I made my way through the first steps of the legendary dagger quest over yesterday and today. I pickpocketed Hagara last night, paid the guy in Stormwind to charge the ring, and today I went to Ravenholdt and did my business there.
I thought the epic daggers were as good as mine.
I got to Gilneas and did the whole stealth run through the city. It was a good challenge. I chose not to look at any online guides and figure it out myself. Solving the puzzle was good fun, if not a little frustrating. It took about an hour and a half of trial and error until I found a good path. More than once, I would get to a safe spot 2/3 of the way through and think, “I wish there was a save game function.”
Finally, I stood in the courtyard with Creed. You have to kill this guy solo, which includes not only dishing out damage, but avoiding damage, self-healing, and using your stuns and interrupts. You’d think that all of these would be easy mode for someone who has played a rogue for as long as I have (six years).
Not so fast.
I am strictly a PvE rogue. I don’t PvP *at all*. As a result, there are a number of rogue abilities (Combat Readiness, Gouge, Dismantle) that are not even on my button bars because they are not useful in raiding. I don’t think I have used Gouge since Burning Crusade. I certainly don’t have the survival habits that are second nature to PvP rogues. My bandages and healing potions are not easily keybound, for example.
In addition, I am play an assassination rogue almost exclusively. My assassination rotation comes almost as easily as breathing. Of course, that’s the spec I chose to use in the fight.
As assassination spec I didn’t even come close. In several attempts I never got him below 50%. Without the Improved Recuperate talent my self-healing couldn’t keep up with his damage.
I switched to Combat, which I am not nearly as practiced with. Right away, on my first try in this spec I got him below 20%. Improved Recuperate helped a lot. Still, though, I could not interrupt consistently and had a hard time avoiding his damage.
Eventually, my gear was all broken. I was frustrated and annoyed. Its not that I wanted it to be easy. I was annoyed knowing that a lot of rogues would find the fight easy because they practice these skills all the time in PvP. In the end, I had to completely rearrange my button bars and keybindings for this one fight to have better access to my various interrupts and damage avoidance.
In the end, I succeeded. I did have to hearth back to SW to repair, and then re-do the stealth run through Gilneas. I flasked up and got Well-Fed and pre-potted before attacking. I have an iLvL of 381, so it should have been a lot easier than it was.
Someone will read this and say that I suck as a rogue. I would disagree. In my opinion, I am very good at my job, which is doing massive sustained damage, especially to single targets. I’m not so good at doing the things that I am never called upon to do in raids, like stunlocking and self-preservation.
This is not a complaint. It was a good challenge, and it took me a couple of hours all-told. I’m only writing this to say that it won’t be easy for everyone, no matter how much rogue-ing experience you may have. Don’t go into it thinking that it will be a cakewalk.
Forever a Noob - A WoW Rogue Blog 
I adored the entire Credd quest line, to the point that I’m going to do something I’ve never done before and post on the official suggestion forums saying “please, more stuff like this, please, please”.
FWIW, I managed to complete it using an Assassination rogue. The secret seemed to be NEVER missing an interrupt or ability dodge, stunning him with any spare combo points that I wasn’t using to keep Recuperate or SnD up, and cycling all my mitigation cooldowns. I suspect the fact my other major character right now is a tank came in very handy.
But yes, it’s a bit of a challenge to suddenly completely change the way you play. By the time I did it – and like you, it took about 2 hours, not counting the stealthing section – I’d pretty much redesigned my bars from the ground up.
It was a lot of fun. I especially liked the stealthing part, even though at times it made me want to throw my mouse across the room.
I also like that I was able to do it solo. There was another rogue working on it at the same time as me, and he was shocked when I didn’t accept his request to group up. He could not fathom why I wouldn’t want to make it super-easy by teaming up on saps and distracts and then on fighting Creed.
I loved the Creed quest line, too. No idea what the Credd questline was 🙂
lol
Likewise, I really enjoyed the Creed quest line. It’s one of the most fun things I’ve done as a rogue since stealthing for the Kara key fragments in BC and I would love to see more of it in the game.
It took me close to 40 mins to do the stealth part. I went in pretty gung-ho to begin with and quickly learnt that it would take a more considered approach. In the end I just concentrated on finding those “safe” zones where you could wait in between the pats and would spend several minutes studying the pathing movements of the mobs before making a move to the next safe zone that I could see. I started off in combat spec but soon switched to subtlety for shadow step and found this made a big difference.
