Here’s a link to the video;
Cocytus vs. Lich King p1/2

Combat logs have always been a great place that I’ve learned many things from. Seeing our video visually really opened my eyes to a couple things. Things I learned from the videos.

1) I am super overly hesitant when it comes to a boss that I’ve never downed before. Thinking that if I am out of position RNG will surely screw me and in turn, the raid group

2) My mutilate was not macroed like it should’ve been. I had always noticed that my auto attack was a little slow to get started. At 6 minutes into the second video it is blatantly apparent that a change needed to be made, enter mutilate macro;

3) Phase 3 is the fight. Grouping up for Valks, downing Valks and then spreading out for Defile. Get this down and you are gold. We only saw phase five 3 times in our numerous attempts on the Lich King. On the third time we downed it.

4) My dependency on clicking in a high movement fight hinders me ridiculously. I’m going to work hard on getting movement with a mouse down pat so that I can actually use my abilities in a timely manner. I’ve heard that playing a FPS on the computer can really help when dealing with “the clickies”. Maybe I’ll give that a shot.

The guild and I have downed 7 of 12 ten man hardmodes already, so now we will have to focus on getting the other 5 down in order to finish off our 10 man progression.

That’s right boys and girls, get out your stuns, anesthetic poison and cloak of shadows. It’s time for Ruby Sanctum!!

First off caster trash mobs have annoying knockback aoe abilities so use your stuns as much as possible on these guys.

First Mini Boss, Baltharus the Warborn, to your left as you enter. Nothing to crazy here. Boss throws out a debuff to all melée. Spread out until debuff clears and then continue deeps. At 50% this boss splits in two, remain on first boss and let the off tank grab the second one. These guys have a big cleave so leave aggro to the tanks. Tricks and Vanish may be needed on this fight.

Mini Boss #2, Saviana Ragefire, is a dragon on the right of the instance as you enter. Unless you’re running with a hunter, throw some anesthetic poison on and lawl at Saviana’s enrage mechanic. This boss is easy enough so just treat it like any other dragon and watch for flame breaths.

Mini Boss #3, General Zarithrian, is located on the far end of the instance and has a couple of abilities that while manageable do add some chaos. Zarith can be disarmed so use it early and often to save the tank a little bit of damage. Basically they’re two phases to this fight which will repeat over and over. Phase one is a simple tank and spank. After a few seconds he will fear the entire raid and summon two adds at opposite ends of the area. We put some CC on one mob and had the off tank grab the other one while we focus them down one at a time. There are some tank switches here so save your Tricks for the tanks and help them build some aggro on the spawned mobs. I’m pretty sure it’s possible to Zerg this one without worrying about the adds but am not completely sure on the logistics and if the tanks still need to switch.

Once these three mini bosses have been defeated Halion will appear in the middle of the room.

Halion. ProTip – This is a dragon, normal rules apply. Never find yourself at the head or tail of this boss. Always try to park yourself in a rear quadrant of the boss. Blizz seems to have fell in love with their defile/shadow trap mechanic as in all phases of this fight you’re dealing with something very similar. Halion throws out a debuff on one raid member which will, when dispelled, drop a ring on the ground. Fiery Combustion in the physical realm and Soul Consumption in the twilight realm. The longer this debuff remains on a player the bigger the ring on the ground. One person in the raid should be your designated dispeller. If for some reason you run your debuff out of the group and get out of range of the dispeller just pop your cloak and drop it. Be careful though, dropping this debuff in the first phase causes a knockback to all players inside the ring. Where as in phase two dropping this on a raid member causes a suck in effect and pulls everyone in the area to the middle of it. Make sure you are out of the raid before being dispelled or cloaking it.

Now that you understand that mechanic the rest of the fight goes pretty smoothly.

Phase one in the physical realm. Halion targets one raid member and drops a meteor strike on that person causing damage to anyone in the area and spawning fire in four different directions from the target. This fire is unpredictable so just keep your eyes open and stay out of it.

