Rising Through Struggle, Arena Changes

As a rogue who is a diehard fan of PVP and arena both, I find that with each week brings peaks and valleys to my arena career. Now I know that I’m no professional myself, but I take arena seriously. When I group up with my partner and we get into the spirit of arena, there really are no interruptions. To me arena is a constant learning experience whether its learning how a specific team works against you or learning the counter that you need against certain match ups. My partner and I try and always learn something from arena and the different comps we face each day. A lot of times many people will rely on an alternate website to find strategies and plans for what to do against specific set ups. I try to stay away from this because in all reality there isn’t one way of defeating a specific set up. I find that most of the time when I’m in an arena I subconsciously take mental notes on what a team will do and when, as well as how my partner and I must counter act the opposing teams moves.

A Little History

When Wrath of the Lich King came out, an awesome day IMO, it brought new arenas and new strategies to go with them. As a rogue who has seen many changes in the arena system and overall PVP, I find that the new arena ranking system is very flawed at the moment. It has become apparent that there really is no specific way or equation that is in use to determine how many points a team will win or lose at any given rank in arena. From what I can see, the only obvious characteristic that is shown by the point system is that it works on a sort of momentum principle. This meaning that with each win comes more points, the same can be said with losses.

As a rouge who runs a set up of nothing more than a mage friend that happens to be in the same guild (Malice of Haomarush) I am often stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to a wide spread question among rogues…PVE or PVP gear? I have gone about this question many different ways in my experience however, it is how you as a rogue play. That is what arena is mostly about…play style, and how you work as a team. Different strategies call for different types of gear. For instance, if you run a more burst oriented team such as mage rogue you should lean more towards PVE gear, for this will allow you to gain the extra attack power and critical strike chance to allow your burst damage to be affective. Since the expansion, resilience is in a sense…BROKE!!! The whole idea behind resilience is to give everyone with it a higher survivability rate against opponents. When introduced in BC it was a glorious thing that everyone was going crazy over. In times more recent however, resilience has played a very miniscule part in arena teams everywhere. This is especially true with rogues on 2 DPS 2’s teams. With reduced ratings on resilience and no ability to ensure our survival for a short time, we find as a class that the extra AP and crit are a far better choice when partnering with another DPS class in a 2’s match up simply because the burst damage gained is far superior to survivability. I typically never go into an arena match with little more than 250 resilience at the most, this is only because I try to keep a benchmark health of >20k

This brings me back to a question I have received from many friends and just folks I’ve seen on my server before…Why a mage??? And the answer to this is a fairly simple one…old habits die hard. Back in the days of BC, I ran many different teams just trying to find my place in the world of arena and PVP in general. As I progressed and improved upon my skills in the arena and BG, my friends noticed that I was actually fairly talented when it came to PVP on my rogue. With this little extra confidence boost, I went and looked for some sort of starting point as to which I could get a feel for the arena world, it was then that I found my idol….Akrios (now Akrioss, his website is http://www.roguerogue.com/). It was also because of him that I began running a mage rogue set up. When run correctly, mage/rogue is nearly unbeatable. But that’s just it, it has to be run correctly in order for it to be effective.

There are many teams that can be seen played wrong yet still win just because of the makeup of the team. Mage/Rogue is most surely not one of these teams, it takes more finesse and skill, in my opinion, to run this team properly. A typical arena match for my partner and I runs just like every other Mage/Rogue team would approach an arena, CC the healer and burst down the other DPS, or in some cases find the weaker of the 2 DPS classes that you are up against should it be a 2 DPS team. Now I know that not everyone approaches a match exactly alike, however it is all once again just how well you and your partner mesh together as teammates and as friends, as well as personal skill should your match ever become a 1v2 battle with one opposing DPS being low on health of course.

All in all, the new and revised arena system is still in great need of improvement. I feel that with time issues such as resilience scaling and point system flaws will be fixed, however this will all take time. As with all great things that come in time, it will be a great path of trial and error on behalf of Blizzard.

Roll with the punches, thaboush OUT!!

The Class That Stood Still

For the past week or so my partner and I have slowly yet surely been rising rank by rank in our battle groups 2's arena bracket. Yet I find that no matter how many games we win there are almost 2-3 lost games to match them. It is becoming more and more apparent with each patch that the rogue class is a never changing class. Yes in Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) we as a class got several new abilities, however none of which are of any use in the most widespread use of a rogue...Player VS. Player (PVP). It seems as though every time Blizz tries to make the game a little more interesting for rogues as a class, they seem to crash and burn hopelessly into an endless abyss of broken talents and worthless abilities.

