Is it too early to speculate on a Cataclysm raid spec? Probably. Are these trees finalized yet? Probably Not. Is Blizzard going to care what I think they should do to change these new Cataclysm trees? Nope. Am I going to write this post anyways? Yep

Take a look at the initial Rogue talent tree and mastery bonuses here; Wowhead Talent Calculator.

***I have a couple specs linked in this post. They are currently not working on the wowhead site. Some talents look like they’ve change since this was posted.***

Right off the bat you’re going to notice one thing about the assassination tree. Out of the first 5 talent points you use, 2 are completely wasted. For end game raiding neither Improved Eviscerate or Deadly Momentum have any use, damage or survivability. Unless by some kind of crazy turn of events Eviscerate becomes the new finisher for Mutilate. Combat on the other-hand will definitely use the assassination tree to there advantage by speccing possibly 7 talent points deep as they gain big buffs from the tree.

What we lose from the current end game spec. 51/18/2
Lightning Reflexes. Too far into the combat tree to get too. Less haste meaning less white damage and energy regeneration.
Dual Wield Specialization. Mastery bonus for combat.
Quick Recovery. As of right now we lose the energy refund from missed attacks on this ability. Not sure why, but I don’t think this is OPed and hopefully will be added back.
Hunger for Blood. This has been replaced by Vendetta and adds another cooldown to the Mutilate rotation.

What we gain.
Vendetta is the replacement for Hunger for Blood.
Quick Recovery and Fleet Footed are now in the same talent, Quickening, so we get them both and no longer have to choose. This adds some great survivability to rogues.
Camouflage. Not sure if this one will make the cut but it’s another speed buff and let’s us get to the boss faster stealthed in order to maximize Overkill. It’s also the only viable place to spend talent points, in the Subtlety tree, to get to Opportunity with a mutilate build.
Opportunity. Just a straight 10% damage buff, per talent point(max 3) to Mutilate. This talent was used in the old Mutilate with Rupture spec.
Coldblood. Now also grants 20 energy and makes this CD much more useful then its Wrath counterpart.

These trees will change as the beta moves along. I do believe that the first row of talents for assassination will be changed to help end game a little more by adding a new talent or adding an additional benefit to one of the current choices. Moving Improved Eviscerate to the Combat tree would be the most effective. Trading this with Precision would be awesome!

The next thing that jumps out at me is the lack of good places to spend talent points in the combat tree after the first tier. It would seem that as of right now to maximize dps your ideal spec would be 31/2/8. Bad thing about this is we take a hit in our hit. Only providing 4% hit instead of 6%. Blizzard has stated that they would like to make things such as the hit cap harder to get too. If this is the case the 6% may end up being more important, and so the spec may be more 31/3/7.

Last thing I want to talk about is Improved Expose Armor. What an awesome talent. Is it warranted to spec into? If your guild is into some hardcore progression, every deep counts and you have no warrior then yes this talent becomes pretty important. The other good thing is you wouldn’t sacrifice good dps talents from the tree to get it. Instead you would probably trade Quickening for it.

It would appear that Blizz has figured out a way to accomplish the goal of having talent points that are movable and up to the discretion of each individual player. This will end up being a great tool for players to utilize depending on what content they’re working on, what the raid makeup looks like and personal preference. It’s a surprisingly refreshing change from the “you have to spec this way to do max dps”. Zarhym made it perfectly clear that some trees and classes still needed some work. He said Assassination Rogues were one of them. Not sure how big the changes will be but as of right now I love the look of it. Like I mentioned earlier the only thing I would like to see changed is the removal of Improved Eviscerate from the Assassination tree.

For a Mutilate Rogue the goal is to keep your envenom buff up 100% of the time. Since this goal is downright impossible, your next goal is to keep it up for as long as you can. The idea is after you Envenom and then get 4 or 5 combo points, you check to see if your Envenom buff is still active. If it’s not your just going to hit Envenom when available. If there is time left on it you should wait until it is about to drop or has just dropped to Envenom again. By doing this you are also passively energy pooling. Saving your energy so during your next Envenom buff you can get your CP’s up as soon as possible with a couple quick mutilates. If you get in a good cycle with this you can keep the buff up for a good long while.

I posted a video that was my first true attempt at this idea. Watch closely my Combo Points and Energy Bar directly above my action bar. Also keep an eye on my RoguePowerBars on the right side of the screen for the Envenom buff. Old habits kept creeping in throughout the fight as I still clipped my envenom buff multiple times. But a couple of times I was really able to get some good sequences off where I was able to keep the envenom buff for about 20secs with minimal clipping.

I wasn’t able to get a log on this fight. But I did get a combat log on Festergut directly after this one. In an attempt last week my envenom buff was up 34% of the fight. After this concept I was hitting 54% on the envenom buff. Which means that I had 20% of extra time where Instant Poison had an improved proccing rate.

If you search for this topic on google, your going to find lots of forum posts that try to argue that this is just not worth it. IMO since auto attacks and Instant poison are your main two damage dealers why would you not want to use the Envenom buff to your advantage instead of hindering it?

