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.