The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Combat Leveling - Part 2 of 3
by Zasp
Continuing the post on my preferred leveling build, I hereby present the second installment of the 3 part “guide”. If you missed the first part, I’d recommend starting here. A little reminder, this is about combat leveling. It talks about using Sinister Strike and no other attacks along the lines of Backstab are discussed.
With that, I remind you that the Brain Melt Warning light has been turned on, please enjoy your flight.
Levels 30-35
On to the next tier in the combat tree, which includes Mace Specialization, Fist Specialization, Sword Specialization, and Blade Flurry. I bet you’re starting to see a pattern here with all the Specialization abilities. I think the developers couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything more entertaining, which seems like a bummer, but it gives you a good idea just what this tree is meant to do. Improve your ability to deal sustained damage.
Mace Specialization gives you a 1% increase in damage on critical hits and a 1% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds with a mace, capping out at 5% increase to both. One thing of note is that it’s a 5% damage increase when dealing any critical strike with a Mace, changing your critical damage multiplier to 2.05 from 2.0. As a rogue you want to (and will) crit often and these little modifier changes can add up rather quickly. This can be a nice increase and stacks with other abilities of the sort. The Mace stun, while random, can be useful in both soloing and PvP. However, I would not recommend this for PvE unless you have no other options. Because the stun is random thus you have no control when the effect may happen, it can annoy certain tanks. You don’t want to see the stun fire off when the tank is trying to move a mob to avoid a patrol or at the beginning when incoming damage is needed for building rage and thus threat.
Fist Specialization gives you 1% increased critical strike chance with Fist Weapons, working the same way as Dagger Specialization in regards of applying to only the hand with the Fist Weapon. Crit chance is good especially if you happen to get you hands on a really good Fist Weapon. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen 1-59 as they are pretty scarce.
Sword Specialization gives you a 1% increased chance to gain an extra attack after hitting a target with your sword per point, again capping at 5% increased chance. This talent can make for some pretty random burst damage as there is no cooldown on the ability other than the caveats one of your weapons has to hit the mob and has to be a sword. It is worth noting that all extra proc attacks swing your Main Hand Weapon REGARDLESS of what type of weapon is in your main hand. Meaning if you have a sword off handed and anything else main handed its going to result in an extra swing for your main hand not your off hand, which a lot of rogues may not realize.
This is why Hybrid Specs such as 16/45 Combat Fist/Swords are so appealing. This provides 5% extra crit on your main hand while your off hand is providing more white attacks for that main hand. Mace/Sword is also a viable build (utilizing the best weapons available to you, of course). I’ll talk about more about these builds at a later date but its worth mentioning now.
Last but not least is Blade Flurry, which is a very solid talent point. Being able to attack two mobs at once for a cost of 25 energy. Not to mention getting 20% haste! This is all kinds of awesome and only on a 2 minute cooldown, so we can make quite a bit use of it. Use it! Use it all the time. Even on single mobs. Because of the 20% haste. 2 minutes is not a lifetime and its going to be rare that you need it when you don’t have it.
I’d go this way when distributing talent points:
30 – Blade Flurry – As its useful all the time.
31 to 35 – Weapon Specialization of your choice I tend to go with Sword Specialization as swords are most heavily itemized when leveling (good speed choices etc) and I don’t often respec for the 4 to 5 levels a mace happens to take the slot of your main hand.
Following along, our build now looks like this.
Levels 35-39
This brings us to the next tier in the combat tree - Blade Twisting, Weapon Expertise, and Aggression.
Blade Twisting gives you a 10% chance (per talent point), capping out at 20%, to Daze the target for 8 seconds. This daze effect can only happen when using Sinister Strike, Backstab, Gouge and Shiv. I find it a pure PvP talent that very few people take since the pure combat builds have fallen out of favor recently in arenas. Not to mention the fact that Crippling Poison slows the target’s speed by 70% compared to the 50% of Daze and is available on demand if you have it on your Off Hand with that handy (IMO PVP) ability called Shiv.
Weapon Expertise increases your Expertise Skill by 5/10 per talent point. These two talents give huge returns in any area, as it reduces your chance to be dodged and parried by 2.5%. Let us keep in mind, MOBS can dodge from behind unlike players making this talent extremely useful. It changes the attack table to allow more hits which in turn can mean more crits. I recommend maxing this out with your next 2 talent points(36-37) because the more chance you have at connecting the mob the quicker said mob is going to die.
