Daily Thoughts: My Favorite Part of 4.1

OK. So we’re getting a new raid – the Firelands. We might even be getting a second new raid in patch 4.1, which some theorize is the War of the Ancients raid. My main, a Paladin, is finally going to see Divine Storm add holy power, which should solidify our ability to put out competitive AOE numbers. These changes and a host of others don’t excite me near as much as a pair of little changes for rogues. Did I say little? I meant supermassiveomgforpvpfuntimes.

Stealth base cooldown has been reduced to 4 seconds, down from 10, and the movement penalty from being in Stealth has been removed.

[Sub] Nightstalker [talent] now reduces the cooldown of Stealth by 2/4 seconds, and instead of negating the movement penalty from Stealth, it adds a 5/10% movement speed bonus (stacking with other effects) while Stealthed.

Lets work this out, first all rogues now can move the same speed as everyone else when stealthed, making hunting your prey as a rogue so much easier. The CD to return to stealth is also lowered to 4 seconds. This makes it much safer to jump out and score a kill. As long as the kill takes you out of combat, you only have to wait 4 seconds, down from 10 in order to be safe and sneaking around again. As an extra bonus for the subtlety spec the cooldown on stealth is reduced to zero. If you’re not in combat you can immediately get back to stealth. On top of that, when stealthed they will actually move 10% faster than normal movement speed. This means a sub rogue will actually be faster in stealth than another class who doesn’t have a talented move speed. Never again will rogues have to watch their targets casually run away because they were just slightly out of range and Shadowstep was on CD.

You might ask, “If your main is a Paladin, why are you excited about this change?” I would have a two-part answer for you. First, run speed and extra sneakiness or not, jump me alone on your rogue and you’re dead if you don’t run. Second, I do 80% of my PVP on my rogue in battlegrounds as sub spec. It was bunches of fun before and this is icing on an already very tasty cake.