Rogue Leveling Guide

A Rogue is a pure DPS class that wears leather armor and should focus on getting a lot of Agility which will give him some Dodge chance thus survivability while leveling. A Rogue also has some nice stunning attacks that should always be used to minimize damage done to him. First Aid is definitely necessary to minimize a Rogue’s downtime.

The Rogue has three nice talent trees and they all have their pros and cons. If you want to make a nice leveling build you should check out the one below because it takes a bit of all three talent trees and it will give you a lot of useful abilities and boosts to level up like crazy.

Rogue Leveling Build

You should start by putting some talents in the Combat tree. Start with Dual Wield Specialization and then go for Precision to make sure you hit a lot with both weapons. Now go for Deflection because you will encounter a lot of melee mobs and that makes 6% parry chance really nice. Skip Riposte but do take Endurance so the cooldown of Evasion and Sprint are much shorter. These two abilities are great while leveling. Now Improve your Spring and Dodge chance and finally take Blade Furry which is just great when you’re fighting two mobs at once. It increases your damage by 20% anyway for 15 seconds so even if you’re fighting one mob it’s quite good.

Now put five points in Malice at the Assassination. Take Ruthlessness and Puncturing Wounds. Do take Vigor asap because it is really nice to have 110 Energy. Take Lethality to improve the damage from your critical strikes and then go for Vile Poisons and Improved Poisons. Take Cold Blood which is a killer and Fleet Footed to increase your movement speed which is always welcome while leveling. Take Quick Recovery and then take Sealed Fate to apply combo points faster which is a nice combo with Cold Blood.

Take Overkill so you can do more damage when you come out of stealth and then take Deadly Brew so runners won’t be much of a menace since they get their movement speed reduced with 70%.

Take Deadened Nerved to reduce damage done to you and take Weaknesses to increase all damage done by 6%. Last but not least you should take Mutilate in this tree which is a nice attack.

Take Relentless Strikes and Opportunity from the Subtlety tree and you have a great leveling build.

With this build you will have more Energy-boosting talents, two great attacks in Mutilate and Blade Furry, increased movement speed, a lot of crit and hit rating, some Poison specialization, some Dodge and Parry chance, and you will have your Sprint and Evasion improved.

Rogue - Shadow Stalkers

Rogue’s have a clear purpose in WoW, dealing damage. Rogues are a melee class that can use several high damage abilities to make sushi out of their opponents, whether in PvE or PvP. Rogues can Dual Wield every kind of one-handed weapon there that can be found in WoW. There are able to use their special abilities with the use of Energy. With some of these special abilities, one can apply a combo point on their target. The Rogue also has some finishing moves that are more effective when more combo points are applied on the target. There can be a maximum of five combo points on a target and they disappear once a finishing move is being used.

Next to their great damage dealing capability the Rogues are also known because of their ability to stealth and their preference to attack from behind with their backstab ability. They walk around stealthed in battlegrounds and arenas, sneak up behind their enemies and have an edge over them. Being able to stealth also comes in handy in PvE scenarios because there is an ability called sap which can be used on Humanoid mobs which keeps them out of combat for up to sixty seconds. They are also able to Blind a enemy for 12 second, making him incapable to do anything.

Rogues also have some stunning and disrupting abilities which makes them great for both PvE and PvP purposes. Some good Rogues are able to stunlock enemy NPC’s or players, which basically means that they can hardly move, cast or attack.

Rogues can also use some poisons on their weapons that either boost their damage or put some other debuff on a target.

The following races have Rogues in their ranks: Dwarves, Gnomes, Humans, Trolls, Undead, Orcs, and Blood Elves.

A Rogue can choose to specialize in the Assassination, Combat, or Subtlety build, or choose to combine either one of these talent trees. All the trees are there to increase the damage output of a Rogue, since tanking or healing are definitely not his thing and can even be considered as a Rogue’s weak spots. It is for the player to decide which talent tree suits him best. All the trees got their pros and cons, the one player likes this, the other likes that, discussions go on and on but basically it comes down to preferences.

What can be said is that the Assassination tree is usually chosen for leveling and focuses on the crit rate and poison aspects of the Rogue, while the combat build offers the Rogue the chance to specialize in a particular type of weapon, which is why this build is probably better at 80 once you got some steady weapons.

The Subtlety build focuses on the Survivability, crowd control and Stealth aspects of the Rogue. This build gives the Rogue some burst damage and this is probably why a lot of PvP Rogues go for this build.

