my bank full of Thistle Teas and knowing they will get a nerf soon I used them freely. CS-CB-Mut-KS-Mut-Tea-Mut-Evi muhahahah!

If you didn't try using CB on the first Mutilate yet I'm gonna tell you why you should start doing it. It makes the 2 individual strikes both crit so you increase your burst damage quite significantly which is helpfull in all fights while a CB Evi after a CS-Mut-KS combo is often not possible because the target a) died or b) escaped.
You also get a guaranteed 5cp thanks to Sealfate! That means that your Kidneyshot will hold the full duration and you get the most out of your Find Weaknesses and Improved Kidneyshot skill.

Now you might have the impression one of your Mutilate strikes is critting often enough... well if you got 30% critrate the chance for at least one of your mutilate strikes to crit is 51%. (The chance not to crit with one strike is 0.7 with both attacks its 0.7 * 0.7 = 0.49) Imo once every second fight is not often enough once you got to win a hard one on one.^^

You might also point out that you don't like to waste CB on an attack that has already a high chance to crit on its own. Well, with 30% base chance you have a 30% chance that your Evi would have critted anyway so it's a 30% chance that your CB is wasted there. When you do a CB before Mutilate it applies to both individual strikes and these strikes have just the same crit chance as an Eviscerate so the average chance for CB being wasted on a Mutilate is the same 30% as for Evi. (It's just that there are more possible outcomes than "completely wasted" and "made full use of") But your Mutilate can't be parried or dodged as your target is affected by a CS and you are in his back. So you won't lose your CB to a dodge or parry whereas (dependant on what you are fighting against) a dodged or parried Eviscerate is quite a common thing.

If you are still not convinced here is another good reason why Mutilate should get your CB instead of Eviscerate: Mutilate strikes that crit do 230% of the base damage while Eviscerate crits do only 200% of their non-crit damage. That is because Lethality does affect Mutilate while it has no effect on Eviscerate.

Unless you have very weak gear where critting Eviscerates do a lot more damage then a double-crit Mutilate the Mutilate is a lot better to use CB on. Give it a try!

Next post I'm gonna write a short review of my current Hemo spec that I use with a GM sword. I'm running out of lines for today! =)

I stopped raiding

2006-11-06T01:50:00.000+01:00

I started to feel like a raiding bot over the last weeks. No time for the other aspects of WoW and still a bad conscience cause I feel like I don't devote enough time to neither WoW nor my work nor my studies. And my girlfriend, friends and family deserve a larger chunk of my time as well. So as I can't make the day last longer I have to abandon the one thing I actually can abandon, and that's raiding.

I don't stop playing WoW and I remain with my guild. We have a non-raider rank so I can still stay with the guys I raided with for one and a half year. I'll focus on writing my diploma thesis now but I got plans for WoW aswell.

When patch 1.13 arrives and brings the PvP revamp I'm gonna get myself a decent low speed mainhand (Grand Marshals Claw or Longsword) and spec Heavy-Sub Hemo. Thats a spec you can't experience really while playing in a hardcore raiding guild. I really look forward to try my nice gear (7 Bonescythe items and two 65 dps daggers) in PvP. And while my gear is nice theres lots of room for improvement regarding my duelling skills.

Furthermore I got the TBC Collectors Edition preordered and once it arrives I plan to level a Draenei Shammy parallel to playing my rogue in the new zones. I'm not gonna rush it and once I reach endgame again I'll most likely stick to the PvP and casual PvE side of the game.

Raiding with Fusion gave me many great moments and was quite some fun overall. I wish them the best of luck with further progress in Naxx and hope that the Four Horseman (where we are stuck for 7 weeks now) will go down soon!

Whats WoW doing when you swing your weapon?

2006-09-21T22:54:00.000+02:00

When you attack someone and swing your weapon, a lot of things can happen. In most cases you'll just land a normal hit, but sometimes you'll crit. Or you miss. Or maybe the opponent dodges or parries. If you want to decide what gear is best in a given situation, it helps if you know how WoW decides what's gonna happen to a swing.

While I have no insight to the actual implementation, the result comes down to this: The game is rolling a virtual dice and using the result to identify one of the entries in a big table (which is usually called the hit-table). And there it will be able to read what's gonna happen with this swing.

To say it a bit more technical: There is a random number generated. The range of possible numbers is devided into "areas" that map to one of the possible results of the roll like miss, crit, dodge, hit etc.