At 75% Halion opens a portal to the Twilight realm. All members enter this portal by clicking on it. Here you need to pay attention to the orbs floating on the outside of the room. Halion will emote that the orbs begin pulsating with energy. Make sure at that point you are not in between them as they will connect to each other with what I like to call a beam of death. Your tank should be slowly kiting the boss in a stationary circle. The goal is just for everyone to stay out of the beam as it will one shot any player. A tank may be able to take two ticks of damage but the basics behind this is it hurts.

At 50% Halion opens a new portal to the outside. At this point your group should have designated which tank, healer and DPSers will be going out and which will be staying in. We found that leaving melée in the twilight realm was the best because we could easily dps while moving from the beam. All of the abilities from the first two phases are still happening so you may need to cloak off a debuff if your raid gets a little scattered. The goal here is to put even deeps on both sides of the portal. More deeps in the twilight realm means that Halion becomes stronger in the physical realm and vice versa.

Kill and Collect Epicz. Ruby Sanctum Loot Tables

Annnnnd that’s your final raid boss for Wrath of the Lich King. With guilds downing this thing on heroic in the first night it’s not a super hard fight but one that requires quite a bit of coordination from all raid members. Which may make this pug unfriendly for a month or so.

**The video above is from “Flight of the Conchords”.**

Title pretty much says it. The guild and I ventured into ICC 10 last night and put our best attempts on some heroic modes. These are not guides. It’s more of some points that Rogues may need to worry about.

All in all it was amazing night. We had only seen three heroic mode fights before this. Marrowgar, Gunship and Rotface. Marrowgar actually gave us a little trouble. But we got it down. It is actually one of the tougher hard modes. Cold Flame. It moves faster, it stays longer and does damage to a wider area. All of which are openings for an individual to screw up. BOOOOOOOONEEEEE STOOOOOOOOOOORMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! must also be taken very serious as he hits hard in Heroic mode.

Next up Deathwhisper. 2 shotted. Ghosts hurt. Watch out for them and you will win. Frostbolts hurt. Interupt them and you will win.

Lootship. ‘Nuff said.

Saurfang, still a fairly easy fight. Adds hurt which is why blood beasts must be focused down while one is slowed or trapped. One shotted!!

Rotface is probably the second easiest heroic mode fight next to gunship. Basically you want to stay away from your ranged friends when running out to the tank to drop off Mutated Infection. If your caught holding hands with a ranged while running out then you’re rolling the dice that you may begin a chain of vile gas. Downed this one before so it was no trouble.

Festergut. Two words. INFORMATION OVERLOAD. This is the most I have ever struggled with keeping up with where I was suppose to be and what’s happening next. In the heroic mode you’re not only watching for spores, but now you also have to keep an eye out for malleable goo which Putricide throws from a balcony above the room. We try to ignore the mechanic by switching feet on Festergut during every goo regardless of whether it was coming to melée or not. This one took a couple trys just for the simple fact that Festergut hits the tanks super hard. Downed him right at enrage. Close one. This is how this fight went to me. Total utter chaos. “Stare at the bosses ass. malleable goo, move to other foot. Two spores in melée run out to ranged. Get back inside before vile gas. malleable goo Move. WTF foot am I suppose to be on. Spore on tank move up make sure you get spore, malleable goo move to other foot but stay close to tank to get a spore. Omg we still have to dps. 30secs to enrage pop cooldowns. malleable goo move to other foot. DPS!”

We put some attempts on Blood Princes in heroic but wasn’t able to get them down. The only difference in this other then increased damage, a debuff, Shadow Prison is applied to a player every time they move. It has got to be the most annoying debuff I have ever seen. Especially since this is the most movement heavy fight in the Instance. But I have no doubts we can get it down next week.

After seeing these 7 heroic mode fights, I am still amazed about how the difficulty of these don’t compare to the Lich King. But we are making progress.

The grownup inside of me loves to stealth and stab mobs from behind, while the kid in me wants to smash them in the face!

