How To Improve As Assassination Rogue — The War Within Pre-Patch
On this page, you will find out how you can improve at playing Assassination Rogue in World of Warcraft — The War Within Pre-Patch. We list the common mistakes that you should try to avoid and the small details that can greatly improve your performance.
Not Overcapping Resources
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
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.
Snapshotting Correctly
You will want to ensure that you cast Garrote while
Improved Garrote
is active, so make sure to cast it once within 6 seconds of opening from stealth,
or after casting
Vanish. The bonus Damage over Time will be retained
for its entire duration, or until you refresh it.
Not Holding Cooldowns For Too Long
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.
Correctly Managing Bleeds
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.
Knowing How To Sim Yourself
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.
Analyzing Your Mistakes as a Assassination Rogue
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.
Changelog
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Page has been reviewed and updated for Dragonflight Season 4.
- 21 Mar. 2024: Page has been reviewed for Patch 10.2.6, no changes were necessary.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Page has been reviewed and updated for Patch 10.2.5.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Page updated for the Patch 10.2 Rogue rework.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Page was reviewed for Patch 10.1.7 and no changes were necessary.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Page was reviewed for Patch 10.1.5 and no changes were necessary as Assassination received no changes for the Patch.
- 01 May 2023: No updates were required for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Rogue Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written and reviewed by Seliathan, who has been playing Rogue since the first day of Classic. He currently raids in Familiar with Drama, and is one of the foremost Mythic+ Rogue players. You can often find him streaming on Twitch, or follow him on his personal Discord server.
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