Samuel Dings 80, or Three More to Go

After a long day of questing for 2.3 million exp, I finally hit 80.  Now I’ve got reps to grind, heroics to run and raid bosses to down.    About half of my gear from 70 made it the whole way, but I’ve got some fairly easy to obtain upgrades in the works.  

Next up for me is a thorough evaluation of rotation for my Rogue, so I’ve got a date with a training dummy.  I’ve also got 3 70’s that I’d like to get to 80, and some professions other than skinning (Hunter) and herbalism (Rogue) that I’d like to get to 450.  As for the blog, I’ll be writing up the theorycrafting I’ll be doing for my new Assassination spec.

- Sam

Rogue DPS: The Assassination Experiment

I have always been a Combat Rogue.  Always.  Swords were my weapon of choice, ever since the day my brother ran me through Deadmines and got me a Cruel Barb (next day I had 2).  I only dabbled in fists with the 105 Badge Main hand before the expansion.  But that was then….

….This is now.

A friend of mine has been leveling his blacksmithing, so I received a thrown weapon, and dagger in the mail.  *Gasp*  A Dagger?!?!  Samuel does not use those puny half-swords!  But I had been reading that Blizzard was trying to get daggers back into the hands of rogues, so I kept an open mind.  When I hit 76, I checked the auction house for a main hand, Fully thinking that I wouldn’t want to pay the outrageous amount of gold it would cost.  However, upon checking the ah, I found a main hand for 150g; since I had already made 200g in auctions, I went ahead and bought it.

At first I tried to use my Combat spec with the daggers.  It was epic fail.  While my attack speed was way up, Sinister Strike and Eviscerate are based on weapon damage, and don’t hit anywhere near as hard with daggers.  So I looked for a cookie cutter Assassination spec on the Internet, and headed to respec.  Normally, I read up on these things and study all of the talents in a tree before I make a sweeping change, but I decided that since I was leveling, I didn’t want to take the time to really read into it.  This was not a smart idea.

At first I didn’t really like the spec.  I felt that it was inferior to combat in every way.  That was mainly becuase I didn’t know how to properly play it.  Initially, I was opening with either Ambush or Cheap Shot, followed by Mutilate and eventually Eviscerate.  There’s nothing really wrong with that plan, and as long as some other things are taken care of, that’s pretty much the quickest way to dispatch of a mob.

There’s a few things missing from the pattern though.  Since I’ve never played as an Assassination Rogue, I’ve only worried about poison for raids, and maybe instances.  I obviously didn’t catch the 40% Increase in damage mutilate gets on a poisoned target.  I’ve since fixed that issue, and Mutilate is hitting much harder now.  Another thing that I failed to see at first is that Hunger for Blood is not a 3% damage increase on a cooldown.  It stacks 3 times, and it’s not only possible, but easy to keep it up at all times.  Again, had I spent 10 minutes researching or looking at the tree, I would have seen this.

The best thing about the Assassination tree now is that your Eviscerates and Envenoms will refresh your Slice and Dice to its max 5 point length.  As long as Slice and Dice is up, either of those moves will refresh it to 26 seconds, even if the finisher was only a 1 point move.  Once you get Slice and Dice up, if you’re able to stay on the mob, you won’t have to worry about refreshing it.  This is really cool while soloing.

- What I’ve learned -

Combat is a better soloing spec that Assassination, mainly because it allows you to hit multiple targets at the same time.  Until fan of knives at 80, there’s no multi target ability for an Assassination Rogue.

Assassination is just as good, if not better than Combat on a single target.

Assassination requires more buttons to press than Combat, and feels more fun than spamming Sinister Strike.

- Sam

Scenes from Northrend

 

Sam is 74, and I haven’t written a lot since I got the expansion loaded.  I figured I needed to send something your way, so I thought I’d take a post and show you some of my screenshots from Northrend.  I’ll keep the comments at a minimum, as Blizzard’s amazing artwork says more for itself that I could hope to describe.  I will say that I might be replacing my current desktop wall paper with the above picture from Howling Fjord.

 

- Borean Tundra -

 

Riding the boat from Stormwind, and Valiance keep.  I love that blizz added working lighthouses; they really add to the whole feel of the area.

 

The quest Oh Noes! the Tadpoles is one of my favorite so far.  It would be a travesty for Blizzard to not release a baby murloc non combat pet.   In other news, speaking Murloc is almost as much fun as running around in a murloc suit.

