The man who doesn't like to pug...

...pugs the 10-man version of the Wintergrasp raid.

I decided to have a go at Wintergrasp whilst online just to see what the zone was like and see how well the Eviscerator's set I've crafted holds up when fighting against everything else.

As it turns out the Horde were outnumbered but the Tenacity buff and some good work from those involved (no real idea who) meant we won, provided the buff to all the instances the rest of the guild were running and made the raid instance available.

There were soon messages running around the General channel, and having heard good reports about pugging normal and heroic instances I decided to give it a go, especially as there would be the chance for some nice epics. Sadly no rogue loot dropped but I did get a chance to have a look at the boss fight.

First up, we are definitely in a dps race, there's a 5 minute hard enrage timer so you need to get him down within that time. Second there's a lot of damage everywhere, the boss has a couple of random target abilities and leaves an AoE effect about the place meaning ranged need to keep on their toes as well as the tank if he leaves one on top of the melee. Finally he'll wildly lunge and grab the main tank, meaning he needs to be picked up by an off tank for the duration.

As a rogue there are two key things for this fight.
1) Stay below both tanks on threat. Think Gruul, think Moroes, just stay below both of the tanks or you'll be dead as soon as the main tank gets picked up.
2) Tricks will aid which ever tank needs it most so use it as much as possible.

The week lock out means you're not going to be farming it any more than the other raid instances but with the right group (or even within guild) there's a potential quick way to some epics and a couple of emblems.

Achievements, discuss...

One of the big new changes recently was the introduction of achievements. Something that has sent certain members of my guild to the very corners of the world discovering things.

At a personal level I've been going for the 50 pet achievement especially with the UI change that means they don't take up bag space. I'm currently sat on 34 on Crash but may be able to get hold of the rest of the Alliance racial pets which should get me a lot closer to 50 and the extra pet.

While it is generating a reasonable amount of spam whilst in cities and from guildies I'm very happy to see it in game for the extra things it allows you to do. There's also the added bonus of having things to work towards, and random things that you can pick up without realizing you were going for them.

A recent example I was fighting in Arathi Basin trying to get 50 HKs with the G.N.E.R.D buff up as part of the Hallowed End achievements. Whilst in there I took the chance to pick up the Make Love, Not Warcraft by hugging a fallen member of the Alliance before they released. Having been on a HK grinding spree I was quite surprised when it was announced I'd achieved Arathi Basin Assassin. For this reason I shan't be reading up on all possible achievements (not that I'm convinced you can possibly remember them all) for the extra surprise when you hit one of them.

Rogues and Battlegrounds

I've done a few battlegrounds during my WoW playtime, mainly to grind for the S1 and then S2 swords but occasionally to get some gold from the daily quest or just let off some steam by beating up some alliance.

Having heard enough calls to nerf rogues from priests, mages, warlocks and just about anyone else who's had their behind handed to them on the end of a dagger/sword/mace I thought I'd share some tactics I use and that way other people can know what might happen and start thinking...

Arathi Basic Defense
I love playing defense in AB and in fact can get quite possessive of my flag and go a bit gung-ho to get it back should the enemy manage to steal it away from me. Anyways being in stealth is an obvious state of affairs, but a key aspect of the AB map is the amount of bushes and shrubberies near the flag. These can help camouflage you even more and are away so any AoE that a class does next to the flag doesn't de-stealth you before you can hit the stunlock.

It is very amusing to watch someone and start capping the flag only to find themselves at half health and with a stack of poisons applied. So remember if the flag looks undefended there's a rogue, no really, there is. Don't come crying to me that you got killed because you should know they're there.

Make use of fear
Yes it's annoying when you do the headless chicken dance due to some warlock or priest hitting a magic defense button but watch your combat flag, chances are that once the fear has worn off you'll be out of combat and able to re-stealth without having to Vanish and of course stealth equals stunlock which is always nice.

Kick the Elemental
99.999% of the mages you come up against in a BG will be frost specced and so have a pet water elemental which they can summon to cause mayhem. However they only have one school of magic available and kicking them leaves them stood there with nothing to do except watch their master get obliterated.

So there's a few tips and what you should be looking out for. If anyone has any for playing a feral druid (other than trying to be a rogue in cat form) I'd be very grateful for them.

