My original blog indicated that this would be a series of three installments regarding the future of Warlocks in WOTLK. I expressed some major concerns about demonology, demon form, and the overall state of Warlock competiveness. As I mentioned in the previous blog demon form is just not worth putting 51 points into demonology to get. I don’t intend on blogging about warlocks very often after this series is complete. Warlocks aren’t looking good for the future and you’ll more than likely see me beginning to blog about different classes that I intend on playing in the future such as paladin and priest. We can’t fully predict what Blizzard has in store for the warlock class in 2009 but unless something drastic occurs I won’t continue playing a warlock for either Got Game West or online play, but that’s all for another blog. For the time being, let’s take a look at what we have and what we should have as far as destruction goes.

Destruction since day one has focused on high damage spells with medium to high cast time. We received some nice additional instant cast spells such as Shadowfury (originally a .5 second cast). Shadowfury is almost identical to instant howl of terror. The combination of shadowfury/hot will allow us to get at least a few cast off each game, during which we have more than enough burst damage to drop somebody or at least blow defensive cool downs. I really do think the devs had the right idea with chaos bolt. Going through everything but complete immunities is incredibly powerful, and it’s honestly not that hard to get the cast off with the change to a few conflag talents. Basically every time I conflag, it grants me a 30% haste for the next 3 spells making chaos bolt a 1.2ish second cast depending on gear. No more cheat death, no more cloak or pain suppression if it’s timed right. The problem with destro is that it is almost entirely based on cast times other than backlash procs and shadowburn. All of the interrupt GCD’s have been removed so faking cast is not as easy as it use to be. I also don’t think warlocks should have to be the only class that has to turret cast to do damage. One of the nice things about destruction is we have two extremely powerful tree’s at our disposal, even if we do end up getting kicked, our damage output for the duration more than likely isn’t going to change. However, I think we need a few more outs to secure uninterrupted cast times in clutch moments. Novas, deepfreeze and more novas allow mages to cast freely if they play correctly and well. My recommendation would be to add one more stun either AoE or single target to our arsenal. While, of course, this would not be anywhere near the duration of nova, maybe around 2 seconds, it would be not only an excellent escape spell but a fantastic offensive spell, similar to deep freeze. With all of our utility anything longer than 2 seconds would be a bit much. From slow dot damage to one of the highest burst classes in the game, destruction is really panning out to be our most viable spec, and although I may be wrong I will surely be trying it first upon hitting level 80. There are a few other things I’d like to talk about before this blog comes to a close.
The whole problem with the class is we are still the easiest target to train. I often find myself saying mid arena match “If all else fails, just shit train the warlock” which still holds true with 99% of the teams we play. This brings me to my next topic of contention, Pet survivability.

Since the beginning of season three and the introduction of spell penetration our pets have become easier to kill. Originally only really killable by melee our pets are now very easily 2 shoted by mages and 1 shoted by melee, as opposed to 2 shoted by melee and (maybe) killable by other caster classes. From what I can make out of beta 70-80 felhunters only receive a 2k hp buff which doesn’t exactly help us. Our pet’s resistances only go up a few points and casters will have equivalent of not more spell penetration at 80. Being that our chance of survival without soul link is slim to none, I really hope the devs look into this addressing this problem. It takes so little effort to drop a felhunter now it’s out of control. Today I had Venruki pet nova, frostbolt, and lance my pet. Poor jhhuzzum didn’t even see it coming. Let’s put that in an arena situation, not only would I more than likely have a rogue or warrior cramming damage down my throat, but if all it takes is a quick tab shatter combo I might as well have entered the arena without a pet. I don’t think our pets should be unkillable, but I do think it should take a little more than a whirlwind and a white hit to kill them since we are a pet based class. My suggestion would be a bigger boost in the percent of our stamina they receive. Also, Blizzard definitely needs to look into pet resilience. Perhaps they could add armor/item slots for additional stats. That way both hunters and warlocks could customize their pets for their preferred play style. Fel-domination also needs to be instant or undispelable. I’m fine with good players reacting fast enough to stop it but if it only takes a dispel to remove I might as well just skip it in the demo tree; it should have been undispelable from the beginning of season 4. Either buff pets or make fel-dom irremovable and on a shorter cool down, you pick.

