Rogue

• Vanish: For the first half second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability. (Change Reverted)

First I’m going to say I find it kind of ironic that even a vanish fix ends up breaking vanish:

Blizzard performs vanish fix

Rogues gain working vanish

Rogues gain stealth

..

Stealth fades from rogues

Working Vanish fades from rogues

Sorry, sorry, bad joke for these dire times… I know.

But really, it’s not the end of the world. It seems like Blizzard wanted to fix vanish, but after 3 years of it being broken they still have no clue how without making us overpowered. I mean the only problems with vanish is that when instants happen at the same time vanish and the instant cancel out, and when instant happen 0.1 ish after vanish the instant goes through and breaks vanish as though it never occurred. The immunity was not necessary, those are the only problems that really need fixing, but for some reason blizzard can’t seem to do that.

On the bright side, it’s not like rogues are bad right now and it’s not like without a working vanish anything will change, it just means we will stay in our current state. It also means we won’t receive whatever nerf was coming with the vanish fix. It would have been nice to not have vanish bug, but the fix really made vanish a bit too easy to use. Vanishing between dot ticks and making this terrible ability work is one of the few things that can really differentiate rogues in terms of skill, and 0.5 seconds was still a huge window to get a reopener.

Now with that said, let’s hope that this isn’t the end of Blizzard’s plans for vanish. All we really want is for it not to bug out in the ways listed above, so if they can do that I think I’d be content. I’m sure people will disagree with me but I’m not all that upset about this reversion. As much as it pains me to say this, it’s better they fix it right than fix it wrong.

At least they removed frozen core giving reduced cast speed to already borderline overpowered mages:

Mage
Frost

• Frozen Core no longer causes your Ice Lance criticals to reduce the cast time of your next Frostbolt or Frostfire Bolt

This was necessary and I’m glad it happened before the patch came out, even if it does nerf our most popular comp in rmp.

Update

Here’s GC’s reply to things. At least it seems Blue understands the situation…I think. Maybe. And I agree with the aoe part. But the whole “no promises” rhetoric is getting kind of old. Kind of 3 years old.

We’re not happy with the current Vanish fix on the PTR.

Even at 0.5 seconds, the rogue sometimes gets hit by a missile already in flight. Yet, even at 0.5 sec it’s too easy to screw up using AOE to break the stealth, which is a totally legit counter in our minds. Therefore, making the immunity longer or shorter causes other problems. As I said earlier, the attempt was *not* to make Vanish into Cloak of Shadows Jr. We’re not trying to offer a big PvP buff to rogues. We just want the ability to work as advertised. The intent of the 1 sec (then 0.5 sec) immunity was to provide a little padding so that the ability didn’t fail in situations where it is supposed to succeed. I’m not sure it’s doing that though, and it’s causing other problems.

The way we want it to work: If you Vanish after a single targeted spell is cast, you’re safe, even if the missile is still in the air. If an AE spell is cast on you, even if you just went into stealth, it should break you out.

We’re working on a hopefully better fix now where we record the time that a missile leaves the caster and compare that to when the Vanish is activated. There still might be edge cases though that this doesn’t fix, if for example the cast and the Vanish happen very close together and someone’s client isn’t updated quickly enough. TLDR: It’s complicated.

For perspective, in patch 2.4 prior to LK, Vanish was more reliable in the situation I’m talking about above: used after a spell was cast would make you immune to the spell. It had some other bugs at the time, but all of those that we know about have been fixed. We have made many changes to the way spells work in the 3.X cycle, and one of them made the situation bad again. We need to get the conflict between missile travel time and Vanish resolved the way it used to work. The bad news is that since this is a code fix, it might not make it into 3.3. The good news is that because it is likely a server fix, it doesn’t need to wait for a major patch.

I’m also going to stamp this with “no promises” since unreasonable players may start complaining if Vanish isn’t fixed in exactly one week from now.

P.S. I used the word “spells” a lot above because to a developer, everything you do in WoW, even a melee attack, is a “spell.” It isn’t necessarily confined to what players think of as spells, such as Fireball.

