When Blizzard redid the talent trees for Cataclysm, a major part of the design was the notion of filler points - that is, a max level rogue, in filling out any of the three trees, will spend most of their points on obviously essential talents, but have a few leftover to spend according to personal preference. From a PvE perspective, this usually means that there are a handful of talents that do not increase personal DPS, but provide a variety of survivability or utility tools. And its a good idea...

• Aldriana

This has been cross posted on my blog at wordpress.com.

Some people might call this post a troll, but I mean it very seriously. I think by most objective measures World of Warcraft: Cataclysm can be classified as a failure. Not because production value was poor (in fact it was excellent). Not because there was insufficient content. It failed simply because Blizzard has fallen into the trap of trying to please everyone and as a consequence is pleasing almost no one. Since the release...

♦ emptyrepublic

Today I’d like to discuss rogue AoE. Its sort of a tricky subject, as its not that our AoE at current is precisely bad - in fact, Combat has quite possibly the strongest cleave in the game, and Assassination sustained AoE on large packs is quite strong as well. However, despite these clear strengths, our AoE as a whole is poorly designed and needs significant reworking.

The first problem is the large discrepancy between specs. Assassination is quite respectable at (some times...

• Aldriana