Also, what the hell are soul shards still in the game for….. bah maybe I’ll save that for part 3. Stayed tuned for affliction next week.
-Didy
Team GotGame

After the WotLK talent trees were released, everyone was speculating about how a shadow dance daggers build could possibly be successful in arena. With the energy cost on backstab lowered from sixty energy to forty five, backstab became the highest damage per energy ability a rogue had. On top of that the buff to ambush and the talent Waylay, daggers were beginning to come together. With the use of shadow dance coupled with the old shadow dance were able to maintain a 10% increased damage for the duration of shadow dance, along with also being basically immune to cc with four vanishes.

The only other hope for blizzard to restore the rogue class to the “glory” days of daggers was to implement some very unique and useful abilities to mutilate. Well with the creation of hunger for blood, deadly brew, and the change of some poison talents things were looking nice. I didn’t mention infectious poisons because first off that never worked on the PTR build and was removed, and secondly it almost seemed like a bad thing. Considering that would poison was no longer a five stacking poison, you would of needed to use instant poison on your main hand weapon (with the old deadly brew it would proc deadly) in order to provide protection so your wound poison didn’t get dispelled. This would mean that healers could keep a stack of deadly poison ticking on them for protection, which would make them unable to be blinded or polymorphed.

I’ll admit that the first build of hunger for blood (where it removed ALL debuffs and would refund full energy if it devoured a debuff) was over the top. However, when Blizzard changed it to only remove physical debuffs it seemed as if they had it perfect. This change solved mutilate rogues number one problem, which was mobility. With the option to remove hamstring, wing clip, and also bleed affects it almost felt like it was too good to be true. Well, apparently it really was too good to be true.

Now with another change to hunger for blood and to shadow dance, it is almost forcing most rogues to either spec some variant of mutilate without hunger for blood, since it is hardly worth it anymore, or just go shadow dance hemo. Both of these specs are fine, however I personally was hoping for a little change from just mashing hemo while staying at 25 energy. I won’t even go into the relentless change, because that has been drawn out too much already. In the end most of this is speculation and none of this will be even close to what will actually pan out, just like pre-BC people thought 30/0/31 would be the most dominant arena spec.

If we want a good battlegroup the PvP community has to stick together and make one mainstream server where you can not only get ques against other good teams, but also be able to duel. I myself have actually found myself logging into WoW again, not because arenas are fun or exciting but because I can improve my own personal game just by dueling other people that aren’t completely oblivious to one on one play.

Since my arrival to Cho’gall 5 days ago, there has been a total of 9 gladiators and 3 brutal gladiators that have also staggered along, and these are just the ones I know of. This server is growing, and rapidly. If you want to make season 5 any good and be part of a server/bg that’s going to be anything like BG9 once was season 2, to start transferring now.

You wont regret it!

Blizzard - SUPPORT THESE TOURNAMENTS! There are only TWO easy steps that require little to no work on your part!

Step 1. Allow authorized tournaments like Electronic Sports League and Major League Gaming host their own server at the event. Not only would this allow administration of the server (like stopping players from queueing from home at the same time tournament players are), it would give the players 0 ping like EVERY OTHER COMPETITIVE LAN GAME! Honestly, it’s the most frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced. I’m having a very difficult time not holding down my shift key right now. Why force players to play with 300+ ping? This has happened at Orlando, Montreal,  and Blizzard regionals. Every other tournament has had around 150 ping, which isn’t exactly rosy either. All this does is frustrate players, adds to the randomness of the game (difficult to predict and LoS crowd control effects, for example,) and make the game appear messy, confusing, poorly administrated, and unattractive to play.

Maybe they don’t want to give out their server client software, or maybe they just don’t care. Either way, the obstacles are minimal and the gains are very notable.

Step 2. Take into account tournament play when you administer a patch. This is the dumbest part of what’s wrong with Blizzard. The most obvious representation of this is the dominance of Warrior-Warlock-Druid pre 3.0. Warlocks were particularly good in Season 2 when armor pen wasn’t existent and cleave was less successful. Also, no one had spell pen on their gear. Blizzard made tournaments permanently Season 2. Add in the fact that Void Star Talisman was available to every warlock.

Grats on no spell penetration, bro.

