Rogue Talent Guide (3.3.3) - Assassination
I did this, once. Months ago. Years ago. I'd while the hours of a useless typing class in school using the web access to post information about classes. Most of it was rendered invalid soon after. Some people argued. They've not been heard from since.
This isn't to tell you how to play. This is for people to get a general understanding of the class' specializations, what they can and cannot do effectively in each tree. A lot of people limit themselves to a particular class or two and don't understand the mechanics behind the other 27 class/talent combinations. If you're reading this and think of a valid argument, pause and consider that this wasn't meant for you who understands the class, but for the healer or tank who's staring at you in complete lack of understanding as you say that you can't stab something a certain way.
ASSASSINATION
Assassination is just that, assassinating something. It deals heavily in poisons, which constitute a substantial portion of an Assassination rogue's DPS, roughly 15-20% of it in total. The main attack is one granted to the rogue by a talent deep in the tree, Mutilate, which is similar to an Enhancement Shaman's Stormstrike. Because of this ability, and because most people can't spell Assassination, most rogues of this persusasion are called Mutilate or Mute-spec. At higher levels it will be the rogue's sole ability for generating combo points, as anything else pales in generation; a critical strike with the proper Assassination talents grants three combo points for 55 energy, the best alternative being Subtlety's Hemmorhage which is 1 for 34. You'll note that Mutilate does bonus damage towards poisoned targets - this ties in perfectly with the numerous talents which improve the rogue's poison abilities. All application rates are increased substantially, as well as damage; furthermore, a hidden mechanic obtained via talents is that any target poisoned has a 3% bonus crit chance similar to Heart of the Crusader from Retribution Paladins. Most overlook this.
At maximum level, the rogue's rotation is relatively simple. One lands 1-2 Mutilates, and then follows up with Envenom, which turns Deadly Poison stacks and Combo Points into nature damage. What this means is that Mutilate rogues do a hybrid of physical and spell damage, which completely bypasses armour. All rogues get Envenom, but deep Mutilate has a talent which removes its ability to consume the poison stacks, similar to Obliterate and Frost DKs. Envenom increases poison application rates, granting Deadly Poison a 65% chance to apply - this is not normalized as Instant Poison is - which in turn automatically triggers the rogue's opposite hand to poison the enemy once Deadly Poison is at a full 5/5 stack. Essentially, this allows a Rogue to use Instant Poison on both hands at the same time as applying Deadly Poison, and granting Instant Poison a much higher application rate, boosting DPS by an incredible amount.
Because the majority of a Mutilate rogue's damage comes via the very high frequency of Instant Poison applications, they are not capable of simple attacking an enemy. Starting combo points and poison stacks takes several seconds of attacking to get into the proper rotation, giving the Mutilate rogue marginally less mobility than Subtlety or Combat. However, granted a solid and immovable object such as a raid boss, a Mutilate rogue can offer very high, very easily sustained DPS. They suffer on trash, though, since things often die before the rogue is able to start the rotation, giving very poor DPS. Crit capping is an issue as well; a Rogue will reach a certain point, ~75% +crit, where they simply cannot crit any more due to their high innate miss rate. Mutilate is particularly bad for this, being granted +18% crit rate simply through talents, and an additional 5% on the 4T9 bonus. Coupled with a Rogue's naturally high crit rate, one can easily achieve +75% crit chance on Mutilate in mediocre gear, leading to Crit essentially becoming useless.
Assassination is not offered any of the burst damage talents that Combat or Subtlety have. A Mutilate rogue is given only a single burst Talent - the ability to instantly grant a critical strike on any special ability once per three minutes. They are not granted the high mobility talents in Subtlety, nor the multi-target capabilities of Combat. They are however, given a very useful move speed talent that allows them to stealth for only -15% speed, useful for running down prey. Fan Of Knives does highly boosted damage using daggers as well, due to their normalized speed being so slow. As well, the Mutilate rotation is incredibly simple, with even the maintainence of Slice 'n Dice which is such a vital component of rogue dps completely and utterly removed.
