As far as rogues go, maces are really nice if you can get good maces, but most of the easily obtainable weapons are swords. So, if you prefer using weapons from quests or instances instead of relying on world drops that you would have to shell out gold (sometimes quite a bit of it, too) for, swords tend to be better and easier to find, as well as being almost as effective.
If you can pull it off, daggers can actually be far more effective than most people give them credit for if you can twink to the point where mobs get stunlocked 100-0. That way, you have almost no downtime because you don't take damage. Otherwise, however, combat swords/maces is usually the better option.
On a somewhat related note, I've been playing my rogue as combat swords since around level 40 or so, and I'm thinking about switching back to daggers (Mutilate now instead of random dagger pvp build though). Is it at all effective, and what daggers should I get if I'm going to try to level a rogue as daggers?
Please don't just tell me "No, it doesn't work." I'd really rather know why it doesn't work and what generally goes wrong, as well as how good your daggers need to be in order to keep up with combat. I currently have the Grand Marshal's Longsword MH and Footman's Longsword OH. I'm level 62 right now just so that you know that as well.
...max out Deflection and pick up Riposte. An extra 10% avoidance to all melee mobs - which account for a huge proportion of the mobs you'll be fighting in the game - translates directly into less damage taken and less overall downtime...
Others have included parry in their leveling builds. My rogue alt swears by Riposte too, but no one has yet mentioned the (admittedly minor) dps increase that an extra five points of parry gives: Riddle me this - Parry Mechanics. I barely noticed it with all the swoosh noises my rogue made, but I could see a lowbie warrior with a slow 2H caring.
Originally Posted by Kyth
The only true error is in not learning how to make your second kill better.
I recently levelled a warlock and a rogue, using affliction for the lock and combat and mutilate on my rogue.
For the warlock, I think that affliction 1-50 is probably the only logical choice. Talent choices are fairly obvious, aside from empowered corruption not being worth the talent points till outland, when you have a decent amount of spell damage. Amp curse and exhaustion are personal choices as well, but anything that can't be feared is probably also immune to exhaustion, and therefore isn't going to help you solo much. It does work as an escape tool, though.
The only problem with affliction in outland is the elite stuff that was so easily soloable in the old world is generally immune to fear. I ended up spending my extra 20 or so points in demonology to pick up the stamina talent, improved voidwalker, improved health funnel and demonic aegis. For grinding, I would generally have my VW tanking 1 mob with a couple dots on it, so I wouldn't pull agro, and be fear kiting another. I would usually be killing 2 mobs at any given time, and if I was low on mana, I would do a few lifetaps, fear kite a mob and let me pet regenerate or consume shadows. That was the closest I got to drinking.
As far as elites go, I was able to solo everything in outland up to Nagrand with the exception of Durn. I was able to solo most of the harder elites with the help of enslaved demons from the forge camps, but getting to them with the demon intact is honestly a headache sometimes.
For my rogue, I was straight combat until 57, when I got bored with SS spam, so I decided to give mutilate a shot. After I got used to the spec and rotations, I honestly think I had less downtime with mutilate then with combat. Key parts of the build are quick recovery, so you will almost always bandage to full, remorseless attacks, imp kidney, and oppurtunity. Because you need oppurtunity, I would not try mutilate until 55, or it won't be as effective. When 2.4 goes live and improved backstab becomes puncturing wounds, this build will be even more viable, since the ease of killing mobs very much depends on your mutilate critting.
Cheapshot=>hope for a poison tick and mutilate=>regenerate energy till around 80, kidney and mutilate. If it isn't dead, envenom or mutilate again.
All this is fine in an optimal situation. However, mutilate seems vulnerable to just about anything messing up your grinding. Adds are harder to deal with then combat, because of lack of blade flurry. One add isn't bad, but with two, you're probably better off vanishing, or you're going to have to eat to full hp after you're done. Also, if an elite isn't stunnable, good luck killing it. I was able to solo Terrokantula at 65, but that was about the hardest thing I soloed, and I think the only reason I lived was stoneform.
I guess I'm saying if you're bored with combat, give mutilate a shot.
Edit: Octaviann, I used green daggers until I picked up the blue quest dagger from the bone worm quest in the bone wastes. I picked the quest up at 63 I think and had a guildy run me through it. Besides that, you can get a blue dagger from the ring of blood in nagrand, and 2 blue daggers drop in the Coilfang, from Mennu the Betrayer in SP and the Black Stalker in Underbog. If you can't get the quests done, AH some green daggers or use whatever quest rewards you find.
