Rogues have always been the premier interrupters of World of Warcraft. Back in the day, druids and paladins didn't have any interrupts, much to their chagrin. Warriors couldn't interrupt from Berserker Stance, which left them unable to interrupt effectively. Up until recently, death knights and monks didn't even exist. Shamans have been valuable in the past with their short-CD interrupts, but the main job of locking down a target always fell to the rogues.

Rogues have been tirelessly interrupting spells since WoW's launch 8 years ago. Individual mobs use spells quite frequently. You're bound to find an array of dangerous casters in a dungeon. Interrupts have been a crucial raid mechanic from the days of Molten Core. Other players are also notorious for trying to cast spells at rogues. Kick has been a featured part of the rogue arsenal for years. So why has it failed to evolve alongside the other interrupts?

Our PvP gloves aren't cutting it

Rogues used to equip their PvP gloves when facing tough interrupt-drive encounters like General Vezax. Sacrificing a little bit of damage to ensure the raid's survival seemed like an easy call. Because rogues were the only efficient interrupters in the game for so many years, we're always tasked with the job. General Vezax, the Reliquary of Souls, and the Iron Council are all examples of encounters that hinged on a rogue's ability to keep a boss' spells under control.

Previously, our PvP gloves only lowered Kick's energy cost, but didn't eliminate it. With the latest PTR changes dropping Kick's energy cost to 10 energy, the gloves will finally make Kick free. I don't think that's going far enough. PvE rogues shouldn't have to use PvP gloves simply to do their job effectively, and PvP rogues should have the ability to use PvE gloves if they have access to them. Kick's energy cost is overly punitive and serves no real purpose in this new world of interrupt diversity.

Interrupts were homogenized, except for Kick

Blizzard made the decision to give every single melee class a reliable interrupt, and as such, rogues are no longer the only game in town. In fact, due to the energy cost of Kick, rogues are actually the worst interrupts you can use (after monks). I was surprised to learn that nobody else pays an important resource to use their interrupt anymore. I thought I was reading the tooltips wrong. Surely everyone else pays to interrupt, right?

Warriors can now Pummel from every stance for 0 rage, and they can also pick up a free AoE interrupt in Disrupting Shout. Death knights can use Mind Freeze for 0 runic power. Paladins have access to Rebuke, which only consumes mana and has no impact on their overall damage. Shamans are in the same situation, as Wind Shear only costs mana and can, in addition, be cast up to 25 yards away. Even feral druids, who usually mirror rogues quite directly, have a free interrupt in Skull Bash. Why are rogues left holding the bag?

Every Kick costs us damage

While it's quite complex to calculate our exact damage-per-energy, it's also simple to see that each Kick we use lowers our overall damage. We could've used that 15 energy towards another Mutilate or Sinister Strike. According to my napkin math, we're losing between 15k and 25k damage every time we use Kick. If we're using it on cooldown, that could add up to a 2-3% damage loss simply for doing our jobs. We're losing 20k damage every time we counterShadow Blast when facing Zian of the Endless Shadow. Every other melee class can do the same thing, and for free.

Rogues are now the worst option when it comes to picking an interrupter. Not only does our damage output go down when we use Kick, our reaction time can also be delayed since we need energy to cast Kick. If a quick cast starts just as you use a Sinister Strike or Mutilate, you could be left without enough energy to interrupt before it finishes. We're both less flexible and less effective when we're interrupting, which is a burden that only rogues are facing.

Remove Kick's energy cost

In a PvE environment, removing Kick's energy cost will have immediate upsides. Our damage will be increased on any encounter where we are interrupting. In addition, and more importantly to me, we'll be able to react quicker to spells since we're not waiting on our energy bar. There is no practical reason for Kick to cost energy in PvE, as it only serves to ensure that rogues are worse at interrupting than all of their competition.

In PvP today, Kick already costs just 5 energy for a rogue with PvP gear. On the PTR, Kick will be free if we're wearing our PvP gloves. It's still not fair. When a warrior uses Pummel to silence a priest, he doesn't sacrifice any of his damage to do it. In addition, not every rogue in a battleground has access to the PvP gloves and their Kick cost reduction.

Interrupting is one of the most important things that a melee class can do in PvP, and putting rogues at the back of the pack only serves to further reduce our effectiveness in PvP. I'm not saying that rogue arena representation will skyrocket overnight, but removing stupid roadblocks can't hurt.