To keep it simple let's say we roll with a 100 sided dice. (/random 100)
If you have a 20% crit chance, 20 possible rolls will be a crit. If you have a 5% miss chance, 5 of the possible rolls will be a miss. The same is done for dodge, parry and block. The remaining possible rolls will map to a normal hit.
As hit-chance is not really a fixed chance, the line "Improves your chance to hit by X%" actually means "Reduces your chance to miss by X%".

Example:

These are the parameters:
Your miss chance = 5%
Your crit chance = 20%
The enemy's chance to dodge = 5%
The enemy's chance to parry = 5%
The enemy's chance to block = 10%

For every attack the server generates ONE SINGLE roll to see if the attack lands or not. As I said, to keep it simple let's just say the roll is random from 1 to 100.
If the roll lands between:
1 to 20 you crit
21 to 25 the foe dodges
26 to 30 the foe parrys
31 to 40 the foe blocks
41 to 45 you miss
46 to 100 you score a normal hit

This means that unlike common believe WoW does not determine first if you hit and then if the hit is a crit. If you have a 20% crit chance this means an average of 20 out of 100 swings (attacks) will crit and not only 20 out of 100 hits.
That does mean that crits can't miss, which in turn means that the amount of crits you do out of an amount of swings does NOT depend on your miss rate or any other variable except your crit rate.

This above rule of thumb suffices for everything except the most exotic situations: Situations where so many special things (meaning everything else than a normal hit) can happen that the chances add up to more than 100% which means they can't be placed in the hit table all at once. In that case certain things take priority over others and sadly all disadvantages take priority over the nice stuff like crit and hit.

If you have trouble to understand that, let me depict it like this: Imagine the dice the game is gonna roll for you. On each of its sides is written what's gonna happen to your swing. When the game sets up the hit table, its like preparing the dice by writing possible outcomes of a swing on its sides. At first on every side you can read "HIT". Then the game will start to fill in the other stuff: If you have 10% miss chance, then 10% of the dice's sides will get the "HIT" removed and "MISS" written on them (if it's a dice with 20 sides like pen&paper roleplayers use them, then "MISS" would be writen to two of the 20 sides). After filling in your miss chance the game will continue with other things that can happen: Dodge, Block, Glancing maybe... and in the very end it will come to your crit rate. If there are not enough sides left with the initial word "HIT" written on it, the game can't add "CRIT" tags anymore. In that case (and only in that case) you'll end up with less sides reading "CRIT" than you should get and that means you crit less than you deserve. Luckily for us rogues only in the most exotic situations (like when fighting Loatheb) there won't be enough free sides on the dice (or entries in the hit table if you want to be more technical), so you end up losing crit chance.

I hope this information helps!

Combat Dagger builds and Adrenaline Rush

2006-09-05T04:37:00.000+02:00

With patch 1.12 rogues got their revamp and most of us will have a new spec by now. Being in raids most of my time, I opted for a combat dagger build with Adrenaline Rush (15/31/5).

It was not much of a question for me to take Adrenaline Rush now that I could. But I hear a lot of rogues wonder if it's really worth to take or if they should not just go only 28 points deep into the combat tree and put the remaining points elsewhere.

Is AR worth it or not?

In 5 minutes you get to spend 3000 energy, if you have no major downtimes (every downtime favors the AR though). With AR you get 15 seconds double energy or a total of 3150 energy over 5 minutes. Your overall damage through energy abilities increases by: 3150/3000 = 5%.
If you do 50% of your overall damage with backstabs thats 2,5% increase to your sustained dps.

Your dps boost through AR becomes even bigger the longer the phases are in which you don't fight but the cooldown is ticking.
There are countless examples where you get a lot more out of AR than the theoretical 2,5% damage buff.
- The typical PvP fight that you start with all cooldowns and that takes only a bunch of seconds.
- Hit and Run bosses like Firemaw, Chromaggus, Gluth or Heigan where you have large gaps within the bossfight where you can't melee, but your cooldowns will refresh.
- All fights that are shorter than multiples of the cooldown. For example killing Patchwerk takes at max 7 minutes, but I doubt any guild kills him in less than 5. That means you get to use AR 2 times in this fight and it boosts you dps by at atleast 3,7%.

And if you combine the use of AR with Blade Flurry (provided there are 2 mobs in range) or the effect of an Earthstrike trinket or Jom Gabbar, you again increase the theoretical boost.

