WoW TBC Rogue: A Quick Meta Guide

what's going on friends back again with a quick meta guide for the rogue yeah that's right everyone's favorite class to dunk on in regards to pve as always the video has a few sections that are essentially what i wanted to find out for each spec as a youtube consumer before turning to making my own first the pve basics talents stats that kind of thing we'll finish us off with a discussion on race choice briefly before heading into the strengths or reasons to play rogue along with the limitations or reasons you may not enjoy playing rogue following this we're going to cover professions and pvp briefly but if you want super detailed information on these topics you'll definitely want to check out some other videos after this one so starting off with our spec there are a number of options for rogues but rogue is in a rough position pve wise which you've probably heard about and due to this we kind of need to pick the best build and that is combat swords by a large margin back in 2007 people calculated that other specs were between two to six percent worse but with modern min maxing on private servers the gap has widened so we're taking that the combat sword spec is pretty locked in at 20 41 0 with two points being changed if you decide to run improved expose armor but usage is pretty rare due to the interaction with devastate the spec is very close to the sword spec from vanilla improved backstab swaps with improved slice and dice which is nice to help us push down without taking utility talents like endurance we take the new chance and vitality for a nice two percent agi bump and one in nerves of steel to help us push down to combat potency and surprise attacks in the assassination tree we're taking pretty much all the no-brainer picks that you'll be familiar with from vanilla the only variable here is four points in vile poisons this can be two points if you're gonna put two into improved expose but as mentioned it's pretty rare one small note before we transition to the next section is that there is some leeway on main hand usage for swords which sounds counterintuitive but if the main hand upgrade is big enough an offhand sword is more than enough for it still to be optimal to use sword spec in particular roger sun king is really good despite being a mace and even when using mace or fists in the main hand you're going to want to go offhand sword and retain five out of five in swords in regards to stats expertise and hit are always very very strong no matter what stage of the game per point hit is often at a similar value to agility to give you some context nine percent hit is our minimum desired amount as it caps all our yellow hits but more hit is still very strong all the way up to the hard cap which we're rarely going to get close to but it's because so much of the rogue damage is standard melee swings or sword procs expertise is the very best stat for point at least until you hit the cap of 6.5 this is pretty hard to do for most classes but is far more achievable for rogue thanks to the weapon expertise talent that 10 expertise isn't rating it's actual expertise which means those two points give you 39.4 expertise out of the 103 that you would need to cap when you add the human ratio on top of this it brings it down to 44 expertise needed and that's pretty easy to get actually so whilst you don't explicitly need the expertise cap these items with this stat on are going to sim pretty well until you are following these three stats haste is also pretty strong particularly due to sword spec and combat potency it scales decently as we progress through the game and sometimes reaches the same rough value as agility for a general idea crit is of course never bad but it also doesn't really reach the same level as the other stats then we have the very busted armor pen rating the per point value is super low but that's because there's just so much of it on gear so as we get more and more armor pen gear in tier six and salamand you'll often find that the best pieces have armor penetration rating on them especially as we go through early t6 through to summer plateau and the stack budgets increase so that's our stats but how are we actually dealing damage in raids swords rogue is exceptionally similar to classic vanilla road but with a few tweaks first garot should be used on the opener from stealth however there's gonna be so many bosses that will take too much time to do this versus just running in with the rest of melee and starting from there the short version is it's a small min max that is not worth losing any real uptime over so only use it when it's really simple to achieve following this you're going to maintain you guessed it slice and dice without fail the only real change to the rotation is that you'll be using rupture instead of eviscerate with your excess combo points this rate is only used if the target is going to die before rupture deals most or all of its damage as usual sinister strike is our combo point generator of choice for combat swords fists and maces if you do betray the meta daggers is similar but uses backstab instead of sinister strike i'm not going to elaborate on daggers for the reasons explained earlier combat swords is king and i do recommend you go that way so