I am a rogue. My friend is a priest. Neither of us has played either of these before (at least not beyond lvl 20). So, between the two of us, we’re winging it.
We are now lvl 58 and are having some issues.
Whether I’m playing CoH or WoW, I have a tendency to have lots of AOE. I am used to this. I have a very hard time dealing with the fact that I can’t kill 5 guys at the same time.
My friend is getting pissed at the amount of threat he generates just from healing me once. He doesn’t have very much experience as a healer and he’s also used to me holding most or all of the agro.
So, other than blade flurry (which is nice but not great), is there anything I can use to get some decent AOE attacks on my rogue? Is there any way I can increase my threat?
Is there any way my friend can decrease his threat?
Is it possible for people to completely change their playing style after 4 or 5 years? Or, should we just say screw it, start over and go back to our safe zones?
I don’t know anything about the priest side other than there should be ways for him to minimize threat. As to your character, a rogue is DPS not a tank. You’re designed to kill quickly and maybe distract the adds, not take damage and hold threat while he heals you.
Rogues CAN incapacitate mobs in certain ways that keep the fight fair. Use “sap”, for example. You can also move around pretty easily, so often you can find a way to pull one or two mobs away from the others.
It’s really a different mindset; unfortunately it’s one that not that geared strongly towards dungeon play, but you can have a lot of fun in battlegrounds and PVP with this. I’d suggest to read up on how to tilt fights in your favor.
You could also, if need be, find a third partner with aggro generating skills who can be the tank, you can be the DPS and your priest can heal. A little harder to have 3 than 2, but this is a pretty effective trio, especially since you’re generally more lethal from behind.
As noted, rogues don’t have many tools to generate AoE threat. Most rogues go to considerable effort to reduce threat. In your situation, fighting multiple mobs just isn’t going to work out well for you or your partner. You can improve things a bit by cycling targets, ie, hit one mob, then target another, but that prolongs the fights. Another option is to work on your pulling–pull single mobs, or smaller groups. Sap one if possible, kill the other before sap expires. Your priest buddy should never attack a mob you haven’t hit unless he’s willing to tank it.
The “Holy Trinity” of WoW is Tank, Healer, DPS. Rogues are mostly DPS. In a pinch, they can off-tank because they have excellent burst damage and can generate tons of threat on a single target quickly.
I should mention, we’re PVE, rarely bother with battlegrounds or dungeons. We’ve been playing for years but we don’t much like playing with other people and we’re not hardcore gamers.
When we get a bit higher, we’ll team up with my sister and her DK.
Heh. The DK should solve your aggro problems. I loved mine, but only got to play him a couple of months before moving out to the country. Now, I can’t get high speed internet, so I can’t play WoW or CoH anymore.
Maybe sometime next year either the phone or cable company will make high speed available in my area. I really miss gaming.
I want to play CoH but for some reason my computer and it just don’t agree with each other. Oh well. I shouldn’t be playing on the computer too much anyway.
So, thank you all for your insight.
I hate playing DK. My sister loves it. She’s kind of a lone wolf though. She has an annoying habit of just randomly running around a zone, killing everything she sees. THEN she remembers to get quests and goes to kill them all again. But, she gets bored with the quests and goes on to another zone. It works for her. But her method doesn’t work very well with other people.
I took a long hard look at my rogue and realized I had a couple of problems.
I haven’t been keeping up with my armor.
I really needed to respec.
The only way I was going to get new powers was to respec (I think it’s been at least 10 lvls since I got a new power.
So, I got all new armor and respeced from all combat to a combo of assassination and subtlety. I got a whole bunch of new attacks, a new set of daggers, and I made some new jewelry with my 80 Pally.
I have to go to bed so I didn’t give it much of a whirl but it does seem to have improved.
I’m just going to have to keep reminding myself that I’m not a pally or a controller any more (I miss my controller). I think I haven’t really been putting effort into it because it’s not what I’m used to and I kept expecting to give it up and start a warrior or something. But, I’ve come too far to stop now. So, I’ll start paying more attention.
it’ll be more efficient for your priest to go disc and gear up on hp and for you to gear up for dps. you have no tanking skills whereas the priest has plenty designed to survive as a tank in pvp. just scale your pulls down to whatever the priest can handle and you’ll be fine.
(this will also be useful for the times when someone thinks a “lone” priest might be an easy target. )
I have a lvl 80 priest who is dual spec’d - Disc/Holy for soloing and tank healing, Holy/Disc for group/raid healing. Here’s a link to my mostly-Disc spec.
In your situation, he might want to put 3 points into the second-tier talent Silent Resolve, which reduces his aggro from healing by 21% - could probably steal those from what would go into the Holy tree. Otherwise he can just play tank-priest, keep himself shielded, and blow stuff up while you stand behind it and stab it.
Besides going Disc, the priest does have other tricks that he might not be using. Use Power Word: Shield before a pull and then as needed (on himself, if need be), use Binding Heal to heal both of you at once, use Fade frequently.
You and he should be using whatever crowd control you can manage, so Sap for you, Shackle for him if you’re fighting undead. Pick your battles.
It’s not that healing creates a lot of aggro - it doesn’t. It’s half the value of the heal, divided evenly across all enemies in combat. With 5 enemies this means that it takes only the slightest poke to hold aggro over a heal. The problem is, as you’ve noted, that a rogue has virtually no area attacks. Blade Flurry will hit a second target, and at level 80 (!) you get Fan of Knives, the first actual AOE.
So you don’t really have a lot of reason to even fight that many enemies at once, since your only effective means to kill them is Holy Nova. Rogues are much more about going through single targets in rapid succession, than doing a lot at once.
That said, the poster above is also correct. If you do want to go that route, the priest themselves has a lot stronger defensive tools than a rogue if you go down the Discipline tree. All of the healer types in WoW can actually be quite potent solo fighters, at least in terms of their ability to tackle big game (and other players) if not in terms of speed.
My respec seems to be going pretty well. I am actually enjoying playing with my rogue again.
My friend is probably going to respec his priest but he’s going to wait a bit longer (he doesn’t like change, or spending gold).
We don’t intentionally agro large groups. It just happens sometimes, especially with those damn bugs (and dragons). We hadn’t really had a problem til we went into a hive. We’re much happier with smaller groups.
are you an engineer?
rogues own that skill and the bombs you can make provide great agro esp the actual bombs that stun. that and the pets you can create and all the toys provide a constant stream of tricks you can pull in a fight (or more like series of fights).
Actually, I’m not. I’m an alchemist. I knew that engineering would be a good idea but I had never done alchemy before and was trying to get out of my rut.
Yeah, if you can’t handle group pulls you just shouldn’t go underground in Silithus. There are some other areas as time goes by that will give you trouble (there’s one quest in the Hellfire Peninsula, the first area in the Burning Crusade expansion, where you fight these demons that each have not one but three or four little imp pets), but if you’re having fun you should be able to quest & level all the way up to 80.
Yeah, as soon as we finished the quests we had in Silithus, we left. So far, the imps haven’t been too much of a problem for me. I don’t mind working for my levels. Last time we got to 80, we did it with just questing and grinding. Neither of us is a fan of playing with other people so it’s usually just the two of us, plugging away.
I got bored with my 80 though, since we don’t do dungeons and stuff. So, I decided to learn new professions. Between that and my cooking and fishing dailies, I get enough enjoyment out of my pally.
