First things first…I should provide a little background information about myself. Yes I am a christian. Am I good christian? Should you follow my example? No. I am a not-so-typical angry black man, through and through. I have my own issues that I’m working with the Lord on, and I am working out my salvation with him, with fear and trembling. I do not consider myself a “religious” person, but I am very passionate about spirituality and my walk with Christ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_end_times_prediction

Originally, I intended to bash Harold Camping but to be honesty that’s kind of counter-productive and I’ve cooled off a little since so I’ll refrain…I’ve read this wikipedia article linked above to gather a better understanding of the rationale behind this prediction. No one knows the day or hour of the Lord’s coming. It can’t be predicted by mortal means. If you want a biblical reference read Matthew 24:36. I mean think about it, if we could predict when the Lord comes we can just act a fool all day, and try to reconcile with God right before it happens. It’s not that easy; followers of Christ have to live their lives everyday as if the Lord is coming.

Apparently this whole situation has caught major media hype and is the talk of the town. All I’ve heard all day at work today are rapture jokes and such and it seriously pisses me off. On top of there are apparently many people that believe this prediction, and are carrying out their lives as if its almost over. All this is doing is undermining the seriousness of this topic which will likely lead many astray. I actually read the bible so I know better, but this is not the case for all christians, who can be easier by lead astray without a solid biblical foundation.

This also opens the door for all kinds of mockery from d-bag atheists. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all atheist are d-bags; I am friends with many of them. I’m talking about the religion bashing chumps. Yea, you don’t believe in God, so whatever that’s cool, but don’t tell me how my faith is ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’. You don’t know my walk with God. You don’t know what He’s brought me through…I don’t bash your beliefs, why do you feel the need to bash mine? How petty are these guys that they have to belittle someone for believing something they don’t?

Anyway I think I’m done with this rant…I’ve leave this one off with one of my favorite Dane Cook jokes.

dane_cook_atheist

http://blog.generalshade.info

I don’t have any new WoW topics now, but I just thought I’d throw that out there.

I mean he can travel at super speeds, has super strength, freeze breath, lazy beam eyes, x-ray vision, and is nearly invulnerable. I could be missing some as well, but to be honest I don’t care enough to even look them up. I think that DC is next to worthless, with a few exceptions including the great Batman.

Ok so granted Superman has one weakness. But how obscure is it? Kryptonite? WTF man?! Who has some damn kryptonite just lying around. But anyway yea I think I’m done here…

Up until now, I have been been tanking frost with my DK and secondary spec’d as blood for DPS and leveling purposes (currently my DK is 78). Leveling as blood has been all too easy; basically my DK went around and annihilated everything in the way, never having to stop for healing. When I tanked I never had issues with threat, no matter how powerful the DPS was. Generally, I used these rotations:

Single: IT, PS, BS, BS, OB, FS, FS, repeat. Using RS whenever it was available, and doubling IT if I needed a little bit more threat.

AOE: DnD, HB (glyphed), BB, PS, Pestilence, HB, BB, refreshing diseases as needed – RS and FS were my filler when I was waiting for rune refreshes and CDs. My methodology behind this was jump in and grab as much burst threat as possible by using HB and BB right off the bat (because DPS tend drop AOE nukes immediately), then worry about sustaining threat by spreading diseases later. This may not be the the ‘proper’ rotation for tanking frost, but this method worked well for me.

So now Blizzard has made blood the dedicated tanking tree, so I have to adapt; I can respect this. I am little bit concerned about rune management though. Now again, I haven’t tanked blood yet so I don’t know if this is even an issue, but I’d like to discuss my thoughts on this anyway. If my views on this subject change when I tank a few dungeons, I’ll revisit this post

For single target rotations, I’d imagine it would be something like~ Bone shield IT, PS, BB, HS, DS, Runic Dump -> IT, PS, HS, HS, DS (refreshing scarlet fever as needed) using RS when its available. If you wanted to make use of the free BB, and don’t necessarily want to use DS in your opener, I’d imagine it would be like~ Bone Shield, PS, IT, PS, free BB, HS, HS, runic dump and so on. For AOE situations, I can envision a few scenarios~

1.) DnD, IT, PS, Pest, BB, PS, free BB, runic dump – RS when available.
2.) DnD, BB, PS, IT, Pest, runic dump, PS, free BB – RS when available

The first rotation assumes that DnD can hold enough initial threat for you to be able to spread your diseases without initial aggro issues. The second rotation is most likely what I’m going to try out at first. The idea behind it is to grab burst threat immediately with a quick BB, and then establish sustained threat from diseases afterward. Both of these would substitute HS for BB after scarlet fever has spread and when there are only 3 enemies or less.

