Dead Space

Lord Jaraxxus down

mortice — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:28:24 +0000

After joining my new guild, I went along to the Argent Coliseum for my first look at the raid there, and also my first taste of 25-mans that wasn’t a pug. I had a huge amount of fun and performed respectably on dps in spite of my lower gearing. As usual, I forgot to take screenshots, so you’ll have to take my word for that.

Northrend Beasts was a very straightforward encounter from my perspective, so I’ll just summarise my experience of it here.

Gormok the Impaler – Tank and spank. In theory you should look out for Snobolds and kill them if they’re nearby, but I must confess I didn’t see any, and no one screamed at me, so they can’t have given us too many issues.
Acidmaw and Dreadscale – start on the mobile target, follow it round, stay out of the poison clouds, then switch after they resurface. No major problems there – just a simpler version of Grobbulus to my mind.
Icehowl – Moar tank and spank, strafe whenever he’s coming to someone near you with his charge thinger. DBM is excellent at telling you when you need to move. My only major problem here was that my UI died on Wednesday, so I didn’t have Clique set up to put Tricks on anyone but the MT, when it would’ve been useful to put it on another dps during the stuns.

I wouldn’t say the Northrend Beasts encounter was faceroll, but it certainly seemed a bit on the easy side to be dropping ilevel 245 epix. More on that note later…

Now, Lord Jaraxxus was another proposition. The first couple of times, we wiped with him at about 95%, so it was clear he was going to be no pushover. We had a couple of problems with our interrupt rotation for Fel Fireball – I was first in the rotation and missed the very first one a couple of times. Mutilate rogues, be warned, it comes early, and before you have your rotation settled in. As it turned out though, it was neither this nor problems with maintaining a 10-yard spread between healers and ranged that was wiping us.

Jaraxxus has an ability called Nether Power, a stacking buff he gains which, at full stacks, increases his magic damage by 200%. Now his chain lightning hits pretty hard in the first place, so you can imagine how important it is to get this buff off. Initially we just had our mages spellstealing, but what with all the chaotic shit going on in this fight, that wasn’t reliable enough. For our successful attempt, we assigned anyone with an offensive dispel to get it the fug off him ASAP. We also decided to put only one rogue (Muggins here…) on interrupt duty, since kick is always off cooldown for Fel Fireball casts, alllowing the other interrupters the freedom to burn down the adds. This probably wouldn’t have been necessary in a group less stacked with melee, but it worked well for us, and allowed me the kudos of being 3rd on dps in my 10-man gear, despite kicking every 10 seconds.

All in all, Jaraxxus is great fun. Not to spoil anything either, but the start of the encounter is hilarious. Keep Nether Power off, move out of the bad shit, get Fel Fireball interrupted and burn those adds down, and you’ll soon be swimming in nice new shinies.

On which note, my loot haul for the evening:

Cuirass of Calamitous Fate
Steel Bladebreaker

I also picked up Shoulderpads of the Monolith from Kologarn when we hit Ulduar afterwards, which essentially means that last night ruined any efforts I’d made to maintain any kind of tier set bonuses. Oh well, shinies is shinies.

How to win at PvP

mortice — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:43:19 +0000

This made me chuckle, and it’s actually pretty accurate.

I’m gonna be ugly! QQ

mortice — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:56:56 +0000

Wow.com just posted up a comparison of Rogue and Shaman tier 9 sets for Alliance and Horde. Rogues of Azeroth, look at the Alliance rogue set. Now look at the Horde rogue set. Look at the Alliance set. Now the Horde set. Alliance rogues, crying yet? I certainly am. Ours is so far inferior as to make me want to learn how to PvP so that I can get some form of paltry revenge.

Still, at least our set has a good name. Although it does beg the question: if this is Van Cleef’s stuff, did he lose it or what? If the Crusade just stole it off him recently, then why the hell didn’t he wear it in Deadmines last month to stop me from killing him with one Fan of Knives?

