About Rogues and other classes in BfA

Although I did skip a few expansions in regards to playing “a lot”, I’ve been playing WoW on and off (more on) since 2006.

BfA is the first expansion (or maybe I’m misremembering) where I don’t enjoy playing Rogue as much as I did, both of them feel kinda weak. My other Outlaw Rogue in Legion doesn’t feel really strong either. Assassination was a bit better in BfA, and it totally rocks from Level 20 to 70 (Mag’har Orc).

Sure, maybe I’m just bad at soloing with an Outlaw Rogue, but some of the other classes feel just so much stronger, all the way from 110 to 120 – until totally overgearing quest mobs, that is, because you should be able to do most WQs in 360+ gear, anyway.

  1. Retribution Paladin – I guess I could say this was my BfA main, as I mostly played Alliance (and only later dragged my Orc Rogue through everything) – awesome damage and survivability – 10/10
  2. Fury Warrior – played 2 of those, both immensely fun and even with not so great gear I didn’t feel weak at any point – 8/10
  3. Havoc Demon Hunter – still feels as overpowered as when Legion launched, good damage even with semi-good gear, and if you use your cooldowns – bam – 9/10
  4. Druid
    • Balance – suprisingly strong, but maybe because I usually suck at casters – 7/10
    • Feral Druid – a little underpowered at 110, ramping up greatly until destroying everything in level gear at 118-119 – 8/10
  5. Elemental Shaman – played 2 of these again, was a bit disappointed with the performance. Not really squishy, but unless the procs are right, stuff dies not very fast 6-7/10
  6. Demo Warlock – not so roflstomp as in some expansions, but smooth leveling in general – 7/10
  7. Windwalker Monk – had a lot of fun playing this in Legion, was a bit painful in BfA, but not overly bad – 6/10
  8. Undead DK – was ok. Not my favorite class, squishy at times, but it worked 6/10
  9. Beastmaster Hunter – oh wow, was I surprised by this one, I kinda flew through the levels – 10/10
  10. Frost Mage – I don’t like Mages, this didn’t really work fine – 5/10
  11. Priest
    1. Shadow – gave up at 112 and went Disc – 2/10
    2. Disc – a lot better but I wouldn’t exactly call it fun – 4/10
  12. Rogue
    1. Assassination – could be more fun, but still fun – 7/10
    2. Outlaw – didn’t really enjoy this very much – 6/10

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Level 3x dungeons – Guild edition, with bonus rant

Not sure why I’m even worse at posting about these than I am usual to comment in a timely manner.

The dungeon group met up again on Sunday the 22nd to do Razorfen Kraul at Level 30. Our Rogue sadly wasn’t caught up again, had major internet problems, and didn’t have time anyway, so we 4manned again.

There’s actually not much to say – it worked fine and was a little boring, not even a wipe. It doesn’t make sense to go in before 30 if you want to do all the available quests and if you go in at 30 then 4manning it is no problem. Weird.

Because we were done so quickly we looked up what’s next and made a little error in our judgement here. Gnomeregan didn’t sound interesting enough so we went to Scarlet Monastery and did the Graveyard and the 20 Hearts quest in front of it – also no problems, and asking in /1 and LFG again yielded no DPS to join us.

As I’m only writing this only now, I’ll save the hassle to do a 2nd post and just continue – the magic of procrastination.

Last Friday we met again at Level 34+ to do the Library wing of Scarlet Monastery, again it was 4 of us (we do have a 6th guild member at Level by now, a Feral Druid, but he was unavailable as well) and nobody wanted to join. (What’s wrong with this server, no single DPS to be found for dungeon runs). The pulls seem to get a little harder, I messed up one or two, but thanks to a boar pet and a Mage with sheep we survived pretty easily, despite our Shaman Healer being in DPS gear. Unfortunately our Mage forgot to do the Level 38 labeled Mage pre-quest for the Mage quest to the Library, so we might be back.

Again this wasn’t really enough content for a scheduled evening so we decided to check out Gnomeregan and noticed we were indeed a bit too high level, with 2 of us being 36 already (and finally a pickup Feral Druid DPS, also 36) – but at least it was easy. OK, too easy – we need to find some challenge…

Having never really played much Alliance pre-Cata, I fortunately at least had done it for rep on my Level 100 Gnome recently and had run it a few time as a random on my Allied Races, so at least one person mostly knew the way. It was pretty uneventful.

