We asked for a logo that would reflect our guild’s professionalism and dedication to video games.  We knew there were many good logo’s out there already but wanted something unique and noticeable.

You’ll be seeing this around everywhere from now on, and we’ll be slowly updating the brand on each of our associated social/streaming websites:

www.facebook.com/AccessionGuild

www.twitter.com/AccessionGuild

www.twitch.tv/team/Accession

www.youtube.com/AccessionGuild

I’ll be posting an interview soon with the designer, Michael Buck, to give some insight to making of our logo and a background behind the architect    Check back in a few days to see what went into making our logo.

Full-sized Image

Full-sized Image

*Worst screenshot award goes to our GM, Lucente

***Please note: this guide is a work in progress and will change as we progress through beta. As MoP release nears, I expect to iron out all of the information found here and either edit this post or delete it and release a new guide. This guide is being posted in it’s “under-construction” draft version in order to get the information out there and allow for feedback. Please enjoy and comment.***

This is a guide for anyone planning to raid as a Combat Rogue in Mist of Pandaria.  It is written from the perspective of a combat rogue and is intended to provide information for combat rogues only.  While there is plenty of information that can be used in any spec, this information is specific to combat. This guide is written for anyone looking to obtain information about rogues in MoP. Many players may find the information elementary, but it was written for rogues at any and all levels of play, from hardcore raider to casual alt.

As MoP is still in Beta, any and all information listed here can become invalid as Blizzard changes/balances the game.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Talents and Glyphs
2. New Abilities and Major Ability Changes
3. Combat Damage and Rotation
4. Cooldowns
5. Stat Prioirty
6. Gearing
7. Useful Macros
8. Useful Addons
9. Additional Resources

1.) TALENTS AND GLYPHS:

Talents:
Obviously, the talent system has been completely redesigned and there are a lot of options for you to choose from when spec’ing your rogue.  I have included a screenshot of the “general” talent spec I will most likely be using.  Below the image, I discuss why I chose the specific talents and provide my “favorite” alternatives to the talents I will most likely be using.

Glyphs:
Blizzard has incorporated a lot of the damage altering glyphs of Cataclysm directly into the abilities.  With that, most of the glyphs have become personal preference and situational in nature.  Below are the glyphs I will be using.

2.) NEW ABILITIES AND MAJOR ABILITY CHANGES:

A lot of skills that were previously obtained through talents have now become either passive abilities or have been built into other abilities.  I am not going to go through all of the changes, but I will highlight the new abilities and highlight my favorite changes:

New Abilities:

Major Ability Changes: (These may not display the new tooltips)

3.) DAMAGE AND ROTATION:

As a pure DPS class, Rogue damage is the most important thing we bring. Yes, Blizzard made it so that all rogues bring melee haste and nature damage, but for a rogue to really shine, they need to perform well on the DPS charts. At the time this guide was written, combat rogues were the strongest rogue spec and were one of the strongest dps classes. Mastering the rotation is not an overnight process for most players. If you find yourself producing numbers that you just aren’t happy with, then find a target dummy and practice your rotation. You should be able to perform the rotation without thinking so that you can spend your time focusing on boss mechanics. After all, a dead dps does no dps.

Poisons:
Deadly poison is the poison of choice as a lethal poison.
Non-Lethal poisons do not directly impact the majority of the fights. These poisons should be interchanged, depending on boss mechanics and specific needs.

In MoP, poisons will be on the melee hit table, rather than spell hit table, and will require the same hit rating as specials.

Opener and Rotations:

More on Rupture/Garrote:
It has been long debated whether Rupture and Garrote should be used in the rotation. Dropping rupture from your rotation simplifies it and allows you to focus on other things. It has historically been a marginal DPS gain at best. However, SimCraft (see additional resources) was performed with Rupture and it performed well. If you decide to use rupture in your rotation, you should note that it does not currently scale up as you progress through insight. If you start rupture in a moderate insight, you will need to reapply it during a deep insight in order to gain the additional effectiveness of a deep insight. Garrote is really only used when coming out of stealth. If you chose to garrote, you will need to use Revealing Strike as your first ability out of stealth.

4.) COOLDOWNS:

Offensive:
Combat rogues rely heavily on properly timed cooldowns to sustain high damage. Below is some general information about all combat rogue cooldowns. These are not hard and fast rules you must live by, rather, they are generally accepted principles to consider when using your cooldowns. A number of mechanics and environmental factors will play a part in your decision whether or not to use the ability directly off cooldown. You will need to consider things like: Will you be moving off the boss soon? Will you be out of range soon? Is there a phase coming up where you will need extreme burst? Properly deciding when to most effectively use your cooldowns will play a major role in determining your damage.