Warcraftmovies.com Link

Music:

The Exies – My Goddess

Demon Hunter – Fading Away

30 Seconds to Mars – Oblivion

Crossfade – The Deep End

Finally got Aeias to make a PvP video! Yes it’s late but he just came back to the game and still had these clips on his computer. This is a mixture of rogue/mage 2 v 2 from his perspective and 1 v n.

Editing and watching this video really reminded be of what I enjoyed about mage rogue, as well as what I hated about it. The fact that as a rogue, being stunned means death without a healer, one sometimes felt a complete lack of control. Another thing that’s evident is how little time I would spend out of stealth some games.

It was often the wrong decision to open early, and you really had to rely on your mage to play it 1 v 2 while you wait for the right time. It also reminded me just how fun this comp could be when it worked perfectly, and more than anything the potential of an extremely well played frost mage in the bracket to go over the top. I don’t see myself going back to the bracket until hopefully it becomes balanced again one day and once again has equivalent rewards to the other brackets.

If you’re wondering, Aeias will be xferring to Emerald Dream this week when he comes back to play with some friends.

Mahiko Back

Coincidentally making an appearance in this video (with a very nice s. step on a water elemental), fans of his videos will be happy to know Mahiko just started playing again and has his character as Mahiiko on Blackrock.

Eviscerate X Drawing Nearer

So further update. Bizzle just got back and he’s now working on some of the editing and from the little I’ve seen things look really good. In terms of the PvP action, I have everything synced and a lot of the editing is done. I’m missing one scene right now, one dueling opponent basically I still have to record against and I’ll be completely done with recording. So we’re looking at hopefully finishing in the next few weeks. I’ll give more info as we near the release date, but things are looking good.

You can spend a lot of time focusing on stats as a rogue, and as important as gear and weapons are as a contributing factor to our damage, our energy and how we use it matters more. In BC I would say energy management had a lot more to do with our gameplay. Energy ticked in pulses and you had to take your energy into consideration for interrupts. Now it’s very rare you are out of energy for a kick. It was a different dynamic, but energy management is still very important to our class.

The main concept here is not necessarily just spamming mutilate every time you have the energy, but saving it up so that you can deliver several mutilates and finishers in sequence at the optimal time. The question then is “what is the optimal time?”

The first thing you need to consider when thinking about when to deliver your burst by dumping energy is what situation are your teammates in? Are they able to assist with damage, dispels/purges, or control when you dump your energy, or are they controlled or busy being defensive themselves? If your mage frostbolts a target, then you get to the target 6 seconds after and your mage is now shut down through control or peels, pumping all of your damage now makes it a lot easier on the opposing healer.

The optimal time to dump energy is when you have some kind of control on the opposing healer (this can be anything from a blanket counterspell silence to a blind, sheep, cyclone, etc) and your teammates are free to damage and play offensively. If your priest is at ten percent health and can’t dispel or support damage, or your caster has two melee on them, this probably not the best time to blow your burst and dump all of your energy.

Another good time to blow your energy is when you can pool up and land a cs on a target. This is especially true when you want to kill another rogue. If you can land a cheap shot on them at full energy, try to immediately cs–> mut–> cb evis–> mut rather than kidney shotting. If your teammate can squeeze in damage I find this is the best way to drop rogues in arena.

I find it’s also a good idea to pool energy against priest teams and save energy until a shield is down. You can really burst priests hard when you catch them without a shield and you have a full energy bar. On druid teams, swapping is a lot more important, so I like to save my energy right before I’m about to do a swap. With the nature of druid healing, if you can put enough pressure in a swap the damage can be unhealable unless their teammates can peel.

Now let me make it clear that I’m not saying you should just stand around at full energy all game until the perfect moment comes. The key is knowing when a target is nowhere near dieing that you don’t have to just continually pump damage into them. There are key moments in arena matches where your energy management can be the difference between winning and losing; it’s the key to your burst potential as a rogue, and for our class burst damage is the key to scoring kills. It’s something you should take into consideration at all times.

Tier 10 Rogue Graphics (click for full size)

Male

Female

Now I really have no problem with this gear set except (once again) the helm. I’d love a helm that actually looks like a hood or a mask…something a rogue would actually use. Rogue gear usually doesn’t look too bad but for some reason Blizz can never give us a proper head slot.

Here’s a warcraft movies link for full download and a better qual stream.