If overall this sounds pretty unexcited, that’s probably because it is. Sure, it’s fun to play with friends and Classic is fine, but there are quite a few things that annoy me a bit

  • Classic isn’t hard, it’s just slow and tedious
  • Classic is slow and tedious
  • When it launched I had a ton of time and brought both my “solo alt” and my “group main” to 20, then 29 at the same time, with the solo alt being higher. Since then I didn’t have as much time (mostly not at the same time as my duo partner) and am now on the slow end of the group. Personal problem, but annoying nevertheless.
  • We planned a 5 person group and had 5 people – then one bailed out completely but got replaced by a reliable new member, but our 5th didn’t ever manage to catch up. Next run isn’t scheduled yet but even we only do 2-3 levels per week it becomes harder and harder to catch up
  • Alting wasn’t really fun in Vanilla and it’s not really in Classic – imho. I have my alt Rogue (because it’s clearly the best class, no matter the expansion :P) but I’m hesitant to even level a third one to 10. I really love the QoL improvements for altoholics in later expansions.
  • Finally, tanking isn’t really fun to me. Maybe I was hoping for it to be not so bad as I had feared, and I’m the last person to need easy gogogo rush and just charge into a group, thunderclap and keep it forever like in the last expansions. I learned to Warrior tank in TBC and worked my way up from 5mans to 25man alt raids (mostly OT, not MT, but still) – I know how to work for my aggro. But in classic I’m just 100% rage starved all the time. Maybe my group is too trigger happy, maybe I’m doing it wrong – but it’s simply not a lot of fun to wait for enough rage for a single skill most of the time. Also everything resists taunts. Leveling as Arms isn’t much better, but at least Rage is not a problem.

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Lowbie dungeons – Guild edition

It’s been 12 days since I wrote about our adventures in Classic, but it’s not that we didn’t play. We successfully did Wailing Caverns last week (this time the Rogue had caught up a bit), then did it again the next day to finish all the quests (Serpentbloom, Deviate Hides, 99-year old Port).
Some days later we did Shadowfang Keep, even wiping on Arugal. Unfortunately he didn’t drop the nice robe for our Mage, but the Girdle was cool as well. And my Warrior likes the shield, even though it’s an Alliance one. Also I’ve been using the Wailing Caverns quest reward Sword since then.

So far it’s been mostly working out to decide on a target level and day and then everyone catches up. Unfortunately our Rogue (again) didn’t have time this week and so Blackfathom Depths will be 4man or with a pick up DPS. Our target level for BFD was 27, maybe we’re a little cautious here. But maybe we can do Razorfen Kraul directly after it.

Oh, hello draft I had forgotten. BFD went fine but we (again) did a second run because of the Lorgus Jett followup and we noticed that RFK doesn’t make much sense before 30 because of missing quests. So we did all of the instances twice now, and next Sunday RFK is planned as most of us are 30 already.

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I’m stuck on a boat

On the one hand it’s kind of a bit of work, on the other hand it’s too easy and too good to not take advantage of, so right now I’m trying to run at least one mission per day per 120 character as long as I have resources. Not that I need all of the followers at artifact level, but the rewards and the rep especially are kind of worth it. If only it weren’t 15 toons…

I’m also trying to take advantage of the Darkmoon Faire 10% XP buff. My Horde Paladin finished Legion this week and right now I’m working on Dwarf Hunter and Gnome Rogue in Legion and Dwarf Shaman in BfA, because the max level count is already highly in favor of the Horde (10:5).

What I’m not doing is grinding gear – why would I? I don’t raid, I hardly run Mythics. When I ding 120 I try to grab a full set of Benthic gear and then upgrade the missing pieces (usually rings + trinkets) to around 385 as well, that’s enough work for all the toons. A few select ones are doing WQs for real upgrades, but overall I guess I’m not really bothering.

One goal I still have and that I’m missing is Flying in Legion. Maybe I should get to work on that. Also not Exalted with Mechagon and Unshackled, also something to do.

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Altoholics assemble!

While the above screenshot might look like your average “I reached max level” screenshot, it is not.

For the first time since Cataclysm (and a mere 5 levels off in Mists of Pandaria) I have managed to have a character of every class at max level!

  1. Orc Rogue & Human Rogue
  2. Troll Warrior & Night Elf Warrior
  3. Dwarf Paladin
  4. Night Elf Demon Hunter
  5. Worgen Druid
  6. Orc Shaman
  7. Blood Elf Warlock
  8. Blood Elf Priest
  9. Pandaren Monk
  10. Orc Hunter
  11. Undead Death Knight
  12. Undead Mage, as of today

Sure, it didn’t help that I had 2 classes maxed twice already. Or a second Druid at 117, a second Shaman at 112, or a third Rogue at 101 – but that doesn’t matter now. This project is finally done.

After I dinged I did what I usually did for the last few: instantly equip all but 2 pieces of 8.2 Benthic 385 equip, go to Nazjatar, grab another 2 385 pieces and a 370 weapon, and upgrade one piece to 400, then unlock World Quests there.

What was different today that I decided to do the dungeon daily because the reward was a 400 cloak, it happened to be Atal’Dazar and I had just finished the quest line for that dungeon at 119.9.