Last edited by Talibb : 03/17/08 at 5:26 PM.
Reason: Response to above post
On a somewhat related note, I've been playing my rogue as combat swords since around level 40 or so, and I'm thinking about switching back to daggers (Mutilate now instead of random dagger pvp build though). Is it at all effective, and what daggers should I get if I'm going to try to level a rogue as daggers?
Please don't just tell me "No, it doesn't work." I'd really rather know why it doesn't work and what generally goes wrong, as well as how good your daggers need to be in order to keep up with combat. I currently have the Grand Marshal's Longsword MH and Footman's Longsword OH. I'm level 62 right now just so that you know that as well.
The reason daggers don't work well as a leveling spec is that even with daggers that are at the cutting edge of what's available pre-70, you will not be able to stunlock 100-0 without lucky crits, and then you're stuck with an incredibly shitty sinister strike weapon or taking beatings to the face for 5-10 seconds for every 1 backstab/mutilate you'll be getting in. Add in the pain of dodged/parried/missed gouges and kidney shots, and sometimes you're taking 30 seconds of beatings while you either wait for cooldowns or feebly sinister strike with a 1.7 speed dagger for 150 points of damager per 45 energy. Factor in the inevitable adds in BC's densely packed areas with long patrol routes, and leveling as mutilate is just masochism.
The real answer is that "no, it doesn't work," though. The common wisdom in this case is there for a reason, and that is that leveling as a dagger spec is a huge pain in the ass with no real benefit over combat or subtlety builds.
The reason daggers don't work well as a leveling spec is that even with daggers that are at the cutting edge of what's available pre-70, you will not be able to stunlock 100-0 without lucky crits, and then you're stuck with an incredibly shitty sinister strike weapon or taking beatings to the face for 5-10 seconds for every 1 backstab/mutilate you'll be getting in. Add in the pain of dodged/parried/missed gouges and kidney shots, and sometimes you're taking 30 seconds of beatings while you either wait for cooldowns or feebly sinister strike with a 1.7 speed dagger for 150 points of damager per 45 energy. Factor in the inevitable adds in BC's densely packed areas with long patrol routes, and leveling as mutilate is just masochism.
The real answer is that "no, it doesn't work," though. The common wisdom in this case is there for a reason, and that is that leveling as a dagger spec is a huge pain in the ass with no real benefit over combat or subtlety builds.
You are more or less correct in regards to the miss/dodged/parried kidney/gouge. However, the times when both are avoided are rare. I used double deadly to stack it quick while levelling, and if kidney is avoided, I would wait for deadly to tick, gouge and then mutilate, and have a 5 point envenom to finish with. If your gouge is avoided, then you'll probably have to SS to 5 points and envenom. As I said though, this is a rarity, and it just means you'll actually have to bandage. I can usually kill 25-30 mobs in a row, without having to bandage if everything goes relatively well.
You are more or less correct in regards to the miss/dodged/parried kidney/gouge. However, the times when both are avoided are rare. I used double deadly to stack it quick while levelling, and if kidney is avoided, I would wait for deadly to tick, gouge and then mutilate, and have a 5 point envenom to finish with. If your gouge is avoided, then you'll probably have to SS to 5 points and envenom. As I said though, this is a rarity, and it just means you'll actually have to bandage. I can usually kill 25-30 mobs in a row, without having to bandage if everything goes relatively well.
At 65, I was pretty bored with combat spec, and so I had a couple friends help me finish the ring of blood and get the dagger, a ridiculously good weapon at 65. My experience was that mutilate was not a meaningful improvement to my kill speed or downtime, and that I lost a tremendous amount of utility in blade flurry and adrenaline rush in addition to having to fuck around with position all the time and worry about whether poisons were up before attacking.
I don't feel like there's a compelling argument other than boredom for going mutilate as a leveling build, which, I'll admit, is a reasonable factor to consider. But if you're looking at effectiveness, I don't think that mutilate really falls into the same category as a combat build when you're leveling.
I don't feel like there's a compelling argument other than boredom for going mutilate as a leveling build, which, I'll admit, is a reasonable factor to consider. But if you're looking at effectiveness, I don't think that mutilate really falls into the same category as a combat build when you're leveling.