I don't really see a way for rogues to regain the top spot when it comes to interrupting, and that's alright. Kick does lockout our targets for 5 seconds, and that is an important perk in PvP. In PvE, I understand the need for homogenization amongst interrupters, to ensure that rogues aren't strictly required for any encounter. I just don't want to be penalized for doing my job. How about we let homogenization work for us for once?

Reducing Kick's energy cost from 15 energy to 10 energy on the PTR is a good start, but it's still not quite there. No more half measures. Remove the energy cost from Kick (and Spear Hand Strike) like should've been done ages ago and call it a day.

BlizzCon will be returning in 2013, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. Speaking at a press conference at the Blizzard World Championships in Shanghai, China, Morhaime said that the Global Finals held this weekend in China will also be moved to next year's BlizzCon, presumably for the return of the Battle World Championship Series. No date has yet been announced.

In January, Blizzard announced that there would be no BlizzCon in 2012, due to the company's “jam-packed” schedule of getting Diablo III, WoW: Mists of Panderia, and StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm out the door. It was also to make way for its inaugural Battle.net World Championship Series, which saw over 30 national events and five regional events all over the world, culminating last weekend in China with finals for StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft.

Blizzard responds to a class action lawsuit over the game developer and publisher’s security methods.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against video game maker Blizzard, the creators of Diablo III, World of Warcraft, and Starcraft.

The lawsuit alleges that the company “fails to disclose to consumers that additional products must be acquired after buying the games in order to ensure the security of information stored in online accounts that are requisites for playing,” according to a press release from law firm Carney Williams Bates Pulliam & Bowman, PLLC. “This deceptive upselling, coupled with Blizzard’s negligence in maintaining proper security protocols, compromised millions of customers’ email addresses, passwords, answers to personal securityquestions, and other items of sensitive information.”

The suit, Benjamin Bell et al. vs Blizzard Entertainment, was filed in California earlier this week.

“Blizzard requires all of its customers to establish accounts with its online gaming service, Battle.net,” according to the firm’s Hank Bates, “but it fails to disclose to consumers, prior to purchase, that they’ll need additional products called authenticators to keep information stored in these accounts safe. Even though the company frequently receives complaints about accounts being hacked, it simply tells the customer to attach an authenticator to their account. Blizzard doesn’t inform people about this requirement when they purchase the game, and that amounts to a deceptive trade practice. Worse still, Blizzard has failed to maintain adequate levels of security for its customers, time and again, which led to a significant loss of private data in Blizzard’s safekeeping.”

Earlier this year, Blizzard confirmed that a security breach had occurred with the possible loss of customers’ personal data. Still, security breach or not, Blizzard says they find the lawsuit absurd.

“This suit is without merit and filled with patently false information,” a Blizzard spokesperson told me in an email, “and we will vigorously defend ourselves through the appropriate legal channels.

“We want to reiterate that we take the security of our players’ data very seriously, and we’re fully committed to defending our network infrastructure. We also recognize that the cyber-threat landscape is always evolving, and we’re constantly working to track the latest developments and make improvements to our defenses.”

Blizzard continues: “The suit’s claim that we didn’t properly notify players regarding the August 2012 security breach is not true. Not only did Blizzard act quickly to provide information to the public about the situation, we explained the actions we were taking and let players know how the incident affected them, including the fact that no names, credit card numbers, or other sensitive financial information was disclosed. You can read our letter to players and a comprehensive FAQ related to the situation on our website.”

Blizzard also disputes claims that the Authenticator is required to achieve a minimal level of ccount security.

“This claim is also completely untrue,” according to Blizzard, “and apparently based on a misunderstanding of the Authenticator’s purpose. The Battle.net Authenticator is an optional tool that players can use to further protect their Battle.net accounts in the event that their login credentials are compromisedoutside of Blizzard’s network infrastructure. Available as a physical device or as a free app for iOS or Android devices, it offers players an added level of security against account-theft attempts that stem from sources such as phishing attacks, viruses packaged with seemingly harmless file downloads, and websites embedded with malicious code.