Aggression increases damage dealt by Sinister Strike, Backstab and Eviscerate, by 2% per talent point capping out at 3 points for a 6% increase. As Sinister Strike is our main special attack, this provides a very nice buff to our damage. Never mind it increasing Eviscerate damage; as it is your least used finisher in most PvE situations. More on that fact later.
For now we only want 2 points in this talent so for levels 38-39 slap points there, we’ll come back in a second to finish that up.
So at level 39 the build looks like this.
Levels 40-44
This brings us to Teir 7 which includes Vitality, Adrenaline Rush, and Nerves of Steel.
Vitality increases total Stamina by 2% and total Agility by 1% per talent point capping out at 4% Total Stamina and 2% total Agility. This is primarily used as filler. Not that strong of a talent itself, it provides far better returns than having maxed out Endurance, since 2% Agility and 4% Stamina is going to net more use then being able to sprint and use evasion more. Now I’m sure someone will say “I prefer Endurance over Vitality” because its how things work. My opinion? I’d rather have that little bit extra Stamina, AP, and Crit over the cooldowns because it can add up, but this is why its called filler - it often boils down to personal preference.
Nerves of Steel increases your chance to resist Fear and Stun effects by 5% per talent point capping out at 10%. More filler but I feel more useful over say Endurance or Improved Kick. If you increase your chance at those resistances, if only a little, that can mean more uptime on the mob and possibly a more abrupt demise for it .
Adrenaline Rush is one of the main reasons people spec combat. Increased Energy Regen rate means your damage goes through the roof, as it allows you to hit Sinister Strike every 2 seconds opposed to every 4 seconds because your energy regeneration is doubled from 20 to 40.
YOU NEED THIS TALENT IF YOU CAME THIS FAR.
Wait why is he even saying this? As much as it pains me to admit I have seen Rogues with 40 or more points in the Combat Tree without Adrenaline Rush. Shall we all /boggle?
Now since we have filler choices here is how I break down the next couple levels so we can reach the next tier in the combat tree.
40 – Adrenaline Rush
41 – Finish Aggression
42-43 – Vitality
44 - Nerves of Steel
Making your build look like the following. Build as of Level 44
Levels 45-49
This brings us to tier 8, the super wonderful Combat Potency, which starts to enforce the use of a fast offhand. Combat Potency gives your off hand attacks a 20% chance to generate 3/6/9/12/15 Energy (increasing respectively per talent point) which means the faster you attack, the more chance you have at procc’ing this wonderful, wonderful talent. With successive procs, this can feel like a mini Adrenaline Rush. This talent is simply amazing and worth every point from levels 45-49. This talent mandates certain rules about your main hand (but I will save that for a later post).
Level 50
After that comes the big dog, Surprise Attacks, making your finishing moves(Slice and Dice, Rupture, Eviscerate and the like) no longer able to be dodged, which means if attacking from behind your finishers will always land. AND it gives us an extra 10% damage on our Sinister Strike, Backstab, Shiv and Gouge. A very solid tier 9 talent vs some other lack luster ones.
This ends the tree at level 50, bringing us to something like this.
The Brain Melt Warning light has been turned off. We thank you for flying Brain Melt Xpress. Next Wednesday we finish up with the last 20 levels and make this a complete “resource”.
Last week I said “Same bat time, same bat channel!” to which Aensu informed me “You know, Batman was a combat fist rogue right?”. True story.
Till next week,
Zasp
April 23rd, 2008
I’m really enjoying your posts, as I have pretty much no experience with rogues. I even rolled a belf rogue to mess around with
However, I believe this statement “It changes the attack table to allow more hits which in turn can mean more crits” is incorrect.
Your attack table is considered to be a single roll system, which looks roughly like this:
Miss %
Dodge %
Parry %
Glancing Blow (player against mob only) %
Block %
Critical %
Crushing Blow (mob against player only) %
ordinary hit
Hit reduces the Miss chance, in favor of more ordinary hits. Expertise reduces the Dodge and Parry chances in favor of more ordinary hits. In both cases, the chance that you will crit on every given swing remains exactly the same. If you get crit rating, it will push ordinary hits off the table. Anyway, each point of expertise (not to be confused with expertise RATING) reduces dodge/parry chance by 0.25%, so with this talent alone I believe you are reducing your chance to have the enemy dodge by 2.5% and parry by 2.5%, in favor of ordinary hits.
