Post new topic   This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies.    Refugees Of Azeroth Forum Index -> Melee Class Discussion
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Cyverion
Officer

user avatar

Joined: 21 Feb 2009
Posts: 41

Send private message
Reply with quote

re: Rogue Thread 3.2: Lemme Axe You Somethin'

0
Okay, thread's up and in workable condition. If there's anything you want to get added in, or any changes you want to suggest, just ask. I'll be around and keeping an eye on the thread for any suggestions.

Revised for 3.2 with updated information. Here are our changes:
3.2 Patch Notes posted:
After much quiet contemplation, rogues now possess the ability to learn how to use one-handed axes.
Talents
Combat, Sword Specialization: This talent is now called Hack and Slash and applies to axes as well as swords.
Subtlety, Shadow Dance: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute. Now lasts 6 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Rogue races
3. Poisons
4. Gear, stats, gems, and enchants
5. Weapons
6. How to level to 70
7. Leveling 70-80
8. Endgame builds
9. Useful macros
10. Links

Second post: Talent Review

1. Introduction
The Rogue is the primary melee damage dealer in the World of Warcraft. Historically, we've been a major force to be reckoned with in both PVP and PVE. As of now (patch 3.2), this is still the case - with rogues being among the top DPS in many PVE boss fights and still quite powerful in PVP.

Rogues use a unique Energy system for their resources instead of Rage or Mana. Using most special abilities expends Energy, which regenerates at a standard rate, both in and out of combat (although it can be modified by talents such as Vitality). Rogues also build a second resource on the target when using their primary special attacks (also called CP Moves or CP Builders) called Combo Points -- if you've ever played the Assassin class from Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, you probably have some idea of how this works. These combo points are then used by finishing moves to amplify or extend their effects.

However, the Rogue isn't for everyone. We can only do melee damage. We have no significant ranged attacks, no magic spells, and no pets. We are very lightly armoured and have weaker defenses than most other classes. We have no real self-healing abilities, and no real passive utility (although we now pack a real punch with Tricks of the Trade and poison buffs like Savage Combat). We do make up for these deficiencies with powerful damage, high magical avoidance, and a large amount of control over our opponents -- but most importantly, we're a hell of a lot of fun to play.

If you enjoy the idea of slipping out of the shadows and killing your enemies before they have a chance to fight back, the Rogue class is for you. If you enjoy doing lots of melee damage (and nothing else), the Rogue class is for you. If you enjoy having lots of control over a fight, the Rogue class is for you. But if you want to heal, tank, or DPS from range, look elsewhere.

2. Rogue races
Rogues can be human, dwarf, night elf, or gnome on the alliance, and undead, orc, troll, or blood elf on the horde.

Alliance
Human: One of the better rogue races. Humans get slight expertise with swords and maces. Humans also get Every Man For Himself, which acts as a clicky pvp trinket (shares cooldown with the buyable one) and is the main reason they're my favorite race - this effectively allows you to equip two dps trinkets . Lastly humans get 10% more reputation from everything which is fantastic, period.
Dwarf: Stoneform is an excellent rogue ability, allowing you to wipe off all bleeds, poisons, and diseases on a short cooldown. Bleeds have always been our bane, since you can't effectively Vanish while bleeding, but being able to remove rogue poisons and death knight diseases is also very handy. Also you can track treasure, which is usually pretty pointless.
Gnome: The main thing is Escape Artist, which frees you from a snare or root effect on a medium cooldown. A pretty good, utilitarian racial that gives us more mobility.
Night Elf: Night elves have become one of the better rogue races recently. Shadowmeld being usable in combat means that nightelf rogues have a Vanish that actually works.

Horde
Undead: My second favorite race after human. Undead have Will of the Forsaken, which when used breaks fear, charm, and sleep effects. For this reason, an undead rogue is the bane of any warlock or priest. The undead also get Cannibalize (consumes a dead corpse to regenerate health), which will lower your downtime a lot when leveling.
Orc: Orcs are a good PVE race. They have Blood Fury, which temporarily boosts your AP by a not insignificant amount, basically consider this a free AP trinket (with the added bonus of pissing off your healers!). They also have Hardiness, which slightly reduces the length of any stun on you. New in 3.2 Rogues can use Axes, and Orcs get free expertise when wielding an axe (equivalent to humans with swords or maces).
Troll: Trolls are another decent PVE race. Berserking increases your haste temporarily, and it stacks with Slice & Dice and Blade Flurry. For PVP, trolls have the Voodoo Shuffle, which passively reduces the length of any snares applied to you.
Blood Elf: Blood Elves make the best caster killers. Arcane Torrent silences any enemy around you for a couple seconds which can be absolutely lethal if used well and returns some energy to you at the same time. Additionally, while most races have a small amount of passive spell resistance to one school of magic, blood elves get 2% passive resistance to every school of magic.

3. Poisons
At level 20, rogues can get a quest from their trainer allowing them to use a variety of poisons. They can be purchased at any shady dealer (usually hanging out by rogue trainers) and some general reagent vendors, and have various uses. Once you learn how to use poisons they should always be on your weapon. Poisons ignore armor, get stronger as you do (since a few patches ago, they scale with your AP) and have the ability to crit.

New in 3.1 is that Instant and Wound are now on a proc-per-minute system, instead of the flat percentage chance to apply that they've been in the past. The PPM is based on the speed of the weapon: Essentially, this means that you will get the same amount of poison procs from a fast weapon as you get from a slow one. It makes valuing weapon speed for poison application meaningless, except that you should be using a fast offhand for quick reapplication of Deadly if you are mutilate, and a fast offhand for pvp specs without Deadly Brew for reliable application of Crippling.

There are some interesting things that Assassination does with Deadly Poison, for more information see the Master Poisoner talent in the talent review.

Instant Poison deals a flat amount of direct damage. Your standard, no-frills poison.
Deadly Poison applies a debuff to your opponent that deals damage over time, stacking to five applications. Generally used for bosses, since it's strong sustained damage that takes a while to get going. The Envenom finisher uses your Deadly Poison stacks to deal some (unmitigated by armor) burst damage to the enemy.
Wound Poison deals an amount of direct damage, as well as applies a debuff that decreases healing done to your opponent by 50%, making this the de facto PVP poison, but because of its high proc rate, is also used by Combat PVE.
Crippling Poison slows your target by 70% of his normal speed, making this the strongest snare in the game, and your other crucial pvp poison.
Mind-Numbing Poison applies a debuff that increases your opponent's cast time on his spells by 30%. A decent PVP poison, but 30% isn't really anything to write home about, so people usually ignore this one. It also does not stack with other cast-time-increasing effects such as Curse of Tongues.
Anesthetic Poison acts exactly like Instant Poison with a few caveats: It does less damage, it doesn't apply any threat, and it dispels any Enrage effects off the opponent. It doesn't dispel the enrages you'd particularly want it to either (Bestial Wrath or Bladestorm). Basically not worth using except in very rare situations, like Gluth, or dueling a warrior I guess.