Last but not least there's a more subtle buff to your dps. Now that Ruthlessness is not a prereq for Relentless Strikes anymore, putting 3 points into that talent looks like a waste. Take 3 points from Ruthlessness and put a 3rd point into Improved S&D instead as this is the only finisher you'll ever use in PvE and you safe 2 talent points but get the same effect: You can maintain a 100% S&D coverage with only 5 cp Slice&Dice finishers - in other words for 0 energy cost. (A 5cp S&D will hold 30 seconds now, and that's just as long as it takes you to get another 5cp with a combat dagger spec.)
The problem is to get to the first 5 combo-points though. Whatever you do... you will have a large initial gap in the S&D coverage (or many small ones) OR you have to do so many low-cp finishers that you waste 25 energy a couple of times due to Relentless Strikes not proccing. Adrenaline Rush however is the solution. Pop the first S&D after only two backstabs. With 4parts of Bonescythe that's most likely two energy ticks into the fight - otherwise you need three energy ticks. After that pop AR and spam Backstabs. Just when the S&D buff is about to run out, you can do a 5cp one already, thanks to AR, and keep it up for the rest of the nukage.

But don't think only about what damage meter will show in the end. The real big reason why you should spec AR if you go for a combat dagger build is burst damage. Be it Maexxna, C'Thun, Ouro, Huhuran, Gothik... there are plenty of situations where the key is to muster insane dps for just half a minute or so. About 3k more damage in these critical periods does help a lot!

Does it have no drawbacks at all?

Sure it has... one is aggro. Burst damage does always mean burst aggro. And when you want to make full use of AR, you need to use it early in the fight (for the reasons listed above), so you really need to be cautious with your aggro. A well timed Vanish solves all your problems in most cases though.

Then there is the problem that if you take all damage talents that make sense for dagger rogues from the combat tree, you end up with only 28 points in there. To get AR you need to spend another 2 points on talents that don't really increase your damage output. Well, I had no problem spending those. Improved Sprint is a great PvP talent that has its uses in PvE too. The same goes for Improved Kick. Endurance is nice too, especially if you also got Improved Sprint. And if you don't like these talents, buff your survivability and increase your dodge or parry rate. There are enough cleaving mobs in raid instances to make it worthwhile.

Another drawback - at least for me - is that I consider it my precious best cooldown skill I have and I don't want to waste it. Thats why I don't use it as often as I could... its really hard sometimes (for example in an instance where trash dies in a matter of seconds or when you grind easy mobs) to find a situation where it really makes sense to use it.
But the important thing is that you got a way to increase your damage output and cp generation by a large proportion once every 5 minutes which is a big help in countless situations.

Conclusion

Adrenaline Rush is not only a significant buff to your sustained damage, it's greatly increasing your flexibility and burst damage and thus might safe your life many many times. It's the best 31pt talent of all trees and a must for every combat dagger build imho.

My first WoW addon: PoisonPouch

2006-08-04T17:15:00.000+02:00

I wanted to learn a bit more about how to code addons for WoW, and when I got increasingly annoyed by the tedious process of applying poisons to my weapons I thought a little addon helping with that would be a nice starting point.

So I checked for similar addons (trinket menu, rogue tracker etc), tried to learn from them and assembled my own little weapon buff addon that I called PoisonPouch.

I uploaded it to curse-gaming today. Get it here if you want and give me your feedback. I tried to do a localization for french and german clients but I couldn't test them yet so any input on that is welcome.

If you have any suggestions, feature requests, bug reports or other comments, let me hear them.

Serrated Blades and Deadliness.

2006-07-21T06:09:00.000+02:00

In 1.12 the Subtlety tree gets considerably buffed. It's not restricted to talents that buff your stealth, openers, finishers and flexibility but it also contains two talents that increase your (sustained) damage output.

How do the new talents Serrated Blades and Deadliness compare to the old damage talents like Malice, Lethality or Opportunity etc?

Serrated Blades (3/3)

This talent scales perfectly with gear and level. All our damage is physical and armor mitigation is percentage based so the only variable to gauge the power of Serrated Blades is the opponent's armor.

Armor mitigation calculates like this: armor / (armor + 400 + 85 * level)

With 3 points invested and for a level 60 rogue it ignores 300 of the target's armor. How does it affect the effective damage mitigation of a level 60 target?

1000 armor: Mitigation 15,4% -> 11,3%. Physical damage taken +4,84%.
2000 armor: Mitigation 26,7% -> 23,6%. Physical damage taken +4,17%.
3000 armor: Mitigation 35,3% -> 32,9%. Physical damage taken +3,66%.
5000 armor: Mitigation 47,6% -> 46,1%. Physical damage taken +2,94%.
10000 armor: Mitigation 64,5% -> 63,8%. Physical damage taken +1,97%.

