Post edited to make things clearer due to reader comments.
Professions and Stats
Today I was waltzing around one of the cities when I noticed a rogue spamming chat with, “DPS wants to run any heroic 5 man”. This went on for a while until I felt pity for the poor soul, invited them into a group and set up the group to run the Heroic of his choice. He said any heroic was fine. When pressed he admitted that he had never run a heroic before, or any instance in Northrend for that matter. I looked at his gear – it was PvP. Okaaaaaay …
So we went into the Violet Hold – no point in him getting lost on the way out to The Nexus or something. He managed to put up an awesome barrage of around 650 DPS. DPS stands for Damage per Second. 650 at level 80 is not good. It’s not that good at level 70. So we ran him through and then I did the dreaded whisper of, “If you want some help I can give it to you.” Thankfully he responded really well, and we spent some time going through what he needed to do to get his act in order if he wanted to progress to raiding. So in this series of threads I am going to include the basics, and I mean basics of getting your DPS up to scratch and what it should be. If some of this seems really obvious to you, it’s probably not obvious at all to the other guy.
Professions
The first thing I’m going to talk about is which professions a raiding rogue needs. Now if you already have your professions leveled and are quite happy with them, then that’s fine. But a fair number of players that I meet haven’t leveled any professions past the basics. In some cases, they haven’t leveled any professions at all. And your professions, apart from making you money, can give some handy advantages to your character. If you look at any top rogue in the armory, you can bet your life that they will most probably have Enchanting and Jewelcrafting as thier professions. The reasons for this are many.
Enchanting gives you a 40 attack power increase to your own rings, that’s 80 extra attack power. Attack power is very important, it is one of the big three stats that you will need to focus on. Apart from this benefit, you can enchant your own gear and now sell enchants as scrolls on the Auction House.
Jewelcrafting, (JC), lets you craft unique JC only useable gems. You can equip three of these at any one time. Which one interests us? The Delicate Dragons Eye gives us a huge 34 agility, and agility is the next one of the big three stats that we like. This fits into a red gem slot. It’s important to put the right gem into the right slot as it will give you a slot bonus, though sometimes it can be worth skipping the slot bonus altogether, and this post from Zaltu explains why. There are red, yellow and blue slots. Some gems, such as orange ones, fit into two different slots, in this case red and yellow. The awesome thing about this design is that you can use it at 350 JC skill. Another great thing about jewelcrafting is that you get a daily quest which nets you around 13 gold for basicly doing bugger all and gives you a token which you can use to learn high end designs. That daily quest is very important to you, because I’m sure that you have a gathering skill right now and you don’t want to drop it as it’s your cash cow. Wrong, not any more. Daily quests are your new cash cow as well as selling your jewels and enchants. So you’re going to level up cooking and fishing while you’re at it. More on those later.
Now for the big information: You can level these together. The items that you create while you’re leveling jewelcrafting you can then disenchant and use the mats to level enchanting. Here are some good leveling guides for Enchanting and Jewelcrafting. The trick is to use mining to collect the mats for jewelcrafting beforehand, or you can simply buy them off the Auction House. Don’t buy off the Auction House on weekends, as it is more expensive. Once you have all the mats, simply start leveling away. Any extra mats you can sell off on the Auction House.
So what enchants should you use and what gems should you equip? Remember I said that there were three crucial stats for rogues? These are Attack Power, (AP), Hit Rating, (hit), and Agility. You need to concentrate on these, both with your gear and your enchants and gems. There are other stats as well such as expertise, haste, critical strike,(crit) and armor penetration, but these will come along well enough with your gear itself. Lets go through each of them one at a time. I am not going to go into the detailed math here. This is going to be as simple as possible. It’s confusing enough as it is.
Hit Rating: You need to be able to hit stuff without missing, and that’s what your hit rating is all about. There are different levels of hit rating, which are commonly referred to as hit caps. The first thing though that you should realise is that any half decent rogue, whatever their spec, will have all 5 points in Precision on the combat talent tree.
Your base hit raiting is 99, (66 if there’s a weird Draenei in your party due to their Heroric Presence racial ability). This means that your yellow attacks don’t miss. This is good. If you’ve got this covered you can run Heroics.
The next cap to aim for is the poison hit cap, which means that your poisons don’t miss. This is 315. The white attack hit cap is unattainable at this stage. You could reach for it but it would be to the exclusion of all other stats. This guide from WoW.com is a good start, although I disagree slightly with Christian concentrating on Expertise. Expertise will come of its own accord at this point. Don’t fret it. For what it’s worth, the expertise cap is 214. Anything over this is wasted, as is anything over 315 hit. With high end gear now, you’ll go over these anyway without gemming or using enchants.
What enchants should you use? I could write this all out myself, but this post is getting long and Zaltu has done it already. Check out his awesome list.