Mutilate is more fun, by far.
Combat swords is just lame and boring. SS, SS, SS, SS, SS, KS, SS, SS, SS, SS. No thought involved at all, pure repitition and tedium. Plus some of us came from EQ before this and swore to never have our mainhands be anything other than a dagger.
Mutilate ends up being something like Cheap Shot, Mutilate (5 combo), KS, Mutilate, Mutilate (3-5 combo) Envenom, mob dead. Not to mention Mutilate's power in PvP. I know on my warrior I'm pretty much rarely surprised by anything a rogue does. When a rogue does manage to get me down, I scroll back through the combat log and go "Oh, Mutilate. Well, that explains that."
As far as elites go, I was able to solo everything in outland up to Nagrand with the exception of Durn. I was able to solo most of the harder elites with the help of enslaved demons from the forge camps, but getting to them with the demon intact is honestly a headache sometimes.
Its little insights like this that put the real value into this forum. I went through all of Nagrand and it never occurred to me to enslave the elites out of the forge camps to whack the other nearby elites. It would probably be difficult to get one to Tusker but the elite deer and bird are both right in the same area.
More on warrior leveling:
I'd like to point out, that I think most warriors are doing lots of mistakes when it comes to playing and using their talent points efficiently early on. The most important thing to keep in mind as warrior pre 40 is that the majority of your damage will be white. HS will be shown as a large portion of your damage from mods, but actually most of the damage shown as HS is really white damage colored yellow. The extra damage from HS is not much and HS is horribly rage inefficient and 3 rage less wont make it much better.
This leads to many conclusions:
1) Improved Charge
Dont make too much fuss about gaining that extra rage as you don't have much useful stuff to use it on. Your yellow damage will suck until you hit 40. Improved charge is a lot less then 1/2 of a heroic strike (taking into acount the opportunity cost of a HS instead of a white swing) which does like 20 extra (!) damage around level 18. So 6 extra rage for 2 points invested equals to less than 10 damage per mob. This plain sucks. Improved rend will result in much higher damage per mob and is more useful in multipul situations (as you can rend several mobs at the same time). Although some mobs are immune which is especially true for the Bloodelf starting area.
2) Improved Heroic strike is in many situations (I'd say in almost all) less rage efficient than improved thunderclap. And improved thunderclap will help in multipulls and gives 10% extra slow. I used to spam improved thunderclap early on.
3) Parry will not only give you survivability but less downtime and parry hasted 2H swings.
Thus I strongly recommend to max Parry along with rend and thunderclap early on while using a 2-hander.
All this stuff isnt taken into account by the guide posted earlier and on top he doesnt suggest using a swingtimer and kiting/intercepting mobs to further lower your downtime as arms.
And another thing: If you want to level a warrior efficiently (not putting priority on being fast) then you should use the fact that it basically doesnt matter what moves you use early on as your damage will be mostly white (I'd say about 80% when you only take the extra damage from HS into account). Charge a mob, rend, thunderclap while keeping Battle shout on and read your favourite book/website until it dies, especially till you hit 24 (execute).
One thing that works reasonably well as a lowbie warrior is to enchant your weapon(s) with the fiery enchant and using up extra rage spamming hamstring to trigger the enchant.
Leveling up my 2nd warrior just for fun (I'm a masochist), untwinked, I actually went down the fury tree first based on my experience with my first. Piercing Howl is a great talent for running away from a pack of mobs, which I did plenty of. From there I plan to go down to precision and then put the rest in arms. If you are purely concerned about leveling fast, undead is the clear choice on the horde side, alliance races all have decent leveling racials.
Fun thing to do with cannibalize, you can eat the boney remains of alliances, even on PvE servers. So if you can find a dead alliance, or make one yourself, it's like a supply of bandage that lasts for hours.
On a somewhat related note, I've been playing my rogue as combat swords since around level 40 or so, and I'm thinking about switching back to daggers (Mutilate now instead of random dagger pvp build though). Is it at all effective, and what daggers should I get if I'm going to try to level a rogue as daggers?
Please don't just tell me "No, it doesn't work." I'd really rather know why it doesn't work and what generally goes wrong, as well as how good your daggers need to be in order to keep up with combat. I currently have the Grand Marshal's Longsword MH and Footman's Longsword OH. I'm level 62 right now just so that you know that as well.