 

 

I’m glad Blizz got into some Gnomish lore; we really haven’t seen a lot since Gnomer.  Over in Coldarra, I found out that getting to fly on a dragon is better than any quest reward, even if only one person on the server can finish the quest at a time.  If you’ve done this quest, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

- Howling Fjord -

 

There’s a lot of ways to get around Howling Fjord.  These would be my favorite so far.  Flying machines and Flaming arrows FTW!

 

Legendary weaponry anyone? If you want to know how Highlord Tirion Fordring ended up with the Ashbringer, roll a deathknight.  The elevator that I’m on my not be legendary, but its size is epic.

- Dragonblight -

 

Need a hand when helping the Bronze Dragonflight?  Just call on your future self.  Also, if you want to see a very important scene from Warcraft III, this would be the region to go to.

 

I hope that you’ve enjoyed looking at some of my favorite places in Northrend.  Enjoy your leveling.

- Sam

Rules: Bent, not Broken

*** Disclaimer:  This post is about a guild related issue, and I believe both parties acted in their best interests; by that I mean, no one was wrong. ***

Yesterday, a request was made by a guild member to add a child of another guild member to the guild.  Our guild policy is to have everyone apply to the guild, even friends and family.  Our main reason for this particular rule is to prevent our guild from becoming a spam-invite guild, to weed out people that don’t fit our guild philosophy, and to provide information to all of our other members about the applicant.  When the request was made in gchat, I explained that we don’t invite anyone to the guild without an application.  The members response was that he “wasn’t going to make a 12 year old fill out an application.”

Our application is fairly simple, with a few questions about your character, and about why you want to join, etc.  The average 12 year old is more than capable of filling out the application; they can probably complete the task in less than 5 minutes.  How do I know what 12 year olds are capable of?  Well, for those of you who don’t know me personally, I am a teacher, and I teach students from ages 5-13.  Most, if not all of my students from age 10+ know almost as much about computers, email, and the Internet as I do; given that I both maintain a blog and a guild website, that’s saying a lot.  Besides, if they can play and understand WoW, they can handle a few easy questions.

After denying a request to ginvite the child without an application, the member pleaded his case through a whisper, and provided information as to why he was acting on behalf the parent.  The parent would have asked themselves, but they are ill, to the point that it is life threatening.  The member acting on his behalf is a good friend, and promised to watch after the child, a 12 year old boy.   I still told him that we would not invite him without an application, and that the officers had agreed that we do not make an exception to this policy.

I might seem rather cold-hearted after denying the request, but I assure you, I did not enjoy telling him no.  It’s a matter of principle; making exceptions to rules merely opens precedent for more trouble down the road.  If my sister decided to start playing today, I’d make her apply too.  As a group of officers we created a few simple rules that we refuse to break.  What I did do is offer is to bend them.  I offered to automatically accept the child into the guild, if an application was simply filled out.  I would have even gone so far as to accept an application written on his behalf by the guild member. 

The aftermath was that he and his wife left the guild shortly thereafter, and if I was in his shoes I would have done the same thing.  If at any point you’re in a guild and the philosophy of that guild doesn’t line up with yours, it’s time to abandon ship.  I hope they find somewhere that works out better for them, and I hope that those of you who do pray will join with me in praying for that child’s father.

- Sam

Kudos Blizzard

I am very impressed with Blizzard.  After picking up my collector’s edition, and grabbing some food yesterday, I headed home to install Wrath.  About 15 minutes after inserting the DVD, I was ready to play.  The game loaded flawlessly and I experienced no lag in Borean Tundra for the 6 hours I played.  If I forced myself, I could try to find something to complain about, like some of the respawn timers in certain areas, but realistically, they’re probably perfect the way they are. There were just too many people trying to complete them at the time.

 Samuel is in level 71 now, and well on his way to 72.  Rogue training for 71 was a new rank of Sap for 25g.  Yeah, 25g.  If you’re headed into Northrend broke, there’s a rude awakening for you.  I dropped at least 200g just training all of my professions plus their related recipes.  Of course there is a silver lining; money’s not that hard to come by. 

I’ll be leveling more over the weekend, and I’ll write about it then.  I have some good screen shots of my first adventures traveling to, and in Northrend.  If I’m not too busy leveling tonight, I may get those uploaded.

- Sam

Wrath Incoming and Actual Rogue Content

Wrath hits in less than 3 days at this point, and I hope everyone is ready.  I know I am.  I cannot wait to hop on that boat to Borean Tundra and start questing in Northrend (this time for real experience).

