There are a lot of factors that go into balancing your rogue's stats. Agility, attack power, hit, crit, strength, weapon skill, and haste rating all increase your DPS, your most important contribution to the raid, while stamina, dodge, and to some degree resilience affect your survivability. All these factors make it somewhat difficult to figure out whether or not a piece of gear is an upgrade. Will losing this hit rating be worth gaining this attack power? How exactly will increased agility affect my DPS? And does dodge ever really matter?

Luckily, a few smart technorogues have come up with systems that take some of the guesswork out of this -- the Agility Equivalence Points system, and its big brother, the Rogue DPS Spreadsheet.

First, let's take a look at what a single point of stats do for you at level 70.

• Strength gives you one point of attack power.
• Agility gives you one point of attack power, two points of armor, .025% chance to crit, and .05% chance to dodge.
• Stamina gives you 10 health.
• Attack power gives you ... well, one point of attack power. Fourteen points of attack power equal one more point of damage per second.
• Crit rating gives you increased chance to crit. 22.1 points of crit rating equal 1% more chance to crit.
• Hit rating increases your chance to hit a target. 15.8 points of hit rating equal 1% more chance to crit.
• Weapon skill rating is horribly, horribly complex. Basically, increased weapon skill increases your chance to hit and crit a mob that's higher level than you. European CM Crezax says that against boss level mobs, each point of weapon skill over your level's natural "max skill" will give you 0.8% lower chance to miss,
  0.4% lower chance to get dodged, 2.4% lower chance to be parried, and a 0.8% higher chance to crit.
• Haste rating is also complicated. It only affects white damage. 10.5 points of haste rating will make you attack 1% faster.
• Armor penetration is so rare that it's hard to calculate its exact effect on your performance, but it's a very good thing and, like haste rating, is generally found on extremely good epics.
• Dodge rating gives you 1% chance to dodge an enemy attack for every 18.9 dodge rating points.
• Resilience gives you 1% less chance to be critically hit and 2% less damage from critical hits. This is not useful for raiding rogues, as you're doing something wrong if you're tanking a mob. On that note ...
• If your gear contains very high Defense, Parry or Armor ratings, your guild probably has one or more angry feral druids, prot warriors, or prot pallies plotting your eventual death. While these attributes can technically help you, you really don't need them in raiding PVE. Give the King's Defender to the plate tanks and the Treads of the Den Mother to your bearish friends.

Now, if you're like me, you're probably curled up in a fetal position in the corner at the thought of trying to figure out how all these affect your DPS. Dammit, if I wanted to play a game with math, I'd look for an adult version of Number Munchers! Luckily, other rogues have done the hard work for us.

The Agility Equivalence Points System is Ming's brainchild, and despite one's personal feelings towards the rest of Ming's body of work, this is pretty good. AEP is an effort to convert all of the different rogue stats to a single rating system. I used to keep Zodar's AEP charts open when raiding so I could make gear decisions. If I'd been smart enough to do that after BC, I wouldn't have passed on Drape of the Dark Reavers.

The old AEP formula, preserved for posterity on WoWWiki, is 1 Agility = 1 Stamina = 2 Strength = .1% Crit. = .2% Dodge = .13% Parry = .13% To Hit = 2 Attack Power = 5 Weapon Skill = 4 Any Resistance = 5 Health/5 Sec. = 50 Armor. There were mods that automatically calculated an item's AEP for you, and added it to your item tooltip. But itemization has changed in TBC, and Ming and Zodar figured that it was time to rework the formulas. Now there are three types of AEP. Ming's PVP-oriented AEP goes by simple "AEP" on shadowpanther.net, while there are two new AEP calculations for PVEers: DAEP for raiding, and MAEP for total maximum PVE damage ignoring survivability. These formulas are:

DAEP: 1 Agi = 2 Sta = 2 Str = 1 Hit = 1 Crit = 2 AP = 100 Resil = 1 Haste = 1 Wp Skill = 66.6 Def = 100 Dod/Par/Arm/Resist = .143 B Gem = .133 R/Y Gem = .05 Meta Gem

MAEP: 1 Agi = 20 Sta = 2 Str = 1 Hit = 1 Crit = 2 AP = 100 Resil = 1 Haste = 1 Wp Skill = 66.6 Def = 100 Dod/Par/Arm/Resist = .25 B Gem = .133 R/Y Gem = .05 Meta Gem

Are you still not satisfied with this system? After all, hit rating declines in worth as you reach the hit cap, which messes up the whole thing. Wouldn't you like a personalized AEP analysis based on your gear and spec that also comes with a recommendation for damage cycles? Oh, and it also lets you quickly compare the actual effect of changing an item, enchant, buff or gem on your overall buffed and unbuffed raid DPS?

