Tier 16 Armor Set videos: Paladin, Druid, Rogue, Death Knight [Updated]

Adriacraft are back with more tier set videos. This time we've got the tier 16 armor sets for Paladins and Druids, with Rogues to follow later. What do you think of the sets? Here at WoW Insider we're unsure, both these tiers look rather similar, and there seems to be a recurring theme of basic-colored armor with some unusual, even bizarre, frill detail.

As previously, the tiers' different colors will come from different difficulties. You can also remind yourself of the previous datamined tier sets for the Warrior, Priest and Hunter. Hit the break for the other two sets! And do check out Adriacraft on YouTube for all the latest patch videos!

Tags: breaking, druid, paladin, patch-5.4, rogue, tier-16

Filed under: Mists of Pandaria

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Should you play a rogue in WoW?

If you're just getting started with World of Warcraft, don't worry: you're not too late to have plenty of fun. (In fact, we think this is a great time to be playing WoW.) But getting started can be a little tricky with all the choices you have to make. Which race you select is a primarily cosmetic choice, but the class you pick -- and whether it's a good fit for your preferred style of gaming -- is a choice that will make all the difference.

But we're here to help make that choice at least a little easier by talking you through WoW's classes, one at a time. And on the menu for today is the rogue. In World of Warcraft, rogues are lightly armored meleers who use stealth to get in close and then hit their target with precision strikes. The rogue is one of four classes in the game that focuses solely on DPS: their three talent specializations only changing their preferred way of dealing damage.

If getting up close to the bad guys and always being in the middle of combat sounds like your thing, a rogue may be the ideal class for you. Read on for more about what to expect.

Just what is a rogue?
Don't write rogues off as just another melee damage class, because rogue gameplay is definitely unique. Instead of focusing on heavy armor and heavier weapons, rogues are light on their feet with leather armor and tend to use smaller, one-handed weapons -- most commonly daggers. But lighter weaponry -- rogues can wield daggers, fist weapons, one-handed maces, one-handed swords, one-handed axes -- doesn't mean they aren't hard hitting. Rogues have lots of tricks up their sleeves, dual-wielding weapons coated with poison and striking from stealth for extra damage. Rogues have three talent trees, just like the other classes, but each one focuses on a slightly different way of dishing out damage: assassination focuses on poisons, combat focuses on general combat, and subtlety focuses on stealth abilities.

Rogues (and their melee brethren, feral druids and windwalker monks) use a fairly unique resource system called energy: unlike mana, you start at level 1 with 100 energy, and that's all you'll ever have. (Though you'll run into a few things in the game that can increase your energy pool slightly.) Energy regenerates pretty quickly, both in and out of combat, but with the fast pace of rogue combat, you'll still find yourself hitting the bottom of your energy pool as you play. Additionally, certain skills generate combo points and other skills will use them for more powerful strikes, somewhat like a monk's chi.

For racial options, rogues have plenty, with the choice of dwarf, human, worgen, gnome, night elf, goblin, troll, pandaren, blood elf, orc, and undead. The only races who can't be rogues are tauren and draenei (though we do still think tauren rogues would be pretty cool).

Gameplay built around stealth
Stealth is probably the most important part of rogue gameplay: a rogue in stealth sneaks around, unseen by monsters or other players, which allows the rogue to sneak up on targets and wait for the best time to strike. A rogue uses this advantage to hit their opponents hard -- often creeping up behind them for a high-damage Ambush or Backstab. Rogues are also able to coat their weapons in a variety of poisons that deal damage or cause other debuffs, like slowing movement speed or increasing spell damage taken.

But rogues can do a lot more than just dish out damage. They have a number of abilities to stun their targets and a rogue with good timing can keep their target stunned for some time by chaining one stun after another. They can also crowd control using Sap, which incapacitates a target for up to a minute -- which can be useful for groups and while soloing. And when they're in over their heads, rogues have some great panic skills, like Combat Readiness and Evasion to avoid damage and Vanish which gets them out of combat and into stealth. Combined, this gives rogues some good survivability.

And, while this doesn't do much for gameplay -- it certainly won't help you fight any better or gain experience any faster -- rogues can also pickpocket humanoids and pick the locks of doors and junkboxes. Pickpocketing nets you a few coins and the chance of a item or a locked junkbox, which may have other loot inside. While it won't net you big money, the little bit can add up as you go. Additionally, you may find people willing to pay you to open junkboxes... and who's going to say no to some extra coin?

