Yesterday I purchased the dual spec ability for my rogue, (probably a brave but foolish decision considering the state of the realm economy), and promptly plugged in this spec. This is the best PvP combat sword bastardisation spec that I was able to find. I then went and got the Sinister Strike, Cloak of Shadows and Killing Spree glyphs. I had to hunt down an inscriptionist to get the killing spree one done, but eventually I found a kind soul who made it for me, (the one advantage to being on a realm with next to nobody is that everybody is eager to be your friend when they find out that you have 450 jewelcrafting and 440 enchanting under your belt). I’m using a combat spec for pvp because at present I still haven’t found another decent dagger. So my pvp plan is mostly to use a rush down attack with burst damage supplied from killing spree, coupled with crippling and deadly poison. I also handed in all my badges that I had stored up, which gave me over 30,000 honor.
By the way, could Blizzard have made this any more difficult to hand in? You can only purchase 10 at a time and they have a 2 second cooldown? Do they have any idea how long this took me to do? It wasted years of my life, or at least it seemed like years. I could have been doing other stuff with my time, like wondering how the hell to win Arathi Basin. Anyway, I ended up with over 50,000 honor so I purchased a nice new chest to match the legs which I already had. Then I threw some resiliance and stamina epic gems in there which I made myself and some resiliance enchants and I was good to go.
I had to run a couple of battlegrounds to get a few thousand honor to get the chest. The difference after having the chest was noticeable. The difference with the new spec was even more noticeable still. The new random battleground finder is a very nice feature. You don’t have to bother finding a dude to give you a quest, and if you actually win then there is some nice honor there. Mind you, the winning bit can be a bit tricky. It took me 7 tries to win one. Why, oh why did I roll Alliance? Finally we won an Arathi Basin by the skin of our teeth. My new battleground strategy is to just stay away from paladins unless I have a few players at my side. All the other classes are manageable, with warlocks being the easiest to take down. Other rogues are of course a problem, mostly due to the fact that they are specced assasination or something and manage to see me before I can see them, then they can get the jump on me and lock me down. Mind you, I won a few times against rogues when I blew them away with Killing Spree when they were at half health and thinking that they were fine. I haven’t seen another combat rogue in a battleground yet, so I’m enjoying being one of a kind.
You can quickly farm a good deal of honor with the new honor points system in battlegrounds. An hour of play got me almost 20,000 honor, almost half of what I need for some nice new gloves. You also get arena points for winning your first LFG battleground, so I could conceivably use these to get some better weapons. All in all I’m enjoying the pvp play which I haven’t partaken in for a good few years. I’m still very rusty, (oh I can use disarm on a warrior? Gee, I’d forgotten about that. And what does this Blind button do again? Hint to self – don’t hit blind after you’ve ruptured your opponent.)
The only frustrating thing for me is ganking the horde. I can’t find them. I fly around Northrend, I go to the daily quest places, to the good places to farm nodes, to flight points, you name it and the best I’ve done was springing two level 70 and a level 77 player in the Borean Tundra. So where are they all? Is there some super secret horde hiding spot in Northrend which I don’t know about? Tell me you bastards!
March 31, 2010 at 8:34 am
If you have JC and Ench you could be SO rich considering that there are 2 pages of gems in the AH and nearly zero ench scrolls.
BTW I can approximate about 2 more weeks until the lvl80 recruitment starts.
I can tell where the horde is: farming badges by killing Keristrassa the 1000th times, standing on the Dalaran fountain on a mammoth or circling around it on a bike.
The best way to catch them is in Wintergrasp. But I wouldn’t go there alone.
As soon as there will be enough 80 we can do premade BGs, making them trivial to win.
March 31, 2010 at 4:43 pm
The problem with JC is sourcing gems. I still need to find a miner buddy and an alchemist for transmutations. Scrolls have been selling quite nicely, some more than others.
I’ve camped out wintergrasp a few times but even if I manage to gank someone, reinforcements arrive very quickly to try and take me out. Let me know as soon as you’re pulling 80′s in.
March 31, 2010 at 10:16 am
The weapons need an arena rating of 1800, which you may not find trivial to get. Your best use for them is to buy 251 PvP set pieces (gloves 440 points, 7k honour, and up from there) which would otherwise be available only with EoF.
Combat is an… unusual… choice for PvP – have to admit the only verifiably combat rogue I saw recently was turning me into gray mist as he I identified him, so maybe there’s something to it for ganking. Subtlety daggers has a lot going for it, gank-wise, and just got buffed; it’s where I’d look.
Prot paladins absolutely love rogues, and eat them for breakfast (when I pvp as a protadin, the smart rogues use their kidney shot to start running away from me, having seen how little their burst hits for); the other sorts, might be managable. Dismantle will make them hate you. From more recent experience, shadow priests have no decent way to stop you, so long as you cloak aggressively to stop them ever doing much.
March 31, 2010 at 4:45 pm
I’ll check out those 251 pvp pieces for sure. It looks like I’m going to have to give subtlety a look-in. Off to forge of souls for a dagger I suppose. I won’t go near a protection paladin but I’m very happy to buddy up with one.
March 31, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Hmm, if i were you I’d go Mut-prep, I find it to be the most reliable, flexible, and all around best spec for pvp. in fact, i believe the top 70ish percent of rogues in arena sue one for m or another of mut- prep, so if you want to find the spec, just look it up on arena junkies real quick. also, subtlety has been buffed and I find subtlety to be the most fun in b/g’s yet awful in arena’s if you are in need of some decent dagg’s, run a few Forge of souls a few times and pick up a few of those 232 daggers. Ony also drops some pvp oriented dagers, (the something gutgore ripper) I run pve combat and have better weapons for that, yet even when I spec combat for pvp and gear for it, I find that mut-prep is still vastly superior. it has all kinds of nice utility in the sub tree such as batter stealth (movement, detection and rank wise) and deadly brew in the mut tree so you get free crippling off of almost any poison you rock, and of course the wonderful mutilate for those pretty combo points.
on a different note, I find killing spree to be unfair against some people and i feel bad using it in pvp. gl with wateva you do though.
March 31, 2010 at 4:47 pm
I’ve never played sublety, so I don’t know how comfortable I would be with it, but as soon as I get another dagger I’ll give it a shot.
Killing Spree unfair? It’s the only show stopper that I have. The only problem with it is if I’m fighting someone too close to other players it will hit everyone when I set it off, thus making it meaningless.