Defensive:
Rogues have been given a set of tools which, in my opinion, gives them some of the highest survivability tactics in the game. Effectively using these defensive cooldowns will allow rogues to survive longer while taking less damage. Learning to use these abilities correctly will allow your healers to spend more time focused on other players who lack the damage reduction that rogues have.

5.) STAT PRIORITY:

Currently, there are no “hard and true” values nor has a true stat priority list been created by the major theorycrafting rogues. However, it is my belief that the stat priority list will remain the same for combat rogues. I do think the value for mastery and crit will come up some, so I have made a little bit of a change in that regard.

1.) Agility
2.) Yellow Hit
3.) Expertise
4.) Haste
5.) Mastery
6.) Crit = White Hit

The new hit/expertise caps that you will want to obtain are 7.5%. This takes 2550 Hit and 2550 Expertise rating to obtain.

6.) GEARING:

(this section is still under construction and will be added later via edit or in a separate post)

7.) USEFUL MACROS:

This is a very useful macro to use to combine Adrenaline Rush and Shadow Blades. This macro is HIGHLY recommended, as they should be used together.

#showtooltip Adrenaline Rush
/Cast Adrenaline Rush
/Cast Shadow Blades

This is a start attack assist macro, designed to ensure you begin attack even when you have too little energy to cast your ability.

#showtooltip Sinister Strike
/startattack
/Cast Sinister Strike

This is a very handy tricks of the trade macro, designed to cast tricks at your focus target without having to actually target them. All you need to do is set a focus target and then press this macro.

#showtooltip Tricks of the Trade
/cast [@focus] Tricks of the Trade

7.) USEFUL ADDONS:

Rogue Power Bars – Timer bars for all rogue abilities (poisons, cooldowns, potions, etc.
NugComboBar – Combo Point tracking addon
Combo Point Redux – Combo Point tracking addon with insight tracker

Sinnaabun’s UI – Here is a link to download the UI I was using in Cataclysm. This is a custom build ui. When MoP goes live, many of these addons will need to be updated.

9.) ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Elitist Jerks MoP Discussion
Elitist Jerks 5.0.x Mechanics Guide
Simcraft T14H Results
ShadowCraft Rogue Reforging tool
ShadowPanther

This Thursday after our Dragon Soul raid you can catch one of our raiding roundtables live via our livestreams.

The following members are set to attend (so far):

Amalyth (Protection Warrior)
Vida (Guardian Druid)
Jello (Hunter)
Sinnaabun (Rogue)
Saramore (DPS Warrior)
Chimerian (Restoration Druid)
Evaclol (Rogue)
Rachen (Shadow Priest)

…and perhaps more to come!

It all starts following our Dragon Soul clear! So tune in to http://www.twitch.tv/amalyth starting at 7pm CST for all the fun!

-Amalyth

I’ve also included a “BiS” list bellow; however, this list is VERY preliminary and possibly completely incorrect. I’ve done a bit a testing using SimCraft and it seems that our three DPS stats (Haste, Crit, and Mastery) are very close together in value. I will have to do much more personal testing/experimenting to convince myself of what the true stat priority will be, and there may or may not be another build or two that will change our class once again before release, so it’s impossible to be 100% confident in the list I’ve made.

GEAR LIST SORTED BY INSTANCE:

GEAR LIST SORTED BY SLOT:

BIS LIST:

For the most part, I’ve stuck with the old Shadow Priest stat weights and given haste a vast priority over any other stat.  I personally think haste is still going to be very good, but since DP is so important to our rotation (and MB along with that) hit will probably becoming more important.  For that same reason, crit and mastery may get more appealing as well.  Also, as a small note, this list is specific to the items available in the Heroic 5 Mans in MoP.  Again, this list is very preliminary, and will likely change in the future, so feel free to check back as we get closer to launch to see if there is an updated list posted.

Head – Whitemane’s Embroidered Chapeau
Neck – Mindbreaker Pendant
Shoulder – Shoulders of Engulfing Winds
Back – Cape of Entanglement
Chest – Robes of Fevered Dreams
Wrist – Bombardment Bracers
Hands – Conflagrating Gloves
Waist – Fermenting Belt
Legs – Leggings of Unleashed Anguish
Feet – Soulbinder Treads
Finger #1 – Vithrak, Gaze of the Deadman
Finger #2 – Signet of the Hidden Door
Trinket #1 – Vision of the Predator
Trinket #2 – Flashfrozen Resin Globule
Weapon – Headmaster’s Will

I’m also going to try and create a complete Shadow Priest guide here in the next few weeks. It kind of depends on how busy I get at work and how often I can pull myself away from LoL, but check back now and then to see if anything new is available. I hope this post will be useful to those out there who like to have things all in one place like I do.