Who should (and shouldn't) play a rogue?
We like playing rogues and think you might, too. Here's the type of player who's most likely to enjoy a rogue: If you like stealth gameplay, rogues are probably the class for you. Though druids can also stealth in cat form, stealth is core to how the rogue class works and plays into many of their abilities.If you want to be in the middle of combat, rogues are always there.But, we admit, the way of the rogue is not for everyone. These are signs you probably shouldn't play a rogue: If you want to do anything other than melee DPS, a rogue is not the class for it.Though rogues have good survivability and nice arsenal of panic buttons, you might find them a bit too squishy for your taste, in which case you might look at the plate-wearing death knight, paladin, or warrior for your class of choice.
Want to know more about rogues?
If you're interested in learning more about the rogue class, these are all good places to start:
If you've decided rogue isn't the class for you, don't fret: there are plenty of other options! Be sure to check out our guide to druids, hunters, monks, paladins, priests, and warlocks -- and look for more newbie class coverage coming soon! Just because you're a newbie doesn't mean you can't bring your A-game to World of Warcraft! Visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to everything you need to get started as a new player, from the seven things every newbie ought to know to how to get started as a healer or as a tank. Tags: featured, guide, how-to-play-wow, new-to-world-of-warcraft, noob-guide, rogue, rookie-guide, should-i-play-a-rogue, world-of-warcraft-guide, world-of-warcraft-help, world-of-warcraft-noobs, world-of-warcraft-rookies, wow-guide, wow-help, wow-noob-guide, wow-noobs, wow-rogue, wow-rogues, wow-to-play-world-of-warcraft

Filed under: Rogue, WoW Rookie

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Encrypted Text: Rogue tier 16 set bonuses reviewed

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me or tweet me with questions or suggestions of what you'd like to see covered here.

Set bonuses are the perfect time for Blizzard to experiment with fun class effects. They're in use by a limited set of players, they can be tuned specifically for a particular tier, and the bonuses are ephemeral. Class changes are much harder to implement quietly and they're even more difficult to roll back if undesirable. Tier set bonuses are a cultured petri dish for new ideas to grow, or to be sterilized. Our new tier 16 set bonuses are just such an experiment.

The two-piece bonus saves us energy on our combo point generators, and has some very interesting interactions with each talent spec's mechanics. The four-piece bonus also changes based on our spec. Killing Spree's damage ramps up significantly, which will pair nicely with its new Blade Flurry interaction. Vendetta's mastery-stacking bonus will add some teeth to assassination's burn cycle. The Backstab/Ambush combo pack, however, is easily the star of the show, and the start of an important conversation.

The two-piece is just extra energy

Your average assassination rogue picks up an extra combo point from Seal Fate on every other Mutilate. With an average of a 30% crit rate, the chance of back-to-back missed Mutilate crits is 50%. A typical encounter might see an assassination rogue unload 50 Mutilates or so, give or take a few. The two-piece bonus gives us 20 energy per Seal of Fate proc (ignore the tooltip), with essentially no wasted energy. Multiply that 20 energy by our 25 Seal Fate procs, and we'll be seeing approximately 500 extra energy during a 5-minute encounter. That's enough for several extra Mutilates and Envenoms, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at. The value of crit will rise significantly for assassination rogues.

Combat rogues have a 20% chance per Sinister Strike to generate an extra combo point, which would activate the two-piece bonus. Your average combat rogue will use approximately 150 Sinister Strikes in a 5-minute encounter, which will result in 30 procs from the two-piece bonus. That's worth 300 energy (at 10 energy per proc), which is a lot less than assassination is seeing. The other catch is that most of combat's damage doesn't come via energy, and as such, the DPE for combat is lower than assassination. Overall, the set bonus is very lackluster for combat, but not as bad as our tier 15 two-piece bonus was.

Subtlety rogues can get a Honor Among Thieves proc every 2 seconds, which should be pretty reliable in a raid. Over a 5-minute fight, that will yield 150 procs, which are worth 3 energy each, or 450 energy total. Subtlety is another energy-focused spec, and should see good results with all of that extra energy. We'll see what the final mechanics turn out to be, as there may be ways to game the stacking effect of the proc to maximize our Shadow Dance damage.