Patch 3.0.9

• Rogues
  • Hunger for Blood (Assassination): Now increases damage 5% per stack, (up from 3%.)
  • Mind Numbing Poison now reduces cast time by 30%, down from 60%.
  • Mutilate damage will now do 20% increased damage against poisoned targets, down from 50%.
  • Slice and Dice (Rank 2): This ability now increases melee attack speed by 40%, up from 30%.

Patch 3.1.0

• Deadly Poison: The amount of damage this poison generates from the rogue’s attack power has been increased from 8% per application to 12%.
• Deadly Throw: Missile speed increased.
• Instant Poison: Redesigned to have its chance to be applied based on the speed of the weapon (frequency-based).
• Shiv: This ability can no longer generate a critical strike, and the poisons it applies cannot be critical strikes either.
• Tricks of the Trade: Will now begin following the first damaging attack.
• Wound Poison: Redesigned to have its chance to be applied based on the speed of the weapon (frequency-based).
• Talents
  • Assassination
    • Hunger For Blood: No longer stacks. Damage bonus changed to 15% for a single application. Requires a bleed effect active on the rogue’s target. No longer removes bleeds from the rogue. Now costs 15 energy and lasts for 60 seconds.
    • Master Poisoner: Now also increases the bonus to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 15/30/45%.
  • Combat
    • Adrenaline Rush cool down reduced to 3 minutes.
    • Killing Spree: Now also increases all damage done by the rogue while active by 20%.
    • Savage Combat improved to 2/4% increased damage against poisoned targets.
    • Lightning Reflexes reduced to 3 ranks for 2/4/6% dodge and 4/7/10% melee haste.
  • Subtlety
    • Shadow Dance now opens a new action bar when used.
    • Sinister Calling: The damage bonus to Backstab and Hemorrhage is now 2/4/6/8/10%, up from 1/2/3/4/5%

Patch 3.1.3

Rogues

• Overkill: Talent redesigned. Now increases energy regeneration by 30% while stealthed, and for 20 seconds after breaking stealth.

As stated previously, no matter how Blizz tries to change the way our class is played from a PVP/PVE stand point, they have yet to improve upon how we function as a class in both PVE and PVP situations alike.  

With the most recent change to our design (Overkill Nerf) we lost our main form of damage output, which is burst damage.  The whole idea behind the original overkill was to allow for more opening burst damage on an opponent.  If our main priority in an arena match was to focus solely on one target and constantly dps him, then the recent changes to Overkill would be completely and unquestionably acceptable.  However, this is most definitely not the case.

With the old Overkill, rogues gained an extra 25 energy that could be put forth in another burst attack, not to mention another possible yet probable 25 energy gained from Relentless Strikes talent, all of which only allows us to scale with other classes that deserve a rather large nerf bomb.

With the “new and improved Overkill” FFS… we merely gain a miniscule DPS boost in single target PVE situations.  Might I add that this only affects how we DPS in single target situations. 

When it comes down to it, Blizz has given the shaft to the Rogue class ever since Burning Crusade came out over 2 years ago.  After the first expansion came out with new 41 talent point trees (i.ex.. Mutilate, Shadow step and Surprise Attacks) they never changed anything majorly in our abilities as rogues to allow us an advantage in a pvp situation.  Now I understand that giving one class an advantage over another would just be ridiculous and would cause a massive drop in the average amount of players.  However, I find it redundant to continuously change a class to better itself in situations and in some cases, reduce an ability to soften the rough edges of encounters to allow for some fair game play. 

After BC introduced millions of players to the world of Arena, we found ourselves searching and calculating what spec would mesh best with our partners and against certain comps.  Though many people disliked it, there was only one reliable and affective spec to use in any arena situation, this was the Subtlety spec.  This is a topic for another post so I will end this here. XD

Face it, when it came right down to it, we only had one affective spec for PVE encounters…Combat.  Surprise Attacks practically made the spec, sure imp Slice and Dice was amazing to have but it would have been nothing had finishers not been  affective.  Since BC, rogues have been awaiting a long overdue change to the line up of effective and useful abilities to add to our arsenal.  Our rotations typically consisted of Sinister Strike, SND, SS and Rupture.  With the introduction of WoTLK brought very minute changes to our skills and our rotations.  The only useful ability we received from WoTLK is Tricks of the Trade (TOT), and in very few cases…Fan of Knives (FOK).  Neither of these abilities allowed us to change how rogues are viewed in PVE and PVP encounters. 