The practical upshot of this large wall of text, is that Assassination lends itself to solid, predictable damage given the ability to attack a target for an extended period of time. Burst damage is possible, but not to the levels of the other trees. Poisons are capable of a multitude of effects - Crippling, Anesthetic, Wound, Mind-Numbing, Deadly, and Instant, most of which are heightened, lengthed, or otherwise improved by talents in this tree that the other two simply are not able to access. Master Poisoner is excellent for raids without a Retribution paladin, and Envenom allows a mutilate rogue to damage even heavily armoured or physical-resistant creatures by using non-mitigated spell damage. Mutilate rogues also scale incredibly well with raid spells - Windury Totem or Improved Icy Talons can lead to a jump of one thousand or greater DPS, as can Bloodlust, simply due to the entirely non-normalized nature of Deadly Poison's new interaction with the opposing hand.
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Excellent breakdown on the
Excellent breakdown on the current mut spec. A couple things I would add is that there is another key component to the setup needs of this spec and that is Hunger For Blood. This requires a bleed effect to be on the target and can be glyphed for an 8% increase in all damage from the rogue. Awesome dps increase for 1 talent point and 1 glyph. Mut rogues love warriors and kitty druids because using the combo points for the needed Rupture or Garrote is a dps loss for the rogue. Finally we come to overkill this greatly increases energy regen (damage) for the rogue for 20 seconds after coming out of stealth. This requires that the mut rogue start the fight from stealth for maximum energy regen and that they refresh overkill every time they can using Vanish.
HfB
Honestly I do not use Hunger for Blood. I never remember to refresh it, so I eventually gave up on it and spent the talent elsewhere. I didn't mention Overkill since it's not something the rogue can control unless the fight is over three minutes, plus it's not really of a concern to other classes why the rogue gets a bit of extra energy for a short while after they unstealth.
4.0 Updates
A bit late coming, but screw you, hippies.
Mutilate did not receive much of an overhaul in 4.0, though a few key points were changed. Namely with the addition or removal of talents.
#1 - Fan of Knives now uses the Throwing weapon rather than simply throwing both your daggers at everything. This evidently has lowered its damage. Now, I say evidently, because for Mutilate and Combat, it's gotten a pretty damn great boost. Combat gets a deep talent to double the damage, but Mutilate gets a mid-range talent that instead allows Fan of Knives to retain its ability to hit with the poisons of your main weapons. With the addition of the ability to actually poison your thrown weapon, Mutilate rogues are able to throw out three poisons in an aoe spread with a single button. Equally enhancing is the drop in energy cost from 50 to 35, allowing a rogue to spam this ability much more often. As well, there is an optional and usually PvP talent that applies Crippling Poison at a 50/100% chance when you hit with one of your other poisons, which allows a rogue to heavily slow (-70%) a great number of opponents. Better yet, if utility is not a worry, a rogue can place Deadly Poison on his thrown weapon, and potentially throw out three hits of Instant Poison every shot if he can manage to stack Deadly to 5 on every target. The practical upshot of this is that Assassination has arguably been granted the best AOE capability of all three specs.
#2 - Vigor is gone. You will no longer see rogues running around with 110 Energy. Instead, Assassination automatically offers 120 max energy and 15% bonus damage so long as the rogue dual wields daggers. The effect of this is that Mutilate hits harder than before, and has a much easier time getting into its rotation, so that on a start of a pull from stealth the rogue should easily be able to accomodate target changes. However, as before, once Overkill is gone and the rogue is not energy capped, switching targets is very difficult.
#3 - Hunger for Blood has been removed. Good riddance I say, I hated it. That ability was originally a pvp one, usable to remove a Bleed on the rogue, to offer a stacking Enrage on the rogue. That got removed right quick. The new, PvE implementation was one of the shoddiest 51pt additions to a talent tree I've ever seen, which Blizzard has intelligently added to baseline Assassination. Instead, Assassination's new bottom tier talent is Vendetta, which is more or less an incredibly improved Hunter's Mark. Every three minutes an Assassination rogue can throw up a +30% personal DPS increase for 30 (36 glyphed) seconds on a target, usually for those last critical bits of a burn phase, which finally allows the spec to have real burst damage potential. Aside from that it also makes the target visible to the rogue for the duration, despite any spells or abilities they might have, though this is more a pvp thing.