“When a player attaches an Authenticator to his or her account, it means that logging in to Battle.net will require the use of a random code generated by the Authenticator in addition to the player’s login credentials. This helps our systems identify when it’s actually the player who is logging in and not someone who might have stolen the player’s credentials by means of one of the external theft measures mentioned above, or as a result of the player using the same account name and password on another website or service that was compromised. Considering that players are ultimately responsible for securing their own computers, and that the extra step required by the Authenticator is an added inconvenience during the log in process, we ultimately leave it up to the players to decide whether they want to add an Authenticator to their account. However, we always strongly encourage it, and we try to make it as easy as possible to do.”

More to come as this story unfolds.

As critical as I’ve been about the always online requirement in Blizzard’s latest IP, Diablo III, their response to the security breach earlier this year was handled very well. They were open and communicated the issue quickly and effectively to players, and worked hard with law enforcement to figure out what happened. All companies, including banks and online retailers, face security issues similar to the ones Blizzard faces.

Nor does it strike me as very likely that Blizzard’s optional security authenticators will be grounds for legal action—after all, they have no legal obligation to offer these to consumers to begin with.

I admit to being very skeptical of this kind of lawsuit. While I believe consumer protection issues are important, I also think voting with one’s wallet is a better route to take than legal action, especially when it comes to something like video games.

The suit’s plaintiffs seek damages and to prevent Blizzard from “tacking on additional, undisclosed costs to ensure security in the form of a post-point-of-sale Authenticator.”

The suit also demands that Blizzard no longer require Battle.net accounts for any game that’s not an MMO.

This might be a good idea, but it’s not the sort of thing I want to see enforced through litigation. Businesses need to be able to craft their own business plan, even if that means signing up for an online account.Perhaps Blizzard ought to make its Authenticators free of charge—the app versions already are—but there is no way that the service ought to be enforced by a court.

Consumers are free to shop elsewhere, or to play games that have no similar requirement made by companies who they believe offer better security.

The spell hit table is actually quite simple: the dice behind your character's stats roll to see if you hit or miss, and then roll again to see if you critically strike. There's no seeing if the mob dodged, parried, or blocked you. If you can see them in line of sight, you could possibly hit them. Things can absorb your attacks, however, and reflect your spells.

You probably learned as you were leveling that very first time that you missed some of the time, and you missed more often against higher level mobs. There is a natural miss chance for a spell to hit based on level difference. The point of hit rating on gear is to cover this gap so you never miss.

Spell hit in Mists of Pandaria

One twist to hit in MoP is the inclusion of expertise rating as spell hit. This allows a warlock to reforge an item that already has hit on it into expertise rating, which adds more spell hit. It also allows as warlock to take advantage of specific racials when wielding the correct main-hand weapon.

The caps are different for PvP and PvE activities. In endgame PvP, it's assumed that you're going up against players of the same level as you (6% hit). In PvE, it depends. Heroic 5-man mobs are considered to be +2 levels (12% hit); raid bosses are considered +3 levels (15% hit). Challenge modes have raid-level bosses and do not adjust the spell hit of a character in the ilevel changes.

How much rating is that? In previous expansions, the hit rating grew with the gear ilevel, and scaling helped keep the percent the same. So you got oddly specific numbers like 1742 rating for your hit cap and freaky decimals for 1% (102.47), since it had been the same 17% raiding hit cap since forever. In MoP, the hit chance was redone, so now we have a more memorable number like 5100 for the hit rating cap and it's 340 per 1%.

The hit cap is a hard cap; that is, any rating over the cap does nothing extra for you. The main headache about spell hit is due to the hard cap fact. Soft caps -- like haste plateaus -- are points where "this much" rating is highly desirable, but going over will still provide benefit, if less importantly.

Should I cap my hit?

The short answer? Yes.

The long answer? Being hitcapped guarantees that every damaging spell you complete a cast for will, barring absorption, deal damage. So to put it simply, missing hit is possibly missing damage done, and you should cap your hit as best you can.

But I can recast the spells I miss! Sure you can. But wait, do you see that floating combat text there?

That's a soul shard wasted because your Haunt missed. That's your Soul Swap only applyingUnstable Affliction and Corruption because Agony missed. That's Agony or Doom falling off because you tried to apply it at the last second and you missed. That's your Wrathguardmissing because he inherits your hit percent. That's your 500k Chaos Bolt doing zero damagebecause it missed.