now we're at the final pve basic the race choice without any doubt the top choices are human for alliance and troll or awk respectively for pve dps i want to caveat this though in terms of absolute piss troll is a little better than orc it's widely considered the orc is superior in vanilla pve and whilst this is true the addition of combat potency really amplifies the value of haste effects even more for rogue as such whilst it's quite a small difference assuming 10 percent haste from berserking troll does edge it slightly to touch on another race i'm sure people may consider pretty strong blood elf yep arcane torrent is pretty good but the 10 energy every two minutes is just not the same value of the aforementioned racials pvp wise you are looking at undead and human undead's will of the forsaken is widely covered as a genuinely overpowered racial and that's why it's nerfed in wrath but the bigger factor is the kind of compositions you're gonna face you'll see large representation from priests warlocks and warriors all of whom will use fear as cross cc and breaking net is a huge factor to getting winds in addition to this the stun resistance for orc is nerfed down to 15 from 25 so whilst it's still nice it's just not as reliable or as potent as full of the forsaken likewise arcane torrent is far from awful it's actually really good but it's genuinely alarming how good will forsaken is in tbc and its arena meta alliance side it's definitely perception stone form and escape artists are strong racials in their own right but the value of catching an opposing rogue or druid out of stealth will win you more games than either of the competing options okay so now we're onto topic i'm sure some vanilla rogues are anxious about why i play rogue in tbc and where are they good i'll begin with two statements one will sting and the other one will sting less rogues have the worst overall pv experience in terms of performance all the way until you get the giga juice in tier six and even then it's not really exceptional unless you get both those orange pixels before you find some rope to go with your chair i must say the extent of this performance is a little overstated first rogues do have some mechanical utility that is often overlooked when using the passing speed running goggles that we often see or wear ourselves in this community kicks are frequently required in tbc raids and rogues along with warriors have the most consistent kicks in the game as exemplified by the way you can control caribbeas which is an ad in the characters encounter with just three classes if you pick the right ones that is prop warrior rest of shaman and rogue those three combined can lock down this ad until the raid gets to killing him just an example of where kicks are super important and rogues are very very valuable there in addition cloak of shadows makes damage in tech from encounters such as the caliph goss safravar encounter far easier to manage likewise it can invalidate some mechanics such as the wrath of the astromancer from solarian and tempest keep i will say though that neither of these things are particularly game-breaking and boss tuning will determine how valuable these things are but there is some utility built into rogue if easy tuning occurs which would reduce the things i've just mentioned to a very minimal importance it does potentially change something else in the favor of rogues in the event of easy tuning it's plausible to not use a warrior tank now don't get your pitchforks out warrior mains i'm just saying it's possible because the most unique thing to prop warrior is their defensive versatility and cooldowns and at this point you might think why the hell does the success of prop warriors matter to rogues well the main reason improved expose is not really a thing in tbc is because it prevents prop warriors using devastate as part of their threat per second rotation and as such the trade-off isn't really worth the lower threat ceiling because threat is a real thing in tbc so without prop warriors rogues will genuinely provide some good utility which may make them more popular in terms of raid composition because you'll probably have heard that usually at the moment on private servers you bring zero or one rogue in the early content and potentially a second one in the very late game if you add a melee group honestly there's a lot more i could say on this topic in terms of rogues not being completely trash but i'm conscious of time so i want to point out the extreme strength of rogue and this applies somewhat to all tiers of content but particularly in that late game where you're gonna put all that effort into getting to and it will finally pay off as is usually the case for all melee specs tbc adds a lot more pressing reasons to provide strong bursts and cleave damage due to mechanics fights that are immediately coming to mind are the muru encounter in somewhere plateau and the ads that hydra swaps create assuming tuning is appropriate it's very useful to have on-demand bursts especially in cleve form and rogues provide good potential here whilst it's often the case that kj is the one fight where all melee shine and rogue is no different if we're talking about a true moment of glory for your tbc experience i genuinely believe it will