In general, you will be using different poisons for different situations.

PVP: If you are not Assassination specced (most likely subtlety) you will be using Wound mainhand and Crippling offhand. No questions. If you are Assassination specced, though, you will have the Deadly Brew talent, which applies crippling to the target on successful application of most other poisons. You will be using Wound in the offhand, and either Wound, Mind-Numbing, or Deadly in the mainhand. Wound in the mainhand likely adds the most amount of sustained damage. Mind-Numbing in the mainhand helps control casters slightly better. Deadly in the mainhand should only be used in very rare cases and only if you know exactly what you're doing (it is relatively poor damage and precludes you from blinding or gouging your opponent), but it can help protect your wound/crippling from being removed by a dispel-happy druid, shaman, or paladin.

PVE: Instant mainhand, deadly offhand if mutilate, wound mainhand deadly offhand if combat.

4. Gear, Stats, Gems, and Enchants
Rogues can use daggers, swords, maces, fists, throwing weapons, bows, crossbows, and guns. You start out knowing daggers and throwing weapons, but to learn any other weapon skill (which you should do asap) you will need to visit your city's weapon trainer - ask a guard where he is.

Rogues can use Cloth and Leather Armor. Cloth is functionally useless for us so you will be always using Leather.

Your gear comes with useful offensive stats. Our primary stats, in no order, are Agility, Attack Power, Critical Strike Rating, Hit Rating, Expertise, Haste, and Armor Penetration.

Here is a vague guideline to what each of these stats does.

Attack Power directly increases the damage you deal with all attacks, from your autoattacks to your special moves. Different moves use different AP formulas which you can find on the internet if you care. AP affects everything you do, and is one of the best stats to stack.
Crit increases the chance you have to deal double damage (or more with talents) on an attack. Some moves, like Rupture or Deadly Poison, cannot crit (though our new T8 bonus allows Rupture to crit). Crit helps us out a lot with throughput (Sinister Strike glyph, Focused Attacks, Seal Fate, etc) and with damage (Prey on the Weak, Lethality, etc), and is a very powerful stat as a result.
Agility is a base stat that adds 1 AP and a small amount of crit, as well as some dodge and armor. The amount of crit it adds is nowhere near as much crit rating will give you, though, and so it starts off weaker than other stats at max-level (although with Ulduar gear and the 4T8 bonus, can pull ahead).
Hit decreases the chance of an attack missing an opponent. At zero hit rating while dual wielding, you have a 5% chance to miss on your special attacks (8% when fighting a raid boss) and a much larger chance to miss on your white damage. At level 80, you need 99 hit rating (with Precision) to not miss your specials. You need 315 hit rating (with Precision) to not miss poison attacks (which use spell hit mechanics). Any hit rating above this number only boosts your chance to hit with white attacks and therefore has much less effect on your overall DPS. This poison hit cap is reduced to 237 if you have a moonkin (specced into improved faerie fire) or shadow priest in the party, and reduced further to 210 if there's a draenei in your group as well. In PVP, where you usually don't put points into Precision, you need 164 hit rating to eliminate the chance of missing on a special attack. And of course, if you're Alliance and have a Draenei in your group, all these hit caps decrease thanks to their aura.
Expertise decreases the chance of an attack getting dodged, parried, or blocked by your opponent. A level 83 boss has a 6.5% chance to dodge your attacks, meaning you need 26 expertise (214 expertise rating) to bypass it. If you have 2/2 Weapon Expertise you only need 16 expertise (132 rating), and if you're human using swords/maces you only need 13 expertise (107 rating) to cap. You don't need to worry about parry since you should be behind the boss whenever possible you sneaky backstabbing madman.
Haste increases the speed of your autoattack. It doesn't do anything for your special moves. This can help proc talents like Focused Attacks or Combat Potency. The only thing Slice & Dice really does is give us 40% haste. This is not a particularly good stat I disagree. The brilliance of haste is that it amplifies the benefit you gain from every other stat. If you're attacking more times, that's more attacks to get benefit from AP, crit, ArPen, and hit.
Armor Penetration ignores some of your opponent's armor. When it first debuted in TBC, it was great. Then WOTLK came out and it became a horrible stat, but 3.1 buffed it significantly. Now, it's quite worth trying to accrue a good amount. In some situations, can be worth stacking (particularly if you are in possession of a Grim Toll or Mjolnir Runestone trinket). This stat gets better as you gain more of it, up to 100% of armor reduced.

Ultimately, Rogues are a very math-oriented class for optimizing our DPS, owing to the number of different stats we have to balance and how they affect one another. As a result, you'll often hear to "spreadsheet it" when asking whether something is an upgrade -- in other words, let an Excel spreadsheet do some modeling and calculations for you to see a theoretical DPS gain or loss.

Your stat/gemming priority for PVE varies based on spec and gear level. Consult a spreadsheet to know for sure, but will probably go something like this:
1. Hit until you are capped for special (yellow) attacks.
2. Hit until you are capped for poison (magic) attacks.
3. AP, Agility, or ArPen depending on which stat is best for you to stack at the time.

Since 5% hit rating is very easy to get in a PVE spec with Precision, and you'll probably have a fair amount of hit already on your gear, you will likely not have to gem for hit. As a result, you'll find you're not worried about what you're gemming and are just stacking power (red) whenever possible.

While we're on the subject, here's your metagem: Relentless Earthsiege Diamond. It's ridiculously powerful, and as a result, it makes any helm with a metagem very powerful, even when compared to some higher ilvl helms without one. It also means that you need to have at least one gem of every color in your gear at the time -- which is usually no sweat for a red and yellow gem, but typically means you have to sacrifice a bit of power on one of your gems to socket a purple gem to satisfy the requirements. Believe us though, it's worth it.

Because there are now epic gems, meaning there are three quality levels of gems to consider (four if you consider "perfect" uncommon gems), I'm not going to link them all in Wowhead. Instead, I'll give you the prefixes and what they mean:

Red: Bright (AP), Delicate (Agility), Fractured (ArPen), Precise (Expertise)
Orange: Accurate (Hit/Expertise), Deadly (Agility/Crit), Deft (Agility/Haste), Glinting (Agility/Hit), Pristine (AP/Hit), Stark (AP/Haste), Wicked (AP/Crit)
Yellow: Rigid (Hit), Smooth (Crit), Quick (Haste)
Green: Jagged (Crit/Stamina), Forceful (Haste/Stamina), Vivid (Hit/Stamina)
Blue: Solid (Stamina)
Purple: Balanced (AP/Stamina), Shifting (Agility/Stamina), Puissant (ArPen/Stamina), Guardian's (Expertise/Stamina)

tl;dr version: Typically, you'll fill the one blue socket with the best socket bonus with a purple gem, at least one yellow socket with a good bonus with an orange gem, and ram in as many red gems as possible.