When it came to Creed himself, I was lucky. Another two rogues had made it to Creed at the same time and together we made short work of him. Nevertheless, I could tell that I would have definitely had a bit of trouble with him had I taken him on solo.
The stealth was so much fun. There is the shorter path you can take to Creed by swimming across the river to the stairs, but I felt like it was cheating. I made a point of succeeding by going through the main part of the city once. Then, when I had to re-do the stealth after hearthing to repair, I allowed myself to take the shorter route, knowing that I could do the longer path if I wanted to.
Look forward to doing this on my Rogue and I am attempting to avoid guides or spoilers as well. I will read your post in full after I’m done. 😛
Combat readiness is damage reduction, which is useful in raids, gouging the add pounding on the healer is useful in raids, disarming the add pounding on the offtank is useful in raids and, of course, interrupting is often essential as well.
Maybe you should try getting used to your new bar layout and keep it for raids as well, straight damage dealers are a dime a dozen, players who can control encounters beyond their inherent role are not.
Combat readiness reduces damage from incoming ranged and melee attacks. Other than Rageface, I don’t think I recall being attacked in any raid in this expansion.
There was a time that I used to try and save the healers if they were being attacked. Inevitably, my tanks would taunt the add off the healer long before I got to him. Besides, nowadays tanks have infinite threat, so there is almost no way the healers pull aggro.
Interrupts can be done with Kick and with stuns. I have yet to find a raid encounter that has so may interrupts that I need more than those two things. If I had to go to a third interrupt, it would be Blind. Gouge is way down the list.
I’m not going to deny that there are times when that stuff might be useful. However, those times are few and far between and, for me, not worth using precious keybinds for.
It’s phased, not instanced, so you’re able to assist other rogues on that portion of the quest. A guild mate and I duoed him after failing separately. I guess we should say we went 3 on 1, since a horde rogue showed up and assisted, which resulted in him getting credit too.
I definitely wanted to do it myself. There was another rogue working on it while I was, but I would have left if he got to Creed at the same time as me, so that we wouldn’t be able to work together.
I didnt read all the comments thus far, but I will tell you how I did it.
1. Subtlety spec w/ imp recuperate-and userecuperate up the whole fight.
2. you must absolutely have the BLIND GLYPH. Blinding creed and bandaging without your poisons breaking blind is important.MAKE SURE YOU LET BLIND FULLY RUN ITS TIMER BEFORE YOU REENGAGE HIM AS THIS BURNS UP YOUR CDs TIME.
3. use all your stuns, especially kicking his casts.
4. food/flask before fight. have plenty of bandages.
5. This is a stamina fight not a burn him down fast fight, so be calm and patient he will die.
I’m hoping to see this fight soon, but I’m planning on staying as an Assassination rogue. I have a specific build ( http://www.wowhead.com/talent#ffIf0sGzoGobhZ0h:qkVfmi ) that I use for solo’ng content that should hopefully work. That is, once I actually get a ninja invite into my guild’s normal 10 man to pickpocket Hagara … and after I scrape together 10k gold again (upgrades through LFR have bankrupted me … I’m a non-raider =)
Finally got a chance to read your post as I was avoiding doing so until I got Creed down. I have to say this quest line was a lot more fun than the one for Dragonwrath (Legendary Staff). I wish I could recall them but there were several lines of dialog that made me laugh out loud.
It was also tons of fun sneaking through Gilneas sapping and distracting its inhabitants along the way. I have always played Combat as I love the play style so that was the spec of choice for me. First try was 50% while I was at work where the network has a lot of lag so I used the time to figure out a strat and arrange my bars in the most optimal config for me.
I got home and after a bit of work got him down. I was sad it was over which was totally not the case when I killed Thyrinar. I was in ilvl 378 gear and it probably would have been a bit easier in a little better gear but that problem was partially solved when I got those sweet daggers. 🙂
Hi All!
Well I managed to get Creed down all by myself over the Christmas holiday weekend. Knowing that I wont have a chance to do this again (nor did I want to, lol) I had my encounter recorded using fraps. A friend put it all together for me. This is my run through from stealth to Kill with no annotations or captions saying what I did. It took me a couple days to master this but I had a lot of fun doing this. Anyway I just wanted to share my experience with creed and I’m glad no other rogues came around wanting help…this is a lot more rewarding if you do this solo.
Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RibmwROZmhc
Thanks for discussing this Dinaer!