Rogue Legends: Interview with Neilyo

Hey Neil, thanks for accepting my invitation. This interview is very special because I want to offer my community a surprise along with my farewell movie. Even though you have quit long ago, you still have a lot of fans, especially in the TBC community, and I know they will be delighted to hear you talking about your TBC Rogue experience…

How did you start playing rogue?

When I first started playing WoW, I asked my friend who I started playing with, which class he thought I should play. He told me he thought I’d like rogue or maybe some other class (i don’t remember which one it was) and I asked him about the differences between the two classes he recommended., When he told me about the playstyle and how rogues did a lot of combo moves, I thought that it sounded really cool and fun, so that’s how I chose to play the rogue class, and when I started playing it, I knew that it was the right choice.

How did you figure that rogue was your perfect class ?

I first discovered how strong the rogue class could be when I was leveling and would world-PvP every chance I got. I saw that if I executed my combos perfectly, even if I was low health, I could still win many times. I even loved world-PvP so much that I usually levelled with a PvP build in case I ran into any people. This was before arena came out…

What makes you feel the rogue class was magic?

Rogue is such a unique class, because their toolkit allows for and promotes a lot of finesse. This is why I think rogue PvP videos are often some of the most popular PvP videos again and again.
Rogues are very much duelists and combo heavy. There are so many different combos and variations of the same combo, and interesting mechanical exploits, which gives each rogue player a lot of freedom to choose what sequence to use at any given time.
Because of this, playing rogue feels really rewarding when you execute an intricate combo smoothly and, a lot of times, this ends up making you reach a flow state and that’s such a wonderful feeling. Also if a high rated arena match comes down to 1v1, you better hope that your one person alive is a rogue that knows how to duel.

Would you share memories of TBC with us?

I have a lot of fun memories of TBC times:
Everyone was so excited when server transfers were opened up and most of the serious PvP’ers transferred to BG9 and Tichondrius. Seeing so many gladiators outside in Durotar was just awesome and it became a proving ground for new transfers.
The game was still novel for most people at this time. The initial excitement around arenas was still very strong.
I remember coming to Tichondrius. I think we got rank 1 on the server I came from but it was small and easy. When we started playing arenas on BG9, we found that our team composition wasn’t good enough; we had to run one of the best team compositions for a rogue to compete and this was when the real competition started. It was great.

What was your favorite tricky rogue move?

My favourite tricky rogue move was probably vanishing a blind or anything that had no travel time. Because this was the hardest to do since blind or other abilities with no travel time were instant. You didn’t have time to react, you had to do everything based on intuition, anticipation, and predicting the enemy, getting in their head.

I also loved blinding rogues out of vanish, because people always thought they just got unlucky with the timing. They’d think like “If I vanished a little bit sooner I’d have vanished their blind”.
But then when you did it to them again and again, they would realize that you got in their head.
I remember seeing vanishing blind happen accidentally and thought to myself maybe it can be done intentionally.
I usually knew when the enemy rogue wanted to blind, I could also stunlock them and intentionally give them a small little window to blind in between the stunlock to make it even more predictable: that’s when I started testing it out.

What about RNG?

Haha, I remember the most frustrating thing in TBC was rng of course, particularly mace stun because warriors were so common.
I remember losing some high rated matches because my druid got mace stunned two times in a row. –laughs.

What would you answer to people saying that you were too much of a defensive player?

I never liked to label my playstyle because I never tried to play a particular style, really. I just tried to figure out what was the best style for the current situation. The best style could change at any time when the situation changes. So it’s best to be flexible and ready to change your style at any moment. But oftentimes, properly playing defensively could give you control over the flow of the match until you can get everything lined up with your teammates for a perfect swap.
A lot of the times the most skilled plays were also defensive ones because when you are aggressive, you usually just use all of your abilities on the one person you’re attacking, but when you’re playing defensive, you may need to cc two or even three enemies at the same time.

Do you rewatch your videos sometimes? What’s your favorite movie of you?

My favorite one of my own TBC videos to watch were the dueling ones. Rogue versus Rogue was just so pure. It was what pushed rogue to the limit for me and helped me discover every deep mechanic the class had.