Your stat/gemming priority for PVP is:
1. 5% hit rating
2. Whatever you want

I maintain that 5% hit is probably the most important thing you can have when going into an arena or battleground. Missing a Cheap Shot and coming out of stealth prematurely sucks. After that, you can stack AP for sustained damage, Crit for burst damage, Resilience for survivability, or Agility for a balance of all three. I personally prefer crit. Rogues who play mostly as Subtlety may want to stack AP (for Deadliness) or Agility (for Sinister Calling). Unless I'm mistaken, even though Armor Penetration has been buffed, it's not a good idea to gem it for PVP, due to its new (in WOTLK) percentage removal system and increasing returns of penetration. If you're really interested ask about it in the thread but I doubt anyone cares.

Enchants
Weapon: Berserking. Mongoose doesn't proc as much at 80 as it used to, so I'd use 50 AP or Accuracy for middle of the road weapons, or a weapon chain for a pvp offhand.
Head: Arcanum of Torment from Ebon Blade revered.
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Axe from Sons of Hodir exalted, or the inscription one if you didn't want to grind rep with those jerkfaces in Dun Niffelem.
Gloves: Crusher if you're not an engineer, or Hyperspeed Accelerators if you are!
Chest: Powerful Stats, or Super Stats for a much cheaper alternative if you don't care about min/maxing for an extra 2 agility and 2 strength.
Cloak: Major Agility, or Shadow Armor for pvp, or the tailoring one if you have tailoring for some reason
Bracers: Greater Assault, or the leatherworking one
Legs: Icescale Leg Armor, or its cheaper leatherworker-only variant
Boots: Icewalker is the most powerful statwise, but modeling shows that runspeed is usually worth picking up, so Cat's Swiftness/Tuskarr's Vitality if you don't have Fleet Footed. If you're an engineer, you can go with Nitro Boosts, depending on how much you value a 5 second sprint on a 3 minute CD against a normal passive run bonus
Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle allows you to ram an extra red gem in your belt
Ring: Assault, if you're an enchanter

5. Weapons
Other than base stats and weapon damage per second (higher stats are better, higher dps is better), there are two things we look at when choosing weapons: Damage Range and Weapon Speed.

Damage range is the "X-Y Damage" you see when looking at a weapon's tooltip. This damage range determines the amount of damage put out with most of your combo moves (a combo move is any ability that increases your combo points, like Sinister Strike and Mutilate, but not Eviscerate). It's best to use an example: Remorse and Serilas, Blood Blade of Invar One-Arm have nearly equal damage per second (dps) in the tooltip. However, Serilas has a damage range of 325-605 while the Remorse has a damage range of 187-349. This is because the Remorse autoattacks much faster - this is useful for other classes, but not us rogues. Whenever you use Sinister Strike, a number is taken your mainhand's damage range for damage calculations, meaning that combo moves from a Serilas are nearly twice as powerful as combo moves from a Remorse.

Weapon speed is not directly important, but through inference can be much more useful to look at than damage range. A "slow" weapon is classified as one 2.4 speed or higher, and a "fast" one 1.6 or lower (for daggers, a slow weapon is around 1.8, and a fast one is around 1.4). For the most part, the damage range of a weapon will rely entirely on the weapon speed. Assuming there isn't a significant item level difference, slow weapons have a much higher damage range than fast ones. For this reason, you should only mainhand slow weapons.

Fast weapons also have a use in rogue mechanics, but these are usually only preferable in the offhand. For PVE, the talent Combat Potency in Combat and the talent Focused Attacks in Assassination grant significant energy regeneration when using faster weapons. Fast weapons should only be used in the offhand because the increased energy from mainhanding one is not as strong for dps as the increased yellow damage from mainhanding a slow weapon. Fast weapons will also build a stack of Deadly Poison more quickly, as DP hasn't been changed to the PPM system yet. For PVP, the faster your offhand, the less energy Shiv costs, but we don't use shiv that much anymore so it doesn't matter as much as it does in pve. Also in PVP, if you aren't offhanding Wound or Instant (like, if you were subtlety and were offhanding Crippling), a fast offhand will apply more Crippling procs since that poison hasn't been hit with the PPM change.

A good general rule for any pve build is slow mainhand, fast offhand. There are some exceptions, especially with pve assassination and extremely high end weapons, and with pve subtlety, but if you are at this level you probably know what you are doing. Pvp mutilate may want to strongly consider a slow offhand for slightly higher burst. If you have questions about what weapons to use I encourage you to consult a spreadsheet or ask in this thread.

Note that new in 3.1, the speed of your weapon does NOT affect how much overall damage you get from IP/WP, since poisons have been changed to a PPM system. A slow weapon will proc the poisons more, a fast weapon will proc poisons less, but the overall damage will be the same for both. This changes weapon choice in pve assassination from fast/fast to slow/fast.

TL;DR: The optimal configuration is slow mainhand fast offhand, all specs.

6. How to Level to 70
The tried and true tree that rogues have been leveling with for years is combat, and prior to level 50, this is still pretty much the case (Assassination doesn't pick up its signature move until 41 talent points can be accrued at level 50, and Subtlety is just ... odd at low levels). If you're level 50 or above and aren't really enjoying the combat playstyle (or are just bored and want to shake things up), I definitely recommend picking up assassination. While combat is arguably best equipped for smooth leveling, assassination and subtlety can be a lot of fun, and Outland and Northrend love to give daggers as rewards for quests, whereas Combat can sometimes be left out of quest itemization. However, go with whatever's the most fun for you.

You have two choices when leveling. You can either go straight down the tree to the bottom, or you can pick up the two crucial five-point talents in the other trees. These talents are Malice, Dual Wield Spec, and Relentless Strikes; they all provide very very large benefits at the cost of not being able to get talents in your primary tree as quick. It's your choice, and remember you can always respec if you're 5 points away from a really great talent in your base tree.

Feel free to throw in Malice/DW Spec/Relentless Strikes at whatever level you please. I recommend Malice and DW as soon as possible, while Relentless can wait until you start regularly engaging in fights where you use a finisher more than once a fight. The last couple tiers of talents for all trees are particularly bad, especially for leveling, and should probably be avoided.

Good leveling glyphs: Mutilate/Sinister Strike/Hemorrhage (depending on spec), Eviscerate (always good), Vigor (if you have it), Evasion (for elites), Blurred Speed, Safe Fall. I also find that Glyph of Slice and Dice can be useful when leveling, as it allows a 1-point SND finisher to last the duration of your average mob.

Combat Leveling
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0xZMgVo0cxqru0xRtx without Riposte
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#f0xZMgAz00xqru0xRtx with Riposte
Riposte is our most energy-efficient attack, slows your target's attack speed by 20% for 30 seconds, and has the passive bonus of increasing the size of your penis by 50%. The drawback is that it can only be used after _you_ parry the _opponent's_ attack. This means that in solo PVE and in many PVP situations, it's amazing. Unfortunately, in group PVE situations (where you're typically not the one being attacked) its usefulness drops (although the passive penis bonus is quite nice).