be on progression for the muru encounter where you will shine in a big way often touted as the hardest encounter ever put into wow though that's debatable you will likely have a lot of pools on this encounter unless the tuning is really poor and in doing so you're likely going to be a key reason as to why the difficult ad waves in phase one go down as planned see there's a bunch of overlaps and the typical method of dealing with a particularly nasty humanoid ad wave is to sheep one of them and cleave the other two with things like sweeping strikes blade flurry etc this allows the mages and warlocks to aoe the void ads that will spawn again often in an overlapping way during phase one in short the reason to play rogue is that the payoff is actually worth it long term i would suggest that you might want to keep an open mind on using two characters if you're super serious as a rogue player because at the very least you can flex to rogue in the latter stages of content when they're far more valuable and perhaps use a second tune to progress the early content where rogue does sometimes struggle to make an impact over competing classes for those very limited melee spots this leads to the major downside or limitation of rogue and it's the obvious one you are a melee spec but you're also one of only two melee specs that bring no unique utility for raid dps assuming a pro warrior is present this is a problem because you're only really going to run one melee group if you're trying to min max at least for the early content and most of tier five and when you consider that retribution arms and enhancement all bring more to the table it's really rough until that scaling kicks in for fury and rogues in the late game so tldr a raid spot will be hard if the majority of people adopt a min max approach to raid composition and unfortunately classic vanilla has shown that people will gravitate that way even if they can't pull it off properly so just be aware of the competition you're signing up for if you do plan to go rogue all right enough beating of a well-known topic we all know it by now what about professions well another surprise leatherworking is back as always drums are going to be better and unless changes are made 20 of them are going to be essential for proper min maxing however the upside for rogues is that the late game chess piece is actually best in slot for the whole game as always enchanting dual crafting provide their usual boosts of an improved epic gem and eight stats onto rings however there is a small twist to this very predictable tail blacksmithing doesn't get a lot of coverage for rogues but remember when i said there's some leeway on the main hand if it's good enough yeah that's right dragon strike and its lesser versions are actually very good for sword rogue because there's actually a lack of good swords especially early on in tier 4 for example you have three main hand options as combat swords hope ender a boe from the new kazakh world boss spike blade from karazhan and falls bane from karazhan but that one's also amazed by contrast you can craft dragon more around this time which is the second stage of this mace which with a sword offhand is more dps because the proc is very good it has a higher item level for that stage of the game and it's pretty slow like we want but don't mistake me here you're probably replacing dragon strike a fair bit earlier than a warrior or shaman would but it is worth considering to help your case on the meters early on because the early itemization isn't great for swords anyway and melee players pretty much have to hustle every little bit for that raid spot in my opinion so now we're on to the final section pvp and to be honest rogues are so good i was tempted to just meme the section with the word god and cut to the outro but i'll go through the motions rogues aren't dominant in tbc arena whilst some private server aspects may be a little bit different once we get to live rogue is just pervasive in all arena formats and find themselves as part of most top compositions you have a plethora of options in twos lock shadow priest druid disc mage and many others i assume but generally those are the big ones but that's a lot of options for an s-tier comp in threes it opens up even more arguably you play well with so many setups the only thing that will change is the strategy rogue literally does everything kill potential control mobility you will not have a hard time farming arena weapons at the very least if you're willing to get decent at rogue if you're aiming high again this is probably the class that gives you the best chance of getting there i have nothing more to say other than those glowing words rogue is synonymous with tbc arena so that brings the video to a close i hope you found it useful for helping your decision making going into tbc it's definitely tough as a rogue in pve but far from a lost course thanks for all the support i look forward to airing my thoughts in the next little channel update because the community has grown so much since the last one but with that said i'll see you next time hopefully in your notifications

Channel: Knot

Views: 90,691

Keywords: WoW TBC, TBC Classic, Rogue, PvE

Id: hEngLaehvLE

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021