The fundamental flaw that I see in any of these rotations is the use (or lack thereof) of the frost rune. With the exception of spreading frost fever with IT, frost runes are just not used in any tanking scenario I can think of. Meanwhile, we may run into issues with waiting for unholy runes to charge: DnD (initial threat) PS (disease), second PS (for free BB). It would have made more sense to have IT proc the free BB, at least that way your utilizing all of your runes consistently in an AOE scenario. Single target wise, I don’t think anything really needs to be changed; though I heard IT lost the heavy threat it used to generate. Just some thoughts…

************Update as of 2/5/11*************

Ok so I’ve tanked with my DK since the 4.0.x patch (in WoTLK content) and I will say that it does work out well. There is enough aoe threat generation between DnD, BB, Pest, and HS for there to be no issues. Single target threat is very strong as long as you have plenty of Rune Strike procs. Haven’t tanked in Cata yet (with my DK or any other of my tank classes), but I don’t forsee any issues. I still have my concerns about the Crimson Scourge talent, although my proposed changes are more of a wish-list kind of thing.

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http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2010/05/23/nr.synthetic.cells.cnn?iref=allsearch

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First off all I don’t really like to get into discussions about politics or religion, as these are usually very heated topics. However, I would like to mention the fact that I am *not* an atheist. So, with that said, let me divulge into my views about this.

To be honest, I’ve seen this coming a long time ago. It appears that it’s our nature (humanity) to tinker with things, even some things in which we don’t fully understand. So it was only a matter of time for this to happen, and this is just the beginning of such experimentation. Based on the information I’ve read on this topic, the intention of this technology is to manufacture vaccines, and to create bio-fuels, etc. That’s all well and good, but what is going to happen in the long term with technology like this at out fingertips? Genetically engineered food? Obscene biological weapons? Advances in cloning technology, which may include organ/human cloning?

Hmm…it seems like the topic of biological ethics will be most likely be a heated discussion in the future. What intrigues me the most about this is the potential integration of this stuff with technologies such as neural networks. Are we going to see true artificial intelligence, man-made sentient lifeforms, etc? Could the ‘War of the machines’ be a reality? Or could humanity succumb to a fate like the movie version of “I am Legend”?

I don’t know man, it seems that as I get older the lines between science fiction and current events seem to blur. And who knows what type of activities/experiments that are going on that are not in the public eye. I honestly think that will create true artificial intelligence sometime. This may or may not be in my lifetime, but shiz might hit the fan when ‘Skynet’ goes online! Just some food for thought; I’m very interested in topics like this so I may have post similar to this in the future.

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In general , I thought Transformers was a good movie; I was a bit surprised. However, it’s always the  little things that really rub me the wrong way.  The Autobots state that they’ve learned their manner or speech and such from the internet. So we have the robot Jazz, who obviously adopted his mannerisms from African-American  sub cultures.  So…what’s the first thing he says? “What’s crackin’ little bitches?” or something to that effect. Really? Damn man, why is the first thing the black robot says have to do with bitches? It wasn’t even provoked either, it was like his greeting to the humans. Then…my boy jazz is the *only* Autobot that dies in the movie. Not only does he die, he gets ripped in half like a piece of Laffy Taffy. *On a side note, I recommend looking up the Robot Chicken rendition of this, quite hilarious*. To be honest, I’m surprised Tyrese survived in this movie.

As far as blatant stereotypes go, the 2^nd movie was even worse. Don’t even get me started on the twins! Omg, one of those bastards had a gold tooth….And then there’s the line: “Nah nah we don’t really do reading” or something like that.  And then there’s  the constant violence between the two of them. I could probably go on for days, but I won’t….Despite all of this I actually liked Transformers 2 as well. This movie actually had me a little emotional (when Optimus died).

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Moving past my disappointments in the movies, lets change the topic to the Transformers games. I own both the non-movie related PS2 game, and the PS3 version of the game based on the first movie. Both of these games are quite lackluster. I never got a chance to play the 2^nd movie based Transformers game, but reviews that I’ve seen were not very favorable (shocker). I’m not going to get into the details of these games’ deficiencies on this blog, if I decide to at some point it will be on my Gaming Blog. But, like Episode IV of Star Wars, there is a new hope. Everything I’ve seen (previews, videos, etc) on the new non-movie based Transformer game look really cool. This will most likely be one of the next console games that I pick up. Hopefully this game will redeem this franchises’ gaming ventures.

