I’ve been playing a lot on the Tournament Realm the past few weeks, not only in the actual 3v3 competition but doing a lot of dueling as well. Where on live realms, the majority of players don’t have optimal gear, on TR everyone has access to everything available at the pre KT gear level. The result? Rogues are depressingly weak 1 v 1. When the best players put on some defensive gear and spec defensively as well, you’d think a rogue could counter this by gearing and speccing offensively. Wrong.

Here’s a quick overview of each class as I see it 1v1 going in to 3.1

Death Knight – Lost cause once they go “anti-rogue”. You might have a hope on some shadowfrost or average blood dks on live that use considerable pve gear, but once they put on resil you’re probably cooked. Dwarf and you can forget it. Getting them to 30 percent is usually impressive. Your best hope is to open with cs gouge restealth, slice and dice in stealth, open cs ks  rupt vanish. Open again after DR with a cs ks dimstantle eva trank, and pray you force a trinket or mark of blood at this point. Once that happens you need to get a cloak prep vanish off. Open once again to try for a kill here. You can also swap anesthetic poison and shiv the hysteria off if they are blood if they trinket a stun before you blind. The problem? None of your vanishes can fail, and with a dk with drw, dnd, and deathgrip there isn’t much chance of that happening, at least not consistently.

Frost Mage – They already should win with moderate resilience. When venruki (or any top mage) goes gnome and gears defensively, this moves to what I consider unwinnable at the moment unless you get very lucky, although literacola says he’s making progress by opening and forcing a block with 2 vanishes, then cloaking after block for the kill. The big problem here is deep freeze (which they can kill you in if you don’t trinket), so you trinket that, and they can snap df into sheep and the duel is basically over. A lot of mages don’t do this as it makes the fight kind of a joke.

Warlock - at least rogues can beat warlocks, right? Enter destruction warlock Psyhawk. Here are some sample duels (nothing serious but it should give you and idea for the fight or kill 10 minutes if you’re bored).

Alternative Wegame Stream

At best this is a 50-50 fight as undead. As good a player as he is, a class that we supposedly counter and dominate is a scary duel, and not winnable without wotf. If you vanish away you will get shadowfuried out. He often chains stuns to deathcoils so vanishing one of those is out. Killing the pet is out because of demon port fel dom, and if this fight gets to a second set of drs and you have no trinket you lose. Health stone with talents, etc, is about an 8k heal non-crit. I think a series with him would be winnable, but, after 3.1 destro buffs? Good luck.

Warrior - Dueled sonydigital and dahis as well as some other warrior a bunch as prot or a prot / arms variant. They have (more…)