Given the commonly held belief that a raid boss typically has 6.5% dodge, and that you are standing behind the target to ignore parry/block, you would need 26 expertise to cap. With this talent you need 16, or about 3.94*16 = 61 expertise rating.
April 23rd, 2008
I seem to remember reading a blue post somewhere that it’s a two-roll system, and that the chance to crit was a chance over all attacks, which included misses, which is why +hit is so important, so you wouldn’t lose a potential crit to a miss. I may be wrong about that, but that is what I seem to remember reading back when I was hardcore raiding and really working the theorycrafting.
April 23rd, 2008
@Esoth
You need 64 Expertise Rating to cap with the Rogue Talent Weapon Expertise, because partial Expertise does not round up only down. And 64 / 15.77 = 4.05 which would round down to 4% It was proven back in 2.3 by the awesome people at Elitist Jerks. This value is also agreed in the Rogue’s basic bible Roguecraft 101.
As for the single roll system, that is true for white attacks, but Rogue specials use a 2 roll system. Again to borrow from the Elitist Jerks and their recent think tank post on melee combat which can be found here.
It states the following better then I could ever think of wording it :
“One roll vs Two roll
The majority of melee attacks made in WoW use a one-roll system. This means that a single check is made against the hit table to determine the outcome of an attack.
Some special attacks (notably all Rogue special attacks) use a two-roll system. The first roll first checks to see if the attack lands, misses or is avoided. If the attack lands, the second roll checks to see if it hits or crits. Two-roll attacks are observed to be similar to one-roll attacks in all other manners.
This can be proven by using an ability with a very high crit rate against a target that has an ability that decreases the player’s ability to hit. For example, Attumen’s Intangible Presence debuff decreases the player’s chance to hit by 50%. If Backstab had a 60% chance to crit and used the one-roll system, all hits while under the effect of Intangible Presence would be critical hits (since crits override normal hits in the hit table). This is not the case, so it can be deduced that the crit chance is rolled separately from the avoidance check.”
Hopefully that clears it up. If need be I’ll try to find all the research I can on it and get back to everyone. Instead of just quoting the awesome people over at EJ.
@teh Khol
I’m not sure if I ever saw one… Then again I’ve forgotten the name of the site that keeps all the blue posts organized so its not exactly easy to search.
April 23rd, 2008
All evidence suggests that white attacks are a single roll system, while yellow attacks are a two roll system (roll to hit, then roll to crit).
Eliminating the chance for yellow attacks to miss or be dodged/parried leads to more hits, which leads to more chances to roll for crit (blocked yellow hits can still crit).
While it’s not much of an issue any more since they effectively knocked 15% off the chance to glance vs bosses, it’s still true that the “crit cap” for white attacks = 100% - (miss% + dodge% + parry% + block% + glance%), because crit is pushed off the table before any of those, and crit pushes normal hits off the table. Thus, reducing those numbers allows more room for crits on the combat table.
Under normal conditions, I don’t know if it’s really possible now days for a rogue’s white crit to exceed their crit cap given that so much melee leather comes with piles of hit rating, but the statement “more hits can mean more crits” is still true.
April 23rd, 2008
Awesome Zasp, thanks!
April 23rd, 2008
@Zasp
Now that I read the bit you quoted from EJ, that jives more with the vague memory I have of the blue post I read. Either way, it still boils down to mo’ hit is mo’ bettah.
April 25th, 2008
@zasp- the website where blue posts are collated is wowblues.com
April 28th, 2008
I have a 36 Dwarf Rogue I really like the idea of useing daggers because I like to RP, why wouldn’t I want to use sinister strike with them? I just am not sure why it is bad, I could just take your word for it but thats not how I roll lol.
April 28th, 2008
@Derrow
Well in Part one I said in a perfect world you’d never want to sinister strike with Daggers because your using energy for a weaker attack if you have daggers.
I’m going to guess you have around 300 AP mostly because its a nice round number for me to do calculations for you.
I’m also going to assume you have Vanquisher’s Sword for a sword, and for a dagger since your alliance the SM quest reward Black Menace.