Now this blog is in no way going to move to an all encompassing Rogue Blog, mainly because I’ve been playing Mutilate for so long I honestly don’t see myself learning everything there is to know about Combat in a short time. Just as with my Mutilate spec it’s gonna take a long while of running heroics and raids to really get a good grasp on what I’m doing. The reason for my choice to run the two specs is mainly for situations. Doing a lot in ICC there is tons of instances where Combat is just flat out better then Mutilate. As I pick up new gear for my Mutilate Spec, I am using the stuff I am replacing for my Combat spec. Easy as that. Mutilate gets the haste gear and Armor Pen gear is headed to Combat. Obviously this can’t always be the case but they are the main two stats I am keeping an eye on.

From my first few runs as Combat, I am pretty surprised about how easy the rotation is. I was always under the impression that juggling so many CD’s would make combat a tough spec to get. It’s not true. The BIG difference. I have to refresh Slice & Dice?? I was so used to Envenom refreshing it, that this seems to be my biggest hurdle so far. Anyways I was happy when Chase Christian over at wow.com decided to write Combat 101. It times up perfectly with my new venture.

My comments tend to be the best part of this blog which is why I would love if anyone has any tips for making the switch, to post them. Threads, guides or anything would be great!

Well the Cataclysm Rogue preview is up. I posted it early this morning. I have to say I was pretty impressed with my internal clock. I’m in the states on the east coast and I woke myself up about 2:45 am. Just in time to hit refresh a couple times and sure enough the Rogue preview was posted 3 minutes before midnight West Coast time. I wanted to give my thoughts on the preview.

I want to start out by saying that there is alot of pertinent pvp abilities in this preview. Since I don’t do much PvP, I was fairly dissappointed. I’m going to skip a couple of the PvP abilities and focus on some PvE changes. Believe me there is some QQing here. But at the same time I understand the tough job the designers have in coming up with great abilities for all classes and balancing classes and specs for both PvP and PvE. It’s no easy task and for the most part I applaud Blizzard for the job they do.

Tricks of the Trade to be nerfed – This one raised my eyebrow a bit when I read it. My opinion on ToT is it is our buff to the group. Every other class and spec has something to give to the group whether it’s a raid wide buff, an aura or a cookie of somekind. Rogues have Tricks. Our buff makes sure that tanks are gettig aggro, and at the same time offering damage increases to another melée during the actual fight. I was actually hoping Rogues might see their first raid wide buff or aura. But it doesn’t look like we are, so why is our only beneficial raid ability being nerfed?

Redirect – In a nutshell redirect is an ability trainable at level 81 and was created so that combo points are never lost. Whether you are just switching targets or a target dies you can always switch those combo points to a new target. As a mutilate Rogue we see uses for this all the time. As everyone knows Mutilate is a single target DPS spec and although we can put out decent numbers on multiple target fights it is no where near the single target DPS. This ability will be beneficial for any Rogue spec and both PvP and PvE but because of the CD it may be a situational ability and to me doesnt look like it will dynamically change anything we are already doing.

Along the same lines as Redirect, spells such as slice and dice will no longer have target requirements meaning instead of building combo points on a target we are basically building CP’s on ourselves for slice and dice.

Passive Attack Damage Reduction – In an indirect way this was already announced back at Blizzcon. The change to the haste stat should be efficient enough to achieve this goal. The fact that while not only affecting attack speed, haste will effect energy regeneration and in turn raise the number of special attacks done. Along with this Blizzard has made it known that they would also like to make capping such stats as hit and expertise a little tougher which would also lower the amount of white hits that are landing on a boss. Pretty simple and a welcome change in my opinion.

Lastly would be the mastery bonuses – Assassination continues with their poison damage with emphasis on crit. Combat would seem to be an overall heavy hitter and easier combo point generation, with haste as main stat. Sublety gets the heavy finisher as their mastery and will rely on Armor Penetration. I think I was expecting a little more emphasis on stats as mastery instead of the different ways each spec does damage. But do these stats look out of place to you? Assasination is reliant on poison damage, shouldn’t we be worried about haste for more poison procs? Combat is a beast all through their abilities wouldn’t they want to ignore as much armor as possible? Finally if your goal is to make Sublety dependant on big finishers, wouldn’t it be important to make sure those finishers are critting? I could be way off on this and if I am feel free to correct me.