I don’t know about other people out there, but I simply don’t like this design.  Sure, it’s fun to put some RNG proc’s into the game for some variety and to make the game not stail, but what about when you’re trying to push the highest DPS you can and it actually matters?  For hardcore raiders, we want to be able to push out the maximum damage possible, as consistently as we can.  A simple example: Heroic Ultraxion, where we literally wiped at less than 500K HP on the boss several times before getting the kill.  I remember looking at logs in between attempts and wondering, “Why am I 1-2K DPS less than I was last attempt?  I felt like I did better this time.”  When we are attempting a boss with such a strict enrage timer we needed every little bit we can squeeze out, and it’s just disappointing to wipe at such low numbers knowing you had no control whether or not you did 38K DPS or 42K DPS.

So, now we’re here in Mists of Pandaria Beta; what does Blizzard have for us in store?  Well to start, let me give you a brief run-down of the changes that I feel are very impactful towards our damage/rotation:

• Shadow Orbs are now generated from Mind Blast instead of from procs
• There is no more Empowering Shadows (the percent damage increase from using Mind Blast with Shadow Orbs)
• Devouring Plague now costs Shadow Orbs instead of mana and does significantly more damage
• Shadow Word: Pain is now our “spam” ability while moving with a frontloaded damage portion to it

Now of course there are many more small changes that I haven’t mentioned, but these are the big changes that significantly affect our damage output.  We went from having a random aspect to our rotation (Shadow Orb procs) to being rewarded for casting our Mind Blast on cooldown and generating Shadow Orbs to cast Devouring Plague which, from experience on Beta, is our number one priority.  Blizzard is moving in the right direction, giving us more damage for skillful play as opposed to giving us damage randomly with no skill attached.  Other than that change, there are some new differences that might take some getting used to, like Shadow Word: Pain no longer being refreshed by Mind Flay, but nothing that an experienced Shadow Priest will have a difficult time with.  There are also some interesting choices in the new talent tree that allows for some diversity in specialization, but I’m sure anything to do damage will be calculated out through SimCraft.

Of course, RNG is never going to completely gone from our rotation… I mean, it’s World of Warcraft we are talking about; however, the more they make X happen because of Y instead of X happening on a percent chance the more people will feel rewarded for their skills.  I play this game because I enjoy the progression race.  I enjoy taking the time to strategize a boss and execute said strategy with 24 other people.  On top of that, I can compete with other DPS within my raid, and now with World of Logs and similar websites, I can complete with the rest of the world.  True enough, it’s not very difficult to press my buttons in the right order, move out of fire on the ground, or  use my cooldowns when I’m supposed to, but it’s the combination of everything all at once and being able to still beat other people doing the same thing is what drives me to play well.  At the end of the day, making my rotation based more on skill and less on RNG aligns with my desires in the game, and so I’m very pleased with Blizzard’s change to my class.

Yes, Heroic Strike doesn’t do as much damage as Slam, but that’s really the only bad thing about this change. Despite that, there are multiple pros that make Taste for Blood better than it was before the patch. For starters, Taste for Blood now affects an ability that’s off the GCD instead of an ability that’s on the GCD. Not only does this allow you to go about your normal rotation with ease while being able to make use of your proc, but you can also use this more to your advantage to try and get extra stacks before using the proc without losing DPS. As an example, you could get one proc from an Overpower, use Slam+Slam (or CS+Slam depending on if CS is up and you don’t have the CS debuff applied to the target), MS, Overpower, and then get two more stacks. Because of this change, you were able to add two extra stacks to Taste for Blood without losing any DPS whatsoever. This also allows you to make better use of your procs during the Execute phase compared to before, which was harder to manage than it is now.

Deadly Calm is now even more useful because of this change. You can now either use Deadly Calm to use your proc in case you are low on rage, or use it strategically to help with a burst of damage, which brings me to my final point. This change now allows for more small bursts of damage to your target compared to when Taste for Blood affected Slam. As an example, you can pair Heroic Strike with an incredibly hard hitting ability like Dragon Roar to get a good, small burst of damage. Before this change, you were unable to do something like that.

Overall, I’m very happy with the recent changes and when you truly think about how this change now affects other things, you will likely be more content with how it now works and see that the current frustration is very unnecessary. I hope now when Blizzard makes a change with an ability, people won’t jump the gun and instead think about how a future change could work out better than how something previously did.