You're now level 70. Playing as combat is like playing a barbarian. The tree is characterized by strong sustained damage, plenty of energy, and not much else. Your standard soloing rotation is SS, S&D, SS until dead, maybe throw in an eviscerate at the end if you have 5 points up, while watching to see if your riposte key lights up (if you specced for it). You will want to have a slow weapon, like a sword, fist, or mace, in your mainhand (feel free to change the weapon specialization in the build to whatever weapons you have handy, but swords are likely most prevalent in Old Azeroth. The weapon specs all add a roughly equal amount of dps), and a quick weapon in the offhand (once you get Combat Potency). If you get adds, hit blade flurry and maybe adrenaline rush and watch them die really fast.

Subtlety Leveling
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=f0xZ0xZe0cdIhzdAzVcot

Grats on 70. This is a hemorrhage leveling build. You will probably want to spec into Improved Sinister Strike until you are high enough level to take Hemorrhage. Playing as sub is like being a ninja. The subtlety tree is characterized by very powerful openers from stealth and very high survivability and mobility, but poor longterm damage. Your soloing rotation is Stealth, Cheap Shot, (whatever finisher), Hemo until dead. You will frequently have 5 combo points right off the bat after opening, and from there you can kidney shot, eviscerate, slice & dice, whatever you please. Like combat, you want a slow mainhand (offhand speed doesn't particularly matter). Do not mainhand a dagger.

Leveling as sub daggers is possible (in which case just take all the ambush/backstab talents instead of the filler pvp stuff) but a gigantic pain in the ass since you're completely helpless if something goes wrong or if you get adds, so I very strongly do not recommend it. If you do decide to level that way for some reason, make sure you get the gouge glyph.

Shadow Dance isn't actually a very useful talent for leveling, so feel free to skip it. Great for world pvp though!

Assassination Leveling
http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=fGgcoeMoVMoGzZ0xZxbcbh

Assassination is the only tree where you can level with daggers and not feel stupid. I wouldn't recommend speccing primarily Assassination until level 50, when you can get Mutilate. Playing assassination is like playing as an assassin The tree is characterized by very strong burst damage, combo points out the ass for frequent finishers, and high poison damage. I ventured down into Subtlety because you're ultimately aiming for Dirty Deeds and Initiative, which synergize extremely well with the mutilate playstle, and because the last two talents of Assassination are completely useless for leveling. Mainhand a slow dagger and use whatever offhand - your offhand speed doesn't really matter when fights are over in 5 seconds.

7. Leveling 70-80
Here is a quick guide on how to level to 70-80. You have two options, combat or assassination. Sub is just not worth leveling as in Northrend - hemo doesn't do enough damage, backstab is a pain in the ass.

Combat: Start here. I would recommend continuing through Assassination for better CP management and more crit damage as you level. This is a kind of boring spec - though very efficient - just continue what you've been doing for the last 70 levels. You should end up with something like this.

Assassination: Start here. 70 is a good time to respec assassination, and don't worry if you don't have any good slow daggers, there are a few nice ones off beginning Northrend quests. Head down through subtlety - Improved Ambush and Initiative make things extremely fast. Once you get Dirty Deeds, you will be dropping mobs almost instantly: CS, mut, evis, mut again if they are still alive somehow, move to the next mob. This should be where you end up.

Some recommend leveling Assassination from 70-80, and I'm going to recommend doing it as Combat (partly because I'm a contarian asshole, but mostly because I like having cooldowns available to burn on elites or multiple mobs, like Adrenaline Rush and Blade Flurry). Northrend has items of all kinds available in the starting areas, just look on Wowhead to see if there's something good you want.

After reaching 80, it's time to head to the rogue trainer so you can try out one of the many...

8. Endgame Builds
Here are the accepted cookie cutter builds. Your aim as any PVE build is mostly to keep up slice & dice and rupture for as much as possible, while throwing in Eviscerates or Envenoms depending on spec. Don't let S&D fall. While low CP S&Ds are fine if you need to refresh it quickly, using any other finisher at 3 or lower combo points is a waste of energy. Your aim as any PVP build is generally to use an opener from stealth and then improvise.

PVE Combat 15/51/5 or 7/51/13
Editor's note: I think you'll find that 15/51/5 is the best. The gear threshold at which it surpasses its 7/51/13 cousin is very low, and you have to "waste" a few talent points in Sub to get down to Serrated Blades. Spreadsheet it to be sure, but I default to the former.

Floater points: The one point in Endurance can be put anywhere. If you do not use a fist mainhand then you can change the weapon spec for sword or mace spec, however, Close Quarters Combat is currently the strongest weapon specialization all else being equal (due to itemization, not necessarily due to intrinsic superiority). (The addition of melee haste to Lightning Reflexes has killed two weapon spec builds like fist/sword). In the 15/51/5 spec, you can substitute Improved Eviscerate for Ruthlessness if you find yourself having trouble maintaining rotations.

Glyphs: Sinister Strike, Slice & Dice, Rupture OR Sinister Strike, Killing Spree, Rupture. Glyphing Killing Spree reduces the cooldown on that ability to 1 minute 15 seconds, so if you're not having trouble maintaining a rotation with SnD, I suggest opting for the KS glyph.

Weapons: Any slow mainhand and any fast offhand. They must be the same type of weapon for purposes of weapon spec, so either two maces, two swords, two fists, or a fist and a dagger.
Another Editor's Note: It is possible that you may temporarily use an offhand weapon that is not of your spec's weapon type (e.g. using a sword offhand when CQC spec). This is typically only because you have a shitty offhand and drops are not cooperating with you (as is the case with my rogue). Again, spreadsheets are your best tool here when making this sort of judgment call.

Playstyle:
Forum Image

Yes bitches that's a flowchart. Start up the initial S&D however you want, garrote or one SS or anything. One thing I couldn't figure out how to convey in flowchart form is that if S&D drops at any time, you must refresh it immediately and start your cycle over. The basic idea is to keep up S&D all the time, keep a high rupture uptime, and Eviscerate if you get lucky with procs and have some extra time with both S&D and Rupture up.

Most rogues fall into an Xs/5r/5e rotation, where x is usually a number between 3 and 5. In other words, you'd sinister strike X times, slice and dice, sinister strike 5 times, rupture, and sinister strike 5 times, eviscerate, and repeat. Do some testing (or spreadsheet it) to find what rotation works optimally for you.

PVE Assassination 51/13/7
Floater points: Instead of Ruthlessness, you could take Vigor and Fleet Footed. Fleet Footed is very good for movement fights, especially since in 3.1 the DK's speed-enhancing Unholy Aura doesn't affect the raid anymore. Though I'm guessing it's probably better to get a runspeed enchant on your boots and just keep Ruthlessness. If you're doing a dungeon where there are no humanoids, giants, beasts, or dragons (like Naxxramas), you can take the points out of Murder for whatever you want - Quick Recovery or Fleet Footed are good choices. Finally, if you find yourself with an excess of hit and are having trouble keeping up S&D, moving a point from Precision to Imp S&D is a valid choice.

