2.1.0 Patch & Tier 6 Armor

Well, let's start with the armor. I'm going to pretend I didn't see it. OMFG, who am I kidding? I've seen it. Apparently, they were running out of time and decided to alter the Nightstalker armor rather than come up with something cool. We also apparently have forever been assigned the colors red and black. I'm beginning to know how the druids feel with their brown and green. HA! Whatever. At least red and black are cool. Poor druids. T_T The patch includes the introduction of more Darkmoon Faire cards. I think this may be the rogue card:

Wrath (Furies)

Each time one of your direct damage attacks does not critically strike, you gain 17 critical strike rating and 17 spell critical strike rating for the next 10 sec. This effect is consumed when you deal a critical strike. (Stacks up to 20 times)

That's a maximum of 15.38% increase to critical. Wow. It may be trinket slot-worthy.

Rogues changes in the patch, categorized with comments

• LAME! Added a new double-attack animation for "Mutilate".
  I'm sure rogues everywhere were dying for this one.
• NERF! "Cloak of Shadows": The tooltip has been adjusted to indicate this ability removes hostile effects, rather than dispels them. "Cloak of Shadows" does not count as a dispel, and will not interact with dispel resistance or effects triggered by dispelling. This ability no longer removes the "Weakened Soul" debuff.
  Ever since I've read this I've wanted to try this out before it gets patched.
• BUFF! "Deadly Throw": This ability will now damage hunters and their pets when they are affected by "The Beast Within" or "Bestial Wrath". Those targets will still be immune to the movement impairing portion of "Deadly Throw".
  Hmm. Maybe I'd care more if I mapped this ability.
• BUFF! Fixed a data error that caused "Ghostly Strike" and "Riposte" to generate more threat than intended.
  Awesome! But I don't have either, so "meh".
• BUFF! Fixed a bug where the "Silence" effect on "Garrote" was getting resisted too often.
  The Man is always trying to put the Rogue down.
• NERF! "Insignia of the Alliance/Horde" and "Medallion of the Alliance/Horde" now remove "Fear", "Stun" and "Polymorph" effects and no longer remove "Charm" effects.
  Boo. This is one of the three reasons I equipped this trinket. Rather disappointing.
• BUFF! "Improved Sap" (Subtlety) renamed "Dirty Tricks": Increases the range of your "Sap" and "Blind" abilities by 2/4 yards and reduces the energy cost of your "Sap" and "Blind" abilities by 25/50%.
  Alright, apparently all the gold I've slipped GMs is finally paying off.
• BUFF! Increased the frequency and amount of "Blinding Powder" found in pickpocketed junk boxes.
  OMG!! OMG!!!! So lame.
• NERF! "Mutilate": This ability will now always consume the "Cold Blood" buff when it strikes an opponent.
  Hmm.. Another one of those "doesn't affect me why should I care" changes.
• NERF! Poisons: The difficulty of dispelling these is now based off the level of the player, not the level of the weapon the poison is applied to.
  Makes sense, but it doesn't make it cool to nerf.
• BUFF! Reduced the reagents required to create most poisons.
  Sweet!
• NERF! "Remorseless Attacks"(Assassination): "Hemorrhage" added to the buff tooltip. This ability will no longer trigger from killing totems.
  Yet they still allow warriors to generate rage from totems and critters. h8 warriors
• BUFF! Rogue poisons no longer have charges.
  You had me at "Rogue poisons no longer have charges."
• BUFF! "Sap" now automatically gains the full benefit of "Improved Sap".
  2 free talents points for damage. w00t!
• BUFF! "Shadowstep" (Subtlety): The cooldown has been reduced to 15 seconds.
  Someday, I'll have 123 Talents points to be able to take advantage of all of these buffs.
• NERF! "Stealth" will now be broken correctly by damage shield such as "Oil of Immolation".
  What IS the reasoning behind a rogue unstealthing when damaged? Total crap I tell ya.
• BUFF! "Surprise Attacks" (Combat): This talent now correctly prevents "Envenom" from being dodged.
  I wonder why no one cared before. Let me think. Oh yeah. Envenom is useless without Mutilate which is at the bottom of the Assassination tree and Surprise Attacks is at the bottom of the Combat tree. *sigh*

Well, there you have it. We got a few Buffs, but mostly, Nerfs. Obviously, Blizzard hates Rogues. Please lobby for more Rogue buffs.

