But apparently some rogues think otherwise.

Quite frankly, they’re wrong. I would post this on the forums, but I’d rather do it here.

So let’s do a line by line on their reasoning shall we?

1) I rarely get focus fired in 5vs5

Any strategy that relies on the stupidity of your opponent is a terrible one. Despite the fact that a good percentage of the WoW population is not proficient in PvP and never will be, there is a sizable portion of the community that does in fact, have a brain stem.

It is not always the best strategy to kill the healer. In many cases, the healer is more durable then the DPS classes (ie: holy\disc priests and holy\prot paladins). Thus, it is sometimes highly effective to go after the DPS classes and squish them, crippling the other team’s damage and thus, rendering the match a mop-up. It is in your best interest to stay alive as long as possible should the enemy team decide to curbstomp you.

2) I’m an offensive class. My job is to do DPS. I’m not built to take damage.

You’re not doing any DPS if you’re eating dirt. Dead Rogues Do No Damage. However you need to say it, engrave this in your brain.

The fact that you can’t take damage well makes it even more important that you load out on stats that keep you alive.

3) Resilience doesn’t do me any good because I have lots of escape methods.

Yes, you have escape methods. . .

But at best, they provide half-decent coverage. Evasion only works against melee for 15 seconds and is on a five minute cooldown. CloS works for 5 seconds and is on a one minute cooldown. Vanish is not going to stop the damage from coming, especially if the warrior that is trailing you is smart enough to slam either of his pbaoe fear or snare.

Your escape methods as a rogue are on significant cooldowns, don’t last long enough to make a serious difference, or cover all the bases. To get anything resembling full coverage, you have to blow multiple cooldowns at once. In other words, you should not, and cannot rely on them to save you. And speccing prep is no solution either. I’m not going to fully explain why 30\o\31 is a sub-par 5vs5 team spec. Any build that relies heavily on positionals in this kind of situation is just asking for trouble.

4) Resilience sucks. It doesn’t do its job well. I’d rather have more stamina.

With the way crit and AP is scaling these days, an additional 400 hp or so is not going to save your life. Even another thousand isn’t going to do you that much good. Especially when you’re wearing leather. Not eating the crit is going to save your life. People who argue that the 5% crit debuff is so small to be useless are missing the point, and the fact that resilience also lowers how much damage a crit will inflict on you. It’s not going to be an IWIN stat, but its certainly better then nothing.

Furthermore, if you’re eating the MS from the warrior, more life isn’t going to do you much good anyways. Having an inbuilt damage mitigation is going to do you much more good in that situation. It’s seductive to believe that more life always equals a good thing, since you can see the effect it has on your character immediately, while resilience is more in the background. You can’t really point out a moment and say “HAH, resilience just saved me there!”.

5) I need more damage to do my job better. If I drop one person and die, I did a good thing.

WRONG.

You are not going to drop someone like some kind of anime ninja. Especially not as you start to fight better teams. People do have reflexes, and your damage output is not difficult to curtail, or even heal through.

Melee damage is weak in that the class that relies on said damage needs to get close to his target to do his magic. When there are so many snares\roots out there, its not hard to keep a melee class slowed down. Which means your defensive dispellers have to watch you extra carefully to get those off you.

Getting resilience is not nerfing your ability to do damage. Not staying alive long enough to do your job does. You didn’t do your team much good if you died period.