Ambush is back on the menu

I'll talk about assassination's new mastery-stacking Vendetta and all of combat's Killing Spree improvements another day. Today is all about the "buy 4 Backstabs, get a free Ambush" set bonus that answers the fundamental question that every subtlety rogue asks themselves: why can't I use my openers all the time? Subtlety has always been a spec that revolved around Stealth and openers, neither of which work well in a raid environment. Shadow Dance is a band-aid that's plastered over the gaping chasm between what openers are designed to do and the inherent limitations of Stealth as a spec-defining mechanic.

Every feature of the subtlety spec pushes rogues towards Ambush. Master of Subtlety, Find Weakness, and even our tier 1 talents all revolve around dropping some massive Ambushes on our target. Without Ambush, subtlety is a poor combat-clone that should be removed from the game (and probably replaced with a tanking spec, all things considered). The truth is that Ambush has always been the core damage dealer of a subtlety rogue, and putting a "more Ambushes" set bonus onto our tier 16 gear is exactly what the doctor ordered.

The subtlety four-piece bonus allows sub rogues to keep Find Weakness up over 80% of the time, and that's not including all of the extra damage and combo points from Ambush itself. Do you remember ArP rogues from Wrath? Do you remember how crazy-good they were? It's almost impossible to overstate how good this four-piece bonus is, at least the PTR incarnation. Currently, the four-piece set bonus for subtlety is better than all of the other subtlety two-piece and four-piece set bonuses in Mists of Pandaria -- combined.

What's more exciting than the set bonus is the implication of the mechanic itself. Blizzard is experimenting with ways to get more Ambushes in the hands of subtlety rogues. I've talked with a lot of you about subtlety's identity crisis and how crucial openers are to the spec's PvE health. If there's a way to shake up subtlety's dependence on Shadow Dance and to spice up its rotation, we might start seeing more subtlety rogues showing up to raids and applying to our guilds. One of the best things we can do is to give subtlety a shot in the Siege of Orgrimmar, to give Blizzard good data to work with.

I don't care what the final mechanic ends up being, as long as subtlety ends up using Ambush more often, and not just while wearing the tier 16 set. Four Backstabs turn into an Ambush? Ambush replaces Eviscerate for subtlety? Sub has a new finisher (with a short CD) that grants Shadow Dance for 1-5 seconds, based on combo points? Ambush turns into Blindside, via a 20% proc with each Backstab? Do whatever it takes, just let subtlety use its defining ability outside of cooldowns. Sneak in every Wednesday for our patch 5.2 guide, a deep-dive into the world of assassination and combat rogue AoE rotations -- and of course, all the basics in our guide to a raid-ready rogue. Tags: 2pc, 4pc, ambush, assassination-rogue-encrypted-text, backstab, combat-rogue-encrypted-text, featured, four-piece, guide-to-rogues, killing-spree, patch-5.4, ptr, rogue-assassination-encrypted-text, rogue-combat-encrypted-text, rogue-guide, rogue-info, rogue-set-bonus, rogue-subtlety-encrypted-text, rogue-talents, rogue-tier-bonus, set-bonus, sub-rogue, subtlety-rogue, subtlety-rogue-encrypted-text, tier-16, tier-16-set-bonus, tier-bonus, tier-set, two-piece, vendetta, wow-rogue, wow-rogue-info, wow-rogues

Filed under: Rogue, (Rogue) Encrypted Text

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Encrypted Text: The rise of the ranged rogue

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

The original Shuriken Toss never made sense. Why would rogues, a purely melee class, want a single ranged attack? We don't have the supporting toolbox to make the transition into a ranged DPS spec. Melee uptime is our top priority. Because of our reliance on our melee attacks, mobility is our most requested feature. Why would a class want Shuriken Toss when they can have Shadowstep?

Patch 5.2 is turning a one-off ranged ability into everything a rogue needs to attack targets from range. If you use Shuriken Toss on a target that is farther than 10 yards away, your auto-attacks gain a 30-yard range for 10 seconds. The auto-attacks turn into tiny shuriken that you throw at your target. These shuriken have several special properties, but the extended range is obviously the most important aspect of the ability. With Shuriken Toss, ranged auto-attacks, and Deadly Throw, rogues suddenly have a ranged repertoire.

The details of shuriken auto-attacks

There have been a lot of rumors flying around about Shuriken Toss, so let's set the record straight. The shuriken don't deal shadow damage. The attacks deal regular physical damage, although reduced to 75% of our normal auto-attack damage. The upside is that the attacks are considered to be yellow attacks, so they use the yellow hit table instead of the auto-attack hit table, meaning that they'll never miss if you're at the yellow hit cap. The result is that you'll hit more often with shuriken than you do with your regular attacks, resulting in more poison damage and more auto-attack damage. The shuriken can be dodged, parried (deflected), and blocked.