In all honesty, most people avoid levelling as daggers simply to minimise the amount of movement you have to do. It's infinitely easier to stand in front of a mob and smash one button than to have to constantly run and turn around, but if you're not bothered by that, I'd say there's no real reason NOT to level as daggers, particularly Mutilate.
Mutilate really is an insanely fun build, and while you might take a little longer to kill mobs with an unlucky crit streak, the times when you DO get a double mutilate crit and virtually one shot the mob tend to make up for it. You might level slightly slower, but you'll probably enjoy the experience a lot more.
When choosing weapons, use the same rationale you would when choosing swords: the best weapon you can obtain at your level. For a 62, good choices would be the [Hardened Stone Shard] from Sporeggar rep (though that would be a painful grind) and the [Wastewalker Shiv] from Slave Pens. This link gives a good indication of the other rogue daggers available as you progress through Outland.
From experience leveling as swords and as daggers:
Leveling as daggers is not too terribly bad, in terms of speed, compared to swords, as long as you can get the daggers to do it with. Swords gives you considerably better options, however, for dealing with additional mobs, especially given that some (Backstab) don't work at all in that scenario. It's also more consistent damage.
There's not a whole lot that daggers has going for it - it's somewhat more interesting, but it tends to take away more time than it adds and it removes the uberfun ownage of having AR + Evasion + BF.
From experience leveling as swords and as daggers:
Leveling as daggers is not too terribly bad, in terms of speed, compared to swords, as long as you can get the daggers to do it with. Swords gives you considerably better options, however, for dealing with additional mobs, especially given that some (Backstab) don't work at all in that scenario. It's also more consistent damage.
There's not a whole lot that daggers has going for it - it's somewhat more interesting, but it tends to take away more time than it adds and it removes the uberfun ownage of having AR + Evasion + BF.
I would add in that if you actually had to be behind your target for CS or even pick pocket more people might even bother with dagger builds. I went sword combat all the way up. I really think Blizzard needs to look into the CS/PP mechanics because for the majority of my leveling I could walk straight into +1/+2 mobs and CS them before they would aggro. I could pickpocket all +1 mobs from in front and most +2 from the side as I ran by with autoloot on before I proceeded to CS them or SAP
When choosing weapons, use the same rationale you would when choosing swords: the best weapon you can obtain at your level. For a 62, good choices would be the [Hardened Stone Shard] from Sporeggar rep (though that would be a painful grind) and the [Wastewalker Shiv] from Slave Pens. This link gives a good indication of the other rogue daggers available as you progress through Outland.
By the by, we found out in the leveling of my guild's stable of alts that you can do a stealth run through underbog with a level 70 and loot almost all of the sanguine hibiscus in there without killing a single thing. A run doesn't take more than a half hour if you don't know what you're doing, and you get ~20ish hibiscus which translates to 3000 Spore Rep. Makes the grind MUCH quicker, although you do need to be 63 to do the Hibiscus quest.
One fun dagger build I went into while leveling my rogue was the (100 - miss rate)% crit Ambush build. Remorseless attacks(40%), Improved Ambush(45%), Malice(5%), and base crit rate(~10%) add up to 100% crit, meaning you're going to miss or crit. Add in Opportunity for 20% more damage on the way to Imp Ambush, and you'll take off probably 2/3 of the life of a mob 1-2 levels lower just on your opener. You obviously want to maintain a very good (slow) dagger for your level while doing this, and need to proceed very quickly from mob to mob in order to get the Remorseless bonus.
You can get the necessary talents at level 29, or 31 if you don't want to respec into it and presumably take Imp SS early on. You can then go to precision to remove the few misses you do get. It's a very fun and useful build for 1v1 until you get into the 50s, but it's absolutely awful fighting more than one mob or fighting higher level mobs. I played around with it for 10-15 levels and it was a blast, but I eventually went to BF/AR in the 40s.
One fun dagger build I went into while leveling my rogue was the (100 - miss rate)% crit Ambush build. Remorseless attacks(40%), Improved Ambush(45%), Malice(5%), and base crit rate(~10%) add up to 100% crit, meaning you're going to miss or crit. Add in Opportunity for 20% more damage on the way to Imp Ambush, and you'll take off probably 2/3 of the life of a mob 1-2 levels lower just on your opener. You obviously want to maintain a very good (slow) dagger for your level while doing this, and need to proceed very quickly from mob to mob in order to get the Remorseless bonus.