So all in all, Serrated Blades is quite efficient against low armor targets. This makes it especially useful against clothies, sundered mobs or in combination with Expose Armor. Note that it also buffs your Rupture considerably.

Deadliness (5/5):

For most rogues the dps through attackpower is slightly higher than the weapon dps. These rogues would see their white damage increase by 5-6% through Deadliness.
(0.1 * attackpower_dps / (weapon_dps + attackpower_dps) * 100).
If Deadliness affects not only attackpower from gear but also attackpower added through buffs, the increase would be like 7-8% in groups.
Specials attacks like Sinister Strike, Backstab and post patch even Eviscerate and Rupture are also affected by attackpower. However a large part of the special damage is always a flat bonus which is not affected by Deadliness.
How much a special attack's damage will increase depends on how much of its damage is based on attackpower.

Hemo:
Your Hemo damage is 100% weapon damage and thus will increase by the same percentage as your white damage. (Usually a bit more than 5%).
Sinister Strikes:
Lets say you have a Vis'kag and with it your Sinister Strikes hit for an average of 380 damage on 0 armor targets. 68 damage of that is the flat bonus each SS gets. (100 + 187)/2 = 144 damage come from your weapon and the remaining 168 damage will come from your attackpower (~980AP). Deadliness would increase your Sinister Strike damage by 0.1 * 168 / 380 = 4,4%.
Backstabs:
Let's say you have a Perdition's Blade and your Rank 9 Backstabs hit for an average of 550 damage on 0 armor targets.
225 damage are due to the flat bonus. 1.5 * (73 + 137)/2 = 157 damage come from your weapon and the remaining 168 damage will come from attackpower (~922AP). Deadliness would increase your Backstabs by 0.1 * 168 / 550 = 3.1%

If you got exceptionally good gear then the flat bonuses of your specials aren't as significant and you should expect a proportionally higher dps increase. If your gear is worse than what I used in the examples, then you can expect a proportionally smaller dps increase through using specials.

To compare these new talents with old damage talents such as Lethality, Opportunity and Malice you can use the following values as reference points:

Malice (5/5):

White damage increases by ~5%. Sinister Strikes by ~4%. Backstabs by ~3% (3.8% with Lethality) for an epic equipped rogue. The overall effect becomes slightly smaller the better your gear (+hit and +crit).

Lethality (5/5):

With a basic crit rate of 25% 55 of 100 Backstabs will do 15% more damage than without Lethality. So your average Backstabs get a 8.25% damage increase. If you do 40% of your damage with Backstab, its a 3.3% dps increase.
For sword rogues with the same basic crit rate only 25% of your Sinister Strikes get a 15% damage boost so your average Sinister Strike gets a 3.75% dps boost. If you do 30% of your damage with Sinister Strikes, thats a lame 1.125% damage increase.

Opportunity (5/5):

Backstabs get a 20% dps increase, so if you do 40% of your total damage with Backstabs, you get a 8% overall dps increase. Pretty straight forward and very very strong compared to other talents. A must-have for dagger builds.

Precision (5/5):

If you have less than ~6% hit chance on your gear, points in Precision are kinda powerful. It will up your damage by ~4-5% depending on the spec and gear. As soon as your specials don't miss anyway +hit will only improve your white damage. If you are combat specced that is still a 3-4% dps boost, a Sealfate build will get only like 2-3% total dps increase out of speccing Precision.

Dual Wield (5/5):

This one is straight forward again. Your damage through normal melee attacks is upped by 1.75/1.50 = 16.67%. If you do 40% of your damage with white hits that's a 6.67% damage boost. Most rogues that are deep in the combat tree (especially raiding ones) do 60% or more of their damage with white hits. So Dual Wield would be a 10% damage boost for them.

Conclusion:

Blizzard added two very cool damage talents in the Sub tree. But as those that optimize their specs for raid damage won't want to waste lots of points into the lower tier utility talents, you might wonder what these talents are good for. Well, actually they make builds that go deep into the Subtlety tree more viable than they were pre patch. For example 21/8/22 dagger builds not only get better utility talents than before but they can pick up Serrated Blades and increase their dps in groups and against low armor targets by a couple of percent. The true winners however are Hemo rogues in my opinion as they get a number of interesting new choices. For example with patch 1.12 you can combine Hemo with 2/2 Dirty Deeds and Improved Kidney Shot. Or you could use Hemo together with Seal Fate and Cold Blood. But with Deadliness promising you 5% or more of total dps increase with both Hemo and white attacks it seems smart as well to spend 30 points in Sub and the remaining points into the Assa tree up to Cold Blood. And it's not less viable to spend full 31 points in the Sub tree and get the buffed Premediation and Gauge instead of Cold Blood.
So while Blizzard isn't buffing high-end raiding rogues there, they offer us a large range of new builds that are all tailored around PvP and at the same time stronger in PvE than current PvP builds and thus they make the Subtlety tree much more competative than before compared with the other trees.

