Now anyone who’s been playing 3s this season has noticed the biggest trend to hit this bracket is the shear volume of cleave teams. It comes as no surprise as you can add just about any two viable melee classes together excluding enhancement shaman, group them with a healer (probably a druid or a prot paladin) and succeed in 3s.

While I don’t think cleave is grossly overpowered, I do think that the amount of skill that effects the outcome of cleave games is much lower than classic caster / melee / healer teams. You can be the best DK in the world, playing at the highest level and the degree of separation between your cleave team and any random DK / Ret / Warrior / Hunter + Druid / Hpal won’t be too noticeable. I actually feel bad for people playing cleave because it doesn’t really give you a chance as an individual player to really excel, although I’d assume its fun to play the role of a blender. In fact when I think of a ret paladin training a priest, with about 7 buttons, spinning around, I don’t see it much differently than making a smoothie.

That being said, cleaves aren’t going anywhere any time soon; their popularity only continues to grow. As RMP, which is currently the most viable and most played rogue comp in 3s, you will no doubt have to deal with countless cleaves and their variations when playing arena. It’s also possible for your priest to simply die in a strangulate regardless of how well you play, but there are some key steps you can take toward giving your team the best chance for success. (more…)

The full patch notes can be found here. These are mostly just bug fixes but the HaT change has a lot of potential, depending on just how periodic the cp generation will be.

Rogue

• Honor Among Thieves: Periodic critical strikes now grant combo points for rogues with this talent.
• Killing Spree: Error message when no targets are in range has been changed to “Out of Range.”
• Master of Subtlety: Being under the effects of Cyclone when the buff from this talent is about to expire will no longer make it last indefinitely.
• Overkill: Being under the effects of Cyclone when the buff from this talent is about to expire will no longer make it last indefinitely.
• Shiv: Deadly Poison will now apply properly when Shiv is the attack used to break a Gouge.
• Tricks of the Trade: Using this ability on a target affected by Cyclone or Banish will no longer place the ability on permanent cooldown and will instead give an error message.

Turn the Tables: Rank 2 of this talent will now work properly with raid members, and not just party members.

So over the past month or two I’ve drastically reduced the time I’ve spent playing WoW. This is due to a several factors; a summer job, the fact that it’s summer, not having a competitive or active arena team, as well as others, but these don’t really matter. What I want to talk about is how different this game is depending on your level of dedication.

The first thing I’m realizing is that even when you play casually, it’s still not really like you can just pick up wow for a quick twenty minute play. Each play time usually involves several hours of commitment. The difference between casual and hardcore for me has been more like going from playing multiple huge wow sessions to having one or two a week, and these being shorter. As much as people suggest that Blizzard is aiming this game at casuals, I don’t think it’s as easy for casuals to get gear or succeed in arena as some would suggest. Other than arena gear, you can’t earn much honor or successfully pve without at least a moderate time commitment.

I guess what I’m saying is that as much as people complain about this game being casual friendly, it really isn’t. Is a casual WoW player is someone who does a few dailies each day, does their wintergrasp weeklies, farms even 30k honor a week (not enough to buy much, at least not quickly), does some light pve or light arena? The community would probably define this as casual, but you’re spending at least upwards of ten hours just to do this, and you’ll always have more to do.

I think when people complain about an increasingly casual wow, people probably think they are saying you need too little a time investment to do well. I think the real issue isn’t time investment. I think the problem may lie in the difficulty of attaining the highest level of gear. What casual seems to mean to WoW is that you don’t really need to follow a structured raid schedule of an elitist guild as was true in other mmos or of wow in the past to get the highest item level of gear or compete in end game. I’m not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I’d also say that playing casually actually increases your motivation to succeed in game, or at least it does for me. Taking it easy for the last little while, I haven’t played arena to top ten ratings. Ratings that were meaningless to me two months ago are suddenly interesting again. I realize this is really just the effect of wanting what you don’t have, but I find it very interesting that the less time you spend in game the more motivated you become to play.

Tip When Playing with a Priest

I don’t think this is any big secret but a friend of mine said he didn’t know about it when listening to arena last night, so I thought I’d mention it. It’s a good idea, situationally, to call for shield before you vanish to maximize the chance of the ability working. This means that dots and aoe that’s already laid down won’t affect your vanish. This doesn’t mean you can do this all the time but when your priest isn’t under pressure it can help.

First Look at the Final Boss for Trial of the Crusader

The final boss for the Trial of the Crusader is now available for testing on the North American PTRs. Pardon the last minute announcement of this, we’re still having some technical difficulties on the North American PTRs and we weren’t sure if this testing was going to be available.

Eviscerate X Update

Still far from being done so stop asking, but I’ve made a lot more progress in the last month than I had in the past, and it’s starting to feel like I can potentially finish. And what I do have so far I’m very happy with. I’m going to start actively recording duels against top opponents, and if you’re alliance on cho’gall, and not a rogue (I realize this is a rogue site but I’ll have more than enough clips against rogues when the video is finished), and you’re interested in some duels, hit me up at feedback@roguerogue.com, or if you’re on horde cho’gall for that matter.