Glyphs: Mutilate, Hunger for Blood, Rupture

Weapons: The two highest DPS daggers you can find. Speed doesn't matter quite as much as it did before, because poisons being PPM means that you can use a slow dagger without compromising the bulk of your damage. If you have several daggers of the equivalent dps, use a slow one in the mainhand and a fast one in the offhand. If you have two slow daggers with high dps and one faster dagger that's slightly lower dps (e.g. two sinister revenges and a webbed death), it's probably better to offhand the quick one, but this advice is far from concrete. Judging your daggers can be quite tricky, so if you aren't sure then check a spreadsheet or ask in the thread.

Playstyle:
Forum Image

Hunger for Blood is now only one stack (down from three ), costs 15 energy (down from 30 ), and lasts one minute (up from 30 seconds ). Because Blizzard hates rogues, it also requires there to be a bleed on your target before you can use it. You need to start it up either yourself with a garrote, or wait for the raid's feral druid/warrior/hunter/other rogue to put up a bleed. If all else fails you can put out a 1 cp rupture or something but this is far from optimal. After that, put up a low CP Slice & Dice - hopefully this should be the only time during the fight you need to press S&D. After that, try to maintain a high rupture uptime while using envenom to refresh S&D (also as your filler finisher when the target is already ruptured). Use 4 to 5 CP ruptures/envenoms for the best result. As with combat, if HFB or S&D fall, immediately bring them back up - these are your #1 priorities - though if you play well S&D should be in no danger of falling. Don't overwrite Rupture with itself, if you have to just envenom again. The amount of deadly poison stacks you have doesn't appreciably affect the damage of envenom so feel free to envenom even if you only have 1 stack of DP up (or even eviscerate if you have zero stacks and need to refresh S&D/burn your energy, but this shouldn't happen often).

PVE Subtlety 8/20/43

Floater points: Almost every point in sub here is a floater point. The required sub talents are Relentless Strikes, Serrated Blades, Preparation, Dirty Deeds, Hemorrhage, Master of Subtlety, Deadliness, Hemorrhage, Premeditation, Sinister Calling, and Honor among Thieves. Everything else can be changed as you prefer. All talents in other trees are mandatory.

Glyphs: Eviscerate, Slice & Dice, Hemorrhage if you feel like it

Weapons: The bulk of your damage here is Eviscerate. Like all finishers, Eviscerate does not take your weapon damage into account, instead being based on a calculation involving your AP. Therefore it doesn't particularly matter what your weapon speeds are, just pick the highest DPS weapons you have. Fists and daggers are strongly preferred since they get the weapon spec bonus (you don't have enough points to get sword or mace spec).

Playstyle:
Forum Image

Stack your group with hunters, keep up S&D, mash your Eviscerate button. That's literally all there is to it. Honor Among Thieves takes care of the CP for you. If the CPs aren't coming in quick enough, you can Hemorrhage. The best classes for your group, in order of preference, are 1. Survival Hunter, 2. Enhance Shaman, 3. Blood DK, 4. Elemental Shaman, 5. Unholy DK.

Which is more PVE DPS, assassination, combat, or subtlety?
Subtlety has the potential for the highest raid dps, but requires a very specific group (and can be quite boring). If you mostly do 10 mans and heroics or your guild doesn't feel like catering raid groups to your every whim you should not spec subtlety. Combat and assassination are roughly equal with combat slightly beating out assassination, choose the one you have the better weapons for or the one you enjoy the most.

PVP Mutilate/Prep 41/5/25
Floater points: Improved Eviscerate, Ruthlessness, Lethality, Quick Recovery, Murder, Focused Attacks, Find Weakness, Master of Deception, Camouflage, Heightened Senses. Some of these are kind of stretching it, and if you're not very familiar with rogues, I would just use the linked spec.
Glyphs: Vigor, Eviscerate, Mutilate, Evasion, Preparation, Cloak of Shadows, Gouge
Playstyle: Generally thought of as our current strongest all-around pvp spec. Run around and Mutilate people, not much to say about it.

PVP Shadowdance Daggers 17/0/54
Floater points: Improved Eviscerate, Lethality, Master of Deception, Camouflage, Serrated Blades, Heightened Senses, Master of Subtlety, Waylay
Glyphs: Vigor, Eviscerate, Evasion, Preparation, Cloak of Shadows, Gouge, Ambush, Crippling Poison, Shadow Dance
Playstyle: Less popular in America than in other places, apparently. This is a lot more skill-intensive than any other pvp spec for two reasons: First, your main attack is Backstab. It does a lot of damage and crits a lot, but you need to be behind the target, which can be hard with all the snares flying around (luckily you have shadowstep to help out with that). Second, Shadow Dance is actually pretty damn difficult to use effectively (and unlike Bladestorm or Beast Within, we can be CCed during its duration, wasting our CD), but if used well can devastate your opponents. Thankfully 3.1 gives us a new action bar for Shadow Dancing. If you want to use it without thinking too hard just Ambush over and over for fairly reliable burst.

PVP Shadowstep Hemo 27/0/44
Floater points: Ruthlessness, Blood Spatter, Improved Expose Armor, Lethality, Quick Recovery, Master of Deception, Camouflage, Serrated Blades, Initiative, Heightened Senses, Master of Subtlety
Glyphs: Vigor, Eviscerate, Hemorrhage, Evasion, Preparation, Cloak of Shadows, Gouge, Crippling Poison
Playstyle: It's like what we used in the latter half of BC but rather weaker. Some people do very well with it, and I have to admit it's a whole lot of fun. Basically the same as the above spec, but trades Shadowdance for Cold Blood and your daggers for a big slow fist weapon or something.

9. Useful macros
Here's a list of useful rogue macros.

code:
#showtooltip Cheap Shot
/cast Pick Pocket
/stopcasting
/cast Cheap Shot
To make this work, you need to go into your interface options and turn auto loot on. What it will do is pickpocket something from your opponent as you open on them. This is the best way to level lockpicking and is a pretty mindless way to make extra cash even at max level. Keep in mind Pickpocket can be resisted, so doing this in dangerous areas might be bad. You can keep this on for PVP, other players can't be pickpocketed so you'll just get an error message as you cheap shot them.

code:
#showtooltip
/cast Deadly Throw
/cast [equipped:thrown] Throw; Shoot
Deadly Throws if you have a combo point, does a normal throw (or shoots with your gun/bow/crossbow) if you don't.

code:
#showtooltip Preparation
/cast Evasion
/cast Sprint
/cast Preparation
Burns all your abilities before using Prep. Since you're going to reset all the cooldowns anyway, you might as well run faster and dodge more for a few seconds. Sometimes a little finicky.

code:
#showtooltip Cheap Shot
/cast Premeditation
/cast Cheap Shot
With Premeditation having a 20 second cooldown since 3.0, there's little reason to remind yourself to Premed every time you open. Premed is not on the GCD, so this simply gives you two extra combo points on your target every time you open. Replace cheap shot with garrote or ambush as necessary.