Blue Post: Underwater Combat, Uldum, Class Changes

Quote from Blizzard staff

Vashj'ir - Underwater Combat
We're working to ensure combat, breathing and travel are less cumbersome in this underwater zone than many of you may be thinking. The zone is quite large with a great deal of quest content and exploration to be done. In many areas you'll really get a deep ocean feel, but since you're questing down there, we want to make sure underwater gameplay is greatly improved. (Source)

Uldum / Larger 5-man Dungeons
There's a level 85 five-player dungeon you might just learn about soon which holds seven bosses in a single instance. It's in a place you may have heard of before... Uldum. ^.^ (Source)

Armor upgrades at level 40
We talked about changing it, but decided we liked it the way it is. It's a pretty nice reward to suddenly be able to equip mail or plate at higher level. By similar logic, you could argue that we should make helms, shoulders, trinkets and even mounts at low level because they're awesome upgrades and players are going to get them anyway.

It doesn't actually make the itemization simpler to add plate at lower levels. We have to create more items and make sure they are well distributed. That's not a huge consideration either way, but you listed it as a benefit and we don't see it like that.

We also don't think it's a huge balance problem either way. Nobody is so weak below level 40 that perfect gear optimization is really going to make a difference between success and failure.

The strongest justification for letting e.g. warriors use plate at level 1 is the feeling at level 40 of having to swap out all of your gear. But even in that case if you hold on to the mail for a few more levels until you get a more suitable quest reward you're not really going to be at a noticeable disadvantage. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Winter's Chill
Yeah, we probably need to make Winter's Chill apply the entire stack at once like Improved Scorch and Improved Shadow Bolt. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Healing in Cataclysm
Our goal is for paladins to be able to raid heal. Don't look at the designs for spells that none of you have even been able to try and conclude those mechanics can't possibly allow you to raid heal and therefore our goal can't possibly be met and will therefore be abandoned. It's fine to raise concerns -- that's one of the reasons we announce stuff like this early -- but some of you are trying to get a spell buffed that you haven't even cast yet.

I will say our vision for the AE spell though is not that the paladin runs around constantly, but that you position yourself where you can do the most good. Sometimes that will be back with the healers. Sometimes that might be in the melee. Sometimes you'll have to spread out and your group healing won't be as efficient (in the same way a shaman's group healing isn't as good in the same scenario).

Tranquility is on a very long cooldown. It is not the way druids AE heal. We want to shift it from 5-person group to raid because we'd like to do that with every spell. Having to organize players by arbitrary group is a strange concept since it doesn't actually manifest itself in the real world (in the way distance from you on the battlefield does).

We aren't going to give paladins anything resembling Circle of Healing. One (or two) of those spells in the game is plenty.

Spirit will be a good stat to stack but only to a point. Once you can heal say a six minute boss fight without going out of mana, then any additional Spirit is pretty much wasted. At that point stats like crit start to look pretty attractive because they increase your spell's throughput without increasing the mana cost. Maybe you'll be able to heal someone with one cast, allowing you to swap over and heal another player. In today's healing environment, where a lot of that excess healing will be wasted overhealing, getting a huge crit on a spell isn't nearly as valuable.

We'll have to see how raid healing goes. We might be okay with the tendency for groups to still assign paladins to tank healing because they are particularly good at it. What we want to avoid are those cases where a group feels like they can't possibly keep tanks alive because they lack a paladin or they can't possibly keep groups alive because they have too many paladins. (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rogues Cooldowns

In actuality it's not quite this extreme, but the stereotypical rogue encounter is that if they have their cooldowns available, they're going to wreck you and if they don't have their cooldowns available, you're going to wreck them. Giving Cloak a chance to fail was a way to make sure that rogues couldn't guarantee that they would be immune to spells for a few seconds. Usually they would be, but sometimes they'd get unlucky and the lock or whoever would have a chance against them.

In Cataclysm, we want to reduce both extremes. That is, the rogue shouldn't feel invulnerable when they have all of their cooldowns available and they shouldn't feel helpless when they get caught without them. In that environment we think it's safe to remove the chance to fail because Cloak won't be the only thing that determines victory or defeat vs. a caster. Things like Smoke Bomb and larger health pools as well as other changes should help keep a rogue alive when Cloak is on cooldown. Likewise, the warlock won't be stunned so much so they won't be quite so frustrated when the rogue does pop CoS.

Having a ninety percent chance to succeed is actually a pretty frustrating place to be. At that point you aren't grateful when you roll lucky. You're mad because you were so unlucky. At 90% you start to count on something, which makes it worse for it to fail. If Cloak had a 10% chance to succeed (we wouldn't do that, but just for sake of argument) then you'd feel awesome when it did work because you got lucky. What I'm getting at is that it's not like we thought the 90% deal was super fun gameplay. We just thought it was necessary.

