The new tier 10 armor sets. This might be enough to make me pass on any gear rolls in the new 3.3 raids (assuming I could actually get into them in the first place.)

The t10 rogue set, noooooo…..

• Paladins now wear dresses.
• The Tauren and the Humans have merged (hunter armor) or maybe those are gloves?
• Warriors, DKs, Priests, and ‘Locks are Ok, at least by comparison to the others.

So here they are, in all their, ahem, glory.

I think Bliz needs to look into Aion’s armor remodeling system.

Weool Ok… the servers aren’t up yet (as I write this) but the patch is finally here. Rumor has it that this is the biggest patch Bliz has ever provided.

Naturally there will be a few bugs coming along with the patch, and no, they’re not the ones you’ll kill to earn XP. As an aside, it’s be kinda interesting to be able to code a hack that fixes a game bug and get Bliz to pay you for it.

Anyway, the full patch notes are in the usual place so check them out. Here are my remarks on miscellaneous points:

General Notes

Mounts can now swim.

Trainers, having decided that their trainees can’t read, have done away with the course requirements for books and will now teach those skills directly.

Dual Talents – Now you can have two builds to switch between. For example, one for raiding and one for PvP. The only downside is that it costs 1,000 gold to get the ability.

Glyphs – A bunch of new glyphs are being introduced and a bunch of old glyphs have been changed. You no longer need to be near a lexicon of power to install glyphs.

And the most important, game-changing, change of all: New music can be heard at the Argent Tournament grounds and in Ulduar.

Class Notes

All classes get a couple of pages of changes, except Warriors and Warlocks, who get a few lines each. Guess that means that Warriors and Rogues are nearly perfect. Looks like there are more than a few buffs in the list of changes. A few nerfs, too.  I’m looking forward to Rogues now being in demand for raids. Oh, Ok, I’m awake now… what was I saying?

Enough changes have been made to talents and spells that everyone (except Rogues and Warriors?) will get a free respec and should visit the trainer the get new spells.

Armor Penetration has been buffed. All classes now get 25% more effect from it. The main visible change of this will be to drop PvP survivability in the BGs (at level 80) from 1 second to 0.9 seconds.

The Fear mongers on the house have had a bit of a nerf. The fear (and related abilities) break sooner now.

DKs, Pallies, and Droods, the classes most in need of a buff, now receive 30% more haste from Haste Rating.

Profession Notes

Alchemy – Several Flask changes, introduction of Northrend Mixtures, and secret Alchemist loot caches (from the Bosses) in Uldar.

Blacksmithing – New recipes from Uldar and an upgrade to some recipes in the 1-300 range to make them useful.

Cooking – I’ll pass these on to my wife and she’ll update our cookbooks (Tauren Chef and Wrath of the Kitchen King) appropriately.

Enchanting and Engineering: have some updates and tweaks.

Fishing – You can now catch a mount! It’s pretty rare, though. Also, you can now fish anywhere.

Gathering skills – For some time low-level twinks have been able to get to 450 mining and skinning (for the crit and stam buffs.) No longer, there’s now a level requirement for those skills.

Inscription – More recipes and quite a number of Glyph changes.

Uldar bosses - will, rarely, be dropping recipes for several professions.

Misc Notes

There’s a bunch of interface tweaks

Lots of little item changes, but if you use Glyphs (you are, aren’t you?) you will want to check it out. There have been some significant changes.

Lots of little bug fixes.

So all in all there’s a lot there. Something for everyone and all that.

I’ll state this upfront – I’m a newb when it comes to raiding. I finally joined a guild (with my 80 Rogue) which does some raiding (mostly PUGs) and when asked,”Hey, ya wanna join us for (some raid abreviation)” my answer is typically, “What’s that?”

So I prodded a friend, who does raid a lot, into writing an article on Rogue Raid DPS which I found quite useful. Now it’s time to start playing around with some of this stuff and see what I can come up with and see if I can get to the point where my Rogue is useful.

My first raid was 25 Man OS (no drakes) and I beat most of the healers for DPS output. I was running a PvP mutilate build and had no clue so didn’t respec.

More browsing brought me to the ElitistJerks.com Roguecraft Spreadsheet which factors in a huge amount of stuff. It includes a Mutilate build and various defaults for maximum DPS.

I specced into that build and hit 2k DPS on the Orgrimmar practice dummies, so maybe there’s hope for cracking the top 20 of a 25 man raid?

Anyway, here’s what I’m working with for now:

Mutilate Build Details

Here’s the build on WoWhead

Note: this is a dagger build and assumes use of instant and/or deadly poisons. Lev 80 (non elite) mobs go down real fast with this build.