So I queued for Heroic while mopping up some of the easy Nazjatar intro quests and proceeded to have a very uneventful quick Heroic run. Just that after the last boss the tank, the healer and one dps left and the Hunter and I regretted not saying something about the additional boss. To be fair this was the first time this has happened to me, that a group didn’t automatically do the daily dungeon boss, even on Heroic. So we set out to look for this boss, and hoping we might be able to two-man it, as I had only one person on my friends list online who was not playing Classic, but in a dungeon as well.

So this Shadowblade Razi seemed to be a stealther who either had some adds or spawned them and was patrolling the area left of the instance entrance, where nobody ever clears. He found me more than I found him and that’s when I died. Then my Hunter companion came and we kited him around for a bit until he reset. Bummer. Then we rebuffed, looked for him again, found him… and suddenly we had 3 adds, a normal mob group. After some wiping and kiting we got them down, then we had him again. Long story short, after around 7 deaths and spending all cooldowns we managed to take him down. 500g in repairs for a simple 385 -> 400 cloak upgrade, but I regret not a single gold. It was the most nerve-wracking 10 minutes I had since I stopped raiding. Also the most YES WE DID IT since a first kill in a raid, years ago. Also kind of a Vanilla WoW moment just in the time where everyone plays classic. Spontaneously trying something ridiculous and seeing it through, even with a lot of wipes and no rushing, gogogo, and abandoning ship at the first hurdle. And yes, it was only Heroic and maybe a Hunter+Frost Mage duo makes this a lot easier, but as I wrote above I had dinged an hour ago, I suck at Mages, my item level was around 360 (with 0 Azerite traits spent) and the Hunter was 395 item level.

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Ragefire Chasm – Guild edition

Last night we finally had everyone online and in the correct level range to venture into our first dungeon – Ragefire Chasm.

The group consists of:

  • Level 14 Tauren Tank Warrior in Arms spec (the author)
  • Level 14 Troll Shaman
  • Level 14 Troll Mage
  • Level 14 Troll Hunter
  • Level 10 Undead Rogue (Slacker)

Actually it went pretty uneventful except for one wipe when underestimating the lowbie Rogue’s aggro range and then some Hearthstone use by two people to get out of a chasm. The Rogue was too low to get the book quest so we ran it again and then only one book dropped. Anyway, all got to level 16 (13) and now we’ll meet up again at 20 for Wailing Caverns. That’s probably why I forgot the victory shot, because it was totally not epic. Also technically it wasn’t a guild run yet because we only made the guild after the run. Ah well.

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Adventures in Azeroth – Classic edition

So my Warrior is still at level 14 and waiting for the full group to catch up, but I did play my Undead Rogue. I might have a Rogue problem, but who cares?

Cloth shoulders with AGI, yeah!

Level 24.95 now, just finished Shadowfang Keep with an all-23/24 group with zero problems. Before that (also today) I had to run Wailing Caverns a second time because:

  • The group didn’t do the 99 year old port (ok)
  • I only got 10 of 20 Deviate Hides (meh)
  • I got ZERO Serpentbloom (WTF?)
  • I forgot to loot one gem (this one was my fault, bags full I guess)

But now I got all quests done, had to camp Mad Magglish for “only” 15mins in a group of 3, had to solo 3 mobs for my 20th hide – but it worked. Except for the tank with zero orientation, guess we could’ve shaved off 5mins easily if he had listened to our directions. Ah well. Also marking mobs seems to be not a thing. Also CC is unheard of. But I can make Poisons now.

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Non-Classic WoW

Being fed up with the queues in WoW Classic and just waiting for most of my group to catch up (I did level my Rogue alt to 14 and Blacksmithing on the Warrior to 9x though) I played some retail WoW.

I still have this plan of having one of every class to max level, and the classes missing were Hunter and Mage (after the DK dinged a few days ago). So 1 or 2 days ago I finally logged in the 111 Orc Hunter again – was standing at The Great Seal – emptied the bags a bit, flew to Vol’dun and… kinda killed it. I don’t remember any of my toons to just do every quest in record time, not even close to dying once. So I did 111.x to 116 on the first day and then 116 to 120 on the second day without really playing a lot. Mobs only hurt at 118+, before that I was just murdering groups of 3.

Anyway, only Mage left if I didn’t miscalculate. Started Vol’dun as well, dying multiple times. Hmpf

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WoW Classic launched

… and I was there.
Stayed up until midnight, logged in without problems 3 minutes late and managed to get to Level 6 after 2:30 hours. Today I also mostly played WoW Classic and finished Mulgore.

WoW Classic Tauren Warrior at Level 12

And because there is one Ragefire Chasm quest in Undercity a sensible person would just take a zeppelin there and grab it.
Others decide to level their alt because they want one anyway. 4:18 h for Level 1-10 in Tirisfal Glades.

WoW Classic Undead Rogue at Level 10

WoW Classic launched Read More »