After telling myself to remember to train in Orgrimmar I promptly forgot. It was another level or so before I went back and remembered.
With the decision made to level skinning, I made my way to Eversong. LOTS of dragonhawks and cats to skin (and eggs to loot). The leveling guide says to head out to Durotar and on this server there probably wouldn’t have been much competition, but the only thing better than kill sharing on a low pop server is not kill sharing at all.
BoA and Satchel gear has mostly rendered craftable items obsolete for leveling alts. I was able to make myself a pair of gloves before I ran out of light leather, but they were shortly replaced with the contents of a helpful satchel.
Brief tangent: Call to Arms should apply for all levels, not just cap.
Finished gathering leather in between killing the last boss in various dungeons. I hardly got complete dungeons all weekend. Including a Blackfathom Depths where we zoned in to the entrance, picked up our quests and were a little confused when we got to the first boss and it was already dead. A party member admitted that only the last boss was left and 3 people quit right then rather than get the easy satchel. I “tanked” trash until a new party could be formed.
Oh, I did get a complete Gnomer that wasn’t too terrible except for the creepy mage attempting to flirt with the female toons in the party. A second complete Gnomer was bad. Nothing really to point at other than the 3 guild members just dicking around forever in between every pull. I’m glad *someone* found their deaths amusing because it sure as hell wasn’t me.
A couple talent points and a glyph or two and Slice and Dice has made rogueing much more interesting.
It doesn’t feel like it’s doing a whole lot (I still haven’t gotten the BoA daggers, yes, I’m lazy) but it at least gives me something to juggle.
I even made it a little game while I was leveling up skinning to try to get from one bloody carcass to the next before losing my buff. Unfortunately, it takes longer to skin most of those mobs than it does to kill them so I was fighting a losing battle.
And I had always wondered why combo points remained on a corpse… OMG I can cast a finisher on a corpse!
This really changed the way I dealt with trash. I wasn’t so worried about getting a finisher up on the mob before it died because now I can refresh S&D and just move to the next target, turning it into a little pincushion or using Recuperate if it looks like the healer has wandered off again. (That’s been a pretty common theme in my dungeons – AFK or DC healers, and the tanks that don’t notice.)
IceHUD even has a pre-built tracker for S&D that shows its current duration as well as what it would be if I were to pop it at any given time.
Now I just need to pay better attention to when Blade Flurry is up. That one should just get the little sparkly border on it like pet abilities. I’ll turn it on just for a trash pack and somehow leave it on. Oops.
The words “Not enough energy” are probably going to permanently burn themselves into my screen.
I seem to take personal offence to finding stealthed mobs. I never really paid much attention to them before, except to kill them as needed. But now I will go out of my way to take down a stealthed humanoid. Sap, rifle through their pockets, gut them. In reality it’s not much different than what I do to a non-stealthed mob, but I twist the knife a bit more and get just a little bit of a kick out of it.
The range on sap is huge. I mean freaking huge.
Thinking yourself to be clever by sapping one mob before beating the shit out of the other guy with him is only cool if you manage to stay out of the fire between them. If you catch on fire, not so cool.
Vanish is awesome. ‘Nuff said.
I don’t want to go so far as to say that I’m having fun or enjoying myself. I’m still not a fan of melee combat and still flip out of there’s too many mobs for me to figure out where I should be standing.
But as far as diversions go, this one isn’t too bad.
I know what you mean about the stealthed mobs. My main has always been a rogue and its like you don’t want to get out rogued by a mob so you gotta do them right haha!
Rogues are just really awkward to level. I don’t see what spec you’re levelling as, but if I could make a suggestion, I’d say go for Assassination rather than the commonly-suggested Combat. Deadly momentum is such a huge quality of life improvement (and works with your skinning game!) and definitely has fewer energy issues than the other specs.
I like the sound of less energy issues. I *finally* got some talent points in Combat that are helping out with that so it’s a little smoother now.