Warrior Warlock Druid began doing quite well, though not entirely dominating. By the second qualifier, however, Blizzard misstepped. They balanced PvP around Season 4 by buffing Warlocks and Mages with undispellable Fel Armor / Frost Armor. Throw in Rogue nerfs - no more PvE cheat death, lower hemo. Now Warlocks have the Season 4 patch with SEASON 2 GEAR. Grats on God mode, bro. PMR cant touch you. In fact, no one can.

You know what you could have done Mr. Blizzard? Change the gear to Season 4. But nope, they have better things to think about.

I guess all I want is for Blizzard to actually care about tournament play and not just half-ass it every time. SO GET TO IT! Give us 0 ping please

Recently –Especially prior to the Hunger for Blood nerf – players have been going nuts for assassination because of Deadly Brew. For those of you who do not know, the new talent Deadly Brew will make all poisons apply crippling in addition to their normal poison. This being the case, when one procs wound or mind numbing poison crippling will also be applied. This makes it easy to cover wound by almost always having Wound + Crip + Mind Numbing on the target. Moreover, poison proc rates for wound, mind numbing, and crippling have been increased to 50% per hit. This being the case any target a rogue is on should permanently be wounded, have mind numbing, and crippling on it. This is a great and very advantageous buff to rogues.

On the other hand, while assassination rogues have always been considered the strong poison oriented damage dealers, recent changes seem to have removed this notation. At this point, there is only one real advantage for deep assassination rogues over any other spec of rogue and that is the application of mind numbing on attacks. However, the more instant-centric arenas become the less mind numbing is necessary and the less necessary poison talents are. With a 50% wound proc rate along with a 50% crippling proc rate there are still going to be few times where a target is not debuffed with wound poison and/or crippling poison. Even if abolish can entirely remove wound in a single tick it should be reapplied with a matter of a second or two from main hand swings alone.

So what is the real advantage of assassination if the poison advantage is very slight? Well, there is no doubt that mutilate has scaled to all hell and is without a doubt the most ridiculously high damage and burst rogue ability at the moment. However, is a bit more burst with moderate to low mobility worth the sacrifice of Shadow Step and the utility of Shadow Dance? The answer is the same it always has been with specs in WoW, it all depends on who you’re playing with. Fortunately I can see both being used relatively often in in competitive arenas and I look forward to messing around with both, although I think I’ll most likely be drawn to Shadow Dance for the utility.

Back in vanilla WoW, druids used Healing Touch max rank rotations. Queue up the spell, cancel it at the last second if your target is full health. Rejuvenation was a helpful buffer, but hardly bread and butter. With itemization changes, this evolved into downranking Healing Touch for faster cast time and great efficiency. In terms of PvP, we were very reliant on kiting to stay alive – very few classes had getaways from roots, and travel form could get you anywhere you needed to go without worrying about being slowed. Druids were considered a low end healer, an “innervate whore,” and generally were everyones’ bitch. The support class of support classes - carry my flag, innervate my priest, battle res our healer. Nor could we specialize in Feral or Balance, as both trees were broken, and itemization was non-existent.

Then came the Burning Crusade. Two words: cyclone and lifebloom. Now druids were kings of HoTs, and the kings of crowd control. Now granted, we were not dominant at first. How come? Well, lifebloom healed for half as much as it does now. That’s right, it healed for 300 with 3 stacks. Season 1 Gladiator druids were not common – check this out. Soon after, however, they fixed the lifebloom bug. Plus healing actually applied to the second and third stacks. Immediately, druids dominated 2v2 and 3v3s. It’s a cliché at this point to say “take any setup, replace the healer with a druid, and it’s better.” Because this is almost true. However, after months of druids being at the top of every ladder, Blizzard brought out the nerf bat and took our cyclone down to 20 yards. This barely dented our representation at the top of world rankings, amazingly.

So now we’re at the present. Cyclone is nerfed, Lifebloom is not. Druids are easily the most powerful healer in terms of arenas. Yet always keep in mind that Season 1 difference when druids had the low end of the stick.

Here comes Wrath - and Blizzard went overboard.

-Lifebloom costs 489 mana at level 80 (compared to 220 mana at 70). It also heals for LESS THAN IT DOES AT LEVEL 70. I’m not exaggerating any of this – it heals for 208 per tick for each stack at level 80. Welcome back to Season 1. But wait, there’s more.

Read it and weep.