On a side note, If you have never seen World of Logs it is an amazing site. Anyone from your group with an account and knowledge of how to do it can post combat logs. I have no idea how to do this but another person in guild posts them for us. If no one in your guild posts logs I suggest going and checking another guilds logs just to see the insane amount of imformation collected from these combat logs.

Chase Christian from Wow.com lays it all out for us. He also makes some points as to why we may see Combat leave rupture out of their rotation also. Rupture may be to little to late for this expansion.

On a side note, ran the new and improved Culling of Stratholme yesterday. And…well…it’s new and improved. No more fighting over who’s going to be getting crates. You’re instantly transported into the fight. No RP at all!!

Alright so let’s go down the list;

Mutilate – I love this add-on because it lets me focus on what’s going on around me so I can “Get out of the fire stupid”. Basically this is an ever changing add-on on my screen that tells me which ability I should be doing next. Whether my Slice and Dice is about to drop and I need to Envenom, or Hunger for Blood is about to drop and I need a Rupture to reapply it. It also tells me when my vanish and tricks of the trade abilities are ready to be used. It basically makes an easy spec, even easier.

CT Viewport – This add-on adds the black bar to the bottom of my screen. Adds the ability to change the game’s viewport. This modifies the size of the rendered world, so that you can place UI elements outside of it. Use /viewport to bring up the window.

Bartender4 – This has been a staple for me ever since I used SpartanUI. It’s just so easy to configure.

Pitbull Unit Frames – Honestly, this add-on is good but it doesn’t do much on my screen except player, player’s target, target’s target and focus.

DHUD3 – I love this add-on. I have been leveling a druid lately and when I first started I was having trouble keeping up with my health and the health of mobs before I realized how dependent I had become on having a health bar right next to my toon. It’s higly configurable and also displays your combo points as large or small as you want them.

RoguePowerBars – Great add-on configured right out of the box to include most all of the Rogue buffs and debuffs. So find a good place to put this on your screen and go!

Grid2 – What?! A rogue using grid? What the hell for? I love the simplicity of this addon, and I find it real helpful when my focus target dies and I’m trying to find someone else to Tricks. It can also display all members of the party without cluttering the left side of the screen like the default UI or Pitbull.

AZCastbar – This is a simple addon for displaying cast bars. I have a target cast bar above the DHUD3 and a player cast bar below the mutilate addon.

So that’s it. My UI. I’ve been running this for sometime now and I have gotten used to the sometime cluttered screen, but I have no problem finding anything here.

Azure Shadows is also doing a couple of posts on their UI. Check it out!

Expose Armor is one of those abilities that many Rogues forget they possess. Well at least I did until we got called out on vent for it the other night. For the most part it’s pretty rare that you’re running in a group without a Warrior, or that it’s truely neccesary to waste your time putting the debuff on. But in ICC as you race enrage timers, try to shorten phases and just try to get that last boss down you’ve been wiping on over and over, Expose Armor/Sunder Armor are a must.

Take a good look at every raid group you join and make sure if you don’t have a Warrior, slide Expose Armor into your rotation. I was the lucky one to be chosen for “Bitch Duty” last night, and was surprised about the lack of DPS I lost by adding EA to my rotation. Warrior tanks have Sunder Armor as part of their rotation on every boss. Rogues have to work a little bit more for theirs as you want maximum uptime without letting a slice and dice drop. Since Rupture is no longer part of the Mutilate rotation I just slid EA onto the hotbar and used it as if it was a Rupture. Most of the time I was able to get two Envenoms off for every one Expose Armor, all of which at 4 or 5 combo points.

This is just another way Rogue’s can add utility to a raid. Unfortunately by adding Expose Armor to your rotation you may not be topping the meters, but you’ll be doing yourself and your raid group a big favor.

It seems like such a simple sentence of blue text. But it’s been blown up and the Forums and Blogging community are a buzz yet again. Ahh Rogue Speculation. It’s so fun to watch. Everyone’s waiting to hear what the best spec is for this patch. Here’s a couple links to the forums that have good discussions going on;

Elitist Jerks
Wowhead
MMO Champion

No one really knows for sure which Rogue spec is going to top the DPS meters. Not until the patch is final. But one thing is for sure the two button mutilate build we enjoyed for a couple months is in jeopardy as Blizz tries to revive Rupture.

Here are the three major unanswered questions for Rogues so far;

1)Combat vs. Mutilate – This has been the back and forth spec battle over the past two patches. Mutilate with this patch loses nothing and has possible gains. But does Combat gain enough with a Rupture finisher as opposed to the normal Eviscerate finisher to get back to the top?
2)Mutilate Haste vs. Crit – Ruptureless Mutilate focuses on Haste. Mutilate w/ Rupture would focus on crit. What would we do with all this haste we’ve been gemming for? Would we focus on AP?
3)Glyph – Tricks of the Trade vs. Rupture – Basically this is the one thing I see most people talking about on the forums. The argument is that although adding a glyphed Rupture to your rotation may raise your DPS you might be losing out on raid wide DPS by not using a glyphed Tricks of the Trade on every cooldown. This is a viable argument and honestly this will probably be the most contested point to TotT vs. Rupture. How many Rogues would see a decrease in their personal DPS and want to sacrifice that DPS for the good of the raid group?
We all wait with bated breath for EJ to release their ever so popular spreadsheet and put an end to this speculation.