Finisher Efficiency: Eviscerate

2006-07-05T01:35:00.000+02:00

Eviscerate is the only direct damage finisher rogues have. The damage it does depends on the amount of combo points used. It is mitigated by armor and it can crit, but it's independant from your weapons and attackpower. In other words: it doesn't really scale with gear. Evi might have been a no-brainer when you were leveling, but with Backstabs and Sinister Strikes yielding more and more damage per energy point, and white melee hits making up an increasing share of your total damage, the good old Eviscerate seems to drag behind.
To decide right when to spend combo points how, let's take closer look on Eviscerate's efficiency.

The efficency of Eviscerate with different amounts of combopoints

Without talents this is what an Eviscerate does on a target with 0 armor:

1 CP Evi does 216-312 dmg = 264 average dmg = 28%
2 CP Evi does 384-480 dmg = 432 average dmg = 46%
3 CP Evi does 552-648 dmg = 600 average dmg = 64%
4 CP Evi does 720-816 dmg = 768 average dmg = 82%
5 CP Evi does 888-984 dmg = 936 average dmg = 100%

The damage increases proportionally to the amount of combo points invested. You could say an Eviscerate does 94 base damage and 170 damage per combo point.

An Eviscerate will cost a certain amount of energy which could be spent to generate CP and damage, and with Ruthlessness specced the Eviscerate will be cheaper the more CP you have to spend. So obviously the 5cp Eviscerate is the most efficient one.

For lvl 60 rogues with decent gear, Ruthlessness and Relentness Strikes, Eviscerate will generally start to pay off with 3 or more combopoints. If you do Eviscerates with only one or two combopoints, you lose so much energy that it negates all damage Eviscerate may yield.
While it starts to pay off with 3cp the efficiency gain from using more combopoints is quite large. For example for a Sealfate Rogue in epic gear Eviscerates with 4 CP will mean a 60% higher dps buff than Eviscerates with 3 CP. Full 5 CP Eviscerates are twice as much extra dps as 3 CP Eviscerates.

Eviscerates and Sealfate

So the best way to spend your CP on Eviscerate is with 5 points. However with a Sealfate build you might waste CP if you go for 5 points at all costs: If the last SS or Backstab you do crits, then you lose the extra CP Sealfate is awarding for crits. So what should you do if you have Sealfate and got 4 CP on a target?
For a Sealfate rogue using daggers doing 4 CP Eviscerates or risk wasting an extra CP to do a full Eviscerate doesn't make a difference. If you use Swords/Maces, you are better off going for 5cp as the risk to waste a combopoint is a lot lower with Sinister Strikes.

Short fights

In short fights where you are fighting only one (or the last) mob it's not always possible to wait until you can do a 5 point Eviscerate. If the mob dies too fast you might lose all your CP. Even if you managed to get the finisher off, you might not have time to spend the 25 Energy from Ruthlessness. In these situations 3-4cp Eviscerates before doing a last Backstab or Sinister Strike can be a good option.

Example:
Let's say you are SF dagger specced and have 110 energy. Your raid engages an Anubisath Eradicator. These fights take about 10 seconds, so the best way to start is with two Backstabs and if they both crit, you do an Eviscerate. That way you get a 80% chance to get 25 energy back which allows you to do a 3rd Backstab right after you get the 4th energy tick. If you had tried to do the 3 Backstabs first and then finish with an Eviscerate, you'd have needed 2 more energy ticks (or 4 seconds) which you won't get.

Conclusion

Generally go for 5 CP Eviscerates if possible.

4 CP and 3 CP Eviscerates should be only used if you don't have time to get more cp on a target. They are noticeably less efficient than 5 CP Eviscerates but still better than wasting the combo points.

Eviscerates with less than 3 CP shouldn't be used at all except if you are sure that the Eviscerate will kill the mob and you have time to regen to full energy before you engage the next one. This happens sometimes when grinding.