The Transformers themselves are amazing. Hopefully the upcoming media expressions of this franchise will be less fail, and do Optimus proud

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Redirect (81) Redirect will allow Rogues to transfer combo points from one target (even a recently killed one) to another. 1 minute cooldown.

Combat Readiness (83) Every hit the Rogue takes causes him or her to gain a stack (and refresh the duration) of Combat Insight. If not struck within 6 seconds the buff will fade. Maximum duration of 30 seconds. Combat Insight decreases all damage taken by 10% per application, up to a maximum of 50%. 6 seconds duration, 2 minutes cooldown.

Smoke Bomb (85) Rogues at level 85 will be able to drop a Smoke Bomb, that creates a cloud of smoke to interfere with enemies’ targeting. Players and monsters outside the cloud will not be able to target and directly attack players inside – AoE abilities on the cloud will still work though. Creatures inside the smoke cloud will be able to attack each other normally.

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Okay, let me analyze these one by one.  Redirect allows you to transfer combo points from one mob to the next. Time to time I do run into an issue in which I can’t use a finisher on a target because they die before I can get one off,  so it would be cool to have those points move over to a new target. Especially since rogues and druids will be able to use self-buff finishers without a target. But to be honest this feels more like an ability we should have had from go; there was never really a reason that combo points should have ever been wasted on any target. This is kind of like dual specialization (sorry to go off topic a bit). Why the hell do I have to pay 1000g to activate this when it should just be a part of the game?! I have one toon of every class and they’re all either 70+  or close to 70. So basically between all my toons I have to pay 10k gold to get them all dual spec. I’d much rather be spending time actually playing the game and not farming for gold or trying to corner markets in the AH. But anyway let me get a back on topic.

Combat Readiness will be pretty cool against melee classes in pvp or for leveling in general. But I haven’t really pvp’d seriously since BC, it’s another cooldown, and this has no bearing on my dps. So do I really care? Negative. Smoke Bomb is another ability best served in pvp. In pve basically it just gives rogues another utility to assist tanks. “Hey rogue can you smoke bomb us so that the casters will come to us on this pull”. So now I get to give the tanks extra threat and dps with my tricks and further make their lives easier by making it so that they no longer have to los pull. Oh joy.

As far as mechanics go, rogues stuns will be nerfed but they will get added survivability instead. More pvp stuff, so I really don’t care. Blizz wants more of the rogue’s damage to come from active abilities as opposed to melee hits. So we’ll probably see less haste from Slice and Dice and more damage from mutilate, hemorrhage, sinister strike, and finishers. This might make playing a rogue more exciting if we got maybe….gee I donno another friggin attack ability! I would even dare to say, maybe something that we would have to do on proc so that our damage is either boosted or penalized based on the skill level of the rogue. Oh here’s another idea…maybe blizz should give rogues a friggin raid buff!  I’ve done the research (I’ve even coded a php script to calculate raid synergy), the rogue is the *only* class in the game that has the inability to provide a raid-wise buff. I know rogues provide multiple debuffs, but not a single raid buff. How cool would it be if we had something we could do similar to a DK horn, or warrior shout that increased raid haste or crit maybe? Meanwhile, you have classes like warlocks that get to do penalty-free hellfires, CoE *on top of* banes of agony/doom, and insta-cast soulfires….Ok I think I’m about done ranting here.

To be fair, there isn’t much official information that has been released by Blizzard yet, so until that happens I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. If they re-worked some of the existing rogue abilities/talents, and made some of the more useless ones more viable in generating maximum dps output (so I’m not spamming SS over and over again), perhaps I won’t be so bitter about this.

**********Update (6/14/10)*************

Now that we some info on the potential Cata beta rogue talents (http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#f), let’s revisit this topic.

Assassination:

There are a few changes that I want to note. First off they are getting rid of Hunger for Blood and replacing it with Vendetta. This ability seems very powerful, so I expect it to be nerfed in the future. Either that or it will be a cooldown ability and that would be good as Assassination could use another cooldown. The only current cooldown, Coldblood is getting an added effect of granting energy, this is very much welcomed. Improved Expose Armor is completely reworked to refund all the combo points used on it; very awesome! This will make me actually use this crap if there isn’t a warrior present to sunder armor. They’ve re-worked Master Poisoner to add a 8% spell debuff (likely will not stack with others), which will improve raid synergy with casters. And Venomous wounds has nature damage proc on bleed damage. This would indicate that ruptures will be consistently used in the mutilate dps cycle again. Overall, nice change although I’m not entirely excited about the top of the tree (seems you have to pick between a sap or leveling talents, meh).