Gems are a bit easier. I gem Agility, a bit more Agility and then throw in any more Agility that I can get my hands on. Agility is the base component of AP and Crit. So you want it. The meta gem that you want is the Relentless Earthseige Diamond. This gem requires a red, yellow and blue gem to be equipped in other items of your gear to become activated. You don’t actually have to have three different gems though, as some gems can match two slots. The Balanced Twiglight Opal matches a red or blue socket leaving only a yellow socket to match up. Or you can use the Nightmare Tear or the Enchanted tear,to satisfy one of the meta gem slot requirements. Remember, if you are missing a gem slot as you do not have enough items with gem sockets, you can equip the Eternal Belt Buckle to add a missing slot, (though if you clicked the enchantment link earlier you would already know this.)
That’s enough for now, Part 2 will talk about Talent builds, Glyphs, Poisons and Cooking.
October 5, 2009 at 3:15 am
While you hit *some* of the basics, you’re still not doing the world any favours with this “guide”. All you’re going to do is unleash a whole new batch of confused rogues with little idea of how it should be done.
If in doubt, link them to Elitist Jerks, the stickies on the Rogue forums, or another blog that at least perpetuates correct or uncomplicated information.
October 5, 2009 at 8:53 am
While I understand that you might think that I have only covered ‘some’ of the basics, you might notice that this guide is called part 1 and that the heading at the top is Professions and stats.
And I find it hilarious that you would consider sending a noobie rogue to the awesome complications of Elitest Jerks or the sheer horror that is the rogue forums. And you will notice that I have a rogue blogroll on the side where I am sure that any player interested in pursuing these topics further may click on, plus I included links to specific rogue posts in blogs and on WoW.com in my post. So in short I find your argument facetious and invalid.
October 6, 2009 at 1:54 am
Oh, but I wasn’t referring solely to information you will cover in your next episode of mediocrity. There are several areas where you present misinformation or poorly researched decisions as ‘basics’ for a Rogue.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
For starters, you have touted JC and Enchanting as THE professions to have, at the exclusion of any others. In fact, while JC is probably the top min/max profession, Enchanting is on a par with LW, Alch, or Inscription.
Gem slots: all you said is that “It’s important to put the right gem into the right slot as it will give you a slot bonus.” Well, yes, however you don’t mention when it’s appropriate to gem for the bonus, and when it’s not. More importantly, why or why not. Here, you could have just linked to Zaltu’s post from a few months back.
*Insert segue about making gold and levelling professions.* Leave this to experts too, hmm? Gevlon, for example.
“Your base hit raiting is 99, (66 if you’re a weird Draenei).”
Wut? Next you’ll have a bunch of newbies running around asking how you managed to roll a Draenei Rogue, why can’t they. This may be overly-nitpicky, but you should clarify: 66 with a draenei IN THE PARTY with the Rogue. Bonus points if you can explain why.
Yes, it’s generally not worth focusing terribly hard on Expertise. However, while for you personally, it may be overly abundant on gear, other Rogues may not find it so. Here’s also a good place to mention why it’s especially useful to Mutilate Rogues, for cycle stability.
Correct on the Expertise cap, what about mentioning the Human racial? What about explaining the difference between Expertise Rating and Weapon Expertise (as it appears on the character pane)?
Hit Rating and Expertise are *not* wasted once you go over the caps. Do you understand stat weightings at all? They have a diminished value past their respective caps, but they do not become useless until you reach the Hard caps.
What about mentioning meeting Meta gem requirements? You know, for Rogues not quite dumb enough to drop a profession and level JC just because you said so.
So like I said, you missed some of the basics, or omitted info that would be handy for a newbie Rogue. And you presented some misinformation, which only leads to more confused players. EJ isn’t that complicated if you have two brain cells to rub together. Generally, the people who complain about it as being so are more lazy than anything.
While the Rogue forums can be likened to a roomful of screaming Howler monkeys lobbing faeces around, there are stickies at the top of the page for a reason.
Some of these may now be a patch out of date, but they should be a good enough example of better guides for newbies. What I’m saying is, it’s been done before, in better detail and with a lot less fail.
http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t64665-incoming_rogue_changes_discussion/p3/#post1293637
http://elitistjerks.com/f78/t37183-pocket_guide_wotlk_updated_3_2_a/
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13908723552&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820526479&sid=1
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14133413862&sid=1
http://oneroguesjourney.com/2009/08/27/lets-talk-about-socket-bonuses/
P.S is your armory link current? Because maybe you should remove that link, lest newbie Rogues think that copying you would be a good idea…
October 5, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Thanks for the info – and the tactful way you handled the “noob” 80 … great to see players helping each other out like that!!
