I mentioned that I started as a Rogue in WoW, when it launched. Rogue are like Mages in a way - aside from being incredible damage-dealers, Rogues and Mages get cool moves that do fancy things outside of battle. Crowd control is the forte of the Mage - sending an enemy to sleep, turning another into a sheep, freezing warriors on the spot, etc. Rogues get to 'sap' people, which is like the blackjack in Thief - you knock them out for 60 seconds. Mages get Slowfall, which is an awesome spell with roots in D&D (Featherfall ftw) that lets you fall slowly. They can also teleport and that kind of stuff.
Rogues can go invisible at will, pick locks, and distract people to control what way they're facing. Rogues are an excellent solo class, because the only time you'll have trouble is when you're fighting three or four heavily armoured dudes that you didn't expect to confront. If you have to get an artefact in the centre of a broken down village swarming with monsters, you can stay invisible for as much of it as you like, and when you finally need to get your knives out, you can pick all their pockets first.
Today's Rogues are PvP twinks. A twink is a low level character with gear they shouldn't have - the goal is to stay at a low level and get as powerful as you can for that level, so you can compete in battlegroups capped at level 19, for example. Here's a video of two level 1 Twinks killing Dar'khan:
Since I've brought up that video, I'd like to point something out. If you look carefully, the guy's name is "Røskmeg of the Horde". The 'of the Horde' title is conferred upon members of the Horde who've honourably killed 100,000 alliance players. Wow, they must be great at pvp!
...no, they're probably not. If you consider how they've done it, they must have made level 1 alliance characters and fought each other 100,000 times each. Fuck. This is why WoW can't have nice things.
Do I want to be a Rogue? Yes! It's fun. Do I want to be a twink? The fun with levelling is that you're not at the endgame yet - sure, you're surrounded by power-levelling alts, but they're not all glowing and shit. You're not seperated by several tiers of PvP gear from someone at your very same level. Twinking is almost like an artificial endgame, though - you're passing through their level 19, 29, 39 continuums, looking rather drab in your collection of fairly nice quest rewards and green items, while they run the same dungeon over and over with a level 80 friend on the off-chance that the Nightstalker Bow drops.
In unrelated news: I am so fucking busy lately and it's great.
[Continue reading]