So there it is. My initial thoughts on the Cataclysm preview. Looking back through all these changes I can’t help to wonder if Rogue’s will be having the same problems as they had in Wrath. I’ve got to think that from Expansion to Expansion alot changes with class and spec and there will almost certainly be different things for players to QQ about. The main fixes to Combo Points corrects the problems we have now but what will be some of the issues that arrise after Cataclysm drops. As we close in on the Beta I’m sure we’ll be getting more info that we can digest and more info on how exactly all of these stats and abilities will work.

Wow.com put up an article with some blue posts from Blizz that attempt to clarify some questions on the abilities.

What are your initial thoughts on the Preview?

“In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. Here, you’ll get a glimpse at what’s in store for the rogue class, including a look the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with the rogue’s different talent specs.

New Rogue Abilities

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

Combat Readiness (level 83): Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and the timer will be refreshed whenever a new stack is applied. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped to go toe-to-toe with other melee classes when Evasion or stuns are not in play. This ability lasts 6 seconds and has a 2-minute cooldown.

Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

We’re also planning to make changes to some of the other abilities and mechanics you’re already familiar with. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we want for each spec.

In PvP, we want to reduce the rogue’s dependency on binary cooldowns and “stun-locks,” and give them more passive survivability in return. One major change is that we’ll put Cheap Shot on the same diminishing return as other stuns. The increase to Armor and Stamina on cloth, leather, and mail gear will help with this goal as well.

In PvE, even accounting for active modifiers like Slice and Dice and Envenom, a very large portion of the rogue’s damage is attributable to passive sources of damage. Yes, they are using abilities for the entire duration of a fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of rogue damage that comes from auto-attacks and poisons. More of their damage will be coming from active abilities and special attacks.

We would like to improve the rogue leveling experience. Positional attacks and DoT-ramping mechanics will be de-emphasized at low levels and then re-introduced at higher levels for group gameplay. We are also providing rogues with a new low-level ability, Recuperate, to convert combo points into a small heal-over-time (HoT).

To complement the change to combo points, non-damage abilities such as Recuperate and Slice and Dice will no longer have target requirements and can be used with any of the rogue’s existing combo points, including combo points remaining on recently killed targets. This will not affect damage abilities, which will still require combo points to be present on the specific target you want to damage. To coincide with this, the UI will be updated so that rogues know how many combo points they have active.

Ambush will now work with all weapons, but will have a reduced coefficient when not using a dagger. When opening from Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose from burst damage, DoT abilities, or a stun.

As we’ve done recently with some of the Subtlety abilities, we want to make sure more rogue abilities aren’t overly penalized by weapon choice. With a few exceptions (like Backstab), you should be able to use a dagger, axe, mace, sword, or fist weapon without being penalized for most attacks.

Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in the ranged slot. In addition, we hope to allow rogues to apply poisons to their throwing weapons.

We are very happy with Tricks of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to give rogues more group utility, but we don’t want it to account for as much threat transfer as it does now.

New Talents and Talent Changes

In Cataclysm, the overall feel of each of the rogue’s talent trees will change, as we would like each tree to have a clearly defined niche and purpose. The talent details below are meant to give you an idea of what we’re going for.

Assassination will be more about daggers, poisons, and burst damage.

Combat will be all about swords, maces, fist weapons, axes, and being engaged toe-to-toe with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without needing to rely on Stealth and evasion mechanics.

The Subtlety tree will primarily be based around utilizing Stealth, openers, finishers, and survivability. It’ll be about daggers, too, but less so than Assassination.

In general, Subtlety rogues needs to do more damage than they do today, and the other trees need to have more tools.

Weapon-specialization talents (for all classes, not just rogues) are going away. We do not want you to have to respec when you get a different weapon. Interesting talents, such as Hack and Slash, will work with all weapons. Boring talents, such as Mace Specialization and Close Quarters Combat, will be going away.