Links
Elitist Jerks Rogue Forum: This site can probably answer any questions about rogues you have. The Pocket Guide to WOTLK is an excellent place to learn how to gear and play at level 80, though it seems a little out of date. This also has links to the most recent version of most spreadsheets.

Wow Loot - Rogue: Need a quick glance at what quest rewards and dungeon drops to pick up while leveling? This should be your first stop. This is a good place to find a wide variety of pre-raid gear.

Shadowpanther: Shadowpanther is a very good resource for any rogue who has questions about his gear, whether leveling or max level. It's like a light version of a spreadsheet, and has ranked lists of every piece of rogue gear. For serious PVE this isn't very accurate since the value of stats change depending on how much you have (that is, your stats are fluid in value; hit rating is worth a lot while you're under the yellow hit cap, and almost worthless after the poison hit cap), but for the majority of people - leveling, replacing their 70 gear, etc - it provides a much better estimate than simply eyeballing two items to compare them.

If you have any questions or comments and want to ask me for some strange reason (please do it, I'm so excited!) -- I play a rogue named Aeonwyn on Khadgar Alliance (and before that, another rogue named Miluda on Korgath Horde). I'll be happy to answer what I can, or point you in the right direction if I can't.

Major thanks to all the rogues who came before and aided in the creation of this above post (Lets Fuck Bro, Salt Block Party, and undoubtedly many others I'm forgetting).

3.2 Talent Review
Required means that the talent is mandatory if it fits with your spec. Obviously you don't want improved sinister strike as mutilate, or mace spec if you use swords, but talents like malice or dual wield specialization are useful for all specs.
Recommended means that it's an all-around good talent that you should probably pick up.
Optional means it's a potentially good talent if it fits with your playstyle.
Avoid means you should avoid spending points in this talent for any serious spec.

Assassination

Tier 1
Improved Eviscerate
Increases the damage done by your Eviscerate ability by 7/14/20%.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Required
Eviscerate is, in general, a great move. You use it often in PVP, and PVE combat and especially PVE sub use it as a primary finisher. Skip if you're PVE mut.

Remorseless Attacks
After killing an opponent that yields experience or honor, gives you a 20/40% increased critical strike chance on your next Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage, Backstab, Mutilate, Ambush, or Ghostly Strike. Lasts 20 sec.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Avoid
A really good leveling talent, but completely useless for any sort of serious max level play.

Malice
Increases your critical strike chance by 1/2/3/4/5%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
This has always been one of our best talents. Very utilitarian, but 5% crit is too good to pass up for tier 1.

Tier 2
Ruthlessness
Gives your melee finishing moves a 20/40/60% chance to add a combo point to your target.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Recommended
This is a very subjective talent. I love it for smoother cycles, some people find the randomness useless.

Blood Spatter
Increases the damage caused by your Garrote and Rupture abilities by 15/30%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Optional
Rupture is our strongest damage dealing finisher in terms of total damage output. Very good for PVE, okay in PVP, bad for soloing.

Puncturing Wounds
Increases the critical strike chance of your Backstab ability by 10/20/30%, and the critical strike chance of your Mutilate ability by 5/10/15%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Mandatory for any build that uses Backstab or Mutilate.

Tier 3
Vigor
Increases your maximum energy by 10.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Recommended
Definitely worth the point for PVP builds, especially with the glyph of vigor. For PVE, skip it, I know 10 more energy sounds cool but you will very rarely get a good chance to use it.

Improved Expose Armor
Reduces the cost of your Expose Armor ability by 5/10.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
Almost entirely useless. Expose Armor lasts 30 seconds, 10 energy off that isn't going to matter very much. It could see use if you have to keep up the Expose Armor debuff on a boss, but since it doesn't stack with Sunder Armor you rarely get a chance to use this in raids.

Lethality
Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your combo moves by 6/12/18/24/30%.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Optional
A combo move means any move that grants you combo points, like sinister strike. It sounds good on paper, but in effect it gives you very little benefit due to the odd wording ("damage bonus"). Many builds take this because there's nowhere better to put the points and its hard to argue with pure damage, but if you're making your own build for pvp or whatever this should be one of the first places to siphon points from.

Tier 4
Vile Poisons
Increases the damage dealt by your poisons and Envenom ability by 7/14/20% and gives your damage over time poisons an additional 10/20/30% chance to resist dispel effects.
PVE: Required | PVP: Avoid
Pretty bad now. It used to give all your poisons - as in, not just Deadly - 30% dispel resist which was extremely handy against druids, shamans, and paladins. Now it gives only deadly poison dispel resist, which is nearly useless. Maybe if you wanted to protect your wound or crippling or something from getting dispelled. It's mandatory for PVE, of course - poisons are a lot of damage for assassination builds - but this is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be for PVP.

Improved Poisons
Increases the chance to apply Deadly Poison to your target by 2/4/6/8/10% and the frequency of applying Instant Poison to your target by 10/20/30/40/50%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Avoid
A fairly mandatory talent for any PVE Mutilate build, where poisons comprise a bulk of your damage. For anything else, it's not necessary.

Tier 5
Fleet Footed
Reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15/30% and increases your movement speed by 8/15%. This does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Recommended
Mobility is a huge part of PVP and very useful in a lot of PVE, however, this talent does not help your damage in the slightest. It's situational, but when you need it, it is useful. For the last sentence: It does stack with Camouflage (giving you 100% movement speed in stealth), but not things like boot enchants or sprint.

Cold Blood
When activated, increases the critical strike chance of your next offensive ability by 100%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Great in PVP for reliable burst. A good move to do with this is mutilate when sitting at 0-1 combo points, which will give you 4 combo points. Not all that useful in PVE, but mutilate has no other offensive cooldowns, plus you need it for seal fate. Prep resets it, which makes for a very very potent combo if you use it twice back to back.

Improved Kidney Shot
When affected by your Kidney Shot ability, the target receives an additonal 3/6/9% damage from all sources.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
Situational and subjective. I don't like it myself, but some people swear by it for pvp, especially for multiple dps teams.

Quick Recovery
All healing effects on you are increased by 10/20%. In addition, your finishing moves cost 40/80% less Energy when they fail to hit.
PVE: Optional | PVP: Recommended
It's great for PVPing with a healer. For PVE, it's pretty rare that a finisher would miss, and you don't really have the points to spare for it unless you're obliged to skip Murder.

Tier 6
Seal Fate
Your critical strikes from abilities that add combo points have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to add an additional combo point.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Practically the trademark of the assassination tree. Helps a lot for constant application of finishers, though the majority of your damage is going to be your combo moves and your white autoattack. Get it.

