Now I think we all have our little stereotypes of stealth classes branded into our minds by now. However, seeing as World of Warcraft was a lot of people’s first major foray into seriously playing an MMORPG,wow gold, people flocked to the wow gold Rogue for the rush of approaching an opponent from the shadows, unseen! Unfortunately, these newbies didn’t know a Kidney Shot from Buckshot, and we quickly got a bad rap. Many rogues would run around like maniacs in instances, attacking targets seemingly randomly and just laying into them with no regard for threat.
But those of us that were serious about skinning heads slugged it out and hit that illustrious level 60 cap. At that point, we didn’t have a lot of options for weapons, but one classy weapon stood out. The Barman Shanker. A rare drop in Blackrock Depth, this 2.00 speed main hand dagger took glorious advantage over the total lack of normalization in the damage formulas for weapon speed. From that point on, in PvP, those properly equipped and specialized were more than capable of more or less…. instagibbing a cloth class.
A solid ambush at the time did a whopping 2000-2400 damage. Whopping, you ask? You little whippersnapper, do you remember how much health people had at the time? Boy, on my prissy little night elf warrior alt at 60, I felt tough at 4500 and 5500 raid buffed. So with the naturally lower stamina/health, and of course, sexy cloth armor of the caster classes, you can guess how this went. Well, Blizzard didn’t like that. Slowly, the nerf bat fell upon us. Stealth detection auras and abilities were buffed. Taking environmental damage removed us from stealth, so no more Lava ganking adventures in the hub of Blackrock Mountain. Then the normalization patch hit us like a ton of bricks, and forced the Barman Shanker to the stuff of legend and myth, talked about by old folks like me.
But hey, it wasn’t all bad. We got scaling from Attack Power on a lot of our finishers, and no longer had to spam Detect Traps vs. Hunters in PvP when it was made passive. Thankfully, Burning Crusade handed us a lot of new toys shortly afterwards.
Every class needed love for the expansion, and Rogues got a mixed bag. Combat had stellar talents, but damn was it boring, and we just tiffany got a 41 point passive? Assassination learned how to stab with two daggers at once in Mutilate, and it instantly became the new favorite. It had a major downside though that many of you probably would never remember after playing Assassination now.
You could only Mutilate from behind. Well, so much for leveling that. 60-70 was dominated by more sword specialization and hammering of that already worn out Sinister Strike key. I tell you, we had it rough then.
But then we also got one of the most hated abilities ever given to Rogues. Cloak of Shadows. With the flick of a switch, the push of a button, we shrugged all magic currently on us off and ignored it more or less for seconds afterwards. The tears, they were beautiful. I could’ve dined on them. Time and time again, the warlocks fell without putting up much of a fight. Perhaps that really hasn’t changed much, hm? Against healers, Wound poison was changed to deal damage in addition to the debuff, making it a more viable main hand poison than before.
Eventually though, the same thing that happened to other classes started happening to us. Crap talents were being merged with other crap talents, to hopefully create something useful. In addition, abilities and talents that were considered ‘necessary’ were gifted to the class as innates. And from that point on, Sap stopped removing us from stealth no matter what.
Unfortunately, it also lost a lot of its bite in the process, dropping to 15 seconds at the most, and later to a mere 10. PvP in Burning Crusade became drastically worse. Between Resilience and the 50% decrease in the item cost of Stamina, once fragile people were now towering monsters, no matter what they wore. Every fight had to be won in a hard fought battle, especially since the PvP Trinkets removed everything that we love to apply to maintain control. Even if we got Deadly Throw, to give us a way to fight Kiting, and Shadowstep, to get into position at any given time, we fell drastically in PvP effectiveness compared to before.
Oh, but through all of the monotony of PvE, we did get our first sexy epics in Illidan’s dual blades. Fame and Glory to any Rogue who used those. Bonus points if you didn’t look ridiculous as well. They even lasted you well into…
We got two main new moves that remain staples in our arsenal to this day. Tricks of the Trade makes us the single greatest aggression assister in the game, and full use of that on every cooldown will more or less ensure tiffany what is hitting your tank, never stops. Well, until it dies I hope. We also got Fan of Knives to finally give us some kind of area of effect power that isn’t Blade Flurry, so now we can mash that like a champ in area of effect encounters to contribute.
Hunger For Blood was a powerful new assassination talent, but boy were we vocal about having to hit it every so often to keep it active. No other class has had such a potent self buff that they had to keep refreshing every 30 seconds with the exception of the old Paladin Seals. But who cares about those stupid warriors of the light. We have a trainable Cloak of Shadows, kneel before us!