-Death Knights can remove HoTs with a disease which you can’t cleanse. Warlocks can reduce healing done by HoTs. Death Knights have an unshiftable slow. Yes, counter-classes are everywhere. If you see a deathknight in arena, you may as well fall over.

-Druids were formerly the kings of instant heals – but now every class has a multitude of instant heals. Paladins specifically received a free Nature’s Swiftness each time they get a Holy Shock crit (which appears to be the majority of the time.) All healers now have druid like abilities – stronger CC, and tons of instant heals. But keep in mind, NO NERFS TO FORMER ABILITIES along with these buffs! Paladins still have plate, crazy mana efficiency, freedom, etcetera. Shaman still get bloodlust, windfury, mail armor and shield, blah blah blah. Druids and Priests in wrath are SUPER SQUISHY. Their abilities to survive using instants have been given to the healers who already had the ability to survive without instants. Why the hell would you want a Druid or a Priest anymore?

Wrath just feels like a massive nerf fest on druids. Here are the buffs druids got in Wrath that I believe are worth speccing for:

1. Slightly Longer HoTs

2. Healing Touch Glyph (hello, one second Healing Touch.)

3. Empowered Touch now 40% instead of 20% increase on Healing Touch.

Three (very minor) things. Awesome.

And as a side note for my detractors, I will NOT spec into Tree of Life Form unless our 51 point restoration talent is improved. Tree form is horrific. You cannot tank damage in it, you cannot heal through damage in it, because druids NEED to use their CCs to compete in arenas now.

So that’s that. But.

I’m going to tell you how to SUCCEED as a Restoration Druid! Well… you have to abuse the buffs Blizzard has added to Balance.

44/0/27

Yeah baby. Lunar Guidance, Dreamstate, Moonglow, Nature’s Splendor, Genesis, Gale Winds, Typhoon are ALL HELPFUL for a Restoration Druid. The latter two are for longer range cyclones and knockback utility (interrupt that shatter on your partner WITHOUT feral charge!) Not to mention Force of Nature is overpowered as hell, as your trees hit for 850 damage on clothies each hit with brambles. Oh, and thorns hits for 310 per hit (lol.) Throw in a 2000 damage typhoon and things are rolling. If you use this spec, focus your setups on heavy burst and heavy CC to make up for your loss of powerful HoTs. Rejuvenation will be your most efficient heal, followed by Healing Touch (1 second cast, woohoo) and Regrowth. Lifebloom is still usable, but only if you see some burst coming. Variations to the spec are fine, as I myself am considering picking up Improved Rejuvenation, or perhaps filling out the Healing Touch mana cost reduction.

Typhoon! WOOOOOSH

I’m having fun with this spec on the Beta realm, and I’m just hoping we get to keep our one second Healing Touches. Currently the best fast cast heal in the game.

Part 1 of 3

Tab dot tab dot tab dot. Something all warlocks are familiar with. We’ve all grown accustom to our current state in arenas, unable to kite, unable to cast, relying almost entirely on our high hit points and resilience, praying to whomever that our healer doesn’t run out of juice or fall asleep before our dots slowly whittle the opposing team away. So what exactly do we gain in wotlk and what do we expect to get nerfed? Lets take a look at the demonology tree to start.

Demonology: Turning into Illidan for 45 seconds has to be the purest form of ownage known to man right? WRONG. While I wouldn’t say the demonology tree is awful, it certainly is going to need some major fine tuning in order to compete with Haunt/SL or even be a viable spec in the arena. Blizzard put way to much emphasis on crit. 10% more spell damage when my pet crits, 3% more damage when either my pet or myself crits, my pets gain 30% of my crit, or 5% crit to both my pet and I. Wow. That’s 16 worthless talent points in my tier 8+ talent choices. Crit does 100% nothing for a warlock. When we do get a chance to cast its almost always a fear and there is no possible way we are going to be turreting shadowbolts except maybe in 5’s.

Metamorphosis itself is alright, Increased armor by 600% is around what plate armor would give. Movement impairing effects and stuns durations are reduced by 50% kind of like toughness. Shadowcleave does do some damage when it crits, but its on a 10 second cooldown so you can only use it 4 times per 5 minutes, Similar to Demon Charge (which can only be used once per 5 minutes and basically works exactly like a warrior intercept). Overall Demonology might be alright for 5v5’s and potentially for 2v2’s but never for 3’s being that most warlocks wouldn’t trade their defensive/offensive dispel for a pet that’s more than likely going to sit in CC 90% of the game and barely does more damage than curse of agony.

