Achievement frenzy

Did your guild catch the fever too?

Most of my guildies spent the entire night chasing silly achievements like exploring all of Arathi Highlands or completing AQ20 (they 4-manned it, I believe). I think I saw Onyxia die three times over a period of a couple of hours too.

I aimed for something a little more out of the ordinary: I went to SSC and I fished Lurker. Then I went to Stormwind to do some more fishing and I was planning on clearing the Stockades while I was there but I got badly pwned by the guards (now level 75, darn you Blizzard) so I had to give up.

Thirty days

That's the time it took me in the Wrath of the Lich King beta to reach 80. Each level takes between six and eight hours, so 70 hours of play in 30 days, which gives about 2 hours every day... ... It felt like very casual leveling but the numbers seem to say otherwise.

Anyway.

Very enjoyable overall. Outland leveling was already fun and WOTLK is even better.

The quests are even more streamlined now: you reach a new zone, you have one or two new quests, you turn them in and new ones open, usually grouped at the same location. Phasing allows for some interesting variations (mostly seeing the landscape change as the storyline progresses) and there are some new types of quests involving various devices and vehicles that break the kill/gather monotony.

All the zones are beautiful and a few of them got me gasping, and I don't get easily impressed by graphic candy.

Every 2-3 levels, something new happens that motivates you to push further: at 72-73, you will do the epic Death Gate quest, at 74 you reach Dalaran, at 77 you can fly again, and at 80, you beat the game and the credits roll.

Ok, maybe not.

I did a short 10-man earlier in the Obsidian Temple, which gave me a short, albeit thrilling, glimpse into raiding at 80. It definitely feels quite new with all the new animations, sounds and abilities that everybody has (for example, I was receiving an insane amount of HOTs). This particular instance is clearly aimed at giving cheap Badges of Heroism to players, but it was short and sweet.

I'm not quite sure what I want to do now or even if I want to keep playing the beta or simply wait until the game ships. This is usually the time when you need to get organized and start running 5 or 10-man and also work on leveling your main professions (along with cooking, which is a bit painful right now) but I don't feel I'll have the energy to do this on the beta.

Invisible stats

Some of the items I received recently make me scratch my head:

• The Savage Choker (Halazzi).
  
• Bladeangel's Money Belt (Nalorakk).
  
• Boots of Effortless Striking (Lurker).
  
• Gloves of Searing Grip (Al'ar).
  

These four items are ilevel 128 and they replaced items of 115 value (mostly Karazhan stuff).

The problem is that despite their higher ilevel, equipping these pieces have made my Hit Rating and my AP drop substantially (hit went down from 251 to 193... ouch), and for Rogues, these stats are usually our measuring stick, so I'm guessing they actually offer bonuses in the form of "invisible" stats.

For example, the Choker improves my Haste Rating by 25. My attempts to find some meaningful (i.e. Elitist Jerks or Shadow Panther) explanations of why this stat is important have not been very successful, and as far as I can tell, Haste Rating cannot even be seen on my Character panel.

The Money Belt ignores 77 of my opponent's armor, which doesn't seem very significant, but I guess considering the number of attacks that a Rogue does, it probably adds up and translates into a reasonable increase of DPS (and my cloak already ignores 112 armor, so that's 188 armor ignored total).

So I pulled my faithful Rogue DPS spreadsheet, entered the new information and I started crunching a few numbers. Here are the results.

First, here are the abbreviations I'll be using for this study:

1. The Savage Choker (ilevel 128, increases Haste Rating)
   
2. Worgen's Claw Necklace (ilevel 115)
   
   
3. Gloves of the Searing Grip (ilevel 128, increases Expertise)
   
4. Netherblade Gloves (ilevel 120)
   
   
5. Bladeangel's Money Belt (ilevel 128, ignores opponent's armor)
   
6. Primalstrike Belt (ilevel 115)
   
   
7. Boots of Effortless Striking (ilevel 128).
   
8. Edgewalker's Long Boots (ilevel 115)

The baseline combination is 1357 (maximized ilevel) and the spreadsheet gives me a DPS of 737, which sounds a bit low compared to my observed DPS in raids, but it doesn't matter since I just want to compare configurations. In the combinations below, keep in mind that odd numbers correspond to an ilevel 128 item and even numbers represent a lower ilevel.

