Rogue's Best Team Composition In 5v5, Huge Latency Improvement Via Registry Changes!

It has been a very long time since I had a competitive 5v5 team. I didn't really get to ride the 4DPS train when it was hot and since early season 1 I just didn't have the time and energy to put together a real 5v5 team. With the decline of 4DPS teams in general I lost a lot of faith in rogue's future in 5v5. Until I saw XOM's armory.




XOM was way ahead of everyone else as he was the first top rogue to make use of the now popular heavy poison 53/0/8 mutilate spec, and he sticked with it and was probably the only top-of-the-BG rogue who did not join the AR/prep bandwagon. When I originally saw his armory in season 2 I thought he was playing a 4DPS team. But after discipline priest changes came out and 4DPS teams really started to struggle, I pulled up his armory and realized he still had a 90% winning rate. I looked at his teammate's specs and suddenly everything connected for me. While coordinations and individual skills are important, arena play is first and foremost about team composition. You can't have that kind of success this many months into arena play without a dominant matrix. And you definitely can't have 90% winning rate in a half decent BG if you have the likes of shadow priests and affliction warlocks on your team.



The XOM Comp:

Rogue

Felguard Warlock

Ice Mage

Discipline Priest

Restoration Shaman (I do believe restoration druid is just as good if not better consider rogue doesn't benefit from windfury)



For starters XOM was one of the first rogues to invest 12 points in poisons. Being able to apply 5 stacks of wound poison and keep them there is far, far more important than maintaining high personal damage. It is your team's damage as a whole vs enemy healing that matters. And as expensive as it is to give up improved sprint, precision, improved slice and dice and dual wield specialization, 12 points of poisons are very well worth it for 5v5.



But more than anything else he put together a line-up that puts the same amount of pressure on an enemy team as 4DPS, without the drawbacks of a 4DPS team! In season 3 DPS went up more than ever and survivability stayed the same, affliction warlock and shadow priest just can't stay alive anymore. The margin of a 4DPS team is super low as a result. So what did XOM do? Discipline priest for pain suppression and power infusion offers great offense and defense, and their mana burn makes him as effective as a fourth DPS when it comes to pressuring the other team. Ice mage with icy veins and power infusion is devastating, what happens when you throw heroism on top of it? He starts casts 3000+ damage frost bolts every global cooldown that can crit for 5000+.



Because a rogue is completely self-sufficient, you don't have to take a paladin which is inferior to all other healers unless he is babysitting a warrior. A restoration shaman's heroism, offensive dispel and earth shocks are far more useful for an offensive team. Finally, a felguard warlock just offers so much to a 5v5 team at the moment. Unlimited mana for unlimited sustained damage, along with mages two of the best CCing classes in the game, and so much more durability over affliction. You have a team that has amazing CCs, amazing burst damage and incredible lasting power as well.



My 3v3 partner Haables started a 5v5 team this week. Originally this was going to be a gold selling team but I realized he had all the pieces for the XOM comp. I wanted RMP+shaman since I heard about icy vein and after I saw XOM's results I wanted a felguard warlock over a second mage. I have to admit when I first saw the roster I wasn't exactly thrilled, our warlock is a gggiiiirrrllll and her gear/arena ratings screamed "scrub" too.



After just one night of playing however, the strength of the line-up was just so undeniable that I seriously think we can push for top spots especially given how dead the 5v5 bracket has been. As a shadowstep rogue I can get the opening sap no matter what. It doesn't matter if the target is standing right in the middle of a flare, it doesn't matter if there are five people charging in on us, I always get the sap off then cheap shot the primary assist right after. If whoever I sapped trinkets I just blind and this whole thing buys a lot of time for my teammates to get into positions and start casting. Most teams would try to DPS me but a shadowstep rogue just has so much survivability compared to warriors. I have been caught in full energy KS and triple bursts. I have been caught by two windfury sword warriors, but I just can't seem to die until my healers are OOM, and that is because of cheat death. Yes I am aware it is bugged at 99% instead of 90% at the moment, yes I am aware it will be fixed, but What an amazing, amazing deterrence for the other team to blow their burst cooldowns on me! Shadowstep allows me to play extremely recklessly. Always the first one in, almost impossible to kite, and very solid sustained damage especially with slice and dice + expose armor up.



On warriors I just use rupture, on lower armor targets I use expose armor. I respecced to get 5 in improved poisons, this allows me to go wound+deadly against a scrub express double warrior + tri-healer (yes one of them was a druid) team. We spam damage on warriors just like a 4DPS would do, except we have the lasting power to take it late game and much, much higher margin for error than running affliction warlock and shadow priest. At the very least we didn't lose to 4DPS teams much lower than us.



We went 35-4 and hit 2025 in just first night of playing. Tent had to leave so we played restoration druid instead of discipline priest and it is pretty interesting. We gain cyclone which is amazing but we lose defensive dispels which forces us to play late game. Priest/druid is probably going to be stronger than druid/shaman for what we are trying to accomplish. Although it will also be very interesting if our druid goes 34/0/27 later to be that 4th DPS while wearing full healing gear. Our druid has access to T6 gear so he is going to have something like 2000 healing and 800 spell damage as well as insane regen.



Dumping damage on a warrior until his healer is OOM is so satisfying, it is exactly what they did to us in season 1 and I am loving it. Shadowstep also makes 5v5 quite a bit more fun to play. Target swapping is so much easier and with 5 in improved poisons, slice and dice already running, I can get 5 stack up really fast.



Reduce Your Latency!



Ever since I moved to Black Dragonflight, my latency went from <100 to 150 sometimes even 170 during peak hours. Our server just seems slower and I am not sure whether it is because it is running on older hardware compared my ex-server Lightning's Blade. This has been an issue for me when it comes to things that require a little more precision, like kicking the 0.5 second pet re-summon.



I read on MMO-Champion's latency fix and it sounded too good to be true. Make a few very minor registry changes and you shave your ping by 100, how can this be possible! Well, I tried it and like many others, my ping went down substantially. Playing WOW on a 50ms ping is an incredible experience. Everything is so smooth that I can't tell I am playing an online game anymore. I am able to land vanish->CS while taking focus fire much more consistently and a super low ping really, really helps shadowstep.



1 - TcpAckFrequency - NOTE if you are running Windows Vista
this setting may not have any effect - a hotfix is needed which i'm
tracking down. This works fine under Windows XP



Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu



Then find:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\



There
will be multiple NIC interfaces listed in there, find the one you use
to connect to the internet, there will be several interfaces listed
(they have long names like {7DBA6DCA-FFE8-4002-A28F-4D2B57AE8383}.
Click each one, the right one will have lots of settings in it and you
will see your machines IP address listed there somewhere. Right-click
in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it
TcpAckFrequency, then right click the entry and click Modify and assign
a value of 1.



You can change it back to 2 (default) at a later
stage if it affects your other TCP application performance. it tells
windows how many TCP packets to wait before sending ACK. if the value
is 1, windows will send ACK every time it receives a TCP package.



2 - TCPNoDelay (Optional, I didn't find MSMQ so I skipped it but it worked anyway)



Type "regedit" in windows "run.." dialog to bring up registry menu



Then find:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSMQ\Parameters



Right-click
in the right hand pane and add a new DWORD value, name it TCPNoDelay,
then right click the entry and click Modify and assign a value of 1.



Click Ok and close the registry editor, then reboot your PC.



That is it! Enjoy!