Murder
Increases all damage caused against Humanoid, Giant, Beast and Dragonkin targets by 2/4%.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Recommended
Very situational, but on things it applies to is a very strong talent. 4% more damage is nothing to sneeze at. However, the damage bonus doesn't apply to anything in Naxxramas where everything is undead. Except Maexxna I think. I don't know what most enemies are in Ulduar, but I'm guessing there's at least one Giant. This does apply to all pvp targets except druids in treeform and metamorphosed warlocks.

Tier 7
Deadly Brew
When you apply Instant, Wound, or Mind-Numbing poison to a target, you have a 50/100% chance to apply Crippling poison.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Required
One of the best talents you can take for PVP, freeing up a poison slot for Crippling. Common combinations include mind numbing MH/wound OH to completely shut down a priest, or wound MH/wound OH if you want to deal more damage at the expense of not having mind numbing. You can even throw in deadly, if you want, to protect your wound/cripple from being dispelled. Allows you to Shiv on both a 70% snare and a 50% healing debuff in one move. Useless in PVE of course.

Overkill
Abilities used while stealthed and for 6 seconds after breaking stealth cost 10 less energy.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Not bad, though it'd probably fit better in subtlety. You need to take it though since it's a prereq for Mutilate.

Deadened Nerves
Reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
Not a horrible pvp talent, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don't have the points to spare this low without giving up damage. I find that the safety net it provides isn't all that noticeable.

Tier 8
Focused Attacks
Your melee critical strikes have a 33/66/100% chance to give you 2 energy.
PVE: Required | PVP: Optional
Our premier energy generation talent as mutilate. Applies to all damage, not just specials. If you're going this low in assassination, you'd be dumb not to take it. Not all that useful in PVP, but you might as well.

Find Weakness
Offensive ability damage increased by 2/4/6%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
It's a fairly weak talent, actually. Most of your damage is going to consist of autoattack, and this only applies to your specials. But again, if you're going this low, you should probably pick it up. I prefer taking this over Focused Attacks for PVP, though perhaps the promised less-bursty arena fixes will change my mind.

Tier 9
Master Poisoner
Increases the critical hit chance of all attacks made against any target you have poisoned by 1/2/3%, reduces the duration of all Poison effects applied to you by 17/34/50% and increases the bonus chance to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 15/30/45%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Avoid
The raid debuff portion does not stack with a ret paladin's Heart of the Crusader or an elemental shaman's Totem of Wrath. This talent has been redesigned in 3.1 to increase our DP damage, and is now a better choice in PVE than Turn the Tables.

Mutilate
60 Energy
Requires Daggers
Instantly attacks with both weapons for an additional 181 with each weapon. Damage is increased by 50% against Poisoned targets. Awards 2 combo points.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
This is the reason you went into assassination, the centerpiece of the entire tree. Easily our strongest spammable move, Mutilate hits like a truck. Use a slow 1.8 mainhand. Your offhand can be either fast or slow. Fast will grant you more Focused Attacks procs which is useful for pve dps. Slow will make Mutilate hit slightly harder which is good for pvp.

Turn the Tables
Whenever anyone in your party or raid blocks, dodges, or parries an attack your chance to critically hit with all combo moves is increased by 2/4/6% for 8 sec.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Avoid
This talent sucks just skip it.

Tier 10
Cut to the Chase
Your Eviscerate and Envenom abilities have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to refresh your Slice and Dice duration to its 5 combo point maximum.
PVE: Required | PVP: Avoid
This is an absolutely required talent for PVE. It completely changes your rotation. The way it works is that if you have S&D up, even a 1 point S&D, and you evis/envenom, your S&D automatically refreshes to its maximum duration. If you evis/envenom without S&D up then nothing happens. Don't take this in PVP.

Tier 11
Hunger for Blood
15 Energy
Enrages you, increasing all damage caused by 15%. Requires a bleed effect to be active on the target. Lasts 1 min.
PVE: Required | PVP: Avoid
It's very hard to argue with an additional 15% damage, making this a required talent for PVE if you have 50 points in assassination already. Do not take this for PVP. Your target needs to be bleeding before you can activate it. Classes with bleeds include rogues (garrote/rupture), warriors (rend/deep wounds), feral druids (pounce/rake/rip/lacerate), and hunters (I dunno, some pet thing).

Combat

Tier 1
Improved Gouge
Increases the effect duration of your Gouge ability by 0.5/1/1.5 sec.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
If you're going full combat you aren't going to gouge very much. Useful for picking up as other specs, particularly sub daggers, but most people just use gouge as a last-ditch spell interrupt rather than an actual crowd control due to its high energy cost and limited use. Note that with improved gouge, if you gouge an opponent in PVP and run away, you have a pretty good chance of dropping combat and being able to restealth without blowing a vanish.

Improved Sinister Strike
Reduces the Energy cost of your Sinister Strike ability by 3/5.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
If you use Sinister Strike, you are going to take this talent. This is your best use of talent points upon hitting level 10. If you do not use Sinister Strike, skip it.

Dual Wield Specialization
Increases the damage done by your offhand weapon by 10/20/30/40/50%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
Useful for every rogue spec. Your white autoattacks, no matter what spec you are, are a huge part of your overall damage. All dual wielders receive a fairly hefty penalty to offhand damage, and this does a lot to remedy it. This does positively affect the damage of the Mutilate ability.

Tier 2
Improved Slice and Dice
Increases the duration of your Slice and Dice ability by 25/50%.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Optional
Slice and Dice is our best PVE finisher. Optimally, it should always be active. This adds a substantial boost to S&D's duration, and should be taken with any PVE combat spec. Useless for a mutilate build due to Cut to the Chase. Slice & Dice is not a terribly potent ability in pvp, and its use is a matter of preference.

Deflection
Increases your Parry chance by 2/4/6%.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
Useful for mitigating damage while leveling, but at max level parry is not very useful at all. The only reason you'd take this is as a prerequisite for Riposte.

Precision
Increases your chance to hit with weapon and poison attacks by 1/2/3/4/5%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Optional
Hit isn't the best stat to stack anymore. That doesn't make this a very good use of your talent points for a dedicated combat build, since there's nothing better to put them in. Not that great in PVP if you're above the special hit cap, though if you aren't, this would be a good use of points. There's nothing worse than getting a missed cheap shot.

Tier 3
Endurance
Reduces the cooldown of your Sprint and Evasion abilites by 30/60 sec and increases your total Stamina by 2/4%.
PVE: Optional | PVP: Optional
This can be useful in conjunction with Improved Sprint for PVP, but if you're not PVPing as combat then this is just filler. The stamina boost is negligible.

Riposte
10 Energy
A strike that becomes active after parrying an opponent's attack. This attack deals 150% weapon damage and slows their melee attack speed by 20% for 30 sec. Awards 1 combo point.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Recommended
Awesome for leveling. Riposte is the best attack we have in terms of damage per energy, and now it even gives a combo point. Fairly bad at max level because you have to waste DPS points for solo viability, and let's face it, max level rogues don't have problems soloing. Very good for PVP, assuming you're fighting something that you can parry, and assuming you're actually PVPing as combat.

