Raivyne Is Hemorrhaging!! Get a Doctor – STAT!

Raivyne Is Hemorrhaging!! Get a Doctor – STAT!

Ruh? WTH? Does this mean what I think it means?!?!? I’m afraid so good citizens of Azeroth… Your trusty Combat Sword Rogue has gone soft err ahh umm Subtle.

ZOMG WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!??

Psst… I am still asking myself the same thing…

Anyway, I’m an adventurous sort of gal so when some rogue said, “man I wish one of us was Hemo” I thought hmm… I’ve been hemo before, and I kinda liked it… Why not try it out again? There was also some mention of raid damage being increased by @ 35% if we had a Hemo rogue. Now, I don’t know about all that… the figure sounds kind of high to me considering Hemo only affects Physical damage. However, I’m too lazy to run the numbers myself, so I’ll accept the figure.

Hey, what the heck – right?

On Tuesday, August 29, 2006 I showed up to raid Hemo – 16/5/30

Assassination Tree: Same as my original 1.12 spec

Combat Tree: 3/3 Imp Gouge and 2/2 Imp SS (oops… meant 2/5 Lightning Reflexes… force of habit)

Subtlety Tree:
MoD – 5/5
Sleight of Hand – 2/2 (Reduces the chance you are hit by melee and ranged attacks by 2% and increases the threat reduced by your feint ability by 20%)
Elusiveness – 2/2 (Reduces the cool down of your vanish and blind abilities by 1.5 minutes)
Camouflage – 2/5 (Increases speed in stealth by 6% and reduces stealth cool down by 2 seconds)
Initiative – 3/3 (75% chance to add an extra combo point when using ambush, garrote or cheap shot)
Ghostly Strike – 1/1 (does 125% weapon damage and increases dodge chance by 15% for 7 seconds)
Imp Sap – 3/3 (90% chance to return to stealth after sapping a target)
Serrated Blades – 3/3 (ignores 5 armor/per level of your target’s armor and increases rupture damage 30%)
Heightened Senses – 2/2 (Increased stealth detection and reduces chance to be hit by spells and ranged attacks by 4%)
Preparation – 1/1
Hemorrhage – 1/1
Deadliness – 5/5 (AP increased by 10%)

What I like:

Sleight of Hand – Assuming your feint normally reduces 100 pts of threat (pulled a number out of thin air for argument’s sake) then it would reduce 120 pts with this talent. Reduced chance to be hit by a crit is just the frosting.

Elusiveness – I always did like this talent, it’s saved my butt a few times!

Ghostly Strike – I love this attack! It crits for like 800 damage (for me) and increases my survivability for 7 seconds, every 20 seconds… It crits a lot btw! (could have just been luck…)

Serrated Blades – any attack that increases my damage to enemies – I like. Increased rupture damage… meh I don’t care.

Heightened Senses – Increases stealth detection (great PvP talent!!) Reduces chance to be hit by spells and ranged attacks by 4% (I barely got hit by firemaw’s spells with this – could have just been a coincidence, but I don’t really believe in coincidences…)

Deadliness – I LOVE THIS!! I have always been a believer in AP (yes AP over crit for me. AP in the form of AGI? even better), so this talent just made me drool. With the 1.12 changes I hunger for AP even more.

What I hated

Talents I had to use just to get to hemo. It’s like this – hemo does better damage with swords, but most of the talents going down are completely useless for a sword rogue in PvE (and PvP for a lot of them). I mean how many times do you cheap shot or garrote anything in a 40 man? Garrote, ok maybe… Cheap Shot – fuhgeddaboudit 90%+ of mobs are immune to it.

Imp Sap is fun for PvP, but for 40 raids its completely useless. Camo could be useful (help get to traps in suppression room faster) but there are so many more rogue talents more useful for raiding.

As for a LOT of the other talents on the way down…

Daggers much?

Ick.

My conclusion?

**News Flash**

Going hemo as a raider makes you a 100% utility class FIRST, damage class last.

Duh.

It’s not that your damage is so horrible that you aren’t even on the meters, in fact I was surprised with how much damage I do as a hemo spec. However, it’s a big shocker going from top 3 – 5 to top 10 –15 as a ROGUE. I went from watching yellow ticks of mostly 500+ to yellow ticks of 200ish. My white damage MH crits were in the 700 – 800’s.

That hurt.

A lot.

Hold me… Please?

~raiv