The Rogue Compendium [updated 10/26/08]Follow

Introduction

As Nooblestick, the illustrious author of our most excellent Rogue Guide has stepped away from the game (or possibly just these forums) for some time now, and the sticky has not been updated in more than a year and a half, I've recently taken it upon myself to provide that information in my journal. This has been somewhat effective, but overall a failure, as it's still hard to find a concise listing of everything roguely. To that end, I'm compiling all of the info that both he has gathered and I myself have gathered into one ultimate thread of links. I will be borrowing heavily both from his already created work on the rogue FAQ and my own already created work.

If some of this stuff seems eerily familiar, don't fret; you've seen it before and I'm not claiming ownership of said info.

Table of Contents

1. Race Choice
2. Weapon Choice
3. Talents
4. Mechanics
5. Gemming for PvE
6. Important Links
7. Rogue Macros
8. 3.0.2/WotLK Specs

Last updated on: 10/26/08

Major overhaul to the race, weapon choice, and spec sections.

Edited, Oct 26th 2008 9:27pm by Theophany

Choose Your Weapon! (Written by Nooblestick, with additions and edits by myself.)

A very common question these days. Rogues can use a great many weapon types, so it's completely understandable to want to know which you should use when you first start. The answer, however, is not quite so simple. You ultimately must make the decision yourself, but I can help you to do that by explaining what each weapon excels at.

There are four weapon types (excluding ranged) that you can use as a Rogue. One-Handed Swords, One-Handed Maces, Daggers and Fist Weapons. Each type has its strengths, though most Rogues either use Daggers or Swords. Maces are less common, but still more or less mainstream. Fist Weapons are rarely used at all, as good ones are hard to come by.

Daggers

A very popular choice. Daggers excel at doing a lot of damage in a very short period of time. Ambush, Backstab and Mutilate have ridiculously high base damage, along with exceptional crit chance for the first two. Daggers, however, have been plagued by poor Combo Point generation, which made the talent Seal Fate a popular pick. With the addition of Mutilate (the single most energy efficient CP generation), this is no longer such a huge problem for Dagger builds. These are combined with fist weapons in combat to form Close Quarters Combat (5% increased critical strike chance with both fists and daggers). Daggers should always use Mutilate, or Backstab if you aren't specced into Mutilate.

Swords

Probably the second best weapon to use with PvP, as it allows for high instant attack damage without having to be behind your target or stealthed. This weapon spec in Combat was the highest damage previous to patch 3.0.2 (preparatory WotLK patch), but fist main hand dagger off hand has edged them out. Swords can only be used with Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage, and Shiv (which should never be used as a main attack).

Maces

Mace spec is very useful in PvP. Ignoring 15% armor is useful, especially on high-armor targets that aren't affected as much by Expose Armor. They make very poor PvE weapons, though. Maces generally have the widest damage range, giving some of the highest and lowest damage. Maces can only be used with Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage, and Shiv (which should never be used as a main attack).

Fist Weapons

Fists are very much a 70+ weapon. There are very, very few fists that are easily obtainable while leveling, making them a poor spec choice (as you have to respec when you get a new weapon). At 70+, fists are very easily obtainable, and currently a fist main hand weapon with a fast off hand dagger is the best you can do for DPS outside of mutilate.

Main Hand versus Off Hand

A very common question, and for good reason. The question of what weapon type seems to be the most common, and the answer is very simple. If you're not Mutilate specced, your offhand weapon type makes absolutely no difference aside from the Combat talents that effect only one weapon type.

That being said, what you actually do put in your offhand is a bit more involved than that. Your offhand weapon does 50% damage (75% with Dual Wield Specialization maxed out), so getting higher damage weapons will have a much lower effect than doing so on your main hand. This applies to attack power bonuses as well. The off hand weapon is not used for instant attacks, aside from Shiv, either, so that frees up all damage range considerations entirely.

Now, the end all, be all answer. All other relevant stats equal (DPS, base stats, attack power, etc), faster is better for every build except Mutilate. There are four rules to follow when considering main hand (MH) and off hand (OH) weapons:

Get a fast OH.

For combat, a faster OH means more Combat Potency procs. For mutilate, a faster OH will give you more chances at crits to proc Focused Attacks.

A fast OH will also allow you to apply poisons faster.

Slow MH.

For combat, a slow MH is generally the best. To get more in-depth, you want the highest average damage on a weapon. This usually can be eyeballed by looking at the speed of the weapon and the DPS, though make sure to compare damage ranges as well.

In PvP, mutilate also will want a slow MH. You're not looking for many Focused Attacks procs, thus doing more damage is the name of the game.

Fast MH.

For mutilate in PvE, you're looking for the fastest MH with the highest DPS, much like you would for your OH. As of this edit, this itemization is very poor, so try your best on this one, but do not go out of your way to drop a higher DPS weapon for 0.10 speed.

Spec.

Spec is important! Close Quarters Combat, Sword Spec, Mace Spec, and Mutilate all require very special weapons! Pay attention to what weapons you're using, and use your respecs wisely! Swords are generally the easiest weapons to get as you level up, though if you're up to the challenge, you may want to keep daggers, unarmed, and swords all kept up to date.

Edited, Oct 26th 2008 8:56pm by Theophany

Mechanics (Otherwise titled "Hit Capping, Expertise, and you." Written by myself.)

Since there are so many questions about hit rating, expertise, glancing blows, etc on the forums, I figure I'll write a little article about them to broaden our understanding of how these mechanics work. (Keep in mind this is for level cap only.)

So, on a mob, there are 5 outcomes of WoW's "one-roll" system:

Crit

White hit

Glancing Blow (25%)

Miss (28%)

Dodge (6.5%)

Parry (6.5%)

Block (5%)

Now, here's where we need to break up the mechanics very simply.

Let's assume you're a rogue in my raid. We have Imp Faerie Fire, which gives 3% hit, or 47.31 (rounded down to 47) hit rating, making the hit cap 316. You meet the hit cap, therefore you cannot miss. You've pushed the miss chance off the table.

So the table now looks like the following:

25% Glancing

17% White hit

40% crit

6.5% Dodge

6.5% Parry

5% Block

Now, let me explain glancing blows. Glancing blows are there, always. There's no way to remove them, there's no way to decrease the chance they happen, they're just there. Always 25% on a raid boss (level 73). This brings in the term "crit cap". Crit cap basically means how much crit you can get before it's worthless and crit strikes start being pushed off the table. What I mean by that is that using our table up there, you've still got 17% of your hits that will be normal white hits. If you get to 57% crit, you're at crit cap. If you get to 58%, you're past crit cap, and now you've got 1% crit falling off the hit table, which is wasted itemization.

You really should never have to worry about the crit cap because of something that we also have to take into account: ROGUES ALWAYS ATTACK FROM BEHIND. I don't give two sh*ts about what the encounter is, but if you're on a boss, you're attacking from behind.

Here's why. This is what our attack table looks like attacking from behind. Same boss, same mechanics, nothing has changed; we JUST MOVED BEHIND.

25% Glancing

28.5% White hit

40% crit

6.5% Dodge

Know what the difference is? Instead of that 11.5% parry/block chance, you've now got 11.5% more white hits that 1) aren't glancing, and 2) are doing damage to the mob. Do you see now why rogues always attack from behind?

There's also another difference: when a mob parries your attack, his swing timer is reset. He immediately reaches out and smacks your tank again, possibly killing your tank, or forcing a healer to panic and not heal someone else in the raid.

Now, some more knowledgeable posters may be screaming, "WHAT ABOUT EXPERTISE?!" Yeah, I'm getting to that. First I should note that parry% on bosses is heavily debated right now. It's assumed that it's actually in the range of 12-15%, I just used the old assumed number for my previous examples because it gives my small brain nice easy numbers to work with.

As far as Expertise goes, Expertise rating transfers to Expertise at 3.9 rating per point. 26 expertise will give you 6.5% negated dodge, giving you an attack table that looks like this:

25% Glancing

35% White hit

40% crit

That's now 35% pure white hits. You can see why this is advantageous.

So, there's the end of this little tutorial. Let me sum up by giving you the "front" and "behind" attack tables, along with relevant hit caps.

From the front:

25% Glancing

48.5% crit/white hit

6.5% Dodge

15% Parry

5% Block (on mobs that can)

From the rear:

25% Glancing

68.5% crit/white hit

6.5% Dodge

0% Parry

0% Block

Hit cap with 5/5 Precision and Imp Faerie Fire: 316
Hit cap with 5/5 Precision: 363
Hit cap without Precision: 442
60 Expetise (hitting from the front, negating parry) in rating: 234
26 Expertise in rating: 102
16 Expertise in rating (because of Weapon Expertise): 63

Important Links: (Written by myself.)

General:

EonSprinter's Keybinding Lesson
An incredible write-up that took him a long time to write, that I didn't feel like typing up. He took some of my ideas and ran with them. Insanely useful read to anyone just starting to play WoW.

