Final level 80 rogue build

After playing around with variations to the Assassination / Hunger for Blood (HfB) build I think I have finally determined the build that I will be using which is actually the same build I saw from an Orc Rogue on the closed beta. Here's the link to the build. This is probably the highest raid Damage Per Second (DPS) build, assuming you can keep it up. My current build at level 70 is the same but I only have five points into the combat tree (Dual Wield Specialization). The extra Hit rating, 3% crit and longer Slice and Dice (SnD) times will really help when I hit 80. You have to watch SnD, HfB, and Rupture, all of which are DoTs (Damage over Time) or effects that last for a duration. The SnD is refreshed with Envenom which out does Eviscerate by quite a bit of damage now that it scales with Attack Power (AP) at constant 35% of your AP. Envenom is also a direct damage unlike Eviscerate which must factor in armor. Looking the numbers from Dr Damage (looks like Rogues are the only one which are completely done) Envenom at 5 Combo Points (cp) does about 500 more damage on average than Eviscerate, yeah it consumes your Deadly Poison charges, but it has that nice buff for 1 second per combo point which gives you an additional 15% to apply Deadly Poison, so you can get your five charges back up pretty quickly. So far (okay just on test dummies as I just respecced today) it seems like it should be very fun. I was easily hitting 700 DPS without HfB and not really trying all that hard. Granted I'm not in very good gear either, I'm in basically first part Kara gear and my +Hit is actually pretty low, I really need to increase that so I'm at least up to 100% hit preferably 103% so I can always hit on bosses. The next thing to work on is Crit rating because the HfB is pretty dependent on critical strikes (as I get 2 energy per crit). Unbuffed I'm only at 21% :( Granted these numbers will change in a raid when I'm fully buffed, so I'm thinking DPS should look pretty good. I was constantly at 1k DPS with my other builds on bosses, so I'm not worried at all. Wrath of the Lich King looks like it should be pretty fun, plus the guild is shaping up to be a pretty good raid oriented guild. I'm looking forward to it.

Seam generates IDEA IntelliJ project files

For those using Seam, you've probably seen the announcement that Seam 2.1.0.GA has been released. Work continues at a fast pace for Seam 2.1.1. Dan Allen (Seam in Action author) and I have been working on generating the IDEA IntelliJ module and project files for IntelliJ 8 aka Diana, which has Seam support (check out their screen cast detailing the support, I think you'll be impressed). The initial versions were just checked in yesterday. The next time you run seam create-project you will have Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ project files. For those that wish to tweak the iml and ipr file they're in the seam-gen/ide-project-files/idea directory. Dan continues to work on seam-gen so stay tuned for more announcements. There are a couple of minor issues with it, but nothing an experienced IntelliJ user can't deal with (like XSDs for the namespaces in the XHTML pages, setting up the correct JDK, tying together the JPA files with a Datasource, etc). Please download trunk and let us know! Feel free to leave comments on the JIRA issue.

UPDATE: Current Rogue Build

Build up to 70 on Official World of Warcraft page. As I move closer to 80 my other talent points will go into Close Quarters Combat and Relentless Strikes (or maybe three into CQC and two into Opportunity, not quite sure yet)

Wrath of the Lich King Rogue build

Here's what I'm thinking of for my rogue on WoW: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?rogue=00500500300000000000000000000053230053501005201033310515020000000000000000000000000 It's a raiding build as that's what I'd like to focus on in this expansion. I'm also hoping that my guild will focus on raiding as well. I struggle for a while on whether or not to get Relentless Strikes or the Close Quarter Combat talent. I think in the long run this will probably work out better, that way I know I won't hit energy starvation (which was the main thing I wanted to avoid). If someone has a better idea for a deep assassination build I'm all for hearing it.

What to do with a blog?

I signed up for this blog mostly for the OpenID, but now I'm being told this could be a spam blog, so I guess I need to post something up here :) This is actually my first blog posting! I have interests in web development in nearly all of it's forms (I don't do Photoshop or Flash). I'm thinking I'll use this for posting my thoughts about web development. At the current time I'm a Java developer, but I also have seven years of experience with PHP so I may do posts about PHP. I am interested in Ruby and Groovy, so there may be posts about those two languages as well, I hope you enjoy. There may also be random tidbits about World of Warcraft as I am a pretty avid WoW player.