Almost as much of a mystery as the storyline in Dustwallow Marsh…

Rogue Q&As – Rupture overwriting and Muti spam

mortice — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:57:28 +0000

In the first of an occasional series of Rogue Q&As, I’ll be fielding my guildie Dagobert’s questions about how to play Assassination in PvE. This time around, he asks about when to overwrite Rupture and when to spam your Mutilate key. N.B. The answers assume my current 51/13/7 spec.

Dagobert:

i actually did have a question for you morth, something ive noticed on my rogue, when im doing the envenom rupture rotation sometimes i cant pop rupture on the mob because its saying a more powerful spell is active, im assuming thats because i had more AP due to a proc or something last time round, so my question is, when this happens should i wait for the previous rupture to run out then rupture or should i envenom and rebuild? i have been doing the envenom and rebuild at the moment as it seems standing around doing nothing, even tho regen energy is happening, standing around would lower the DPS ?

Answer after the break…

Morthax
You’re absolutely right – you can’t overwrite a high AP rupture with a low AP rupture, and you can’t overwrite a 5CP rupture with a 4CP rupture. So as you say, you either wait for it to tick out and then rupture again, or you envenom and rebuild, possibly losing some rupture uptime.

The decision comes down to whether or not waiting for rupture will make your energy cap out. Obviously, once your energy hits 100, any gains are wasted, and since energy is the sole limiting factor in rogue dps, you never want your energy to be wasted. On the other hand, if you can pool energy to 90^* while rupture expires and then rupture again, you have a nice pool to mutilate and envenom and thus don’t lose anything.

If you look at world of logs, you’ll see that my rupture uptime is never at 100% – partly this is because I open with Garrote > HfB > SnD > Mutilate (possibly x2) > Envenom > Mutilate to 4/5 > Rupture, so it takes time to get going, but this is also due to sometimes having to decide that energy capping out is worse than a few seconds of rupture downtime.

I don’t have time to run the exact numbers for you, but that’s the basic thinking. Possibly, with 4 pieces of t8 and the serrated blades spec, it might make sense to let energy cap out for 1 or 2 seconds before rupturing to assure close to 100% uptime, but I’d be surprised.

^*Pooling any higher is risky, since Relentless Strikes will probably give you 25 energy back, meaning you have limited time to react with a mutilate and stop your energy capping out.

Dagobert

yeah i tend to notice that i tend to be quite low on energy when i find myself unable to rupture, so maybe im best just waiting a little, because i wont lose my SnD because i will be able to muti back up quickly due to my energy being high again, so maybe i will just wait and rupture, if my DPS drops then maybe the insta envenom is the trick, another thing aswell is when i read forums i tend to see that people spam muti, where as i tend not to as its not really spamable as you can only cast 2 befor your out of energy so i tend to just click things when i need them, is it best to be slow and controlled or be a spam bot ?

Morthax
Spam muti? As in always do 2? Ridiculous thing to do, since you can get to 4 CP with 1 muti most of the time.

If you mean that they spam it when on 1 combo point so that it fires off as soon as they have 52/55/60 energy (depending on glyphs and talents) then that’s absolutely the right thing to do. Remember, assassination is all about getting as many 4/5 point finishers in as you can, and mutilate opens up those finishers. If you can save even a fifth of a second on getting to 4/5 by spamming mutilate, within 5 mutilates you’ve gained an extra finisher. This is very much “squeezing the last 50 dps out” though, and while personally I’m all about that, I know others want a more relaxed experience. In this case, it’s perfectly possible to play with a relaxed style and not lose out signficantly.

But never, never, blindly mutilate to 5CP when you can get to 4CP with one. And never, almost never, eviscerate^*.

Also, you click?! Instaroguefail. All of the following need to be keybound, in order of importance:

Mutilate
Envenom
Rupture
Hunger for Blood
Trinket use (if applicable)
Slice and Dice
Vanish (for Overkill – if you don’t use this mechanic, you should.)
Garrote
/cast [target=focus] Tricks of the Trade
Cloak of Shadows
Eviscerate (in case for some reason your SnD is about to drop and you don’t have DP on the target)
Feint
Evasion

^* For any rogue using deadly poison, Envenom gives more dps than Eviscerate, since it ignores the opponent’s armour, and buffs Instant Poison applications after use.