As we all know, rogues are viewed as one of THE most over powered PVP classes in the game.  This is most definitely not the case, when really broken down into a series of moves you’ll find that if something goes wrong in an encounter, we are basically fucked in many ways.  The fact that we have abilities that serve no purpose in either PVP nor PVE encounters is absolutely a waste of memory on my laptop.  If Blizz is going to try and actually change the game for the Rogue class in a positive way, then I believe they should begin by making some useful 51 point talents.

Shadow Dance is probably the most useful 51 point talent that WoTLK has to offer to our class.  Albeit it is in a sense just making abilities that require stealth available out of stealth for a matter of a few seconds.  This is only enabling us to remember how broken vanish is…yet another story for another day.  Our class is in need of something new that Blizz has to offer us in order to change the way people view rogues. 

Overall, our class is in a DIRE need of something to switch up the way we view the game that we have come to love so much.  Allowing us to gain new and useful abilities would open up numerous possibilities as to how people go about playing one of the best classes to roll in the World of Warcraft.

Roll with the punches, thaboush OUT!!

 

WoW vs. RL

So this is my first post on my blog, and I've been trying to think of a worth while topic. I thought that, being my first post, it would only be appropriate to express my views on the incorporation of WoW, World of Warcraft, (or any video game) into an average high school students (does not exclude people not in high school) life.

As an avid WoW player I typically spend most of my weekends on my laptop, a custom built Nspire with Intel Core2Duo....another story for another day. As I was saying, my weekends, on average, consist of mainly myself and my friends who do play WoW spending time together; whether it be raiding, pvp'ing or just plain hanging out with each other. As for the friends who don't play WoW, well they spend most of their time with us making fun of those who do play. However, they do occasionally comment on how aesthetically pleasing the game (when set on ultra for video settings) is to them. Hell, even the people who have left WoW in the past seem to still have and interest in watching my friends and I play.

I typically like to think of myself as a casually hardcore WoW player, from raiding to PvP, I like to be the best at what I'm doing at any given moment. This means being first in DPS and getting to the highest rank in 2's arena, which is quite possibly at its all time low on the broke scale, oops another tangent... As I was saying, as with all things, being the best at what you do takes time and dedication. This is where the incorporation of WoW and RL, real life, comes into play. I find that trying to simply add in a little pinch of WoW into my daily life simply is not enough for my liking. Now for most people getting on WoW a few times a week and raiding 25 Naxx is enough. This is not true in my case, I see WoW as a way to forget about the worries of everyday life and just get away for a while. For me, WoW is a way to prove myself in ways that I might not be able to in RL. I see it as an opportunity to improve and try to become the best at what it is that I like doing. The same can be said about me in RL, I try to improve upon what I can already do and become the best that I can achieve.

Back to the point, life is a concoction of different elements and people mixed together in one big boiling pot, my elements are; WoW, school, music and the real money maker...work. I find that the people I decide to be around effect my elements greatly whether its music, school or WoW. Being the best, as I stated earlier, takes dedication and time. I don't know about you but as for me, I find that trying to merge RL with WoW isn't always the simplest of tasks. Finding time between boss kills and arena matches to do homework and studying is always a chore for me. I find myself trying to get everything out of the way as soon as I make my glorious yet unsatisfying trip from school to my home. This allows me to have time to myself and get away from people that can easily agitate me, as well as make the most of my time with friends. To me life is about doing what you enjoy while from time to time doing the necessary things that you may not enjoy. What I enjoy doing is relaxing and playing WoW for a little while everyday, if I were to stop doing this yes I could probably find something else to take its place. However, I choose to play WoW because it is something that allows me to learn more about myself and the friends that I play with.

The integration of WoW into RL is not always the easiest. It is, however, the one thing that I can do by myself or with friends, which is why I choose to play WoW instead of getting into only God knows what else. It keeps me from doing things that I'll end up regretting later on, as well as keeps life fun and bearable.

Roll with the punches, thaboush OUT!!