But I see top warlocks with ~12% hit? First, the Armory is not displaying spell hit gained from expertise correctly. If you look on your paper doll sheet in game, your spell hit will correctly show for its percent value as your hit rating plus any expertise rating you have. Second, make sure the warlock in question is wielding an expertise-racial weapon to make up for the missing hit.

An excellent example is Gobuchul, aka Zakalwe from the warlock Elitist Jerks forum. As of writing, his hit rating is 4334; add in 428 expertise rating to get 4762 rating, which when divided by 340 (1%) is 14%. He's an orc, which has the expertise racial for wands, and he's wielding a wand, which counts for the fist weapon of the Axe Specialization racial. Thus, even though the Armory says he's at 12.75% spell hit, he's actually hit capped.

But I gain 400 DPS from extra X stat by reforging under the hit cap! Ask yourself this: am I at that level of play where 240,000 damage over the course of a 10-minute encounter is going to matter? (Honestly.) Would you gain more DPS from adjusting your spell performance than from adjusting your gear for a 0.5% DPS stat gain? (Probably.)

Now, this doesn't mean you need to be super precise about the hit cap. I think being within a reforge or a hybrid gem of the hit cap is an OK under-cap number to be at. At least then you tried to make it work.

Is hit interesting?

Is it interesting for tanks to balance threat (hit/expertise) with survivability (dodge/parry/block)? Maybe. I know some tanks take pride in how much DPS they can put out while also surviving the huge hits to the head. Others simply don't care.

Is it interesting for healers to balance mana regeneration (spirit) with throughput? Mana regeneration is a comfort thing, which can vary from healer to healer, but I think they all eventually end up at around the same number per class.

Is it interesting for damage dealers to balance hit rating? If you're under hit cap, you "lose" because you need more of it. To paraphrase Ghostcrawler, if you're over cap, you still "lose" because now you have useless stat sitting around. There is seemingly no win scenario unless you manage to hit that Goldilocks number that is the hit cap. So no, it's not interesting for damage dealers because it's not fun to balance.

Is hit a necessary stat for damage dealing gameplay? In World of Warcraft, yes.

In games like Guild Wars 2, you can physically move your character out of the way of a spell or a melee attack. Similarly, your character can misfire by facing or aiming in the wrong direction. There's no real point to a "hit" stat there, and indeed, Guild Wars 2's Precision stat for necromancers is more like critical strike for us WoW warlocks.

World of Warcraft, on the other hand, is still an old-school game at its core. We're just getting into moving while casting, and my Drain Soul will still channel as a target moves out of range or line of sight. Our gameplay is still very much rooted in invisible dice and our paper doll stats rather than in the animated space our characters occupy. So we still require a paper doll stat to counter our phenomenal cosmic powers.

Spirit and expertise

The spirit-to-hit change was a mistake. Now that it's here, there really is no solution that won't upset some major portion of players involved.

Holy paladins don't really care since they're the only intellect plate users anyway, and mistwalker monks might not care since the other two monk specs look for agility leather. Caster druids and caster shaman think it's a cool thing since it allows them to share caster DPS gear with healer gear instead of trying to gain two different sets.

But the duality of spirit as both a healer stat and a DPS stat runs into problems when you look at the cloth armor class. Removing spirit as a hit stat puts priests back at the difficulty of gathering two different sets for healing and DPS. Trying to fuse spirit and hit into one stat will increase the competition on gear to everybody. Whatever happens now will royally annoy half the clothies.

I also don't like expertise as spell hit. It's not as angering as a healer offspec needing on that hit gear you need for your pure DPS play, but it's still not a great solution for making hit interesting.

I don't enjoy having to open my melee stat pane to find my expertise rating number so I can add it to my spell hit rating number to make sure they equal out to the hit cap number. (The spell hit percent may update correctly in-game, but I do most of my gear management out-of-game with the Armory, which does not update correctly.) The racials-to-weapons spread doesn't make it better; at least draenei have it easy in that they always have that extra 1% hit instead of having to remember exactly which weapon is their race. Expertise as spell hit is more reforging leeway, but it's also more work to double-check myself when min-maxing my character.

We don't need more ways to express spell hit or mana regen nor even a fusion of the two stats, but a more efficient bridge between healer gear and caster DPS gear. I'd like to see what happens with destruction's Chaotic Energy and haste as the tiers go by and whether that could apply to healer mana regeneration. Then we'd just be left with the original predicamentby Ghostcrawler: is hit an interesting enough stat to keep defending?