In situations where you will regen your full energy until you engage the next target, it might be better to use Eviscerate (and other finishers) not as the last spell. That way you get a chance to spend the 25 energy Ruthlessness might give you back.

Finisher Efficiency: Slice&Dice

2006-06-15T23:21:00.000+02:00

Last post I made I claimed that in non-static fights where you can't be sure that you'll be able to melee the full duration of a Slice&Dice, it's best for a Sealfate Rogue to trigger it with 3cp. The post was quite long already so I left the reasoning out and promised to get back to it later. Here comes the math.

What does a Slice&Dice cost you?

As Sealfate Rogue you have Relentless Strikes and Ruthlessness. So a finisher has a 60% chance to give 1 CP back and you have a 25% chance of getting 25 Energy restored per CP. This is the average cost of your Slice&Dice:

1 CP SnD costs 20 energy, 0.4 CP.
2 CP SnD costs 15 energy, 1.4 CP.
3 CP SnD costs 10 energy, 2.4 CP.
4 CP SnD costs 05 energy, 3.4 CP.
5 CP SnD costs 00 energy, 4.4 CP.

What's the net dps boost of a S&D?

Let's calculate it for a typical Sealfate Dagger specced epic equipped rogue:

Your white damage does (without S&D) 150 dps.
In that case a S&D is a 45dps buff.
Your average backstab does 1080 damage.
With 3 points in Imp S&D the timers are 13.1/17.4/21.8/26.1/30.5
An average 5pt Evi does about 1200 dmg. (Coldblood included)

Okay, what's 1 energy worth?
1 energy is 1/60 backstab or 18 damage.

What's a combopoint worth?
If you can spend the cps with a 5cp Eviscerate, you'll pay 10 energy and 4.4cp:
4.4cp + 10 energy = 1200dmg
4.4cp = 1200 - 10 energy = 1200 - 10 * 18dmg = 1020dmg
-> 1cp = 1020dmg / 4.4 = 230dmg

Now that we have a more or less accurate idea what energy and cp are worth in terms of damage, let's calculate the net dps boost a S&D gives you over spending the points in 5cp Eviscerates instead:

1 CP = 13.1s S&D buff, -20nrg, -0.4cp = 13.1s * 45dps - 20 * 18dmg - 0.4 * 230dmg = 138dmg = 10.5dps
2 CP = 17.4s S&D buff, -15nrg, -1.4cp = 17.4s * 45dps - 15 * 18dmg - 1.4 * 230dmg = 191dmg = 11.0dps
3 CP = 21.8s S&D buff, -10nrg, -2.4cp = 21.8s * 45dps - 10 * 18dmg - 2.4 * 230dmg = 249dmg = 11.4dps
4 CP = 26.1s S&D buff, -5nrg, -3.4cp = 26.1s * 45dps - 5 * 18dmg - 3.4 * 230dmg = 303dmg = 11.6dps
5 CP = 30.5s S&D buff, -0nrg, -4.4cp = 30.5s * 45dps - 0 * 18dmg - 4.4 * 230dmg = 360dmg = 11.8dps

Conclusion

Regardless of what CP count you have when you trigger S&D the net dps you get is almost the same. If you can guarantee that you'll make use of the full S&D duration, then a 5cp S&D is the best choice, but if you lose only 1 second, you are back on the efficiency of a 1cp S&D. If you lose 8 seconds you have not gained a single damage point through your S&D over a 5cp Eviscerate.
Of course, in many short fights you never have the chance to get 5cp off anway. In that case S&D is most of the time better then losing the cp.

Anyway you'll want to make sure that you don't waste precious seconds of your buff. It's far easier to look 20 seconds ahead than 30 seconds and so the S&D with 3 cp is often the better choice in non static fights.
Sure, it would be even easier to guess how the fight will look like in 13 seconds (1cp S&D) but remember that S&D is not the only finisher you'll want to use. Rotating between 3cp S&D and 4-5cp Eviscerates is managable. Squeezing in 4-5cp Eviscerates between 13 second S&D buffs is not. And you don't want too big gaps in your S&D coverage if it's not necessary.

It's still tough to make the right decisions in a fight, but knowing that S&D is almost equally good in net dps regardless of the cp you spend on it definitely helps.

Sealfate builds in PvE

2006-05-29T13:26:00.000+02:00

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

2006-05-23T02:37:00.000+02:00

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?

2006-05-23T01:32:00.000+02:00

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

2006-05-18T01:03:00.000+02:00

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

2006-05-17T15:38:00.000+02:00

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.