O yea and subtlety is getting some buffs…*snickers*

Keep up with the latest PTR patch notes here!

You may consider combat to have all the cooldowns for the Rogue class, and for the most part you’d be right. But Mutilate and the Rogue class in general do provide some other options for CD’s that some people don’t consider.

Tricks of the Trade should be considered a CD that is popped whenever it is available. Even if your not getting the two piece tier 10 set bonus (Adding 15 energy instead of using 15 energy) it’s still going to benefit the group for you to throw this on the second highest melée DPS in the group. Again this won’t benefit you directly unless you are wearing two tier 10 pieces but it will benefit the group by adding 15% damage to a melée DPSer of your choice.

Vanish is one CD I think alot of Mutilate Rogues forget about. Vanish is great as it’s an instant aggro dump, let’s you throw an extra bleed effect on a boss with Garrote and the major benefit is the Overkill buff which increases energy regeneration by 30% while stealthed, and for 20 seconds after breaking stealth. Your initial burst damage on a boss is made possible by the overkill buff and Mutilate gets a way to do that again in the middle or end of a fight.

The last one that I use and I think most Rogues have retired is Thistle Tea. Ah yes, the once useful thistle tea. When you get to the end of a boss fight every tick of energy is important. Why not a free 20 energy boost. I keep a couple of these on me at all times just for the occasion at the end of a fight where I can use it.

On alot of these fights I’m using my CD’s as soon as I’m into my rotaion because on a fight like Saurfang you’ll be able to use these multiple times. But when you hear those words come out of your raid leaders mouth you’ll be ready for them!

Any CD’s I missed?

Lich King-10: Stormfury, Black Blade of the Betrayer: Armor penetration replaced with expertise.

Man I am tired of seeing ArP. Let’s see some of these changes trickle down to other ICC drops to get some more hit and expertise on Rogue gear!

This is getting redundant. But the new wing of ICC, Plagueworks, opened last week and I’m sick of seeing Armor Penetration.  Only counting new Rogue ICC and Frost gear you have 10 items with ArP and no expertise or hit.  And that’s only counting 251 gear!  You can almost hard cap yourself in ArP and never even know it.

Here are the four items I could find at their lowest level with expertise;

Shawl of Nerubian Silk Drop ICC10

Shadowblade Legplates Vendor

Shadow Seekers Tunic Vendor

Footpads of Impending Death Leathercrafter

Because these are the only four pieces with expertise (one of which would be very expensive to craft) I’m having to hold off on other big upgrades to save frost emblems for the two pieces of emblem gear. Each of which will set you back 95 emblems of frost.

So contrary to my past post on Expertise, I think it’s about time to start gemming expertise. Blizz has left us no choice. We either miss Envenoms on a regular basis or lose Attack Power by gemming Expertise. Is this a way of nerfing Rogue’s without saying anything? It hurts the Mutilate Rotation the most so could this be a way of bringing Mutilate and Combat back on a semi level playing field?  The pieces of gear that don’t have ArP are sporting haste.  Haste has become a more important stat with the new ruptureless rotation for Mutilate but I’d much rather have guaranteed finishers instead of having to watch my combo points to see if I missed an Envenom.

On the other hand, if your still playing Combat you’ve got to be loving the move back to ArP. It looks like it’ll be fairly simple to hit the soft cap of ArP.  Even though Mutilate also benefits from ArP we are losing out on other important stats.

Here’s the easy fix Blizz. You’ve already got it in place to have two sets of gear. Emblem gear (tier 10) and ICC drops should be evenly divided among good pieces for both specs. IMO make the tier sets have the basic stats Rogues like (Crit & AP).  And use your raid drops to interchange stats for different specs.  If your goal is to help have two viable talent trees then help us with the right stats to make it happen.  Rogues have never had two different sets of gear because the stats are interchangeable. But when you start messing with some of the most important stats Expertise and Hit and start stacking one of the least important stats Armor Penetration then Rogues will start having trouble.

Expertise, Expertise, Expertise…

Here are the recent changes to Rogues (Specifically Mutilate Rogues);

• The base damage bonus from Hunger for Blood has been reduced from 10% to 5%.
• The bonus damage rogues gain from attack power for poisons has been decreased. This applies to Instant Poison, Deadly Poison, and Wound Poison.

Since it’s so early with the change I’m not exactly sure what this does to Mutilate Rogues (besides bringing our DPS closer to combat).  Hopefully we’ll get some answers about the changes and see if this means big changes to gemming, rotation and other things.