With Mists of Pandaria around the corner I figured I would go ahead and provide a good resource for Protection Warriors to know both WHAT and WHERE to get the items they need to be ready to begin their first raid.

Preface
If you don’t know by now: warrior rage has been completely redesigned. No longer are Protection Warriors going to be full of excessive rage to dump whenever we want. I will leave my personal opinion out of it, but for better or worse — they had an intent with this. Among the obvious ones was they felt that we really did not have the task of managing our resource (at least as much) as others. The other, however, was a more systematic one. If you recall a number of months ago there was a blog post by Ghostcrawler who addressed the issue of tank itemization. The primary issue was tank gear having expertise and hit on them, in what appeared to be “just because.” His response to this was something along the lines of “we want tanks to value expertise and hit, and will eventually implement a way to make this happen.” And, that is exactly what they did. As of the date of this post the only ways a Protection Warrior can obtain rage are the following:

• Battle or Commanding Shout (20 rage)
• Defensive stance generates 1 rage per 3 seconds while in combat
• Shield Slam (15 rage)
• Revenge (10 rage)
• Entering Battle Stance to gain rage from white attacks (higher gain from white attacks than Berserker stance)
• Entering Berserker Stance to gain rage from white attacks and damage taken (lower gain from white attacks than Battle stance, but additionally gain rage from damage taken)

Keep in mind, leaving Defensive Stance subjects you to being critically hit from a boss, among the other significant meanings of being in this stance as a tank.

With the changes to rage generation also came changes to the rage cost of abilities. The majority of our abilities are now free to use, meaning they cost 0 rage. Below are the abilities that cost rage, and their correlating costs:

• Shield Block (60 rage)
• Shield Barrier (20, 40, and 60 rage) [usable at those thresholds; the greater the rage you have when used -- the greater the absorb shield]
• Heroic Strike (30 rage)
• Cleave (30 rage)
• Impending Victory (10 rage) [talented ability; replaces Victory Rush if chosen]
• Shattering Throw (25 rage)
• Hamstring (10 rage)

I stated all of that above to outline the rationale of almost all of my gear choice selections, which is seemingly counter-intuitive. I will explain this later.

What gear is there? Where does it drop?
I am going to organize first by WHERE, and then by SLOT. Click on the instance name to toggle the item and armor slot attributed to it.

Now, click on the item slot to toggle the item and heroic dungeon attributed to it.

Ok, now that you know where to get things, and what’s available to you — it’s time to delve deeper into what specifically you should be getting, and why.

In the preface I went over, in detail, the rage changes and what abilities actually generate rage. The most important factor to remember here is that in order for your Shield Slam and Revenge to give you rage, they MUST hit. That means if you have 0% hit and expertise, you are not going to see optimal rage gain.

Until this point, Protection Warriors have greatly ignored Hit and Expertise, and for good reason: they were essentially useless. However, after participating in the raid testing thus far I have to say that I STILL don’t value using these stats over our other “tank” stats. There were only several occasions that a non-hit resulted in not being able to use Shield Block or Shield Barrier by choice. Additionally, both of our primary avoidance stats, dodge and parry give us the ability to use Revenge — which gives us rage. So, if you have taken a look at the gear available from heroic 5 man dungeons you can see a relative trend. And they are:

1. Mastery is notably absent, there are several pieces with it present, but not many.
2. There are substantially more pieces with both Dodge AND Parry.
3. The vast majority of gear has an avoidance stat (dodge, parry) and Hit or Expertise

That being said, Blizzard has inadvertently (or intended, but I doubt it) given us a choice, and an easy one in my opinion.

Option 1: We can select our gear directly to generate rage and maximize our active mitigation via not missing Shield Slam, but substantially reducing the number of Revenge proc’s we get by selecting one Hit or Expertise secondary stat combined with one Mastery, Dodge, or Parry stat. All the while we take more damage over the course of the entire encounter from the reduced Dodge, Parry, and Mastery loss we sustain from choosing Hit or Expertise.

Option 2: We continue to aim for maximum avoidance and mitigation stats. While we do miss the occasional Shield Slam, but overall we get more Revenge proc’s. Contrary to option #1, we take less damage across the duration of an encounter due to the added dodge, block, and parry.

With that being said, below is the list of items I believe to be best-in-slot prior to stepping into your first raid. Keep in mind, there is not much variety in gear selection so picking up some Hit and Expertise is non-avoidable.