The Rogue DPS Spreadsheet lets you see what effect changing anything in your gear or changing your own buffs will have on your raid DPS. It also calculates a personalized AEP formula based on your needs. The wonderful rogues Chalon, Pf and Ellos, with the help of the Elitist Jerks forumgoers, have maintained the spreadsheet through the years. There is nothing I can say to describe what a great tool this is, and its minor drawbacks (some missing gems and gear) are overpowered by the vastness of its awesomeness. You'll need Microsoft Excel to run it, though you can use a limited version by downloading Open Office. Ever since Phil mentioned this in the last post's comments, I keep it constantly open in the background when raiding. What buff would help more on this boss? Do I want Might or Kings? If I can't Rupture, what's the second-best choice? It's like a Magic Eight Ball for rogues.

Anyway, those are some of the tools that can help you become a better raider, even though all the tools in the world won't protect you from stupid mistakes! Raiders, what advanced recommendations do you have for rogues?

When I was but a young rogue, I shunned stunlocking in all its forms. "Only cowards stun their enemies," I would say. "I prefer to face the enemy head on." Then again, I also leveled to 60 as a dagger rogue who Sinister Struck and wouldn't stun, which serves as strong anecdotal evidence that I was stupid.

Then one day a kind fellow rogue took me under his wing and showed me that stunlocking can actually be an effective way of killing enemies, not to mention getting behind them once in a while to throw a Backstab or two. Eventually, I realized that stunning wasn't cheap -- it was the only way for rogues to survive. So for the benefit of my past self, and any other overly ethical rogues out there, I present a guide to the art of the stunlock.

Abilities: The principle behind stunlocking is keeping your enemy incapacitated while performing high-damage moves. Rogues have several abilities that are important to stunlocking:

• Cheap Shot: Your first move. This stuns the target for four seconds and awards you two combo points. It gives you time to do some damage and awards you combo points for:
• Kidney Shot: The big stun. This finishing move stuns your target for one second, plus one second for each combo point you have. So if you have five combo points, your target will be stunned for six seconds.
• Gouge: Does 105 damage, plus incapacitates the target for 4 seconds (5.5 with talents.) Not a true stun, since you cannot do damage without breaking Gouge, but it gives you time to prepare a move, regain energy, or even restealth and prepare for another Cheap Shot in PVP(if you have the 5.5 second Gouge.)
• Blind: Causes the target to move around slowly and confusedly for 10 seconds. This gives you time to restealth in PVP, bandage, regain energy, etc.
• Vanish: Makes you invisible for 10 seconds, drops combat, and puts you back in stealth. Note: hunter and warlock pets will still attack you!
• Premeditation: This talented ability in the Subtlety tree adds two combo points to your target for 10 seconds, but requires you to be stealthed.

Tactics: So how do you stunlock? There are a lot of different formulas, depending on your build. Cheap Shot > Sinister Strike > Gouge > Sinister Strike > Kidney Shot is a nice mini-combo if you don't want to do a full stunlock, and a good starter for any rogue. If you must memorize one thing about stunlocking, that's what you want to remember.

If you're a rogue who has Hemorrhage in the Subtlety tree, it can go Cheap Shot > Hemorrhage x2 > Kidney Shot > Hemorrhage x1 > Gouge > Restealth > Repeat, or you can move the Gouge up and only Hemo once the first time. If you decided to go for a more Assassination-oriented dagger build, you can Cheap Shot > Backstab > Gouge > Sinister Strike > Kidney Shot > Backstab > Gouge > Sinister Strike > Finisher, or Cheap Shot > Sinister Strike > Gouge > Kidney Shot > Backstab > Blind > Restealth > Repeat except for Blind.

Mutilate rogues will find themselves with more combo points, and will also want to try to toss Shiv in to get Crippling Poison on their target if it doesn't take right away. Combat rogues will often find it difficult to stunlock unless they pop Adrenaline Rush. Really evil rogues who take Cold Blood, Preparation and Hemorrhage can pretty much do whatever they want. A classic stunlock for this build is Ming's lock, which is Cheap Shot > Sinister Strike > Gouge > Kidney Shot > Backstab > Blind > Restealth > Cold Blood > Cheap Shot > Eviscerate > Gouge > Backstab. This will finish off most classes.

There are as many ways to stunlock as there are rogue builds, and good rogues will know when to improvise. For more formulas, check out http://www.wowwiki.com/Stunlock, Ming's Dueling Guide, or the wonderful Osiris's Rogue PVP Guide.