From what I’ve gathered from playing beta, casting is nearly obsolete and unfortunately for us to do any real damage as demonology we would need to be casting. Warlocks are still the most viable target to train, we still cant get away. And without curse of exhaustion we would be doing any kiting even with the reduced duration on slows there’s so many pull back/intercept like abilities we aren’t getting away for more than a few seconds, leaving fear/deathcoil to be our only defensive ability(quite the change from 70 huh?). Some people might argue that the new demonic circle would add to our survivability and although it may come in handy on maps like blades edge, I don’t see this becoming the godsend to the warlock class. Mainly because it doesn’t remove slowing effects nor can you use it while stunned/incapacitated. It also has a 40 second cooldown.

Pros:

-Consistent damage with very little extra to cast.

-Lots of damage when you can cast

-Added survivability with metamorphosis.

-Might potentially be able to get away from a melee train for a few seconds before they’re back on top of you again. Even a few seconds should be able to get you toped back off with how well healing has scaled.

Cons:

- Pets still don’t scale properly and felguards are just going to get demolished even faster than felhunters with the increased wotlk damage.

-Awful talent support for both the warlock and pet with useless crit talents. IE.

Suggestions to blizzard:

-Metamorphosis needs to be reworked, Instead of a 5 minute cooldown make it similar to druid forms. For example it could instead of 600% only increase armor by 360% like it was originally and despawn your pet. You would still be able to cast all your abilities and it would only increase your damage by 5%. 15 second cooldown. Maybe add after a certain amount of time demonform hurts you. Perhaps decreasing attributes after 20 seconds or so.

- Get rid of all these crit talents, and add some that a warlock might get without being forced to. Im all for proc based damage increasing talents but crit is not the way to go.

Part 2 (Destruction) is soon to come, if you have any suggestions or want to see anything reviewed specifically in my next entrée please let me know.

Reason One: Equivalent healing, with the improved spell range! Now you can root at 36 yards and cyclone at 24 yards without the mess of having crappy lifebloom ticks. Want to root that warrior out of intercept range? No problem! Want to get a cyclone off without getting feared? Don’t worry, you’re reverse dreamstate! This build is an excellent solution to the classic druid dilemma concerning nature’s reach versus empowered rejuvenation. You really can get both! But Sodah, you say, you only have 2/5 in empowered rejuvenation. What do you mean EQUIVALENT healing? Well, Lunar Guidance makes up almost entirely for the lost healing coefficient.

Your lifeblooms will heal for just about the same as before.

Bam.

Reason Two: Get your rocks off DPSing like you’ve always wanted. Is your kill target in a kidney shot, the enemy healer polymorphed, and the third opponent sitting in a root? Have you got nothing to do but sit around with a stupid look on your face? Problem solved: just wrath ball them! Your wraths will hit for 850 damage. They’re fast, and they hit hard. I like it; you’ll love it.

Reason Three: Feral charge is so last year. Wrath of the Lich King is introducing an entirely changed druid talent tree featuring Feral Charge as a 21 point talent. That’s right, you don’t get to use your favorite ability in the entire game anymore in the 3.0.1 patch. Why not get ahead of the competition and learn to live without it? I personally deeply miss feral charge, but your new lack of spell interrupt / free get away is really the single downside to this build. Thick hide and Brutal impact are both minor talents in comparison to the gains you get with Grace-Growth. The main reason I did not use 24 / 0 / 37 formerly is because one can argue that Feral Charge is just as offensive as Lunar Guidance / Nature’s Grace / Nature’s Reach. Well, this is actually true in some cases; but recently, not always.
When should I spec 24/0/37 over 8/11/42? Or how about over 34/0/27 (Dreamstate)?

