How To Improve As Assassination Rogue — Season 4

Since all of Assassination's damage is tied to resources, it is important to waste as little of them as possible. You should make sure you do not find yourself being energy-capped or casting Combo Point-generating abilities when at maximum Combo Points.

Pooling Energy has been a vital part of optimal Assassination gameplay for a long time now. Often, players tend to spam builders / finishers without paying attention to the Energy, thus preventing them from maximizing Envenom windows. This is particularly important right before using Shiv, as you will want to start each Shiv with as much Energy as possible, as well as when talenting into Kingsbane.

When specced into Nightstalker, you will want to maximize the amount of Damage over Time effects you cast while the bonus is active, as they will retain the damage bonus for their entire duration, or until you refresh them. This typically leads to a gameplay loop that sees all your DoTs running out (or DoT cooldowns being used) while you have Shadow Dance or Vanish available, in order to maximize the damage bonus this way.

The only requirement for using Deathmark is that your target has Rupture and Garrote up and that, ideally, it will not die before it expires. However, there are no other requirements, so often enough people hold on to Deathmark for too long, and lose damage as a result of it.

You will also want to use Shiv on cooldown, and disregard its Combo Point generation, meaning you will use it even when at maximum Combo Points already.

Aim to have 100% uptime on Garrote, Rupture and Slice and Dice. In some fight situations, it is better to refresh your bleeds before you would normally have to, if you know that you are going to lose uptime on the boss to hit a different target and might not be able to refresh it at the optimal time. An extension of that, is to also manage Deadly Poison in multi-target situations. If you are not using Fan of Knives you might need to pay extra attention to it, and make sure it stays on all targets, so you do not lose out on extra Energy regeneration. In case you have your bleeds applied to a target, but it is about to lose the poison debuff, it might be worth to use Poisoned Knife or Fan of Knives if the target is outside of melee range, to not lose any uptime.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize a Assassination Rogue without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

On top of this, simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and the Raidbots website. Below, you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.