4.0.1 – Part 2!

As promised, I’ve come with a little information about subtlety rogues in pvp in WoW patch 4.0.1. One word – superfunawesomelolcoolshadowstep. This will be a little more geared towards people wanting to start a new rogue or are considering PVP while leveling. I don’t claim to be a rogue expert, for that I’d suggest checking out Elitist Jerks. Sub spec for rogues in PVP currently is so much fun in fact, that I’m considering making it my main pvp character over my long-standing main, the Ret Paladin.

Ganked – With decent gear I’m running around (well, by running I mean sprinting, and by sprinting I mean sprinting while in stealth with sub’s increased run speed in stealth) one shotting poor under geared folks and 2-3 shotting most anyone if I can land a couple good Ambush/Backstab crits. For those who are unfamiliar with rogue skills, shadow step teleports you a decent distance directly behind your target at which point, if you’re stealthed (and you better be) you can open up with an ambush for high damage or cheap shot for a decent stun. Follow this up with backstab spamming and they’re probably dead. At 5 combo points you can eviscerate and if they aren’t dead even still, you’re probably playing wow drunk and you’re actually attempting to kill a rock.

Vanish – A key factor in my 25 kill to 0 death AV tonight at level 69 is the new mechanic to vanish. As of 4.0.1 when a rogue uses vanish, it now has 3 second guaranteed stealth time that cannot be broken by damage or other annoying things, this was not the case in the past and everything AOE or otherwise would make you exit stealth. And did I mention you gain a 3 second sprint after using shadowstep. You can just taste the talent synergy. Vanish and the sprint component helps an aspiring rogue get out of tight spots after trying to make short work of an enemy [see Gank].

I’m pretty excited about seeing my rogue to 80 and eventually to 85 when rated battle grounds become the next big thing in PVP. I will most certainly keep you updated. As a quick comparison between sub and combat in PVP, the few times I forgot to change specs before accepting the battleground queue, I didn’t manage more than 4 killing blows in combat spec, everyone could see me without my improved stealth, and other rogues laughed at me while tea bagging my corpse. It was unpleasant.

Glyphs, gems, and the auction house.

Although it’s a little late for this information to help anyone, I wanted to talk a little about the money I’ve made on the AH since patch. Keep in mind, with auctioneer broken, I find myself far too lazy and frustrated using the default auction house interface so I’m only using the remote auction house which has a 200 per day transaction limit. A few months back I bought a ton of herbs to either mill for inscriptions or use for potions/flasks as I leveled alchemy on an alt. 2-3k herbs all in total, I’d guess. The night before 4.0.1, I milled the majority of my herbs into pigments for inscriptions and made somewhere in the range of 500-600 glyphs. 2 days into the selling of the glyphs and a few gems I made (will get into the gems in a moment), I’m up 200% profit with at most half of my glyphs sold. If you don’t have a good stock of glyphs made before 4.0.1 when 1 ink could make a glyph, spend some time farming the herbs which seem to be selling 2x their normal value now.

As for gem sales, epic gem costs are up 50% on both servers where my toons live. With the demand so high, an alchemist should be using every transmute cool down to make an epic gem to sell. I’m working on that now. I’ll let you know how it works it all works out. Tomorrow I should have some updates for Holy or Ret Paladins in ICC 10m.

4.0.1 – A New Beginning

After my first full day to dive into the latest massive content patch of World of Warcraft, I must admit, I’m finding myself a bit underwhelmed. Admittedly, a fair portion of my general disposition to the patch is a result of the abundance of glitches, bugs, and other (hopefully) soon to be fixed issues.

My main toon, a Ret/Holy Paladin is lagging so bad I can’t get a legitimate test of his new skills and damage capabilities. On the other hand, the 7 frames per second cannot be the only culprit in dropping 70% of my damage. My ungodly lag seems to be character based, as without any different addons, my Paladin on the Thrall server and my Warrior on Vek’Nilash both lag horribly, yet my Druid and Shaman on Vek both play just fine. Of my 6 level 80 toons, my opinions of how the patch affected each is as follows:

Paladin:

Significant damage and minor overall healing nerf. Holy’s new abilities and talents look fun, while so far, Retribution’s talents and new abilities feel more clunky – possibly just from the lag though. Not impressed.

Death Knight:

It’s pretty hard for me to judge my Death Knight’s new talent trees and such because of the massive change. I was blood spec dps and frost spec tank, now I’m unable to play either since blood is tanking only and frost can no longer tank. Purely from a dummy test, 2-handed frost pretty fun and probably similar dps to what I could produce as blood. Probably alright.

Warrior:

The only spec I’ve played my warrior is fury. Fury has taken a decent damage nerf that I anticipate seeing fixed either soon or at cataclysm launch. The new abilities and procs are a little more engaging though. I’m looking forward to seeing him perform better. One of my good friends has gotten a chance to play test Arms spec and the dps is competitive now, which is nice for warriors to have another PVE option. A little excited.

Druid:

Balance druids hit HARD. All-in-all, I’d guess a 15-20% damage increase from what I was previously doing. The new eclipse system is a little easier to understand and plan out which could possibly make it more useful while questing or in dungeons. Feral cat damage plummeted comparatively and feral bear form lost armor. Although I haven’t tried tanking on bear yet, I’m hearing good things. Suspicious.

Shaman:

I must confess, I don’t like my enhancement shaman much. It doesn’t feel like it changed much from before 4.0.1, so if you liked the way they played, you’ll probably still enjoy them. As for me, I see myself switching to Elemental or Resto pretty soon. Damage output has stayed about the same as far as I can tell. Unenthusiastic.

Hunter:

I’m pretty nervous about taking my hunter into an instance. The new focus system isn’t as rogue-ish feeling as I had worried it might be but, it’s going to take a lot of getting used to. Damage looks good and many of the new abilities, such as the new call pet/stable, seem like pretty good quality of life buffs. Hopeful.

Well, that’s my 15 minutes for today. Tomorrow my alliance rogue will hit 70 and I’ll talk a little about PVP on him and how I’m making a killing on selling glyphs.