Encrypted Text: A field guide to bad rogues

A wise man once wrote that there aren't as many people in the world as there seems to be. Yes, there are billions of bodies on this humble planet -- but sometimes it feels as if there's only a couple of thousand personalities, since we keep running into the same archetypes over and over again.

It's the same with WoW players -- particularly bad WoW players. We even have names for some of them: ninja, drama queen, lootwhore. Today on Encrypted Text, we'll be discussing some rogue-specific types of bad players, including their plumage, distinctive mating calls, and where to spot them in the wild.

The Clumsy Rogue

• Identification: This rogue missed out on the stealthy part of playing a stealth class. Whether it's breaking crowd control by misclicks, walking into mobs while stealthed, or simply falling off a cliff/bridge/elevator/stairwell into a group of angry murlocs, this rogue is the equivalent of a ninja walking around in hobnailed boots. With a cane. Banging on cymbals. I'd say I'm a bit of a Clumsy Rogue myself, and my guildmates would probably agree as soon as they run back to their bodies
• Mating call: "Oops. Just let me die! Just let me die!"
• Habitat: Any instance that requires moving around the edge of things, moving outside a certain radius, or not running directly into your teammates (Gruul.)

The Fearful Rogue

• Identification: This rogue is the polar opposite of the Clumsy Rogue. Instead of being inept at stealthing, he's good ... too good. As in he doesn't want to ever come out of his hiding place. This rogue stealths to every fight, only starts attacking when the mob's been tanked for about thirty seconds, and vanishes the moment the mob even looks in his direction. He's also conspicuously absent during buffs and screenshots. There's a nice hybrid of the Clumsy Rogue and the Fearful Rogue out there that likes to stealth past mobs to explore, and then suddenly walks into something and pulls half the instance
• Mating Call: "I thought I was getting close to pulling aggro."
• Habitat: The Blackwing Lair suppression room, and doing any quest that requires you to just pick up objects hidden in caves/camps/nests.

The Look At My Crits Rogue

• Identification: This guy (and it almost always is a guy) is very, very into his crits. He stacks crit rating. He has an addon that tracks his highest crits. He may even have an addon that plays an annoying sound, like the Mortal Kombat "FINISH HIM!", whenever he crits. Sure, his hit rating is abysmal and he sucks on the DPS meters, but that doesn't matter to this guy.
• Mating Call: See title.
• Habitat: Dueling people in front of Ironforge/Orgrimmar, never raiding because his hit rating is lower than Death Valley.

The Prima Donna Rogue

• Identification: This rogue feels that she is the star around which the guild revolves. She considers herself the most skilled player in the guild, and most deserving of raid spots, good items and constant attention. If she's not number one on the damage meters, she will make excuses for her performance, and will often ask officers (if she's not one herself) to bend rules for her. Eventually, she will get fed up and make a dramatic /gquit the moment anything goes wrong or progression slows down even slightly, and hop to a new guild with her tales of mistreatment.
• Mating Call: "Whatever would you guys do without me?"
• Habitat: Any major raiding guild with fast progression. This happens in every class, but it's funniest in rogues -- a prima donna main tank or top healer kind of has a point, but there are millions of rogues out there salivating for a raid slot.

The I Only Do DPS Rogue

• Identification: I've never seen this rogue myself, but it's a pet peeve of one of my rogue mentors. Some rogues take the "Rogues have one job and that's to DPS" stuff on the forums a little too seriously, and therefore refuse to stop DPSing to do anything else. This rogue might as well have only three buttons: Backstab/SS, Slice and Dice, and Rupture, because those are the only three he uses. He won't feint or vanish because they're wastes of energy, doesn't know how to COS out of magic, refuses to kick and interrupt vital spells, and (of course) would never deign to bandage himself.
• Mating Call: "Can't someone else interrupt the spells? I never have enough energy to kick, and it's distracting."
• Habitat: Wiping your group on High King Maulgar, Shade of Aran, or Magtheridon.

The HEAL ME Rogue

• Identification: Once upon a time, I was in a guild with a skilled but rather young rogue. This rogue constantly badgered the healers to heal him, even when it was a tough fight and they were having enough trouble keeping up the tank. Amazingly, he also tended to die on trash mobs a lot more than every other rogue. A couple months after I noticed this, he was doing the "HEAL ME" thing again (this time in a private chat channel) when a druid told me why he died so often. Apparently, he had told a feral druid during a guild BRD fun run that he didn't need the Hand of Justice because "druids can only heal." That, combined with his incessant cries for heals, led the druids to make a pact never to heal him. And since druids were mostly the guys who healed rogues on trash, he died a lot.
• Mating Call: "What are the healers doing back there, looking at porn?"
• Habitat: Any instance group, from 5-man to 40-man.

The Theorycrafting Rogue Who Failed Math

• Identification: This rogue has come up with a spec/gear/playstyle choice that isn't accepted by the majority of rogues, and has decided to defend it with an onslaught of numbers. When other rogues point out a common-sense reason why his scheme won't work, he comes at them with a gaggle of equations and then calls them morons. However, he has made some sort of basic calculation error that invalidates his whole premise. The quintessential example of this is a fairly progressed guild I've heard of where every single rogue dual-wielded Blinkstrike, because one of the rogue leaders had a malformed idea of how valuable the proc was.
• Mating Call: "It's not my fault if you aren't able to comprehend my work."
• Habitat: Almost exclusively rogue forums.

The But I Might Respec Rogue

• Identification: This rogue is specced for swords. No, wait, maybe maces. Ooh, that's shiny -- how about daggers today? Basically, she's a rogue-specific version of a lootwhore. She claims any and all purple weapons, whether or not there's another player in the raid who it would be a big upgrade for. If she's using daggers and a nice sword drops, she'll roll, since she was "only daggers until a good sword dropped" -- even if there's a sword rogue in the raid. Wash, rinse, and repeat for any other weapons. She'll also take feral druid gear and hunter ranged weaons. The worst instance of this I've ever heard, although it may be apocryphal, was a rogue who rolled on an axe because "rogues can use axes in the next patch."
• Mating Call: "Why is everyone getting upset? It's better than what I'm using right now."
• Habitat: Your Kara raid, waiting in the shadows for Malchazzeen.

Do you know of any interesting rogue archetypes? Tell us more!

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