Interface Guide, by Theo
Not exactly my finest work, but this thread can be very useful to anyone that wants to clean up their UI. In here I give pointers for keybinding, positioning of bars, and how-tos on a lot of the basics to UI customization. The addons in the thread are out of date, but there should still be current versions of all of them somewhere on the internet.

PvP:

Shadowpanther's PvP Rogue List
Shows how the most influential rogues in the world are gearing/speccing. Great resource as he updates pretty much every 10 days, so you can see trends as far back as 1/11/08.

Theo's PvP FAQ
My own PvP FAQ on the rogue forums answers a lot of questions rogues have about PvP. Constantly updated with the newest information, it will be a work in progress for a long, long time.

Zug Gaming
Zug Gaming is run by one of the better rogues out there, and features quite a bit of info and experienced tips. If you're looking for rogue/priest advice, this is the place to look, as he's an expert.

PvE:

Shadowpanther
Shadowpanther is an excellent resource for finding upgrades as a rogue. It's not quite as accurate as the rogue spreadsheet, but it's damn near.

Roguecraft 101 (requires registration on the EJ forum, I think)
By far one of the greatest resources for a PvE rogue is the gathered knowledge over at EJ. Pretty much any rogue that knows his stuff in PvE will quote the rogues over at EJ, as they've gone through countless hours of math to boil rogue DPS down to a science. They're also the ones that created my next link.

Aldrianna's DPS Spreadsheet
Vulajin's Roguecraft Spreadsheet (both require M$ Excel or OpenOffice)
One of the best tools to have as a rogue in PvE. I can't count the number of times I've used the spreadsheet in the past year of playing. Simulates DPS down scarily well. As of 8/7/08, I've got the links to both Aldrianna's and Vulajin's spreadsheets up. Using both is the best road to travel, IMO.

New links that you would like added can be PM'd to me.

Edited, Aug 7th 2008 4:31pm by Theophany

This is exactly what the rogue forums need.

Might wanna add something about Professions though. Especially JC, Engineering, and LW.

Nicely done. /cheer

Congratz on the sticky. Keep up the good work Theo, as you're the one I now refer ppl to when they have questions.

Thanks for stepping up a taking care of this Theo. As current as the information contained in the Rogue Board is, it always struck me odd that our FAQ was outdated.

The evident demise of one Nooblestick is certainly unfortunate, but it looks like the new sticky is in good hands. (I was going to make a gay Olympic joke about passing the torch, but I didn't have my laugh-track handy.) Great job as always.

Al

Nah, you could tell that when Churchill said that, he spelled it that way.

If you want to know what a talent really does, you can research game mechanics. That's the thing about tooltips; talents are readily explained. For example, I started a DK in beta. It took me about 15 minutes of looking at the talent tree and fiddling around with it on wowhead.com, but I eventually came to a build that I thought was good. That's from me understanding game mechanics.

Me detailing talents one by one won't do much good; for all that Nooble explained the old talents individually, it was really never used. We get so many questions about talents on the forums, I really want just a "look at this and shut up about it" post.

To the end that I don't show what tree to build up first in leveling? Uh, maybe I don't read like you do (in that I read the whole post) but:

As for what talents to take? If you really can't figure that out, it either 1) doesn't matter, or 2) you're hopeless.

I fully understand and realize what you were hoping to accomplish with your post, but rogue talents are easy to understand. The thing that may need to be explained is combo point building moves, which I may do a section on. I've seen far too many rogues talking about opening with shiv in PvE, talking about using SS with a dagger, talking about hemoing with a dagger, etc.

For what it's worth, Therion is the one person that were I a new rogue, I'd read every post he makes. I've yet to see him post wrong info.

It's probably because he looks stuff up, unlike some posters, and he pays attention to what's being discussed and always will post on-topic.

And there's a reason he's a Sage. He's like the good, quieter twin, while I'm the evil, loud, and obnoxious one.

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHA Suckas!!!! I have you all in check!

But thanks for the kind words daddio. Honestly, what little I know I've learned from these forums and the posts from those of you who are in the know. I can't take any credit for everyone elses work.

For 3.0, level 70 raiding I'm debating between this and this. Probably won't settle on one until I can get a couple runs in and have some WWS to compare the two. My main point of debate right now is PotW vs. Ruthlessness/Blood Splatter. Personally, I'm tending to like the idea of better Rupture damage and smoother rotations but Crit Damage is damn sexy....

When I have data on both builds I'll post my findings.

Who else has two pennies to toss into this discussion?