Assassination:

1. 5/5 Malice – more crit chance
2. 3/3 Ruthlessness – more combo points
3. 2/2 Blood Splatter – Adds to your DoTs
4. 3/3 Puncuring Wounds – +15% Mut crit, +30% Backstab crit
5. 5/5 Lethality
6. 3/3 Vile Poisons – Greater chance to actually apply poisons
7. 2/2 Fleet footed – Moved faster while stealthed and spend less time being rooted
8. 1 Cold Blood – add this into a macro with your favorite strike. I add mine to Eviscerate.
9. 5/5 Seal fate – Use less energy
10. 3/3 Focused attacks – gain energy from crits
11. 3/3 Find Weakness – All damage increased by 6%
12. 1 Mutilate – Your bread and butter attack
13. 3/3 Turn the tables – Adds 6% crit chance to bread and butter attacks. lots of arguing going on over whether to choose this or 3/3 Master Poisoner. Comments?
14. 5/5 Cut to the chance – lets you keep Slice and Dice up permanently.
15. 1 Hunger for Blood – More damage, Rarr! Edit: Will be changed (improved?) when the 3.1 patch hits.

Combat

1. 5/5 Dual Weild Specialization – More DPS
2. 5/5 Precision – Your Dual Weild gives a major “to hit” penalty. This compensates somewhat.
3. 3/5 Close Quarters cbt. – More crit chance

Subtlety

1. 5/5 Relentless Strikes – Restores energy
2. 2/2 Opportunity – +20% damage to your bread and butter strikes.

Weapons I’m using right now. Both drop off the Auction House.

1. Main – Titansteel Shanker
2. Off hand – Librarian’s Paper Cutter

Enchants:

• Exceptional Agility (+26 ag) on Main hand
• Titanium wpn chain on off hand (+28 hit rating)

I’ll be playing with some weapon choices, poison combos, gems, etc. to see what I can do to boost DPS.  Your comments? Thoughts? Changes? What do you have to say?

Edit 4/9: Joined a PUG into 10 man OS. Hit almost 2400 dps on the trash (#2 on the DPS list,) but the group disintigrated before the first drake. No one died, but people suddenly realized they had to wash their socks, so poof. All of a sudden I’m raid leader with two people in the raid.

The Recount addon said I had a miss rate of almost 15%, so I guess I need to look for more Hit ratng. Might try the Titanium Weapon Chain on the main hand as a start and swap an Ag gem for a Hit gem.

Changed off-hand to Namlak’s Supernumerary Sticker

Mongoose provides better DPS than Exceptional Agility and Berserking is better still, but Mongoose is over 400 gold (and Berserking is a lot more.) I’ll see if I can get better weapons before blowing that much cash on Berserking.

Tobald’s MMO Blog has an interesting post on Distributing Naxx loot, with his usual 8,497 comments.

….sooner or later the raiders will find themselves confronted with the question of how to distribute the epic drops. Of course established raiding guilds have systems to do that, but they might find some new complications: Wrath of the Lich King blurred class roles and stats to some extent….

Tobald’s suggests that Guild Drama will only get more interesting.

So just to be clear, I don’t raid. I’ve never been on a raid. Closest I got to a raid was one of those World Dragons where people spent 20 minutes arguing about what level he was. Zzzzzz…

Pretty much the only times I’ve been in any of the instances has been when I was soloing it for the loots. I did make it into Steamvaults, once. Non-heroic.

And yeah, I know what DKP is: Darning, Knitting, and Purling. (Ok, ok… Dragon Kill Points, right?)

With the launch of Wrath and various stats being merged and mashed together and more classes being able to use any one particular piece of gear, how are you raiders deciding who gets what?

DKPs? Seniority? Merit? Contribution? Bribery? Execution of people higher on the list? Nepotism? Girlfriends get first (and 2nd) choice? Free for all loot?

As some of you know this is a fairly new WoW blog, so I don’t know about all the other WoW blogs our there. I’m starting to look around more though, really!

So here are a few I just bumped into via a post on the Twisted Nether Blogcast: Writing an Article Series. I am also linking to the actual article series posted on these sites, where appropriate.

They’re all fun blogs, so check them out even if you don’t have the appropriate class.

4 Haelz – Why Join Before the Expansion? The Time is Now is a five-part series on joining a raiding guild before the expansion. 4 Haelz is a blog about Druids in general and the resto tree in specific.

World of Matticus -Assigning Healing Strategy – Part 1: Recognizing Class Strengths. Lots of raid and priest stuff here, but also a lot of other good stuff.

Hoof and Healz – If you’re a resto shammy and you raid you’ll want to check this one out. Raid Guides

Aspect of the Hare – A cool blog for Hunters. Their tag line says it all: Because it’s not just a class, it’s an obsession. So if you have a Hunter, check it out. So You Want to Play a Hunter

Too Many Annas- Blogging about Life, Resto Shammies, Raids, Warcraft and other Musings. A fun read. Be a Shamanistic Genius (while you level)!

Ok, now I’m going to kill something in AV. Maybe a big sheep thing…

The mighty Nyhm brings forth his wisdom regarding Pick Up Groups (PUGs) and raiding, specifically Karazhan. All of us who’ve been in big PUGs, raiding or not, will nod our heads in agreement.

edit: links to a guide have been deleted.