Here are the DPS values obtained for combinations of these pieces (sorry for the big vertical space, but it's blogger being a pest):

Combination	Variation in DPS
1357	0
1457	-4
2357	+2
2457	-1
1367	-6
1467	-10
2367	-3
2467	-8
1358	+6
1458	+1
2358	+8
2458	+4
1368	-1
1468	-5
2368	+2
2468	-2

The surprise is that the Worgen neck piece seems to improve DPS whenever it's used instead of the Savage Choker, despite it being ilevel 128. The rest of the data seems to confirm that for gloves and belt, the increase in ilevel does translate into an increase of DPS, although it's very slight. The worst case scenario (-10 DPS) means that you will be hitting a boss for 4800 less damage over an eight minute fight. Considering these bosses have 4+ million hit points, it doesn't seem to be very significant.

The first clear conclusion of this study is that the Worgen Claw Necklace and the Edgewalker's Long Boots (both ilevel 115) are better than their ilevel 128 counterparts: they increase DPS in every combination where they are used. For the other two slot pieces, higher ilevel translates into higher DPS, which gives me the answer that I was looking for: the best combination is seems to be 2358 (two ilevel 128 and two ilevel 115).

Weapon skills need to die

My warrior is leveling nicely and I'm having a reasonable amount of fun with it. By reasonable, I mean that the grind is not too painful, but the Warrior class definitely doesn't have any of the various "oomphes" that other classes have when they level (Rogue: "I ripped this clothie mob in 5 seconds", Mage: "Look how I take down 80% of this mob's health before it can even reach me", Lock: "Watch me solo an elite 4 levels above me", etc...).

No such achievement for a warrior: you just charge, whack whack whack, see the mob's health drop slowly and marvel at the occasional crit, and then do it again. I suspect leveling a paladin is equally non-eventful.

I leveled Arms until 41 with the Warrior quest weapon (very nice) and I then respecced Fury and I am currently double wielding two blue weapons and waiting until level 51 where the AV reward should grant me another uberleetwtfbbq two-hander.

A blue axe dropped for me in ZF last night. "Sweet", I thought when I saw it, "Nice axe! Oh... no... an axe".

I have nothing against axes in particular, it's just that at 47, I never used one yet, so my axe skill is at 0. Which means, it's time for the stupid weapon skill up dance.

So here I go, picking on the lowest level mobs possible (still around 45 where I am currently grinding), pop on Defensive Stance with a shield (have to last as long as possible), auto-swing the axe, occasionally use an ability that might prolong the fight (Demoralizing Shout or similar), and when my health has dropped significantly, Piercing Howl and run like a little girl. Bandage. Repeat.

Yawn.

Weapon skilling up is this thing that you either never notice (typically when you just leveled and your cap is now 5 higher, but the increase in miss rate is hardly noticeable until you cap it again) or just a mind-numbing process that can be done while browsing the web. I wish Blizzard would remove it altogether, I can't see any point in this drudgery any more, especially since they keep adding new stats that are more interesting to analyze and work on (weapon expertise comes to mind).

Or is there something I'm missing?

Tales of a leveling warrior

I've been working on my Warrior for about a week now and it's been an interesting experience.

He's now level 27 and as I was hoping, he's already run a lot of instances. Within the past few days, I have received spontaneous whispers to run WC, BFD, SFK and RFD, which I was all too happy to accept. I don't know about you, but this never happened to me on any other character except maybe my Priest (but that was long ago: now that Shamans and Druids have had their healing power buffed quite a bit, Priests are no longer the exclusive healers of way back then).

I make a point of never turning down an offer to run an instance since 1) it's good practice for tanking and 2) the experience is too good to pass up, even with the new accelerated xp.

As for leveling speed, the boost is definitely noticeable. I'm still following Joana's powerleveling guide but I now have the added comfort of being able to skip quite a few quests whenever I feel like it (which is especially convenient for these elite quests that Joana solo'ed with his hunter but which cannot realistically be done with any other class except for a Lock). Add instance runs to the picture and I'm leveling so fast it doesn't even feel like a grind any more.

It's quite funny to see that even without trying, my Warrior is already decked up in blues to the point that I've wondered about hitting the BG as a true twink, but then I realized I would have to run... ohnoes.

Can't wait to get this guy to Outland.

Blizzard backstabs Rogues... again

More changes are coming up for Rogues in the next patch...