#4 - Rupture. You're gonna notice that Assassination rogues actually use Rupture now. Beginning of Wrath it was used, TBC it was used, mid Wrath it was useless as Envenom's ability to boost the poison proc % combined with Deadly Poison triggering the rogue's other poison made it a much higher DPS ability. Now, Rupture has a 60% chance of doing extra Nature damage on its procs while at the same time granting 10 Energy, something it shares with Garotte. In addition, when something dies while it has the rogue's Rupture on it, the rogue is refunded a substantial portion of energy. I've yet to test this thoroughly, but on the Raging Spirits in LK, my bar was being filled from 0 to 120 with each kill. This is much better to all of the "If you kill an enemy...." talents, as it only requires the target to die with Rupture on it, NOT for the rogue to actually be the one that killed it.
#5 - Recuperate. While Combat and Subtlety get abilities that make this much better, with Combat doubling its heal and giving damage reduction when active, and Subtlety actually refunding energy each tick, Assassination gets absolutely nothing to improve this, save for the talent that improves crit chance when the rogue kills something, which now refreshes this and Slice 'n Dice. That means that if Subtlety isn't using Recuperate, they're stupid. If Combat isn't using Recuperate during heavy raid damage, they're stupid. If an Assassination rogue is using this ability when the healers aren't VERY heavily strained, they're stupid. 1% HP/sec for 30 seconds is not a particularly large amount of healing, and juggling your rotations to keep it up isn't worth the effort, Energy, or Combo Points to bother. That said, for soloing it's great, allowing my Beta server rogue to grind through the Cata zones with absolutely no effort or deaths.
#6 - Backstab. Assassination rogues never used this ability, as Mutilate was superior in absolutely every way - more damage, more combo points, and no positional limitation. This is now no longer the case; Mutilate is given a deep talent that allows Backstab to return half its energy cost when you use it when the boss is at 35% or lower HP. This means that with two crit backstabs, you are now doing more damage and getting more combo points for the same amount of energy as a single Mutilate. The practical upshot of this is that Assassination now has a very, very powerful Execute maneuver, perhaps as good or better than the actual Execute ability. Even better, Backstab has a higher Crit rate than Mutilate, as the talents that boost Mute by 15% boost Backstab by 30%. Still better, there's a Prime glyph that makes a critical Backstab refund 5 energy at all times, meaning that a critical Backstab in the Burn phase actually only costs 25 energy, which can be regenerated in the GCD required to recast it.
Overall, Assassination has been handed a few extraordinarily important patches to its setup. It now has a powerful DPS cooldown to rival Killing Spree, its AOE ability has been radically enhanced, its Energy and DPS in general have been increased, and it has a ludicrously overpowered Burn Phase ability now. Before 4.0, Combat was leading the DPS race for Rogues as it has been since Vanilla. Now, depending on gear, Mutilate tends to be a bit higher, though this is seeming to be tweaked soon as Blizzard intends to radically enhance the Combat Mastery.
Speaking of Mastery - for Assassination, it's simply boosted Poison damage. 28% base, and a bonus 3.5% for each point of Mastery. It's not the best Mastery out there, but given that Poison is a high % of Assassination's DPS, it's hardly a bad one.
sub spec.
I have been using a sub spec for pvp since the patch dropped and I have to say it is very effective. Not appropriate for raiding, but great for pvp. Only bad part is that it works best for solo kills. Attack single target, preferably the healer keeping the group alive in the fight, kill quickly and vanish.
Sub is more fun than I thought it would be
I loved Pox's explanation of how to play as sub: Shadowstep, Ambush, Loot. Repeat.
Leveled as combat until the patch hit--learning mut and sub now. I hope they fix combat at some point, I did love it so. I also think it's the easiest of the three to play--once I got my spec figured out.
Yes
They want Combat rogues to be passive, the way paladins used to be. Most damage coming from procs or weapon swings and whatnot. The difficulty they say is managing the larger scheme; planning ahead your cooldowns, your energy use, movement, etc. Mutilate follows a rather rigid pattern - Mutilate to 4, Rupture>Envenom. Once the boss is at 35%, it turns into Backstab to 4, Rupture > Envenom. I have no idea how Subtlety works, as I haven't used it since level 50 or so, back before TBC was released.