New to vanilla Rogue, some questions

[sakeoe]

1: Is there any way to avoid losing combo points when retargeting? Since there appear to be no focus macros this makes interupting/ccing a 2nd player a huge pain in the ass as you have to quickly spent your combo points before you actually make your move.

2: I see that a lot of people say this is the best spec http://www.wowprovider.com/Old.aspx?tal ... 0033212100 and there is no debate.

Without knowing any damage numbers I came up with this spec:
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 002530003h

A friend suggested I would change it to this
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 0253d3301e

What are your thoughts about these specs? Why would they not be viable?

[Busdriverx]

1: Is there any way to avoid losing combo points when retargeting? Since there appear to be no focus macros this makes interupting/ccing a 2nd player a huge pain in the ass as you have to quickly spent your combo points before you actually make your move.

2: I see that a lot of people say this is the best spec http://www.wowprovider.com/Old.aspx?tal ... 0033212100 and there is no debate.

Without knowing any damage numbers I came up with this spec:
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 002530003h

A friend suggested I would change it to this
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 0253d3301e

What are your thoughts about these specs? Why would they not be viable?

I don't understand - are you talking about PvP specs? If so both of the builds you posted quite honestly suck (they suck for PvE too but that's different)

Non-dagger builds are about control + burst with fast combo point generation from hemo (35 energy cost) and Ruthlessness/Relentless Strikes, a considerable amount of your damage in PvP is coming from eviscerate, which is why cold blood + eviscerate is so valued. Not speccing into Prep and Dirty Deeds in a PvP build is just confusing to say the least, and missing out Lethality in any Rogue build whatsoever is weird

[2pumpchumpp]

My main was a rogue in vanilla WoW. I gotta say I had a lot of fun with the first spec you posted - viable for leveling and PvP - not great for damage in instances, but decent to get by on. There are some decent rotations that you can use to almost guarantee killing anyone (warriors always the hardest, warriors shit on rogues, and mages/locks I found to be easiest). The rotations involved using cold blood and preparation in conjunction to get 2 cold bloods, so as long as you get lucky with the other player not having better tricks up their sleeve, usually they would go down with a 5point evis with cold blood.

So that was fun... until I discovered combat-mace spec. That stun proc is AMAZING, so I switched to combat/subtlety with points into mace specialization and was raping everyone, but sadly that was just before BC came out and ruined mace spec.

Here are some tips though, while stun is your best buddy and you open up with cheap shot on almost everyone, you want to do massive damage upfront with a mage, because a stun means he'll just blink out of it leaving you vulnerable, so you want to ambush/garrote (depending on spec) a mage. Other than that, experiment and check it out.

I mainly PvP'd and for PvP, mace was god-spec (mainly because it procced pretty often and it was not on cooldown, but better take em down fast because diminishing returns come back to bite you in the ass) and unfortunately I did not get to play much with it.
With that said, I may be a special case, and most of the time I played my rogue I had the assassination/subtlety spec. Try them both out and see which one is better for you.

That first spec is nice burst damage but heavily relies on cooldowns. Combat mace/subtlety is better for PvP IMO because it's consistent (i.e., you can kill one player and move on to the next and not have to rely on cooldowns other than maybe vanish).

I would also highly suggest getting some sort of addon for the energy tick timer. If you time your attacks right, that can make the difference between you getting that extra sinister strike/hemo in faster to get you to the 5 point and CB evis.

[Scenic]

Im not a huge fan of the cookie cutter cold blood spec. Its arguably better because of the lack of gear but, http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 0033012151 feels so much more rewarding so many fun things you can do with premed, and 10% more ap is always nice too. < is unquestionably the better spec for a aq40/naxx geared rogue.

[Busdriverx]

Im not a huge fan of the cookie cutter cold blood spec. Its arguably better because of the lack of gear but, http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 0033012151 feels so much more rewarding so many fun things you can do with premed, and 10% more ap is always nice too. < is unquestionably the better spec for a aq40/naxx geared rogue.

17/3/31 and 17/0/34 with 5/5 Camouflage and 2/2 Heightened Senses are better specs with better gear for sure, that's when you have T2+ with AQ/Naxx weapons hitting 700+ hemo crit on plate, realistically in current gear it's 400-500

I played 17/0/34 here with ~720 AP unbuffed (would be over 800 with baron cloak + dal'rend set) and even at 720 the ~1k+ noncrit eviscerates on cloth destroy people, it's a lot of fun even in not so great gear

[sakeoe]

So nobody knows a way to target someone else without losing combo points?

My main was a rogue in vanilla WoW. I gotta say I had a lot of fun with the first spec you posted - viable for leveling and PvP - not great for damage in instances, but decent to get by on. There are some decent rotations that you can use to almost guarantee killing anyone (warriors always the hardest, warriors shit on rogues, and mages/locks I found to be easiest). The rotations involved using cold blood and preparation in conjunction to get 2 cold bloods, so as long as you get lucky with the other player not having better tricks up their sleeve, usually they would go down with a 5point evis with cold blood.