Counters: Unlike mobs, any player can get out of stunlock as long as they have their PVP trinket equipped. Luckily for us, many inexperienced PVPers will not wear their trinkets when grinding, or will pop it when they first get Cheap Shotted (leaving you available to Vanish or restealth and Cheap Shot them yet again.) But aside from that, a few classes have a way to get out of stuns:

• Mages can Blink out of stuns, and out of range of your melee attacks. This will often be followed by them Frost Novaing you and then moving far away to hit you with a large fireball or frostbolt. And that's why Blizzard gave you Cloak of Shadows. COS or Imp Sprint to them and resume your assault.
• Paladins can Divine Shield out of stuns, and most of them are smart enough not to blow it on Cheap Shot. Instead, they'll wait until they're low on HP, shield, and heal themselves. When they're shielded, rebandage if they're healing and restealth if possible (if they're not blowing the area up with Consecrates.) You'll essentially be starting the fight over, but they'll be lacking some mana and you'll be lacking health and stealth if you didn't get to bandage. Paladins are tough.
• Beast Mastery hunters have a 41-point talent that makes them immune to stuns, etc. for 18 seconds.
• Orcs of all kinds have a passive resistance to stuns. This can be countered by rolling a Horde character. Several other classes can spec into talents that give them stun resistance.

This is intended to be a basic guide to stuns, so I may have missed something. I'm not a PVP master, so I usually just use simple combos and don't spend time devising intricate locks with Thistle Tea and Renataki's. Feel free to toss in your own stunlock ideas!

You've made a rogue, leveled it to 70, and have managed to finagle yourself a rogue spot in a raiding guild, which in itself may have required bribes/blackmail/sexual favors. Now you're standing in front of Kara, Gruul's Lair or SSC, and you suddenly realize: I have no clue what I am doing.

Like every other class, the rogue raid game at 70 is dramatically different from how you played when leveling. You can't expect to jump right into the raid and top the damage meters. Young padawan, you must learn to raid. And we are here to help.

1. Come prepared. Yeah, showing up at the right place at the right time is a big part of raiding, but there's a lot more to being ready to raid than just being physically present. First of all, read up on the strategy for the boss you're facing. Asking "What does this boss do?", or worse, not asking and wiping the raid, is a good way to ensure you'll never be back in that instance. Take five minutes before the raid and check out Bosskillers or WoWWiki.

Another aspect of coming prepared is bringing consumables. For rogues, this means poisons/sharpening stones, battle elixirs, and healing potions at a minimum. You want to always keep a stack of Instant Poison, Deadly Poison, and Anesthetic Poison on you at all times, and I also bring all the other poisons in case the enemies are vulnerable to them. Good battle elixirs include Fel Strength Elixir, Onslaught Elixir and Elixir of Major Agility. I also bring Elixir of Major Fortitude, Insane Strength Potion and Haste Potion.

Your raid will also want you to download certain mods. Some form of boss mod and threatmeter is pretty much essential to fights nowadays -- I use Deadly and KTM, respectively, but there are many choices. Damage meters can be good if you want to compare your performance to other rogues, but can become the bane of raid groups if you get the "I'm topping the damage meters! I'm topping the damage meters!" attitude. There are a number of rogue-specific addons as well. Three worth mentioning are Slicer, which provides a visual timer for your Slice and Dice, PoisonPouch, which makes buying and applying poisons easy, and StunWatch, which can help you time your stuns on trash.

And finally, make sure you're personally prepared for the raid. Eat if you're hungry, drink if you're thirsty, finish your work or homework, close the naked picture website. I like to concentrate on the raid (and alt-tab out during breaks to read forums) -- however, the top rogue in my guild raids on speed and techno music and does great. Whatever enables you to have fun and do your best.

2. Get a decent raiding spec. "Decent raiding specs" include combat swords/fists/maces, combat daggers, and (against non-poison-immune bosses) mutilate. Generally, anything deep in the subtlety tree is not going to be great for raiding, although there are still some diehard hemo spec players. Combat is best for sustained DPS, as it benefits the most from gear upgrades and can also function as a pretty good PVP spec. Mutilate can work well if you have the gear for it, as mutilate crits can be sky-high, but the spec hits the dust when the boss is immune to poison.

Currently, combat swords is considered to be the build with the maximum potential DPS, but the combat swords playstyle isn't for everyone. If you have a spec idea, feel free to post it on the rogue forums and ask them for comments.