You can throw Shuriken Toss at any target that is more than 10 yards away from you to gain the Shuriken Toss buff, and it persists through target swaps. However, you stop throwing shuriken when entering melee range (to discourage using it in a regular rotation). If you're less than 10 yards away when you use Shuriken Toss, you don't get the buff at all. Unfortunately, since Shuriken Toss is a combo point generator, you need to be careful not to burn any combo points on your previous target when using it.

The most important aspect of the shuriken is that they can still proc both of our active poisons, which allows us to deal roughly our normal auto-attack and poison damage from range. The shuriken are synced up with your weapons' attack speeds, so you'll throw slower but harder-hitting shuriken with slow weapons. Each hand throws its own shuriken and the damage is calculated separately, including passives like Ambidexterity. Procs, like trinkets, Combat Potency, and Main Gauche all still work with thrown shuriken. If you keep spamming Shuriken Toss from 10 yards away, the buff will keep refreshing itself.
You can't be a full-time ranged rogue

I am going to shatter your dreams: you can't play a completely ranged rogue. Assassination rogue damage relies on Venomous Wounds and Envenom far too much. Combat rogues need to use Sinister Strike and Eviscerate to activate Bandit's Guile and Restless Blades, respectively. And we all know how weak subtlety rogues are without Rupture ticking away on their target. Shuriken Toss itself won't rival your main combo point generator, and each spec's mechanics require their specific finishers.
It's about options

My excitement over the new Shuriken Toss isn't about what it can replace, but what it can supplement. Shuriken Toss will boost our mobility indirectly, by allowing us to lower the mobility of our opponents via ranged Crippling Poison application. Shuriken Toss gives us the ability to apply offensive pressure even when we're being snared or rooted or knocked back, which reduces the overall effectiveness of those types of attacks against us. The PvP effectiveness of ranged poison application and reasonably good ranged DPS capabilities cannot be overstated. We are going to be capable of far more ranged DPS than any of the other melee classes.

Shuriken Toss is also going to be a compelling choice for raiders, on occasion. While Shuriken Toss will never make sense on a Patchwerk-style burn, there are plenty of encounters where we're running around outside of melee range. In tier 14, encounters like Feng, Gara'jal, Elegon, the Will of the Emperor, Tsulong, and the Sha of Fear are all places where we're regularly facing targets at range. I can name a dozen fights in previous tiers where I would've killed for this ability. Could you imagine how much easier Firefighter would've been if you could attack from 30 yards away? While Shadowstep and Sprint allow us to close gaps quickly, Shuriken Toss allows us to stay put. It's a subtle but important difference.
Anticipation is still pretty good

All rogue specs have somewhat erratic combo point generation, thanks to their various mechanics. Anticipation, which helps rogues smooth out those irregular combo points, is a net DPS boost in pretty much every possible situation. While Versatility is obviously useful once every great while, Anticipation is producing a real DPS gain on every single encounter. For the raiding rogue, Shuriken Toss will be a hard sell outside of specific encounters that favor a ranged approach. I do think we'll see rogues picking it up, even if just for fun, in dungeons and while questing.

In PvP environments, Shuriken Toss is already popular amongst rogues. Versatility, which seems like it would be valuable in PvP, never really took off. With the developers hinting that Versatility will see some love soon, but not yet, it's likely that PvP rogues will make the most use of Shuriken Toss. That's great news for our dwindling representation in high-end arena. I am eagerly awaiting the first frost mage that tries to root me.
Sneak in every Wednesday for our Mogu'shan Vaults guide, a deep-dive into the world of rogue rotations -- and of course, all the basics in our guide to a raid-ready rogue.
Tags: anticipation, assassination-rogue-encrypted-text, combat-rogue-encrypted-text, featured, guide-to-rogues, ranged-attack, ranged-rogue, rogue-assassination-encrypted-text, rogue-combat-encrypted-text, rogue-guide, rogue-info, rogue-mobility, rogue-ranged, rogue-subtlety-encrypted-text, rogue-talents, rogue-throw, shuriken, shuriken-throw, shuriken-toss, st, subtlety-rogue-encrypted-text, throw, versatility, wow-rogue, wow-rogue-info, wow-rogues

Filed under: Rogue, (Rogue) Encrypted Text

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