I realized how below average my gear was whn I visited – http://armory-musings.appspot.com/class/Rogue/Summary?patch=3.0.8
This is a great site that trawls the WoW armory database and summarizes what every character has of gear etc. The results are fascinating – and very instructive. It makes you realize that levelling to 80 is only half the game! Now starts the fun bit
October 6, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Kryssa,
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response. Unfortunately it got sent to my spam dump for some reason, but I got to it now. Lets go through it shall we?
“Well, yes, however you don’t mention when it’s appropriate to gem for the bonus, and when it’s not. More importantly, why or why not.”
Shoot me, I missed a good link. I am going to repeat myslef again; this is a general guide for dummies. The people who are running around at level 80 doing 600 dps. The ones who haven’t even got a gem in their gem slots. This was not intended as a high end guide because it has been done before and better than I could ever do. I am going to quote myself from the original post:
“So in this series of threads I am going to include the basics, and I mean basics of getting your DPS up to scratch and what it should be. If some of this seems really obvious to you, it’s probably not obvious at all to the other guy.”
The fors and againsts for when to take a slot bonus and when not to are irrelevent here. Players who are looking at their gear with those options in mind are way beyond what I am writing about here. But the players who I am writing this for are often the type who go cross-eyed when you start throwing stats at them. You are making the simple mistake of reading this guide from your own point of view, not from the point view of someone who is doing 600 dps. I am trying to get that player to be interested in his rogue, to understand that he can make it a lot better with a bit of effort. And then perhaps with such effort he can progress to a lot of the things that you mentioned in your comment.
I admit that I handled the professions incorrectly, and it is not consistant with my original aims. I should have listed the pros and cons of each profession and then let them decide. So, in that I thank you. I will add an amendment to that in a future post.
As to your last comment, now you’re coming across as an elitest prick. I have never pretended to be the best rogue out there nor have the best gear. I own two businesses and help with a third so I have limited time to play WoW. If my badge farming obviously isn’t up to your own lofty standards I cannot help that. But your attitude is a classic reason why so many players don’t get close to the end game.
October 7, 2009 at 3:04 am
So in your view, it’s ok to give new players bad information, teach them inferior or lazy habits? Justified with, “it’s ok this is a really basic guide, they can learn better once they’re not newbies anymore”?
If I were doing 600 DPS at level 80, sure I’d want to improve. But I’d rather get the right info the first time, rather than learn poor habits and then have to relearn or learn things left out. So it doesn’t matter what point of view I appear to be reading your “guide” from. Notice I pointed out more than just gemming and profession choices as areas where your “guide” is lacking?
My fault, I was ambiguous here. I wasn’t referring to your gear, it’s fine. I was referring to the 2 points you’ve misplaced in your spec. Cookie cutter is cookie cutter for a reason. And your attitude is the reason so many players get to endgame and are told they’re doing it wrong. Close enough sometimes isn’t good enough.
Way to get defensive and pull out the old “I’m SO busy in real life” excuse. Big deal, we all have jobs and lives, and limited time to play. I’m not questioning that, and not condemning your gear; it’s rather good for someone who sounds as time-poor as yourself. I do question why you are spending time writing half-assed “guides” when it’s clear your own knowledge of the class is lacking or out of date.
All you do is reinforce the adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”. Your “guide” is poor, that’s the long and short of it. All of it can be found better presented, more complete and correct, elsewhere.
October 7, 2009 at 8:02 am
“If I were doing 600 DPS at level 80, sure I’d want to improve.”
Yes, you would. Because you already know that 600 dps is very poor and you understand what is needed to see better end game content. But once again you are not seeing this from someone in their shoes. These players are running around with greens in heroics, and what’s more they think that’s fine. I am not for instance going to talk about Armor Penetration with these players. It is the most interesting stat for combat rogues at present, particularly when you throw maces into the equation. But to these guys it is not valid.
“My fault, I was ambiguous here. I wasn’t referring to your gear, it’s fine. I was referring to the 2 points you’ve misplaced in your spec.”
My fault. I did a little experiment on the weekend and threw 2 points into the Remoresless Attacks talent just to see how it would go. It went ok, but not at the expense of ruthlessness. I haven’t been back on yet to change it. Thank the lord I didn’t log out wearing my fishing gear!
“Way to get defensive…”
That’s a joke, yeah? Have you seen your posts in this thread?
“All you do is reinforce the adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”. Your “guide” is poor, that’s the long and short of it. All of it can be found better presented, more complete and correct, elsewhere”
At the end of the day, I agree that my original post was bashed out too quickly. Do not forget that I have to approve your comments. I left them in for a reason. A lot of what you say is valid. I have made part 2 much clearer, both in its information and who it is aimed at. But at the same time, you are completely off the mark with regards to “those who can’t teach.” In the six months writing this blog, and I get a lot of hits, this is the first time that I have misrepresented information. But do it once and you will get jumped on, which I did. I thank you for taking the time to jump, even if it seemed that you did so quite eagerly, and even if it was done, shall we say, fan of knives style.
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