Assassination – Garrote or Ambush?

mortice — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:21:22 +0000

This was originally posted to my guild’s website.

Introduction

Starting a fight as a rogue is crucial. You have to get Slice and Dice going and begin your rotation as quickly as possible. This process of ‘getting things started’ is even more crucial as an assassination rogue, as you need a full-length (5 combo point) Slice and Dice going as quickly as possible to support your 4-5e/4-5r¹ rotation. This article describes and evaluates approaches to getting a fight started as an assassination rogue.

First six seconds

Wrath added a new talent to Assassination – Overkill. This reduces the energy cost of abilities used after coming out of stealth by 10, allowing massive burst AoE, amongst other things. It also greatly influences our discussion of the optimal starting ability, since every assassination rogue will have Overkill, it being a prerequisite for Mutilate. What follows is a breakdown of energy use and abilities used in the first six seconds of a fight with Ambush, Garrote and starting out of stealth. Note that many variables differ here, notably the amount of energy gained from Focused Attacks.² The assumed talent build contains 2 points in Blood Spatter.

Garrote (no glyph)

Time from start (seconds)	Ability used	Energy remaining	Damage done by opener
0	Garotte	60	0
1	Slice and Dice	56.75	161
2	Mutilate	18.75	322
3.2(ish)	Envenom³	35⁴	483(ish)
4.5(ish)	Mutilate	0	724(ish)
6(ish)	Rupture	0	966(ish)

Garrote will continue for the remainder of its 18 second duration to do a total of 2900 damage.

Garrote (with Glyph of Garrote)

As above, but Garrote will do 3025 damage.

Ambush (without crit)

Time from start (seconds)	Ability used	Energy remaining	Damage done by opener
0	Ambush	50	1840
1	Slice and Dice	46.5	1840
2	Mutilate	8	1840
3.5(ish)	Envenom	25	1840
5.5(ish)	Mutilate	3	1840

Ambush (with crit)

As above, but Ambush will deal approximately 5520 damage (5685 with Relentless Earthsiege Diamond active).

Numerical analysis & Summary

The tables above use reasonable stats as their model and assume optimal procs. With procs optimal and using garrote, it is possible to get rupture active within the first 6 seconds. With ambush, you appear to lag behind by a second in these circumstances, but actually lag by more, since your rupture requires 35 energy as opposed to the lucky garotter’s 25. Since your aim as an assassination rogue is to keep any of the four bars (Deadly Poison, Rupture, Slice and Dice, Hunger for Blood x 3) from hitting 0 and to do this you need to get them all started, Garrote makes for a more stable opener.

On the other hand, it is possible to deal more damage with Ambush. Normalised damage for Ambush is 2392, taking crit % as 35 and assuming a meta-slot gem. Thus, if you have Tricks of the Trade on the tank (since Ambush causes a threat spike), have a Relentless Earthsiege Diamond, do not have Blood Spatter and do not have Glyph of Garrote, open with Ambush. Otherwise, you will be better off with Garrote for stability and average damage. On the other hand, if you don’t have blood spatter, what are you doing playing assassination?

Footnotes

1. 4-5 combo point envenom/4-5 combo point rupture.

2. A value of 1.5 additional energy per second has been taken for focused attacks. This is based on weapon speeds of 0.8/0.8, which seem reasonable with 10-man buffs, slice and dice the majority of the time and fast daggers. You are using fast daggers for mutilate pve, right? . Attack power has been set to 4500, again a reasonable value with 10-man buffs and gear

3. Assumes a mutilate crit first time and Ruthlessness giving a combo point from SnD. This is an assumption we’ll make in every table, since it makes no difference to opener choice.

4. Assumes a Relentless Strikes proc. Again, we’ll make this assumption throughout.