What this means for the readers of this little blog is some actual content about Rogues.  I haven’t really played my main a considerable amount since I relaunched this blog, and it seems sad since the title clearly reflects that I play a rogue as my main.  If you’ve come here because of Hunter / Paladin content, don’t worry, I love those toons and I’ll still be posting about them.  I haven’t had as much time to post recently as I’d like.  If I can get back to posting once a day, I’ll be able to provide the same amount of content about the classes I have as alts, and still post more about my Rogue.

- Sam

Paladin – Live DPS, Argent Dawn, and the Scourge Invasion

**Disclaimer**  I have not taken my paladin into Arena, as I am normally a tank on her.  Nothing in this post deals with, or attempts to deal with Ret Paladin Arena Viability.  This post simply states my observations in Warsong Gulch, Alterac Valley, and Karazhan.

As a Paladin, I have to admit that Retribution DPS was overpowered.  We’ve been nerfed and hotfixed severaltimes, and I wanted to know how that has affected our PvE DPS.  My true PvE test came in Karazhan, where I’ve been topping the damage meter since 3.0.2 came out (while off tanking Moroes and Netherspite).  But before we get to that, here are some PvP observations I had this weekend while I was farming for my Vindicator’s DPS Bracers.  In other related gearing news, I picked up an Arcanite Ripper, and Trollbane this weekend.

 

- PvP Observations -

Battlegrounds on a Ret Paladin are fun.  I ran Warsong six times and AV twice, one of which was a turtle.  Alliance usually is terrible at Warsong, but we split 3 with the Horde on Saturday.  I might add that on one of those wins I threw on tanking gear and successfully ran the flag twice.  I held my own against most classes, felt fairly balanced, except against mages.  I remember killing a mage twice.  I remember dying to them in excess of 20 times.  I noticed for the first time that arcane missiles, like drain life continues to follow you even if you leave line of sight.

Basically I found that if all of my abilities were ready to use, I had mana, I could stay in range, and nothing was used that could negate or heal through my damage, I could win any fight in about 10 seconds.  That being said, If any one of those things wasn’t the case, I couldn’t guarentee a victory, and often lost. 

 

- PvE Observations -

Recount Data – Karazhan 11/1/08

The above stats are from our Kara this weekend.  We’re loving the nerf with the 8k raid dps and the 1 hour 40 minute raid time.  Anabelle was DPS with the exception of Moroes, Netherspite, and the Skeletal Ushers before Opera.  The mage at #2 is geared as well, if not better than us, and took the blue beam on Netherspite.  Also note that at a solid #3 is our other Maintankadin.  Btw, we used less than 20 mana biscuits, and most of those were used to top our mana off from 70% or so.

I won’t lie.  Part of our success was in the group make up. I wish I had run a WWS to find out just how much my DPS was helped by the other 9 members: Prot Paladin, Feral Druid, Enhancement Shaman, a Hunter, Fire Mage, 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Holy priests.  As far as buffs for me, that’s pretty amazing.  What’s crazy is that we’ve run with 4 priests for two weeks in a row, and the only shackles you’ll find in our raid happen on the Skeletal Ushers before the Opera event.

Paladin DPS is still good, though not all of the fixes are in live at the moment.  Group makeup had a good deal to do with my damage, as did the fact that mana is still very much a non issue at the moment.  To be honest, I was 2% ahead of the mage before an infernal landed on my head ruining our of an enfeeble on Prince, so its entirely possible that even without the buffs I might have squeaked by on top.  Regardless, compared to the PvE Damage pre 3.0, I’m in a much better place now.  When dual specs come out, I’ll be going Prot / Ret and healing out of my Ret Spec with Holy gear as needed.

 

 - Argent Dawn & Scourge Invasion -

As of Saturday morning, Anabelle is exalted with the Argent Dawn, so half of my rep grind for the Argent Champion title is done.  In the process of grinding the rep, I was helping one of the guild’s officers run Stratholme for Baron’s Deathcharger, I got a couple thousand rep, and his warrior has an amazing looking mount.  I finished out the rest of my grind gathering Scourgestones while doing the Scourge Invasion events with the Necropoli.  In the process, we got my brother’s somewhat abandoned Rogue (sound familiar?) main 4 pieces of epic leather gear, I picked up 3 pieces of the gear, and the three trinkets.  My favorite of which is the trinket we call the Pocket Paladin, or Pockadin for short.  The best part is that he bubble Hearths when he leaves.  Sorry for the terribad picture, I should have zoomed in.

-Sam