The long road to 70

I think getting to 70 this weekend might actually be achievable. Am 5 bars away from 68 now. Then it's really just a slow grind/instance running to 70. And then start on reputation grinds and wait for everyone to get to 70 so we can raid. I still haven't picked a faction: Scryer or Aldor? At the moment I'm leaning toward Scryer, but Aldor has more PvE stuff. Scryer has an off-hand dagger - I've decided to remain a dagger rogue - and alchemy stuff. Doesn't matter too much, I guess. What I don't get from enchants I can balance out in gear. Which is ridiculously stacking A LOT of stam/AP at the moment.. I'm hitting 7k hp unbuffed. Hit and Crit ratings are suffering as a result. The rating scaling and lack of crit gear makes it much harder to maintain it at around 28%.. at 67 my crit chance is about 22%.. and trying to balance hit and AP. I'll worry about gear when I hit 70.. pfft.

Envenom is turning out to be quite a useful skill to have. I find it indispensable on boss fights, especially when Evis isn't critting as much as it used to, and Envenom does more non-crit damage. And especially since it ignores armor.

A 3k Envenom crit on Tavarok

Had a little run through Auchenai Crypts tonight. Shirrak (first boss) was a little tricky. I think it was the lack of range DPS and HOTs that did us in but we got him down to 8% before calling it a night. We'll be back!

Shirrak the Dead Watcher

Other recent screenshots:

And my fav - a lesson from the Rogue Academy: Real Rogues don't feint. But of course!

BC over the weekend

Busy being a geek adventuring in Outlands since the release. Love the new scenery. Haven't had time to play with my mods and UI yet since the expansion. Managed to tweak Stunwatch to work with BC. This build does nice damage as far as I can see but I don't have Damage Meters or SW Stats up yet so it's hard to tell. And I miss my macros. Will make it a point to find all my mods next weekend. I need Energy Watch back desperately! One bar from 65. One! But I need to sleep :/

Someone landed on top of me in Terrokar Forest today with a flying mount and said "Do you know Bergkamp?" Dude, what have you been telling people about me?

Burning Crusade and my rogue

The long awaited expansion pack is finally out! Reloaded my account tonight to check out what’s going on in Tichondrius. About 40 people are Level 61 already. Spent my time in AV collecting the 3 more tokens I needed.. I now have a Red Skeletal Mount for my rogue as well as the HWL dagger. I know I said I wanted the MH sword but have been doing some serious thinking and will be sticking to a dagger rogue for now. Been testing out my new Assassination spec; Mutilate is so much fun! Assassination build lacks the crazy survivability of the Subtlety spec (Cheat Death, Cloak of Shadows - but now the 41pt skill in that tree is now ShadowStep, Enveloping Shadows, Heightened Senses, Elusiveness etc) but I find it a much more balanced build.. sure Combat will always be a stronger overall PvE build but these days I PvP a little. Imp Backstab has been switched over to the Assassination tree to replace Imp S&D. I now have Cold Blood again (I leveled with an CB-Prep spec) which is really fun to use with Mutilate because both attacks land as crits. And Lethality affects Mutilate as well, so its doing 230% base damage with CB.

CS-CB-Mutilate-KS-Mutilate-Tea-Mutilate-Evis… mwahahaha. Die!!

I have a ton of Thistle Tea and Blinding Powder to spare thanks to Bends.. <3

The thing I miss about my old Combat spec is my crazy crit chance. But I suppose CB somewhat makes up for it.. the insanely fast CP generation from Seal Fate is great though. I find I often have to decide between blowing 4CP on Evis, or wasting 1CP if I throw in another Mutilate. But in zerg PvP that doesn’t really matter I guess! The 10% damage increase from Find Weakness in long fights with S&D (no more Imp S&D) thrown in should be pretty decent energy investment. Haven’t had a chance to PvE with it yet, and I’m too tired to calculate. But now I’m wondering if the 3 talent points I put in Imp BS is worth it at all, since Mutilate almost replaces that skill entirely. I almost always use poisons anyway. Eventually I will fine-tune my spec, but for now I’m just going to enjoy running around with my new horse and mutilating people from behind.

Remember, rogues do it from behind. Bwahahhaha.

2.0!

Downloaded the patch last night. Server was still down when I tried to log on before I left for work. Having a crazy day at work and it looks like I will be here late, so I skipped lunch to check out the new 2.0 Rogue Talents and played around with a few specs. Also avoiding the mall. Am going 41 points into Sub tree for now, before we start raiding again when BC hits the shelves. Have two possible dagger builds for later; one of them is a 30/26/5 Seal Fate dagger build that I might try, the other would be 15/41/5 Combat build. I’ve never raided as an SF rogue before. One thing for sure, I need a main hand sword before BC.

The priest hits 60

Been semi-raiding again. Got the priest (Qcumbie) to 60 at long last, motivated by a bunch of ZG loots that I got defaulted at 58.. including epic robes! Respecced to healbot. Dead broke. Now for attunements and whatnot, but have been a bit lazy. Seem to be the only active rogue in the guild at the moment after leaving Thundermare and going back to WDK, so have been mainly on her. Need to save money for Christmas and New Years’ so putting some money towards my WoW account fees is a great idea. Was bored with the game for awhile so I let my account lapse when I was in Australia. Previous guild was falling apart (internal conflict) so our raids have been quite shitty. From getting to Twin Emps to not even being able to take Nefarian down, partly due to core players taking a break before Burning Crusade releases. Guess I will never get my Bloodfang Chest at this rate. Back to 20mans, including Onyxia, which was really fun because there was no room for errors. On first try we 17-manned Ony to 1%.. bit of a WTF situation at the end, but fun :) Better than spending Sat night partying I suppose.. don’t use that against me!

6/8 Bloodfang

Finally got my Bloodfang Pants off Ragnaros last night. Had a stable 300ms connection until I zoned in. Then it just kept screwing up. I don’t know if thats a Blizz problem or a Streamyx problem but it was immensely frustrating. On the same Streamyx connection I would be getting different latencies when I reconnect to the server. Didn’t feel like I deserved it at all last night, but I have been waiting three months for it.. having been a smart arse and passed on the first drop, and then a mistake with loot distro on the second drop left me running more MCs than I need to. I even had the ZG enchant ready for a month now. I actually enjoy MC runs but not when people scrub it up and we wipe unnecessarily. Two more pieces till I’m done with Tier 2. I wonder what the gap would be like till we get access to Tier 2.5.. probably a long while more. We’re only up to Princess Huhuran in AQ40 at the moment. So much for Naxxramas :(

Post 1.19

Finally got a chance to try my new build out in BWL. Been missing a few raids in the past two weeks, and since 1.12 I’ve only PvPed (not too terribly). So far it’s been quite fun. 2 points in SoH (sub tree) plus the 5 pc Bloodfang set bonus gives me an extra 20% + 25% threat reduction bonus from Feint (Rank 5). More energy into backstabbing! And full points in WEx gives me approximately 3% raid DPS increase.. with the other standard combat dagger talents.. thats about as PvE as I get, really.. more later when I get to try out this build further.