3. Know that you can do more than just damage. Specifically, you can stun, interrupt and poison. Stuns are invaluable when fighting hard-hitting trash mobs. Stunning trash can help keep your healers' mana up and your tanks alive. However, most tanks want to get a couple whacks in on the mob before you Cheap Shot it, unless you are utterly confident that you can either burn it down before it gets out of stunlock or tank it yourself. But if you have, say, an undergeared tank getting smacked for one-fourth of his health each time by a Kara mob, you might just want to step in and save the day. Stunlocking is easiest with a mutilate build, but even combat types can help out with the stuns if you have enough combo points at an opportune moment.

Interrupting spells is another important part of a rogue's job. A lot of trash mobs and even a few bosses (Shade of Aran, Magtheridon's channelers) have spells that need to be interrupted. Know when you're facing one of these mobs and put Kick on an easily-accessible hotkey. Many of these mobs cast spells quicker than your Kick cooldown will be up, so discuss who's going to stop what spells with your local other rogue/warrior/shaman. You don't want to kick a shadowbolt and then be caught with your pants down when the mob decides it's time to heal.

Poisons ... well, poisons serve many functions for a rogue. Instant Poison and Anesthetic Poison do direct damage. The latter should be used on aggro-sensitive fights, since its damage doesn't cause threat. Deadly Poison causes damage over time and stacks up to 5 times, and can be a nice way to keep dealing damage during any phase where you can't directly attack the mob. Crippling Poison slows the mob, which is excellent in PVP but doesn't often come in handy on boss fights. Mind-numbing Poison, which can slow the enemy's casting time by 60 percent, and Wound Poison, which can do damage and reduce healing effects on the enemy, are both excellent in certain situations -- however, most bosses are immune to these poisons. When they're not, though, the poisons do a great job. The channelers on Magtheridon are good examples of where to use these poisons.

4. Know where to be. You want to be behind your opponent at all times. If you're doing your damage through Backstab and Mutilate, the reason's pretty clear -- you can't use these abilities from the front. But even if you're swords, maces or fists, you should be behind the mob for a couple of reasons. First off, a lot of bosses cleave these days, and cleaves tend to be 180 degrees in front of the mob. Staying in the back will keep you from getting one-shotted by a nasty cleave. Secondly, mobs can parry attacks made from the front, but not from behind, so positioning yourself at the rear will increase your white damage. And finally, on most fights, it's easier for all the melee to stay together. That way, you can get chain healed and holy novaed, and if you notice all the other melee running away, it's a good sign that you should run away too.

Speaking of running away, most boss fights require some of that these days. The time of Ebonroc and Ragnaros is long past, and your bosses are likely to run around, AOE, or knock you into walls. Your boss mods should tell you when the boss is set to use certain abilities, so make sure which abilities require you to run (whirlwinds!), which require you to avoid other people (shatter!) and which require you to not move or your raid leader will hunt you down and kill you (flame wreath!)

5. Figure out the right finishing moves. You're going to be using Sinister Strike/Backstab/Mutilate most of the time, but there's still the question of what to do with your combo points. Out in the wilds of Azeroth, you probably spent them on Kidney Shots or Eviscerates, neither of which is ideal in a raiding environment. The most important thing for finishing moves is to always have Slice and Dice up. By increasing your attack speed, it increases your white damage and adds more to your DPS than any other finishing move. Each raiding spec -- combat swords/maces/fists, combat daggers, and mutilate -- has its own finisher rotations. The consensus seems to be:

Combat swords: 2pt Slice and Dice, 5 pt Rupture, repeat. If you have the two-piece Tier 4 bonus, do 1 pt Snd/5 pt Rupture. (In general, Rupture does more damage than Eviscerate.)

Combat daggers: 3 pt Slice and Dice, 5 pt Slice and Dice, 5 pt Rupture, repeat.

Mutilate: Depends, since the combo point generation is so much faster than combat. Always keep up Slice and Dice. If you have Vile Poisons and a stack of 5 Deadly Poisons on the target, Envenom can do quite a bit of damage since it ignores armor, although this is still up for debate. Spearmint of Gilneas suggests "Garrote, Mutilate, SnD if it was a crit, Mutilate again then SnD if it wasnt, Mutilate, Rupture if I'm at 4 points (probably not), Mutilate again then Rupture if not. Rinse and repeat." Mutilating again when you're at four combo points is a waste of one or two combo points.

6. Above all, learn. Learn from your class leader. Learn from the other rogues in your guild. Learn from rogues in rival guilds. Learn from the Armory. Learn from the forums. Learn from Shadowpanther's gear chart. If your DPS is lacking, ask what you can do to improve before someone tells you you need to improve. If someone does tell you you need to improve, listen to what they say.

What other advice would you give to raiding rogues?