But what the hell am I supposed to be doing with all these poisons? I generally keep instant on my main and deadly on my off, but that’s probably wrong. I keep some crippling around for instances with mobs prone to fleeing. And I have the others just in case someone requests it for specific fights, but I don’t think that will really be an issue before end game.
Assassination doesn’t have Vitality like Combat does, but it does have a couple of neat talents that give you energy back. It also doesn’t have Blade Flurry gimping its regen. You don’t have any multi-target abilities, but your single-target damage goes up to compensate. As an oddity of how the spec works, you’ll actually have the most AoE damage of the specs at 80-ish when you get Fan of Knives.
As far as poisons go, the general advice is to use as fast an OH as you can, put Deadly on that, and watch it proc through the roof. Use instant on your MH, and never ever use crippling. Every tree has a talent that you can take to give it the same effect. Assassination has Deadly Brew – only a 50% chance per poison proc with one point, but assassination gets a lot of procs, so it’s up basically 24/7.
If trash is dying really quickly, consider using wound poison instead of Deadly until later levels. It does more base damage and you don’t need to wait for it to stack.
Mind-numbing doesn’t seem to work on anything important, so I wouldn’t bother really.
Rogues really are the class that seems to benefit the most from off-tree talents, though – honestly, all three specs have some real gems in the early points. You just need to last until then.
Hey, I wasn’t being retarded with my poison selections most of the time, go me!
I don’t have much selection in weapons yet. I’ve kept my BoA dagger in the MH (yes, I finally got it) and then have just picked up an OH every couple of levels from dungeons. But I imagine closer to 85 I’ll have more to choose from instead of grabbing wildly at every pointy piece I see.
Now the game is to see just how long I can keep this up. When I get to the box-farming stage I may start to rapidly lose interest…
Trying to keep this in a threaded view. May end up being posted out of sequence. #wordpressnoob
Yeah, the rogue’s rotation is kinda flat. Combat particularly doesn’t even really benefit from the signature rogue ability – stealth. The rotation does get better with gear and levels, though. Well – to the point where you use a different skill below 35% and you’ve got a couple of different finishers to cycle.
(you mentioned backstab somewhere. there’s a talent buried somewhere that halves the cost of backstab when you use it on an enemy below 35% – that’s when you use it, and only then, unless you’re Subtlety.)
I think my problem with the rogue trees is that they’re really all the same to me. I take sharp pointies and insert them repeatedly into the enemy. With mages, at least I’m killing things with different colors.
Right now I only have a handful of talent points. I’m thinking around level 50 or so I’ll dual spec and start experimenting. By then I should have enough talent points that I can feel a difference between the trees.
If – and that’s a big IF – I end up going to end game with this rogue, I imagine I’ll need a solo spec that has more sneaky stuff and a blatant DPS spec so I can yell at the tank for not keeping threat and the healer for not saving me.
Be fair… combat rogues can use maces too.
Technicalities aside, that’s part of my problem with combat. It feels like the bland mcdonalds to a fury warrior’s perfectly grilled steak. Assassination may be avocado on toast, but at least it has its own flavour.
Any spec of rogue is about as sneaky as you want it to be. I’ve found Sap’s glyph to be useful in instances and out. That said, unfortunately no rogue is good enough to pickpocket a mob’s kidneys straight out, and quest-givers tend to want such oddities rather than proof that you’ve mortally wounded the target’s pockets.
Have you tried flailing about in a battleground yet? PvP isn’t really my thing, but it is where the rogue can come alive… all of the utilities that rarely see the grimy light of a dungeon are solid elementium-plated gems against other players. Plus it’s funny as hell sapping players and watching them go hopelessly paranoid.
I refuse to use a mace. It’s just so… everything a rogue shouldn’t be about.
Flailing would be an apt description for me in a BG. If I could skin some rugged leather off my opponents I would consider it. I could spend the whole time skulking about, soaking up honor from proximity kills and farming. But nooooooo Blizz won’t let us skin players.
Wait. Can we skin the Ramkahen kitty people? There’s more than one way to skin a cat…