So that was fun... until I discovered combat-mace spec. That stun proc is AMAZING, so I switched to combat/subtlety with points into mace specialization and was raping everyone, but sadly that was just before BC came out and ruined mace spec.

Here are some tips though, while stun is your best buddy and you open up with cheap shot on almost everyone, you want to do massive damage upfront with a mage, because a stun means he'll just blink out of it leaving you vulnerable, so you want to ambush/garrote (depending on spec) a mage. Other than that, experiment and check it out.

I mainly PvP'd and for PvP, mace was god-spec (mainly because it procced pretty often and it was not on cooldown, but better take em down fast because diminishing returns come back to bite you in the ass) and unfortunately I did not get to play much with it.
With that said, I may be a special case, and most of the time I played my rogue I had the assassination/subtlety spec. Try them both out and see which one is better for you.

That first spec is nice burst damage but heavily relies on cooldowns. Combat mace/subtlety is better for PvP IMO because it's consistent (i.e., you can kill one player and move on to the next and not have to rely on cooldowns other than maybe vanish).

I would also highly suggest getting some sort of addon for the energy tick timer. If you time your attacks right, that can make the difference between you getting that extra sinister strike/hemo in faster to get you to the 5 point and CB evis.

Could you share your combat mace stun build?

1: Is there any way to avoid losing combo points when retargeting? Since there appear to be no focus macros this makes interupting/ccing a 2nd player a huge pain in the ass as you have to quickly spent your combo points before you actually make your move.

2: I see that a lot of people say this is the best spec http://www.wowprovider.com/Old.aspx?tal ... 0033212100 and there is no debate.

Without knowing any damage numbers I came up with this spec:
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 002530003h

A friend suggested I would change it to this
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 0253d3301e

What are your thoughts about these specs? Why would they not be viable?

I don't understand - are you talking about PvP specs? If so both of the builds you posted quite honestly suck (they suck for PvE too but that's different)

Non-dagger builds are about control + burst with fast combo point generation from hemo (35 energy cost) and Ruthlessness/Relentless Strikes, a considerable amount of your damage in PvP is coming from eviscerate, which is why cold blood + eviscerate is so valued. Not speccing into Prep and Dirty Deeds in a PvP build is just confusing to say the least, and missing out Lethality in any Rogue build whatsoever is weird

I see your point however I feel that AR easily makes up for missing out on the energy/combo related abilities you mentioned.

The increased mobility on sprint and reduced cooldown will be huge too. Having riposte will make beating other Rogues and Warriors a walk in the park.

[Busdriverx]

So nobody knows a way to target someone else without losing combo points?

You can't, not possible in vanilla although some 1.12 servers do allow it


If you really insist on a PvP build with riposte and sinister strike, I think this would be okay, but I still don't like it at all

http://www.wowprovider.com/Old.aspx?tal ... 3d32012000

[2pumpchumpp]

I'm by no means a pro, just an amateur, and it's been a long time since I played vanilla wow, but my build was something similar to this:
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1121 ... 3d33012100
It's not set in stone, and it may even not be optimal, so feel free to "tweak" it to fit your fighting style better. For instance, instead of speccing into precision and dual-wield specialization to make your off-hand more viable, you could instead specc into parry and reposte to be able to disarm warriors. But the issue here is that even though I'm told that in PvP most of your damage comes from yellow attacks (abilities) I've always felt that the extra off-hand damage helped a lot, especially since with this build's major selling point is stunlocking, which means that you'll have more time to stand there and let your auto-attacks do damage as well, and the fact that as a rogue you'll try to always be behind your enemy means that there will be even less chance of you parrying someone than you already have, so while it sounds good, in practice I've rarely ever been able to disarm (but if you do, then it helps A LOT with melee classes and hunters).
This also does not give you any high damage abilities, so you may want put some points into eviscerate in assassination to make it more damaging, but the only things you'll be able to trade for eviscerate are blade flurry (don't) or dirty tricks/hemo (again, reluctant - reducing energy cost of anything is always preferable to me and hemo is a lower-cost alternative to sinister strike). I used hemo if I needed the combo points or sinister strike if I wanted to put more damage in.

All in all, I tried to reconstruct it from memory, and this seems like something similar to what I used. Feel free to tweak it to your playstyle - the major point is of course "Mace specialization" and subtlety (subtlety has some talents I just CANNOT do without in PvP, such as Camouflage, which doesn't seem game-changing, but it is).

[Busdriverx]

I'm by no means a pro, just an amateur

don't worry I can tell

[2pumpchumpp]

I'm by no means a pro, just an amateur

don't worry I can tell

Oh thank God! I can sleep better now knowing I didn't accidentally mislead you.