Without the entire gamut of Cataclysm changes though, we're not sure rogues need a PvP survival boost at the moment.

My paladin comment above was more poking at the silliness of expressing "Gotcha!" because we figured out a way that we're comfortable getting rid of a 10% chance to fail on Cloak of Shadows. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Bladestorm
It isn't necessary to change Bladestorm just because Whirlwind changes. If you want to blow the cooldown for a single target damage boost we don't really have a problem with that. Whirlwind was balanced around doing single target damage, which meant it just got free damage when there was more than one target. Bladestorm by contrast doesn't amount to a sizable chunk of damage in PvE. (Source)

Cataclysm Class Preview: Rogue

Quote from: Bashiok (Source)

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.

Blue Post: Cataclysm Class Information Coming!

Quote from: Bashiok (Source)

Beginning Wednesday, April 7 we will begin releasing class previews containing an overview of some of the changes currently being planned for each of the 10 World of Warcraft classes. The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the new spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we're currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes.

These changes will by no means be comprehensive, and are subject to change between now and the launch of the expansion. It's also important to understand that some classes are currently further along in the development process than others, and as a result the amount of information will vary from class to class. Please do not let this frustrate you should your class be amongst those which are on the "lighter" side of things, as all classes will receive the same level of design attention before the expansion is released. Additionally we'll be providing more information for all classes, especially as we move into the beta phase.

Below is the schedule for each class:

• Shaman - April 7
• Priest - April 7
• Warlock - April 7

• Warrior - April 8
• Death Knight - April 8
• Rogue - April 8

• Hunter - April 9
• Druid - April 9
• Mage - April 9

• Paladin - April 16*

These posts are being coordinated internationally so they'll be posted at different times throughout the day and night on the given dates to give players around the world the ability to see posts made at a convenient time. This thread will be updated with links directly to each class preview as they're posted.

*The paladin is still deep in development. Instead of giving a preview that would be potentially less comprehensive than the other classes we made the decision to post it when it's ready, in order to properly honor the paladin class and those that play them. The wait isn't too long however as we're expecting to be able to post it on April 16.

Blue posts – 2010-03-26

Quote from Blizzard staff

Gold cap in Cataclysm
To answer your question though, increasing the gold cap is a definite possibility for Cataclysm -- though nothing is set in stone yet. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Eclipse
The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a "rotation" like that, but you'll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn't play Balance.

Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.

We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.

The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.

We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element.  (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Action Bar bug when rogues use Vanish while Shadow Dancing
It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. Rogues essentially have 3 bars and there are just some technical reasons why we can't go back to the Shadow Dance bar once we've dropped it.

I think the real solution is probably to make it so you can't / don't want to Vanish while dancing. I assume you're Vanishing to get out of roots or dodge spells, but we could solve those in other ways. The spell dodging part of Vanish has been so frustrating to rogues for so long that frankly I'd rather figure out another way to get the same functionality that would feel better all around and leave Vanish as strictly "you want to go back into stealth." (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Revenge and Unrelenting Assault
We like Revenge on UA and we certainly like the new damage Protection can do with Revenge.

If we make any change at all, it would probably be in the duration of the buff. Currently Revenge operates by giving the warrior 5 seconds in which to Revenge. This works fine when Revenge has a 5 sec cooldown, but UA removes that. Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.

I can't believe all this QQ is getting a response from you. Popping shield block and revenge spaming as arms is not new at all.

Nope. And it wasn't a big deal when Revenge didn't hit as hard as it does now. An alternative is to lower the damage Arms can do with Revenge, but we think in this case it's actually a better design that you can do one big Revenge per block / dodge / parry instead of a string of little ones.

I could understand if you think warriors need some balancing but craving into fotm QQ disgusts me. Why are you soo quick to base nerfs off of the community's feedback but soo reluctant to buff them using their suggestions?
Players often complain that we don't implement their suggested buffs or nerfs. This is nothing new. I suspect the volume of nerf posts exceed the buff posts because of the simple math that there are usually multiple classes asking for a nerf and one asking for a buff. We use player feedback to make informed decisions and we place more emphasis on intelligent or insightful points from players rather than a high-volume of low-quality QQ. "Warrior hit me hard" rage with perhaps an attached screenshot of dubious authenticity (tenacity vs. no resilience isn't uncommon) doesn't qualify as an intelligent or insightful point. (Source)