• Hemorrhage: This ability now correctly does additional damage when its debuff has already been applied.
• Preparation now resets the cooldown of Shadowstep and no longer resets the cooldown of Adrenaline Rush.
• Shadowstep now adds a 3 second, 70% movement speed increase.
• Sinister Calling now also increases the percentage damage bonus of Hemorrhage and Backstab by 2/4/6/8/10%.

I'm getting increasingly irritated by the way Blizzard keeps changing their mind about Rogues. Just when a spec is finally being acknowledged as being decently powerful for the Arena ("HARP": Hemo, Adrenaline Rush and Preparation), Blizzard decides that the very popularity of this build was not intended and changes it... again.

From their own admission, they want the entire Subtlety tree to become viable, and they didn't like the fact that players decided to only go as far as Hemorrhage and stop there to pick damages in other trees that, you know, actually do damage.

I don't understand this logic at all.

Yes, the Subtlety tree has long been ignored and is universally considered inferior to Combat and Assassination, and it does sadden me a bit since one of the main traits of a Rogue *is* to be subtle, but I think it's impossible to reconcile this goal with the expectation that a Rogue is first and foremost a very strong DPS class. Rogues are expected to deal a lot of damage, and buffing stealth or speeding up our mobility is not going to help us at all in raid and not that much in the Arena.

Also, while I understand the important of constantly rebalancing the classes as months go by to keep everyone interested, it seems to me Arena Rogues are given quite a run around by Blizzard. Is there any other class that has had to relearn from scratch the way they fight in the Arena from one patch to the other?

I love my Rogue, but Blizzard is making me hate the class more every day.

Rogue openers in the Arena

Since I haven't been able to find anything discussing in details how to open a fight as a Rogue in the Arena, I thought I'd post a few thoughts on the subject.

As an AR/Prep/Hemo Rogue, I basically have a choice between three (most of the time, two) openers: 1) Sap, 2) Ambush, 3) Garrote and 4) Cheap Shot.

Sap

Sap seems to be the best way to open because you remain stealthed and it disables your opponent for a few seconds. When sapped, a good player will first try to assess the situation of his other teammates, and if the fight hasn't started yet, they are better off just "eating" the sap (not doing anything about it) than trinketing out of it (a good way to see if the player is experienced is to see if they trinket out of it right away). With the Dirty Trick talent, the Sap range is greatly extended so it's definitely worth a shot.

The best use of Sap in my experience is when you happen to walk past a stealthed target. Since he's most likely seeing you as well then, you have to be faster and sap him as soon as you hear the "swooshing sound" of a stealthed target walking near you. You absolutely need to resist the urge to Cheap Shot and hit Sap instead, so while you are stealthed, you should always keep your fingers on both keys and be ready to hit the right one (they are mapped to 1 and 2 on my Bongos bars).

Unfortunately, Sap is not an option most of the time since your opponents will be in combat, which leads me to your second option.

Ambush

Ambush deals some reasonable damage and I've seen it crit in the 1700-1900 range with my current gear. However, it requires you to be behind your target and to have a dagger in main hand, so I configured Outfitter to switch to Malchazeen when I'm stealthed but back to Merciless swords otherwise.

Overall, the only times I've ever used Ambush on a target is when they were very low on health, but it's a very rare occurrence (how often do you happen to be stealthed and one of your opponents is almost dead?). And even so, I still think that Cheap Shot is a safer move since you can probably deal the same amount of damage on a Cheap Shot target with your regular attacks (especially if the rest of your team is also focus firing them).

(Update: Since switching weapons triggers the global cooldown and that Ambush doesn't seem to be very useful in the Arena, I'll probably get rid of the weapon switching, stick to swords everywhere and never use Ambush in the Arena again. Garrote seems to be a better alternative)

Garrote

Garrote is probably better than Ambush as an opener because it will silence casters for a few seconds and it also scales with AP. With a few well-timed Garrote/CheapShot/Kick and Gouge, you can silence a casters for quite a while.

Cheap Shot

This leaves us with Cheap Shot, which is, I believe, what you should be using most of the time as your opener. Crowd control is extremely important in the Arena, more so than the burst damage that you can gain with Ambush. On top of that, Cheap Shot grants you two combo points and doesn't have any positional requirements.

In the next post, I'll discuss the next phase of the fight: what rotation you should use in order to inflict as much burst damage on your target as possible in the early phase of the fight.