Blog Revived

 
I know it has been many months since my last post stating I would return to this blog.  Well, that was going into the summer season and I should have known I wouldn’t keep up with it like I intended.  It is now late into the month of October.  The weather has cooled and the rainy, grey skies of fall weather are upon us.  So what’s new?  Glad you asked.

In the World of Warcraft, things have received a great shake up with the impending Cataclysm coming ever near.  I am not going so far as to say my favorite class and raiding spec is broken, but it is close.  I am of the mind that competitive raiding and PvP action is over for WotLK content as the game begins the transition to Cataclysm content and mechanics.  The game has definitely changed and we all know that change is hard for many people to easily accept.  I have a rough time with change myself unless I am coached or otherwise helped to prepare for change.  I told myself that the new patch was called 4.0.x for a reason, and that is because it is WoW 4.0.  WoW 3.x.x concepts and mechanics are now a thing of the past.  I will most likely cut back on my WoW hours while things are in the midst of changing.  Another reason for a raiding break is that after trying to raid ICC25 last night was very little fun at all due to many different bugs and technical issues.  I had to turn the sound off while raiding due to the bad sound delay issues that are known.  The work-a-rounds that are posted such as disabling Death Knight voice effects, making sure the sound wasn’t set to system default in the WoW interface, and even reducing the hardware acceleration on my sound driver didn’t work. 

My place of work is also under going changes.  The upper management has seen fit to reorganize some of the gaming floor space.  The room we currently utilize as our comfortable and quite poker room has now been designated as a new area for high limit e-game (slot) machines.*  The poker room is to be eventually moved to another room with slightly less floor space which is fine as we never ran at full capacity in our current setup except maybe once during a tournament series.  Notice how I said “eventually”?  They haven’t even begun converting the new space for the poker room to suit our needs.  So where does that leave us until they finish?  We will be right in the middle of the open gaming floor in the midst of all the noise and smoke.  The only positive I can find in this situation is that we might draw a couple of extra players who just walk up, see the tables, and think to themselves, “Gee, that doesn’t look too hard.  I can take them.”  We will definitely lose many of our regular players who have grown accustomed to the smoke-free and quite atmosphere we provide with our room even if it is just a temporary situation.

That about covers many of the changes I’ve experience during my absence from the blog.  In my next few posts, I will cover some things I am definitely looking forward to with the release of the Cataclysm expansion in WoW.  Until then, good journey!

Rogue Talent Specs for 4.0.1

Welcome fellow Rogues!  

 Here are the recommended talent specs as provided by Aldriana over at Elitist Jerks.  If you have never been to the EJ website, then I strongly recommend browsing their forums. 

Recommended Assassination Spec   31/2/3

My notes: Most of my time using a Mutilate build has been spent in battlegrounds and arenas so I cannot say much about raiding with this setup. 

Recommended Combat Spec 2/31/3

My notes: My preferred raiding spec as well.  I have raided as Combat since my first forays into Karazhan.  I like Improved Sprint and Blade Twisting over the other filler talents if focusing on pure PvE content.  Blade Twisting acts as pseudo Crippling Poison as Combat Rogues will normally have Deadly/Instant poisons equipped without weapon swapping.  Improved Sprint is even better for getting OUT OF THE FIRE especially if snared which I get the feeling will happen a lot in Cataclysm content.

With the loss of Armor Pen, Rupture is back in the Combat rotation along with the new Revealing Strike ability.  So those that wanted a more interesting button pushing style for this spec apparently received his or her wish.  A bit of frustration may be found with juggling combo points by working RS around a glyphed Sinister Strike.  RS grants a 15 second debuff on the target so it does not have to be used immediately before an Eviscerate or a Rupture.  For example a rogue with glyphed SS with three combo points and no RS debuff on the target procs an extra combo point on the next SS for a total of five combo points.  Now the rogue loses the combo point granted by RS.  This can be avoided by using RS for the first combo point leading up to a rupture or eviscerate.

Recommended Subtlety Spec 3/2/31

My notes: I have never given the Sub spec a try, even when HAT was bugged in our favor in the early days of the WotLK content so therefore I cannot give any good personal insight to this spec and its rotation cycle.