The Assassination and Combat talent trees currently have a lot of passive bonuses. We plan to dial back the amount of Critical Strike Rating provided by these trees so that rogues still want it on their gear.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Assassination
Melee damage
Melee critical damage
Poison damage

Combat
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety
Melee damage
Armor Penetration
Harder-hitting finishers

The initial tier of rogue Mastery bonuses will be very similar between the trees. However, the deeper that a player goes into any tree, the more specialized and beneficial the Masteries will be to the play style for that spec. Assassination will have better poisons than the other two specs. Combat will have very steady and consistent overall damage. Subtlety will have strong finishers.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we’re looking forward to hearing your initial thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.

Cataclysm Stat & System Changes: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23425636414&sid=1

Mastery System Preview: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23710210871&sid=1“

Source

Quick Disclaimer; If you’re not an Engineer or have no interest in being one in game then this post will probably waste 5-10 minutes of your life.

I tend to enjoy checking out (rubbernecking) other Rogues not only on my server but also ones from other top level guilds to kinda see what the flavor of the week is. See how gemming is changing and also see if anyone is having the same problems as me and ways to fix it. Well I stumbled upon something this week that makes me feel like a total noob again. The fact that my engineering has been useful for me ever since I hit 80 and I haven’t been using a single one of the raid applicable enhancements. Sure I use my Jeeves and my portable mailbox for raids. Hell every now and then my gnomish army knife will even bring someone back from the dead. But there are a couple things I completely overlooked when gearing my Rogue. So if your a 450 engineer and a Rogue there are 3 things that may be helpful at 80…

Nitro Boosts – Chances are you’ve seen those toons with the fire under their feet hightailing it through a major city. These things not only add 24 Critical Strike rating but also give you a speed boost if you ever find yourself in trouble in a raid. These also provide a great CD when doing PvP.

Hyperspeed Accelerators – These things are great. They add a CD to your bracers that can be used multiple times during a fight. This gives you 340 haste rating for 12 secs when activated and with such a short cool down, a minute, this is a no brainer for a Rogue engineer.

Frag Belt - This doesn’t seem all that great for raiding, but the fact is it’s a free upgrade as you can have this and a belt buckle attached at the same time so you lose nothing by adding this to your belt. I personally haven’t mastered when this is useful but I’m sure I’ll find an occasion or two where I can squeeze it in. In my opinion I think this is mainly useful for the stun mechanic but would probably only work leveling/questing or maybe on Faction Champs in ToC.

So if your not an engineer I’m not saying go out and spend tons and tons of gold to level engineering. Basically I’m saying if you made the mistake of starting with engineering and can’t see yourself dropping it, then you might as well be useing it as much as possible. I personally look at my engineering as a trophy, being one of the most expensive professions to level, I’m proud to say I was able to get it to 450. As much as I’d love to drop it for Jewelcrafting or Enchanting I just can’t see myself doing it.

My tip for you, go Rubberneckin’ and check out some of your fellow Rogues as you never know what you might find.

[edit] 04/26/10 – Engineering is actually one of the best professions a Rogue can have. According the Elitist Jerks profession EP values. Yet again I prove my noobness.

I know what you’re thinking, what do I care about Feint. I thought the same thing. But recently our raid composition has changed and we’ve been running 10 man ICC with two healers. Because of this we’ve seen a few more deaths then we used to. So I find myself using this ability more and more in ICC to take a little pressure off of our healers.

The threat reduction is really not that useful for raiders, pretty much because by the time you realize you’re going to get aggro you’re either dead or tabbed to a new target anyway. Plus your Vanish is your ultimate aggro drop.

The part I want to talk about is the 50% damage reduction from area of effect damage. There are a couple of fights where this ability is very important.

Let’s start with some trash. The trash in ICC is often considered a joke. Therefore dieing to this trash may cause doubt in your uber abilities by your fellow raiders. Right off the bat in ICC you’re gonna run into some trash called The Damned. Although while alive they don’t provide much danger to melee, when killed they let out a flurry of bones that do quite a bit of damage. If there is only one dieing at a time this damage is manageable, but as multiples die at the same time you may be eating some dirt very quickly. So I like to tab till I get to the lowest health target and feint when he’s about to go down. This just ensures that instead of taking the full hit I’m only taking a little bit just in case another one decides to blow up shortly there after.