This expansion is the first one where "perfect" cuts (which are about a 10% proc rate when you're cutting a green quality gem) are blue quality, and even though they have different names, they have identical stats as blue quality gems. People still don't generally know this, and will sometimes skip over the perfect cuts when they're gemming new gear, but over time it will become more commonly known that there's no difference between socketing, for example, a Perfect Delicate Pandarian Garnet or a Delicate Primordial Ruby.

If you're an enchanter, you may have noticed that the price for the common materials has gone way down, and if you're a jewelcrafter, you're probably wondering what to do with all the green quality gems you get from prospecting, as well as potentially looking wistfully at the profit margins on some of the really desirable research blue cuts.

For a while during the Mists of Pandaria launch, the most profitable thing you could do with these green quality gems was to turn them into enchanting materials, however now this might feel like a lot of work for not a lot of money. For example: three green gems make agreen BoE jewelery piece that will disenchant into 1-8 Spirit Dusts or 1-5 Mysterious Essences, averaging out to just over 5 dusts (assuming you're eventually trading dust up for essences). If the price of dust is 5g, that's pretty good. It's much more likely, though, that the price of dust on your realm will be something like 1.5g. It's not even worth disenchanting at that price -- that green will vendor for just under 9g. Even if the price of enchanting mats is high enough for you to choose to disenchant the greens you'll still have the logistical hassle of trying to manage inventory.

Perfect cuts

The blue quality gem cuts can only be obtained through daily research or using 3 Spirits of Harmony, which can usually be put to a much better use. This research is by color, so if you're looking to get the very popular Vivid Wild Jade cut, you might be unlucky and only get it on your 18th day of research. This may be one of the reasons that perfect cuts, which can be procced off trainer-learned cuts, were designed to be as good as blue cuts. You don't have to wait to get into that market, you can simply cut a stack of Alexandrites into an average of two Perfect Vivid Alexandrites. The 18 normal quality cuts it takes to make two perfects generally won't sell in anywhere near the volume you'll produce them in, but they vendor for 17g a stack.

Another part of the shuffle that perfect cuts can help in is meta transmutes. The orange, purple, and green blue quality gems it takes to transmute the meta Primal Diamonds are often worth more as part of a meta gem than they would be cut. Orange, purple, and green perfect cuts are a very good way to get this part of the market without sacrificing some meta gem production.

Addon challenges
If you use an addon that integrates your crafting and auctioning (like TradeSkillMaster), you'll have trouble with perfect cuts. While you can manually search for a perfect cut to see what the expected price would be, it's a very manual and time-consuming process to search for every single possible cut you could make. Also, unless you have a good memory, you're going to have to keep notes on the ones worth crafting. Luckily for us, there's a website that does this for us!

If you go to the Undermine Journal, click on your realm unless you've already set that up, click the header "crafted" and then the subheader "Jewelcrafting", you will be sent to your realm's Jewelcrafting page. The part we're most interested right now is The Gems Array. Each of these tables represents the prices for a certain color of gem. For example, this image shows the uncut, perfect cut, and rare cut prices for all the ways you can cut a blue gem. If you hover over a price, the tooltip shows you the exact item you're seeing.

While this may tell you exactly what items are being posted for, it doesn't tell you what price they'll sell for. I doubt many people are willing to pay more for a perfect cut than a rare cut, so long as the stats are the same. Still, it gives you a nice way to know which cuts to avoid all together.

With this information, you'll be able to queue up the cuts you want in your addon (or just do them with the normal UI). If you use TSM, you'll want to ensure that the green cuts are enabled in your tradeskill settings, and once you have the perfect cuts in your bags, you'll have to separately and manually add them to your auctioning groups. All of the amazing integration that TSM has for non-procced cuts and crafts are, so far, not working for perfect procs. Still, you only have to add each perfect cut to a group once.

Of all the 5.1 news that's been released so far, some of our favorite changes and additions involve battle pets. The first is the introduction of new rarity stones that will make your poorly statted yet hard-to-find pets better. Even cooler than that, Blizzard is introducing anentire new set of battle pets into the game as rewards for killing old world bosses.