You can get the necessary talents at level 29, or 31 if you don't want to respec into it and presumably take Imp SS early on. You can then go to precision to remove the few misses you do get. It's a very fun and useful build for 1v1 until you get into the 50s, but it's absolutely awful fighting more than one mob or fighting higher level mobs. I played around with it for 10-15 levels and it was a blast, but I eventually went to BF/AR in the 40s.
Quite fun, yes. This is the direction I went until early 50s, but I still have fond memories of doing quests and 1-shotting 40% of yellow mobs, and taking 30% of the life in 1 hit on BFD bosses while soloing it at 24. And being able to effectively guard our flag in WSG by myself, as I could hit for 60%-100% on the flag runner, and with the stealth speed boost, I could always catch them at one of the 2 exits. With deadly and crippling, then would make it at most another 3 or 4 steps. My record at level 28 in WSG was an ambush crit for 1,072.... just lovely at that level.
The beauty of that build is that, just like a stun lock in which you take them down 40-60% and don't take any damage, you take them down at least similar distance without taking damage, frequently farther, and it is a hell of alot faster, and can't be by-passed with stun resistance, immunity, or removal.
Higher levels, opponent health increases faster than your damage, and it gets REALLY expensive to keep it viable, so switched to combat swords. Sitting at 61 at the moment, and the talk about mutilate as fun has my interest. I may feel a respec coming.
I just tried out mutilate on the PTRs just to see how it compares to combat, and I can honestly say that I was pleasantly surprised. It's an extremely effective build in situations when you can get single pulls and I was seeing effectively zero downtime because I was taking so much less damage. Combat may be more effective overal because of the problems mutilate has, but in most situations, mutilate was faster. Also, if you take Fleet Footed, then running away as mutilate is easy since you don't even really need to use cooldowns to escape.
More on warrior leveling:
I'd like to point out, that I think most warriors are doing lots of mistakes when it comes to playing and using their talent points efficiently early on. The most important thing to keep in mind as warrior pre 40 is that the majority of your damage will be white. HS will be shown as a large portion of your damage from mods, but actually most of the damage shown as HS is really white damage colored yellow. The extra damage from HS is not much and HS is horribly rage inefficient and 3 rage less wont make it much better.
...
For pre-40 warrior leveling, I felt I could grind pretty efficiently with 5x sunders. The -AC from 5x sunders increases damage done against a same level mob by about 20%, and the extra damage you do is more rage. Damage per rage wise, sunder is better than heroic strike as long as the mob has say 50% HP left.
If I picked mobs at the right level (around -1), I could go into a fight with enough rage to stack 5x sunders right away, and then leave the fight with a decent amount of rage for the next mob.
I wouldn't bother honestly. The 8 points means you'll be missing out on something nice in the Affliction tree, and with the exception of undead/non-fearables the voidwalker isn't essential.
"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali
For the Warlocks, have you found Improved Voidwalker useful enough to spec into, or should I just keep barreling into Affliction all the way into 50?
Very early on, Affliction doesn't pack enough punch compared to having the improved Voidwalker. I'd strongly recommend starting with 8 in Demonology for Improved Voidwalker and then go up Affliction. At around mid-30s you'll most likely want to respec to full Affliction since the Voidwalker won't scale well enough at that point (read: he won't be able to hold aggro worth a damn). But starting out Affliction works fine, Demonology just makes it easier and safer.
Theorycrafting procedures per role:
DPS = Theory -> Spreadsheet -> Practice
Healing = Theory -> Practice -> Logs
Tanking = Theory -> Theory -> Theory
As soon as you can get Fel Concentration, the Voidwalker becomes largely redundant, even more so depending on how much Shadow Wrath gear you can find lying around. You could spec for it then respec out in a few levels, but honestly those lower levels things generally aren't dangerous enough to be worth it. After a certain point the only common thing you may want to use a voidwalker for is to run into a group of mobs to get initial agro while you dump DoTs on them, and the talents don't particularly increase his utility in that area. I generally just DoT up and take the hits myself anyways, so I run with the succubus.
03/17/08, 4:47 PM
Similar Threads