Combat:

This tree seems the least appealing out of all of them. Although, I can understand to a degree as its clear this tree is being reinforced as leveling tree. The talent that adds extra armor contribution to leather confirms this. There aren’t many new things in this tree; the only thing I kind of dig is Restless Blades which reduces the cooldowns on BF and MS on Eviscerates.

Subtlety:

This tree seemed to have gotten the most revamping, and its clear that Blizzard wants to make it a viable PVE spec; this is exciting. The first talent that I want to note is Honor Among Thieves. Zomg did Blizz actually give rogues a real raid buff? I must say that it’s about damn time. Another talent to note is the reworking of Serrated Blades. This will give Eviscerates a chance to refresh Ruptures; very cool. Hemorrhage is being reworked to add extra damage to bleed effects. This will be nice if there isn’t a kitty available. I predict the Sub cycle will be entertaining: Mixing hemo and backstabs and using SnD, Rupture, Eviscerates as finishers. Most likely my rogue will end up being Sub endgame (assuming I decide to play my rogue).

Overview

All in all there are some exciting changes to look forward to. One of my concerns however is the requirement for SnD. This will definitely limit the amount of damaging finishing moves that a Sub or Combat rogue can pull off, which effectively works against Blizzard’s plan to move away from the heavy amount of melee damage that rogues produce. I have a few purposed solutions to this: Option 1: they can reduce the haste from SnD (20% seems reasonable) and give SnD a mechanic similar to Hunger for Blood: separate it from the combo point system. They could even make it a raid buff like Windfury totem and so that it grants melee/ranged haste to the entire raid (not stacking with other haste buffs). Maybe give it a 45 second duration that rogues have to periodically refresh, and add a minor glyph to increase that to 2 mins or so. Option 2: make it a proc. They could make it similar to Riposte in which you can only use it at certain times. Maybe a have it proc off of melee damage so that its a button that you need to hit, but your not penalizing your finishers to keep it up.

My other concern is with the Combat damage cycle. Based on these talents, its going to be just as boring as it is now. I’m hoping that maybe with the removal of Ghostly strike from the Sub tree that Blizz decides to make it a standard ability. If so they can beef up the damage from it a bit, and make it so that combat rogues use it as the priority combo point builder and use Sinister Strikes when its on cooldown. That would make combat less monotonous and maybe I’d have fun being a combat rogue again. If not, maybe they should rework riposte that it is usable in PvE so that combat rogues need to stay on top of using it instead of spamming SS the whole time. Perhaps this would make some type of indicator of a skilled rogue vs. an average one (That’s right I went there, any moron can do the combat cycle).

Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone from Blizz will see this blog one day and take these into consideration. I think they’d add a breath of fresh air for the PVE rogue At any rate, I’ll most likely be updating this post one last time: when Blizzard finalizes the Cata rogue changes.

***********************Update 10/15/10************************

So WOW 4.0.1 has arrived and we can pretty much guess that the latest rogue abilities/talents will be the final ones (Blizz may throw in some tweaking here and there). Believe it or not I don’t have much QQ, lol. With Revealing Strike combat rogues finally have a combo point generator other then SS. I haven’t played with around with assassination yet, but judging by the talents it seems pretty solid. Obviously rupture will be included in their rotation again (which I like) and everything else seems to be the same, until the enemy is almost dead then mutilate spam turns into backstab spam. Subtlety looks cool, but there is alot of shiz going on with that rotation. Sub rogues have to keep up SnD, recuperate, rupture, and still try to get in as many Eviscerates off as they can to take advantage of their mastery bonus. Uhhh…really? I tried this crap out on a target dummy and it was awful. Its a shame too; this was the tree that I was most excited about.

So back to what I said a few months ago; the woes of Sub could be easily resolved if they took SnD off the combo point system. It would be best served as a HofB style buff, or even a proc. Speaking of procs, why the hell do we have none? I see they got rid of riposte, the only one I could think of that we did have. How cool would it be to have Riposte be a general ability, but have a talent (which would best fit in the combat tree) so that Riposte procs off melee swings or something to that effect. Oh my final suggestion…give us back Ghostly Strike..goodness we already have the least amount of abilities out of all the classes…why are you removing some of them? Lol, ok I’m done.