Today we'll focus our attention on the three ghoulish gifts that drop off bosses in Naxxramas. These creepy undead come with a variety of suitably spooky abilities, and all promise to fit well into many competitive battle pet teams. Undead are one of the best types in pet battling, due to their powerful passive self-resurrection ability and that they're super-effected by critters, one of the worst types in the game. I'm hoping that this trio of terrible terrors might cause us to start seeing something other than Lil' K.T. and Landro's Lichling in PVP pet battles.

How to consume friends and alienate people

Stitched Pupling drops off Gluth, the third boss of Naxxramas' abomination quarter. Despite his terrifying visage, this pup is more of guard dog. While we don't know his approximate stats yet, we do have an idea of his moveset (though no knowledge of which column the abilities fall into). He has two self-heals in Plagued Blood and Consume Corpse. Plagued Blood also gives him some nice utility for your next pet to switch in on, and Consume Corpse's large heal combined with this pup's undead nature guarantee a prolonged war of attrition will be needed to take him down.

This is good, because Rabid Strike's damage buff to your opponent will make sure your Stitched Pupling is taking some hard hits. If it can be combined with Howl, it will also guarantee your next attack is suitably painful. Diseased Bite is a standard damaging attack, and it will hit hard with both Rabid Strike and Howl up. Flurry is a mediocre move, especially as I'm guessing Stitched Pupling is lacking in the speed department. It's only real use will be against aquatic pets that will resist Diseased Bite.

Most likely, you'll only be able to have one of the damage debuff spells, one heal, and one attack. If that's the case, my pupling will be using Diseased Bite, Rabid Strike, and Consume Corpse, to prolong his life while dealing out considerable pain.

Not your average highly-poisonous mushroom creature

Fungal Abomination borrows a few moves from the moveset of one of my favorite pets, theSporeling Sprout. He drops off Loatheb, the end boss of the plague wing, and has moves that are suitably mushroom focused. Like his Stitched Pupling friend, Fungal Abomination looks to be like a tank, with access to both Absorb/Consume and Leech Seed. While I doubt he'll be able to use all three of these abilities at once, it would make him one of, if not -the-, strongest self-healing battle pets.

Creeping Fungus is his standard damaging ability, and synergizes well with a stall team that uses Celestial Dragon. In fact, Fungal Abomination on any team that can keep Moonlight up will be ridiculous. Spore Shrooms and Stun Seed round out his moveset. I don't hate these moves, and they'll probably work well given his apparent ability to stay alive long enough for their bloom effects to happen, but they don't thrill me either. They're some nice utility to add to the mix.

Just like Stitched Pupling, I'm going to assume Consume/Absorb won't be usable together; nor will the two seed abilities or Creeping Fungus/Spore Shrooms. With that in mind, I'll likely try to maximize self-healing with Leech Seed and Absorb (or Consume-they're interchangeable), and try to fit some solid damage in with with a Moonlight-buffed Creeping Fungus.

Spiders. Why does it always have to be spiders?
Leveling up my first pets to 25, spiders were my least favorite pets to encounter in the wild. Their self-healing combined with some high damage was frustrating at best and crippling at worst. Now, dropping off Maexnna of the Arachnid Quarter, comes the Giant Bone Spider. In my opinion, this is the best pet of the bunch, combining a spider's awesome moveset with undead typing for a beautiful end result. Unlike the Pupling or his Fungal friend, I'm going to guess this spider won't be a tank.

First off, this pet is a critter killer. While critters might do super-effective damage to this undead, he can retaliate with Poison Spit and Sticky Web to make sure they die first. That moveset can be round out with Leech Life, ensuring he stays alive during the critter-infested leveling process. Death Grip is great for calling out weak pets, and Bone Bite is your standard attack ability. Siphon Life rounds out the moveset, but without supporting moves or a large health pool the heal-over-time effect won't be more useful than Leech Life.

At endgame, however, I think this spider will best be used to cull the weak. My assumption is that the two healing abilities won't be able to be used together, nor will Death Grip/Sticky Web and the two generic damaging attacks. When an opponent hides his hurt DPSer behind a tank with group heals, your undead spider can use Death Grip to pull him out, Bone Bite to lay the hurt on him, and Leech Life to keep herself alive until the switch. And, if rooted and unable to switch out, Leech Life and her undead passive will help ensure this spider spooks the enemy into submission.