Hurrah for fun GM's

Now that the arena season 2 gear has been made available for honor, it means that it's time to grind honor and BG marks to pick up those pieces that clearly blow away loot from raiding or instances.

Crash has picked up both the swords and got them enchanted with Mongoose, which should see him out until the expansion in terms of weapons. Trying them out in Karazhan last night lead to some fun results especially when our shaman healer was kind enough to drop a windfury totem for me and the warrior tanks. I know I keep mentioning this buff but I truly love it for it's sheer awesomeness.

Medrare's needs are simpler, just attempting to get the shoulders (no Atal'ai Spaulders for him) which are ridiculously good given how straightforward they are to get.

However this does mean grinding the battlegrounds, which is ok providing you can cope with the pillocks that can hang around in there and you have a clue what to do when playing your character in PvP. For Crash it's easy (yes I'm admitting at times that playing a rogue is easy but this is probably the only time), you find the squishy cloth wearer and stunlock the heck out of them and then annoy the warlock by removing all his dots in one fell swoop. With Medrare it's a bit trickier, I don't know whether to stay cat and try and claw things to death, go bear and watch people get bored trying to kill me or switch between everything and do a bit of everything. Fortunately when doing Alterac Valley this problem doesn't arrive, tank everything as if it's PvE, wait for DPS to kill stuff whilst healers keep you alive and win the match.

Any way, getting back to the title of this post, today the daily quest was for Warsong Gulch, normally I'd avoid this like the plague, but the 'For Great Honor' quest was still available for gold and makes for an easy way to make up an honor shortfall quickly. So in I went, expecting the worse but hoping for a group that would make the best of it.

As we're riding towards the Alliance base we suddenly see that our flag has been picked up and a red blur streaking ahead of us captures it before any of us have had a chance to blink. Right so some alliance kiddie has decided to employ a speed hack, well done, /golfclap, hope you feel good about yourself.

As this clearly counts as harassment I wasted no time in raising a GM ticket in the hope of at least avoiding meeting him again and standing a chance of loosing in a fair fight. Here attached for posterity are the screenshots of our conversation.


Two things to take from this:
1) My grasp of English goes out the window when typing fast to a GM
2) There really are GM's out there with a sense of humour that will help and respond.

Needless to say the GM survey was glowing after this conversation and hopefully the little wossname that was employing the speed-hack will enjoy his ban.

The times they are a changing

So half my list of WoW blogs has had something to say about the PTR patch notes for 2.4.3 and I thought it was about time I posted something about rogues so here we go.

There's a solitary change listed so far and I'll copy it here so you don't have to go off following links:
Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Now there's a lot of stuff there and I'll attempt to dissect I a bit, if only just to describe my own thoughts on this change. I've specced into Cheat Death for a weekend of BG honor grinding before now and when it procced and a healer was prepared to use some Mana on me it was awesome. Generally some DPS warrior has just charged in swinging his big two-hander like some demented pillock and looks confused as his execute fails to kill me, and I plainly refuse to die before suddenly having health again.

The first part of the change means that even when you cheat death on a massive crit from your enemy you're still gonna end up at 10% health rather than just shaking it off and doing something sneaky in return. Now this isn't a massive problem as you might just have a chance at that point to pop a potion or vanish or have a heal land, but it's still gonna be a bit scarier when it happens.

The second part just seems nuts to me, in order to get the full benefit of this talent you need to be stacking enough resilience to reduce incoming crits by 22.5%. Given the resilience cap is 25% that's a heck of a lot, and some back of an envelope maths (and wowwiki) seem to indicate you'll need to be stacking 444 resilience rating. Now I'm not a massive PvP player but that seems rather large, in a BG it might not be a massive problem but I can see this could be a big change for arena rogues. Not having played arena at all I'd be interested if any other rogues out there who've dabbled in arena have any major views.

As a conclusion I'm not entirely sure why this change has come in, it feels like a big nerf, and likely to be one from some other class who's vocal players have problems beating rogues who know how to play their class well. We shall have to see if this change goes through to the live realms unchanged, personally I hope not but having got through the last couple of patches untouched something big was clearly on the horizon for rogues.

Stick to the shadows, it's so much easier to hide and pick out the weak one there ;)