Close Quarters Combat
Increases your chance to get a critical strike with Daggers and Fist Weapons by 1/2/3/4/5%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
If you use fist weapons or daggers (don't go combat backstab, it would be for an offhand dagger only) then take this talent.

Tier 4
Improved Kick
Gives your Kick ability a 50/100% chance to silence the target for 2 sec.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
This doesn't get much use. In PVE, anything you would want to use it on will be immune. In PVP, kick already locks out whatever spell school you interrupt for 5 seconds. With many classes, this is more than enough. Several classes (paladins, druids, shamans) only have cast-time spells from one school of magic, meaning kick will lock out the majority of their spells. For classes that don't, you simply need to use kick intelligently: For example, don't use Kick on a warlock casting Immolate, since that'll only lock out his Fire school, giving him free reign to Fear you (a Shadow spell). I could see this getting use to prevent mages from blinking or something but you'd be better off saving your kick for actually interrupting a spell.

Improved Sprint
Gives a 50/100% chance to remove all Movement Impairing effects when you activate your Sprint ability.
PVE: Optional | PVP: Required
Of limited use in PVE, this is Combat's best PVP talent. Synergizes quite well with Endurance, giving Sprint a much shorter cooldown. Note that this doesn't make you immune to anything, meaning that you can Imp Sprint out of a root only to be rooted again half a second later.

Lightning Reflexes
Increases your Dodge chance by 2/4/6% and gives you 4/7/10% melee haste.
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
Redesigned in 3.1. 10% haste is nothing to sneeze at. That's like 1/4th of a S&D. I haven't pvped as combat since like mid-BC but I'm guessing this talent would be at least decent for sustained damage there.

Aggression
Increases the damage of your Sinister Strike, Backstab, and Eviscerate abilities by 3/6/9/12/15%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Pretty expensive, but you can't argue with plain old more damage. Take it. The Backstab part is vestigial, you should not be backstabbing as combat.

Tier 5
Mace Specialization
Your attacks with maces ignore up to 3/6/9/12/15% of your opponent's armor.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
This might be pretty decent now with the armor penetration changes, but I suspect that CQC is still the best weapon spec. Mace spec is, however, not leagues behind, so if you have some good maces you might as well take it.

Blade Flurry
25 Energy
Increases your attack speed by 20%. In addition, attacks strike an additional nearby opponent. Lasts 15 sec.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
One of combat's offensive cooldowns. It's one point, take it. Some cool combinations to do with this are killing spree or fan of knives in a group. It's worth using when off cooldown for single target boss damage due to the 20% haste.

Hack and Slash (Previously known as Sword Specialization)
Gives you a 1/2/3/4/5% chance to get an extra attack on the same target after hitting your target with your Sword.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
A very good talent if you use swords. Slightly worse than CQC, better than mace spec.

Tier 6
Weapon Expertise
Increases your expertise by 5/10.
PVE: Recommended | PVP: Recommended
Expertise can be a difficult stat to find on gear sometimes. This is a good talent. If you are dodge capped you can take another more fun talent since you don't really need to worry about parries in pve.

Blade Twisting
Increases the damage dealt by Sinister Strike and Backstab by 5/10%, and your damaging melee attacks have a 10% chance to Daze the target for 4/8 sec.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
This is a very welcomed change in 3.0. Previously, Blade Twisting was pretty useless, granting your SS a small chance to daze. It was designed this way to give a bit of synergy with warriors, whose heroic strike used to do more damage to dazed targets. But that faced of heroic strike was removed, making the talent more than a little vestigial. Now, it's become an excellent talent for both PVE and PVP.

Tier 7
Vitality
Increases your Energy regeneration rate by 8/16/25%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
This does a shitload to help out combat's energy starvation problem. You gain 1 extra energy for every 4 you generate normally. Take it.

Adrenaline Rush
Increases your Energy regeneration rate by 100% for 15 sec.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
Combat's other offensive cooldown. You need it because it's a prereq for surprise attacks, but you'd be tanking it anyway. AR is a staple of any combat build, able to provide significant burst on demand. New in 3.1 is that it now has a 3 minute cooldown, down from 5.

Nerves of Steel
Reduces damage taken while affected by Stun and Fear effects by 15/30%.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
It sounds like a great PVP talent, and for the stun part, it is. However, the mechanics of Fear make this arguably unwise to take. Fear has a higher chance to break automatically the more damage you take in it - it's rare that you'd ever sit in a full length fear. Taking this talent increases the buffer of damage you have to take before Fear breaks, ultimately making you sit in a Fear for a longer amount of time than if you didn't have this talent. Your call. 3.1 note: I don't know if the fear nerfs make this talent worthwhile, but it doesn't really matter because nobody pvps as combat anyway.

Tier 8
Throwing Specialization
Increases the range of Throw and Deadly Throw by 2/4 yards and gives your Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives abilities a 50/100% chance to interrupt the target for 3 sec.
PVE: Optional | PVP: Required
If you PVP as combat then it'd be a good idea to pick it up. I guess. I mean it's a very very good talent for PVP, but it's also at the bottom of the combat tree.

Combat Potency
Gives your successful off-hand melee attacks a 20% chance to generate 3/6/9/12/15 Energy.
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
This remains one of our best energy regeneration talents. This talent is the reason why you use a fast offhand for combat builds. Fast weapons obviously hit more often, and the combat potency effect is a straight-up chance (not a proc per minute sort of thing).

Tier 9
Unfair Advantage
Whenever you dodge an attack you gain an Unfair Advantage, striking back for 50/100% of your main hand's weapon damage. This cannot occur more than once per second.
PVE: Avoid | PVP: Optional
A nice leveling talent, but at max level isn't that great.

Surprise Attacks
Your finishing moves can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Sinister Strike, Backstab, Shiv, Hemorrhage, and Gouge abilities is increased by 10%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Required
For one point this is a no brainer. Keep in mind the first part of this is very nice for pvp when trying to kidney shot another evasioned rogue.

Savage Combat
Increases your total attack power by 2/4% and all physical damage caused to enemies you have poisoned is increased by 2/4%.
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
This is our other big raid buff. Keep in mind that if there's an arms warrior with blood frenzy in your raid group, the latter part of this talent does nothing.

Tier 10
Prey on the Weak
Your critical strike damage is increased by 4/8/12/16/20% when the target has less health than you (as a percentage of total health).
PVE: Required | PVP: Recommended
Better than Lethality due to the wording ("critical strike damage" vs "critical strike damage bonus"). Also encourages you to stay out of the fire! Take it in PVE. Of arguable worth in PVP, I imagine.

Tier 11
Killing Spree
Step through the shadows from enemy to enemy within 10 yards, attacking an enemy every .5 secs with both weapons until 5 assaults are made, and increasing all damage done by 20% for the duration. Can hit the same target multiple


_________________
Posts from:   
Post new topic   This topic is locked: you cannot edit posts or make replies.    Refugees Of Azeroth Forum Index -> Melee Class Discussion All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum