Assassination Rogue PvP Talents and Builds (Dragonflight / 10.0.7)
Choosing the right PvP and PvE talents is a prerequisite to proper performance in PvP. This guide goes through the various talent choices available to you as an Assassination Rogue and gives you the best combinations you can take.
This page is part of our Assassination Rogue PvP Guide.
Regular Talents for Assassination Rogues
Rogue Tree
Mandatory Talents
Blind,
Sap,
Cloak of Shadows,
Evasion, and
Shadowstep
are core abilities that you need to pick to play the class. These abilities are
your CC, defensive
cooldowns, and mobility.
Elusiveness is a good option against comps with predictable damage
that you can preemptively Feint. Still, in the current meta (very fast-paced, highly
bursty),
Cheat Death is often a better option.
Master Poisoner and
Virulent Poisons have a specific synergy
with Assassination. Having poisons deal more damage and have more potent
effects is mandatory.
Improved Wound Poison and
Numbing Poison are required when
you get to the ultimate talent in the Assassination Tree,
Dragon-Tempered Blades. Since you can use several poisons at once,
you'll be able to play with both Deadly Poison and Wound Poison as your lethal
poisons and both Mind-Numbing Poison and Crippling Poison as your non-lethal
poisons.
Thistle Tea,
Seal Fate, and
Vigor allow you to
generate Energy and Combo Points
at a faster rate. Assassination is a spec that is starved of resources, so
having ways to increase
their generation rate is key.
Important Talents
Marked for Death allows you to generate 5 Combo Points instantly.
This lets you open your kill target
with
Kidney Shot for an impactful opener. You can also use it to land
one more
Envenom during
your goes.
Echoing Reprimand and
Resounding Clarity allow you to
frequently empower your Combo Points
to land power Envenoms during your burst window. This works well alongside
Poison Bomb in the Assassination Tree, and
Amplifying Poison
if you play it.
Assassination Tree
Mandatory Talents
Venomous Wounds is what allows Assassination to regenerate energy. It is a must-have.
Shadowstep, alongside the one from the Rogue Tree, gives you a
second charge of Shadowstep. This makes
Assassination much more mobile and allows the spec to swap targets easily or
escape to safety when needed.
Improved Shiv allows your Shiv to increase your Nature damage. This
is key to landing powerful Envenoms during
your burst windows.
Iron Wire is what gives
Garrote its silence effect. It is a
must-have.
Deathmark is the new burst cooldown of the spec, replacing
Vendetta. This spell duplicates
your
Garrote,
Rupture, and your lethal Poison for the duration,
allowing you to empower your damage greatly. This works particularly well with
another mandatory talent,
Lethal Dose. This talent increases your Bleed damage, Nature damage
over time, and weapon poison damage
for every one of these effects on your target.
Dragon-Tempered Blades is a potent talent. It allows you to play with
two lethal poisons and
two non-lethal poisons instead of one of each. As a result, you can have
Deadly Poison and
Wound Poison
to have both sustained damage and healing reduction, and
Crippling Poison
and
Numbing Poison to have both a slow and be more disruptive.
Bloody Mess,
Improved Garrote, and
Shrouded Suffocation all contribute to enhancing
your Bleed damage. This is key to dealing great sustained damage, as your
Bleeds are currently dealing severe
damage. On top of that,
Shrouded Suffocation lets you gain additional
Combo Points when using
Garrote
from Stealth. It is helpful in your openers or when you use
Vanish
offensively to land more CC
and kill your target.
Important Talents
Elaborate Planning increases your overall damage, but most
importantly, your burst damage. Assassination
Rogues want to kill their enemies during their Kidney Shot with several
Envenom while the target is in the
stun. Therefore this talent is a noticeable damage increase during these kill
attempts.
Internal Bleeding slightly increases your burst damage as it adds a
Bleed to your
Kidney Shot
that deals moderate damage and enhances the rest of your damage through
Lethal Dose.
Serrated Bone Spike is a good ability that deals good damage,
is very cheap, and can generate multiple Combo Points from range. The DoT
will increase your sustained damage, and the spell itself can
be more bursty on your Kidney Shot as it deals much more damage
than your standard Combo Point builder, Mutilate.
PvP Talents for Assassination Rogues
You can choose 3 of the following PvP talents; each has its uses, but some are better for certain strategies than others. The top three choices are the most useful but can be replaced with other PvP talents, depending on your team's goal.
Mandatory PvP Talents
Smoke Bomb creates a smoke cloud around you. Enemy players who are
outside the cloud will not be able to target anyone inside it. This talent
is mandatory for multiple reasons. Firstly, it can help you land a kill by
stunning a target when they have no trinket. By using Smoke Bomb right after
a stun, you will prevent the healer from saving their teammate. Secondly, you
can use it defensively to save yourself or an ally from a lethal cast
about to go off, such as
Greater Pyroblast. And lastly, you can use it
to prevent incoming crowd control on you or your team if such crowd control
would result in you losing a game, such as a
Polymorph or
Repentance on your healer when they have no trinket, and you are low on
health. As you can see, this talent is helpful in many different situations,
which is why it is so powerful. In every 3v3 scenario, this talent is
a must-have, but in a few 2v2 match-ups, you will not pick it as you will mostly
attack the enemy healer.
Situational PvP Talents
Dismantle is a strong PvP talent that allows you to disarm an enemy
for 6 seconds every 45 seconds. Disarming an enemy can delay their next kill
attempt or stop it entirely if they have pulled the trigger. It is a great
pick against Warrior, Rogue, and
Marksmanship Hunter. It is also
helpful against other Hunter specs. However, they can still use many
threatening
abilities while disarmed, and the same goes for Retribution Paladin
and Death Knight.
One thing to note is that you can use Dismantle offensively against Death Knight
and Warrior, as being disarmed prevents the use of
Death Strike and
Die by the Sword.
Maneuverability is a powerful PvP talent versus teams with
multiple slows. You can take this so you can maximize your uptime on your
target. It also removes any root on you when you use it so that you may escape
a Frost Nova or a Steel Trap with it as well.
Hemotoxin causes
Shiv to reduce the target's healing
received by 30% for 9 seconds. This used to be a very powerful talent, but
after multiple nerfs it is barely more powerful than
Wound Poison.
Therefore you will only pick it if you do not need other utility talents, such
as
Dismantle or
Maneuverability.
Thick as Thieves is a very situational PvP talent that can sometimes
surprise the enemy team if you play with a teammate with high burst damage, such
as a Night Fae Restoration Shaman in 2v2. By giving 15% more damage to
your ally on their burst, you can land a kill if the enemy team has already used
their defensives on your
Deathmark. Alternatively, you can force
defensives with the burst of your teammate, further amplified by Thick as
Thieves. Then your cooldowns will close the game. The downside of this
talent is that it requires you to spend a point on
Tricks of the Trade,
something that is rarely done in most Rogue Trees.
System Shock reduces the enemy's movement speed by 90% when you use
an
Envenom with 5 Combo Points on a target with
Garrote,
Rupture, and your active lethal Poison, and deals damage. This is a
decent addition to your burst damage and has the benefit of almost rooting
your target for a brief moment.
Death from Above is an interesting PvP talent. The interesting
things about this talent are that it makes you immune to crowd control when you
use it and is usable from range. It will make you land at your target
location. It can be considered in 2v2 against an enemy that is hard to reach,
such as a Frost Mage, or against a setup comp that relies on stuns
on you to
kill you and will kite you in between stuns, such as Rogue/
Mage.
Unfortunately, there will often be three better options, so you will end up not
picking this
PvP talent much.
The first PvP talent will almost always be Smoke Bomb. To fill the
last two slots, you will need to look at what you are facing. If there is a DPS
that can de disarmed, such as a Warrior, Rogue, Death Knight
or a Marksmanship Hunter, you will pick
Dismantle. If you
will need to break free of roots or remove powerful slows, like if you are
facing Frost Mage, you will pick
Maneuverability. In other
scenarios you may pick any other optional talent as long as it fits your needs.
Changelog
- 21 Mar. 2023: Updated for Dragonflight Patch 10.0.7.
- 25 Jan. 2023: Updated for Dragonflight Patch 10.0.5.
- 12 Dec. 2022: Updated with the Hemotoxin nerf.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 22 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
- 28 Jul. 2022: Reviewed for Shadowlands Season 4.
- 01 Jul. 2022: Updated Tier 7 Talents.
- 31 May 2022: Reviewed for Patch 9.2.5.
- 21 Feb. 2022: Updated for Patch 9.2.
- 10 Nov. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.5.
- 21 Jul. 2021: Updated Tier 1 Talents.
- 14 Jul. 2021: Updated Honor Talents.
- 03 Jul. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 06 Apr. 2021: Rewritten by Shadenox and further updated for Patch 9.0.5.
- 10 Mar. 2021: Updated Tier 6 Regular Talents.
- 14 Oct. 2020: Updated for Shadowlands pre-patch.
This guide has been written by Shadenox, an experienced Gladiator player who has achieved over 3,000 rating on Rogue. You can find him on his YouTube channel, where he creates guides and other informational content regarding Arenas.
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