I could write 8 pages about which spec you should pick for which situation. Since 3v3 is the big thing at the moment, I’m sticking to only a few 3v3 compositions for this discussion. Firstly: why go 24/0/37 over dreamstate? Because you literally cannot out heal the damage of a Warrior Warlock Druid team, nor the burst of a Rogue Mage Priest. You want big heals, and you want swiftmend. Shatters will out damage your heals, and dispels will frustrate you to no end as you waste globals on pitiful single lifeblooms. Okay, so dreamstate has weak healing. Why go 24/0/37 over the very powerful 8/11/42 against either of these killer comps? For warrior gibbing, druid switching, and for the fast kills you will need especially if you’re playing with a mage. My composition (Druid Mage Rogue) cannot outlast another team; you’re dependent on cooldowns, and your mage has a fragile mana pool. You want to get a kill during those kidneys, so you NEED an offensive druid. While feral charging a Warlock’s fear which could stop your mage’s shatter is super helpful, it’s much more efficient in terms of damage and mana to save your cyclone for the warlock instead, following up with assisting on damage.

It's your choice between the extra point in nature's grasp or the point in improved moonfire.

Before I wrap up this lengthy discussion on druid speccing, I’d also like to give an honorable mention to Nature’s Grace. Let me state that I’ve yet to be counter-spelled during a Nature’s Grace cyclone cast. I’m sure that some of this is due to the surprise factor in not expecting a 0.9 second cast, while the other factor is the sheer speed of it. 60% of the time after casting Regrowth, you will get a Nature’s Grace proc. Think of this as an opportunity for uninterruptible Crowd Control! I think you’ll love it, because I do.

And remember: warriors in berserker stance are your best friends.

One thing I learned from shadow-gaming is that people get in touch with me and care about what I write for pretty much one reason and only one reason, my opinion on the current rogue situation, etc. Articles I wrote in the past regarding movies (except the most dramatic ones), other classes or comps were never as accepted as rogue posts. Fact of the matter is, if my specialty is one class, why try to give critiques on ones I am not as versed with? After all, one wouldn’t go to a psychiatrist to hear about the weather, you’d ask a meteorologist–ok, bad example because they can’t seem to predict these hurricanes either, but you get the point.

Now, I don’t want to be terribly unoriginal like most recent gameriot blogs that seem to have been revolving around WOTLK. I am not here to provide the most recent patch notes (although later I may resort to such to avoid having to write a blog – forgive me if it ever comes to this), instead I’m here to offer my opinion on the current WoW situation regarding certain specific topics. For example, today I’m going to go over my personal opinion of a few new rogue abilities and talents.

To get this new blog started, I’m going to talk about my concerns regarding the most obvious and talked about rogue abilities, such as Shadow Dance and Dismantle. I’ll just quickly go over my opinions of Shadow dance and the recent change. The change – for those of you who were not familiar, it removed the vanishing aspect of it – was absolutely necessary in terms of functionality, but was likewise a huge nerf to the ability which previously broke roots, and made a rogue virtually impossible to CC. Shadow dance is kind of a niche ability: on one hand, it provides you with a guaranteed cheapshot while fully dotted, being attacked, etc., which is a dream in terms of reliability of target swapping. No longer will I be locked out of target swaps because of faerie fire. Moreover, it is great because the cool down is nice and short, so it can be used twice in most arenas. This means your swap opportunities are doubled by a single ability. Whereas previously, target swaps were 90% based upon whether the rogue could land a cheap shot, they are now based off of shadow dance and cheap shot.

However, on the other hand, there is a down side to spec’ing into Shadow dance; first of all, you have to give up the new fleet footed (amazing increase in mobility that is surely going to be needed in WOTLK), quick recovery which is surely an amazing talent for Rogues playing in a setup that relies even slightly on endurance (or any pve gearing rogue), and cold blood. Chances are the sacrifice is worth it in that case, but there is one other aspect that irks me about shadow dance. Before they put a five point relentless strikes ability into subtlety, rogues were pretty much forced into a back stab centric spec because the other point dumps were simply horrible.

Well, Blizz quickly fixed that by taking our 1 point talent gem/necessity relentless strikes and turning it into five points. This is terrifically horrible because now if you actually want to go back stab subtlety you’re going to be missing out on some extremely key talents, or you’re going to be putting 55 points into it. Either way, doing so is almost counter intuitive because as you all know, there are so many other HUGE talents out there that you’ll miss. So once again, Blizzard has pigeonholed subtlety into a hemo centric tree (which I don’t mind too much) which defeats the whole purpose of adding the energy reduction to back stab in the first place.

My second topic of the day is regarding Dismantle, perhaps the single best rogue ability ever conceived. Finally, rogues have a defense to mace stunning (thanks for removing this btw, Blizz), intercepting, hammer of justicing, plate wearing melee classes. Let me put it this way: how do warriors peel at the moment? Simple, intercept > hamstring. If they are feeling particularly elite they can intercept > d-stance > disarm. Pretty legit for a 15 second cool down, am I right? Now, let’s go over rogue peeling. Shadow step > Shiv (yeah right, they have intercept - and abolish most of the time - who cares about shiv!) or Shadow step > Vanish > Cheap shot > Shiv/Hemo > Kidney shot. If this resists, you are worthless and wasted one of your only 2 target swap chances. Thank god for Dismantle guys, finally I can simply shadow step > dismantle just like warriors can (without the free stun). Moreover, as you all know, the dualistic advantage of dismantle is that it is not simply a defensive ability, it can be used to remove a shield! Oh heck yeah, and only on a 1 minute cool down. Better than any 51 point rogue talent, period. Well, maybe not better, but close. There is so much utility around this ability, it is out of control > Expose + Dismantle = how much armor?

The first thing you need to be able to do if you want to utilize Mage/Rogue burst is always try and force players (mainly healers) to use their pvp trinket, particularly at the start of a game if possible. The reason for this is because you’re going to setup almost all of your kills around if someone as trinketed. For example: Say you’re running P/M/R and you’re fighting a setup like Druid/Hunter/Warrior; you’re going to want to have your priest stay far away from the hunter and warrior mounted. The reason for this is because theoretically, a mage/rogue should have enough damage against a hunter/warrior before you get in any real danger of dying, to force the druid to pop out and toss some HOTs. When this happens, your priest should run in (on his mount) right on top of the druid to fear him, then proceed with dispelling hots off the hunter and assist the mage/rogue with DPS as well. Assuming your mage and rogue did their job and almost killed the hunter using half of their cool downs, the Druid should have had to trinket the fear to keep him alive. At that point, your priest can spam dispel on the hunter and your rogue can blind the druid, effectively keeping him out of the fight for 10 seconds. With dispel, another pet and another cheap -> kidney the hunter has almost 0 chance of living, thus winning you the game. Another thing to keep in mind is you can always vanish sap off of a blind, keeping the druid out of the fight even longer.

In order to succeed as Mage/Rogue, you really need to be very aware of what cool downs you have available, the reason for this is because you really can’t setup many kill opportunities on good teams without being able to stun lock a target down with the help of your mage, druid or priest. You have to be very in sync with when your team mates can and can not burst. Your rogue should always be warning his partners if he is able to vanish or get a re stealth off before doing so, this way everyone can be on the same page and ready for a kill shot.

I get a lot of tells in game about strategy for Mage/Rogue 2v2 so I’ll go over some of the more common compositions.

Mage/Rogue Mirrors.
Happyminty and I found that the most effective strategy against mirror matches is to start on the mage incredibly aggressive, making sure to SAVE your counter-spell unless you actually have the opportunity to hit the mage’s frost/arcane tree in order to force the rogue to open on either your mage or rogue. When this happens, immediately blind the rogue, he will almost surely trinket or his mage should die, if he does not trinket make sure you are vanish sapping him. If the mage has become too far behind to survive, kill him. If not, you still have counter-spell up and a rogue who has trinketed. Vanish cheap shot -> kidney Shot while your mage spams instant casts and counter-spells the mage’s polymorph as he attempts to peal the rogue with polymorph.

Mage/Rogue vs Warlock/Druid.
You lose, but you can try this strategy that has won us a couple of games vs good Warlock/Druids. Wait out sacrifice buff, have your rogue engage the warlock with a cheap shot - kidney shot. Side note - One of the most important things you can do is not allowing the warlock to get off any dots on either your mage or rogue before opening, putting him behind on damage. While your rogue is stun locking the warlock, have your mage pop his pet/IV/trinket and just spam scorches over and over. The reason for this is the warlock will potentially “Waste” spell-lock on your mage’s fire tree, freeing up frostbolt/polymorph for 20-odd seconds. When the druid pops to heal, have your rogue blind him and keep up your damage on the warlock. If he trinkets, which is really the key to this fight. Have your mage put trash debuffs up on the warlock and begin to sheep him, while attempting to kill the druid that has no trinket up. Save your counter-spell for fears so the warlock is unable to peal the druid and you can potentially pull off a victory.

Videos I recommend you watch for tips!
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=74311
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=81369