Hmm.. Wait... There's more:

• Creatures will no longer "Cleave" targets that aren't in front of them.
• "Polymorph" spell duration has been changed from 20 seconds to 8 seconds.
• Creatures will no longer perform "Sweeping Strikes".

These changes were obviously placed in the game for feral druids. =/ So disappointing.

the end

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Rogue Nostromo

In light of the new n52te, I've updated this post a little with my current set up. Go look at my preview of the new Nostromo.

I'm not going to go over the entire Nostromo deal. I think Phaelia does a great job here. I'm just going to give you my parry, dodge and spin on it.

Why did I decide to go to a Nostromo? I was tired, oh so tired, of hitting Sinister Strike as quickly as possible over and over again. I don't have tendonitis or carpal tunnel and I don't want either. So, when I felt the first twinge of something in my left hand from hitting my [1] key over and over again, I decided that maybe something needed to be done.

My goal with using my Nostromo is two-fold: 1) eliminate hand stress and 2) consolidate the majority of my play onto my Nostromo and mouse, the keyboard is simply for chat and nothing more.

As you might see, my key layout may seem a bit strange. My Nostromo layout evolved from my normal keyboard bindings: Q for Stealth (as it is right next to the movement), X for Sprint Riposte (I no longer use Riposte in my build), etc. I haven't bothered remapping them to something that makes more "sense" as it allows me to switch back to full keyboard and know where pretty much everything is still.

My Nostromo layout

But those are just the keys that are bound. Honestly, it doesn't matter one way or another which key you have mapped to the nostromo except for the "modifier" keys such as "alt","shift" and "ctrl". That is as long as you then map your action buttons in World of Warcraft to the same keys.

I've mapped my functions in the following way:

Hopefully, everything is pretty self-explanatory. SS is Sinister Strike and CoS is Cloak of Shadows. But you already knew that, right? Beatdown, Stun, Bleed, Feint and Stealth are all WoW macros described below.

I've used the outer 3 right keys and outer 3 left keys for system functions regardless of my character. Having esc and tab enables me to quickly handle targetting and escaping out of whatever dialog I'm in. Character, Map and Backpack are also essentials for allowing my left hand to remain on the Nostromo for all my functions. I've also mapped the mousewheel on the Nostromo to my Social window to determine who is on in guild, the Quest window and I use the forward turn of the mousewheel for my mount with a shift+forward mousewheel for my flying mount.

The backstab key, the fourth key in the top row, is the one key I have a Nostromo macro on. I've setup the macro like this:

So, it's basically spamming the key over and over again every half second as long as hold down the key. I use this with Backstab Sinister Strike,shift+key for Sinister Strike and alt+key for my cast sequence of Blade Flurry, Evasion and Adrenaline Rush. I use this on every character for whatever ability I need to hit over and over.

Next, I have created the following macros to further consolidate functionality. Most are based so that they do one function in stealth mode and another outside of stealth. And the Stealth macro is mashable. You have to press alt+stealth to get out of stealth and you press shift+stealth for Vanish.

• Beatdown

  /cast [stealth] Sap;Slice and Dice

• Bleed!

  /cast [stealth] Garrote;Rupture

• Feint

  /cast [stealth] Pick Pocket;Feint

• Stealth

  /cast [stance:0] Stealth; [stance:1, modifier:alt] Stealth; [modifier:shift] Vanish

• Stun

  /cast [stealth] Cheap Shot; Kidney Shot

• Uber

  /castsequence reset=120 Blade Flurry,Evasion, Adrenaline Rush

Finally, I use the mouse for steering and the directional pad for strafting and backwards movement. Further, my mouse has four buttons and I've mapped the far right button to autorun and the far left button to my Ventrillo speak button.

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Another Rogue Blog

This isn't really for you. It's for me. Yeah, one of those blogs. But I'll be posting my views on patches, strategies and anything else I find of interest. I'll probably update it sporadically, but feel free to come back often and make requests.

I had intended to name this blog something else but they were all taken:

• sliceanddice, slicendice
• stabstabstab
• backstab
• pastarogue (yeah, serious.. don't ask)

But in the end, Daffy's words rang true and were available.

Coming next... my Nostromo layout and macros.

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