Second boss I use this on is one of the mini bosses in the second wing of ICC. Stinky. This little bugger likes to do an ability called Decimate bringing all raid members health down to 15% of your maximum. If your group is unlucky he may let out an aoe effect shortly after, dealing 4.5k finishing some melée off. Feinting right as Stinky decimates insures that your healers have a full 4-6 seconds to get your health up to an acceptable level, all depending on when Stinky does his next aoe attack.

Lastly is Blood-Queen Lana’thel. This chick is pretty healing intensive as every one of her phases, she causes tons of raid wide damage. I pop feint on every cooldown here to minimize the effects of Shroud of Sorrow which ticks for 4,000 shadow damage every 3 secs. It’s something that is unavoidable in the fight so minimizing this damage will help you when you get picked for other abilities such as the Pact of the Darkfallen or during the air phase where you take some direct damage from Blood Queen through Twilight Bloodbolt.

Unfortunately I have not progressed past the Crimson Halls so I’m not sure in what other areas feint may be useful but I know in these three situations feint has become another CD in my arsenal. Many people feel that using feint is a waste of energy as you could be pew pewing. But as we all know a dead dps does no dps so when your healers are stressed and need a little help, feint may just be worth it.

Although that is done I am also starting to see the power of duel speccing into combat. The fact that to be truely helpful to my guild in ICC I may need to dump the daggers only and finally give combat a shot. There are far to many fights where movement is a mehanic and changing targets is the norm. The one I’m seeing the most difference is on the Blood Princes encounter. We have been struggling on this fight where as everyone else seems to say it’s “Gunship Battle 2.0″. It reminds me alot of the the Twin’s fight in ToC where it becomes simple once everyone pays attention and does their job. I remember Pugs that just couldn’t get the concept of The Twin Valkyrs and wouldn’t read/listen to their DBM. Fact is that changeing targets to new Princes, combat pulls ahead in this fight and I have seen combat have 1,000 higher DPS then me in the fight.

But the adding of a combat spec is not an overnight job as gemming is so different that you would literally need to gear yourself twice to be successful in both specs. That plus the fact that I have never touched a combat spec and will have to do some research to learn the rotations. I’m basically telling myself that to be a successful PvE Rogue I will have to drop my Mutilate/Prep PvP spec that I love and run two PvE specs.

I’ll keep you updated on my journey into combat as I grab gear for it. At least I know Capping ArP won’t be all that hard…

That is what’s going on in my world, now on to Uncleleo’s.

Believe it or not I am finding my experiences pugging to be very good lately. I have got an extremely fun and knowledgable group for 10 man ICC. 5 to 6 of us as a core group pugging the rest when we need. Out of the 6 from the core group 3 of us are guildies.

I have also found a 25 pug that I join when I can. I’m not sure what it is but in these pugs I am seeing less and less Rogues. I would have to think that with such high DPS, rogues would be in pretty high demand right now. That matched with the ease of getting gear and I would figure you would see more Rogues in these raids. My conclusion as to why I don’t see as many is because most of the Rogues have a 25 or 10 man team and have no reason to PUG. Therefore I have found myself in a position that’s very surprising. I’m topping the DPS meters. This is something that regardless of what I did in the past I never could consistently top the damage meters. I think for the first time I truely understand my class and spec. I understand what tools I have to max my DPS. I understand that Blizz has done everything in their power to make Dagger Rogues the top DPS in the game. All of that mixed with the fact that Im not competing for gear against other Rogue’s makes pugging the perfect situation for me.

Granted I would much rather be in the same core group each week, because hearing a Raid leader explain the fights every week gets pretty old pretty quick. Right now the only runs I am doing with my guild are the Weekly Raids. The guild usually can get two 10 man raids for the weekly, with mains and alts. So pugging the higher raids (ToC and ICC) is the best option for me.

All in all each PUG is it’s own adventure. There’s one thing you can expect when Pugging, the unexpected. Try not to limit yourself or shy away from Pugging because you never know which group will turn out to be good and you might make a few in game friends along the way like I have.