Using this formula from wowwiki “(Attack Power / 14) * Normalized Weapon Speed + Weapon Damage + 22″ will illustrate why you don’t want to sinister strike with daggers.
Sinister Strike Formula for Vanquisher’s Sword notice all instant attacks normalize a weapon speed in this case 2.4.
Max Normal Hit = (300 / 14) * 2.4 + 86 + 22 = 159
Min Normal Hit = (300 / 14) * 2.4 + 46 + 22 = 119
Meaning the average Sinister Strike would be around 139
Sinister Strike Formula for Black Menace daggers normalized weapon speed is 1.7
Max Normal Hit = (300 / 14) * 1.7 + 58 + 22 = 116
Min Normal Hit = (300 / 14) * 1.7 + 31 + 22 = 89
Meaning the average Sinister Strike would be around 102
Also something to note this does not factor in a mobs armor its just a rough damage range, which if I did would favor the higher damage range. Now assuming both build have Improved Sinister Strike
The Average Damage Per Energy with Black Menace using Sinister Strike is 2.55 while the Average Damage Per Energy with Vanquisher’s Sword using Sinister Strike is 3.475 meaning your getting a lot more bang for your buck while using a sword for Sinister Strike.
Thats why you wouldn’t want to use a dagger with Sinister Strike in a perfect world. If your set on daggers you’ll just have to deal, try to use your energy efficiently as possible so you can use Backstab as much as possible.
April 28th, 2008
Ahh ok, I notice that this doesnt take Crit% into account, Spec’d daggers gives me an extra 5% as well I try to get +crit Items/gear, a little hard at my level but I have had a few pieces so far. I was hopeing that this might offset the inherent DPS difference Daggers tend to have. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.
April 28th, 2008
@Derrow
Well we can look at it at a really rough way. And I mean rough because I don’t want to break it down to the T. Hopefully this can spread some more insight for you.
Lets say our level 36 Rogue still has 300 AP. And a 10% chance to crit as Swords and as Daggers 15% because of Dagger Specialization. Note I assume the Sword Rogue has 2 Swords with Sword Specialization.
So the crit modifier is damage times 2, bringing our numbers to this for the Sword Rogue.
Max Normal Crit = 159*2 = 318
Min Normal Crit = 119*2 = 238
Meaning the average Sinister Strike Crit would be around 278.
Now for the Dagger Rogue:
Max Normal Crit = 116*2 = 232
Min Normal Crit = 89*2 = 178
Meaning the average Sinister Strike Crit would be around 205.
So for lets say 100 Sinister Strikes for the Sword Rogue 10 of them would be crits, and I’ll use the Average Number instead of the Max or Min.
So it look like this
Average Sinister Strike Hit 139 * 90 = 12510
Average Sinister Strike Crit 279 * 10 = 2790
For a Total of 15300 Damage delt.
For the Dagger Rogue 15 of the 100 would deal critical Damage so it would look like this.
Average Sinister Strike Hit 102*85 = 8670
Average Sinister Strike Crit 205*15 = 3075
For a total of 11745
If you notice the total damage of the non critical hits for just swords out damages the grand total of the Rogue using Daggers and using Sinister Strike.
If we bump the Dagger Rogue up to 20% at level 36(Which I don’t think would be possible to maintain 300 AP or keep a full combat build.)
20 hits would be crits, so the damage output would look like this.
Average Sinister Strike Hit 102*80 = 8160
Average Sinister Strike Crit 205*20 = 4100
For a total of 12260.
Still less then the Sword Rogues 90 normal Sinister Strike hits.
This also does not factor in any other factors only Sinister Strike Damage, trying to illustrate why you don’t want to use Daggers if possible when using Sinister Strike. Hopefully this helps out.
April 28th, 2008
Cool thanks alot =) I think I will stay with my daggers (yes I use 2) as like I said I do alot of RP with my rogue and he is already known for his exploits as “The Shiv”, but I appreciate you taking the time to answer my posts. I like to know the why’s about the game and some of the resources I find end up confusing me with the amount of data they try to cram in.
April 30th, 2008
The disadvantage of swords to me is that I’d lose Ambush, which is fun, but those numbers are quite convincing.
April 30th, 2008
[...] gave us part 3 of this “guide”. Psh, how can he even use that word? If you missed the first or second installment I’d recommend starting [...]