I made a big push to get my rogue to 90 today. That’s make my 9th level 90 toon, leaving only my priest and monk. I think I’ll probably just not bother with my monk, seeing how much time and effort leveling the rest of my toons took. But overall, I will say that it was a pretty frustrating experience overall towards the end in both leveling a rogue and gearing her.
I prepared quite a bit before hand, locating both BoA daggers in the Dread Wastes to give her a slight head start while leveling. With my cloth wearing spell casters, it’s been massively easier because I had crafted a ton of leveling gear while working on my tailoring professions. That allowed me to provide tons of ilvl 415 blue hand me downs as well as some good Inscription staves I either crafted or purchased off the Auction House.
In the case of my rogue, it was tougher gearing her, despite the daggers since I didn’t gear her up as much in Cataclysm, nor did I have enough crafted goods for her. But while you’re leveling through the Jade Forest, gear doesn’t play as much of a factor in that stage. Most of the creatures won’t hit you too hard and you can do some reasonable damage with the gear you receive.
Once you pass that point and enter the Valley of the Four Winds, things start to pick up immensely. The little rabbit humanoids are real pests and tend to quite a bit of damage, not to mention cluster irritably together in tight formations. If you manage to bypass the first two little zones in the Valley of the Four Winds, you’re almost home free. But moving forward, you’ll be constantly plagued by hard hitting NPCs. And the rogue is just so squishy so you’ll have to figure out ways to survive.
After I hit 90, I used my own guide more or less to try and outfit her. That’s when I started to realize just how much Blizzard seems to hate rogues (along with Enhancement Shamans). Trying to find some decent crafted gear on the Auction House showed me just how unpopular the rogue is compared to other plate wearing classes. Maybe I came on a bad day but it just felt like a royal pain trying to get anything that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Then when I was checking out the DPS meters, I saw that combat rogues were almost dead last. In one of the theorycrafting sections, the combat rogue was dead last. It’s pretty sad since rogues in general used to be one of top damage dealing classes around. But I noticed that my rogue would take a ton of damage but had a hard time really dolling damage out while leveling. This completely contrasted Cataclysm where I could be shit geared and do reasonable DPS.
But the gear and DPS aspects are not the only things that upset me. It’s that a lot of the way your abilities work aren’t well tested when it comes to certain encounters. I managed to find quite a few really frustrating bugs and issues when I was trying to just do my normal rotation in certain encounters. For instance, I discovered that your Ambush would bug you out and kick you if you assaulted a creature in the air (like those mutant moths in the Valley of the Four Winds). My rogue “fell” through the landscape indefinitely then was completely booted out. After logging back in, my rogue still was “falling” through the landscape and ended up near a graveyard (fortunately she didn’t die).
Another fucked up issue is that you really can’t use your Vanish ability to your advantage. Supposedly, in your rotation, you should be employing Vanish in conjunction with Ambush to both build combo points and do DPS. But if you’re in a solo encounter, using Vanish will end up causing the monster to evade. Obviously, Vanish is supposed to drop aggro but if you’ve blown your cooldowns outside of Preparation and/or Vanish, then your actual abilities that you can use in a given encounter are greatly reduced. That’s pretty fucked up in my book, especially if you have to fight a stupid elite (because for some idiotic reason, Blizzard enjoys sending Elites in quests). At any rate, how does a squishy rogue compensate in these situations?
Then the LFR loot issue came up again. I really believe that when patch 5.3 came out, the drop rates reverted back to pre-5.2 days. Meaning that I think Blizzard wanted people to get loot more from their charms since they incorporated that Bad Luck Streak bonus. However, I argue that something didn’t get tested thoroughly. Since there’s no way to tell when you have a Bad Luck Streak, you have no way of accusing Blizzard of wrongful doing. Still at least for older LFRs, you would think that the rerolls should at least be buffed up since the whole idea is to get people into Throne of Thunder.
Either way, it’s been a pretty frustrating overall experience. I feel that Blizzard once again lied to us, the customers and have put up a bunch of walls to protect themselves. But I think that loot is far too important of an aspect to let them get away with murder like this. They really need to make the system more transparent rather than this black hole jackpot gambling mechanism. I mean, honestly, at this rate, you’re better off going to Vegas because at least you have a better shot of making real money as opposed to dealing with this time sink.