Helm: Helm of Rising Flame (Scarlet Monastery)
Neck: Armsmaster’s Sealed Locket (Scarlet Halls)
Shoulders: Spaulders of Immovable Stone (Siege of Nivzao Temple)
Cloak: Soulrender Greatcloak (Scarlet Monastery)
Chest: Canine Commander’s Breastplate (Scarlet Halls)
Wrists: Bubble-Breaker Bracers (Stormstout Brewery)
Gloves: Gauntlets of Resolute Fury (Shado-Pan Monastery)
Belt: Sparkbreath Girdle (Shado-Pan Monastery)
Legs: Sap-Encrusted Legplates (Siege of Nivzao Temple)
Boots: Wraithplate Treads (Scholomance)
Ring 1: Lime-Rimmed Signet (Stormstout Brewery)
Ring 2: Crystallized Droplet (Temple of the Jade Serpent)
Trinket 1: Iron Protector Talisman (Mogu’shan Palace)
Trinket 2: Heart of Fire (Shado-Pan Monastery)
Weapon: Ook’s Hozen Slicer (Stormstout Brewery)
Shield: Shield of Blind Hate (Shado-Pan Monastery)

Here are the raw (purely gear) stat gains you’ll be looking at with this gear (pre-reforging, which I will get to next):
Armor: 45141
Stamina: 14415
Mastery (%): 2481 (4.12%)
Dodge (%): 4645 (5.25%)
Parry (%): 4752 (5.37%)
Hit (%): 254 (0.75%)
Expertise (%): 279 (0.82%)

And, for those interested — below are the base stats for Protection Warriors at level 90. (I am unsure of the algorithm’s to calculate the final stats, or even if they have been changed — so I did not bother to predict it.)
Armor: 0
Stamina: 216
Mastery (%): 0 (17%)
Dodge (%): 0 (5.01%)
Parry (%): 0 (3.21%)
Hit (%): 0 (0%)
Expertise (%): 0 (0%)

Reforging
Unless the math has changed dramatically since Cataclysm, and considering my explanation of gear selection earlier — this is going to work almost identically as before. Stat priorities being:

1. Mastery
2. Dodge or Parry (the removal of Hold the Line means it no longer matters that Parry be higher)
3. Hit or Expertise

With that, when you have a piece of gear with both Dodge and Parry — you take the highest stat and reforge it to Mastery. If they are the same, choose whichever stat you currently have more of. If a piece has Dodge and Mastery, and your Parry is higher than your dodge: do nothing, and likewise with a piece with Parry and Mastery. If an item has Hit or Expertise combined with any Mastery, Dodge, or Parry stat you will always choose the Hit or Expertise and reforge it based upon the stat priorities listed above.

Gemming
This is still up for debate. During the initial Cataclysm cycle, we gemmed pure avoidance and mastery, or even pure mastery. This may be subject to change in Mists of Pandaria with the introduction of Shield Barrier. I’m going to explain in greater detail in the next section as to why. The options though, would be to continue the same style of Cataclysm, or gem pure stamina. The answer to this, in my opinion, is going to come down to a per-encounter basis.

Shield Block versus Shield Barrier
The change to Shield Block was a very strong change. If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s quite simple. Shield Block now blocks every incoming attack for the next 6 seconds with the ability to critically block as well, and is usable twice within 15 seconds. Alternatively, you have the new ability, Shield Barrier. Shield Barrier acts much like the Death Knight ability Blood Shield. It is an absorb shield that absorbs damage based on two components: first, the amount of rage you have when used (the maximum being 60 rage, the cost of Shield Block), and second, your attack power.

This all ties into the gemming dilemma I was discussing earlier. As of this post, in full 476 gear (LFR item level) and a maximum stack of Vengeance (relative to your stamina), you are looking at an approximate 140,000 absorb shield (more if gemmed full stamina). Bosses in 10-man normal mode are currently hitting on average for around 50,000-80,000 damage in 476 item level gear, at varying speeds depending on the boss. So, hypothetically if you are tanking a boss — Shield Barrier is going to be superior for damage reduction. If a boss melee attacks you for 60,000 damage every 2 seconds, and you opt to use Shield Block (and assume you critically block [60% mitigation] all 3 swings) you mitigate a total of 108,000 damage. Alternatively, if you used a 60-rage Shield Barrier, you are going to mitigate (absorb) 140,000 damage. So, the only situation in which Shield Block is going to be more appropriate is going to be on an encounter where you are getting hit by multiple targets, or very quickly from one target. Otherwise, Shield Barrier is your go-to.

In Closing
I will be releasing more guides as time goes on, but I figured this would be a great starter guide for those whom have yet to do their homework, or do not yet have access to the beta. Feel free to comment below with any questions, comments, or errors.

-Amalyth