Outlaw Rogue DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents — Shadowlands 9.2

Level	Choices
15	✗ Weaponmaster	✓ Quick Draw	✓ Ghostly Strike
25	✓ Acrobatic Strikes	? Retractable Hook	✗ Hit and Run
30	✗ Vigor	✓ Deeper Stratagem	✓ Marked for Death
35	✗ Iron Stomach	✓ Cheat Death	? Elusiveness
40	✗ Dirty Tricks	✗ Blinding Powder	✓ Prey on the Weak
45	✗ Loaded Dice	✓ Alacrity	? Dreadblades
50	✗ Dancing Steel	✓ Blade Rush	? Killing Spree

Talents can be freely changed when out of combat and in a rested XP area (such as an inn or a capital city). Moreover, Tome of the Still Mind and Codex of the Still Mind can be used to temporarily allow players to change talents anywhere, as long as they are out of combat.

Optimizing talents on a contextual basis is the highly recommended method of setting up your build, as many talents offer unique strengths in the right situation. We have decided to list a "cheat sheet" of sorts below, however, to help with a quick set-up that should be just fine for most encounters. If you want to fully optimize your ability to play this specialization, we recommend reading the entire talents section here to gain additional insight on when swapping your talents would be beneficial.

The build is the standard choice for most encounters, focusing on dealing high and sustained single target damage.

• Level 15: Ghostly Strike
• Level 25: Acrobatic Strikes
• Level 30: Marked for Death or Deeper Stratagem as Venthyr
• Level 35: Cheat Death
• Level 40: Prey on the Weak
• Level 45: Alacrity or Dreadblades as Venthyr
• Level 50: Blade Rush

The build is specifically used in any content that requires prolonged AoE damage like Mythic+ dungeons or encounters with a lot of add spawns throughout the encounter.

• Level 15: Quick Draw
• Level 25: Acrobatic Strikes
• Level 30: Marked for Death
• Level 35: Cheat Death
• Level 40: Prey on the Weak
• Level 45: Alacrity or Dreadblades as Venthyr
• Level 50: Blade Rush

The two builds suggested above are generalized versions that do not account for individual encounters in the current raid tier. Once the new Raid opens up we have a boss-by-boss breakdown of talent choices as well as tips and tricks only Outlaw can pull off on our dedicated Raid page.

Mythic+ oftentimes requires a very specific talent setup that mixes single-target and AoE to perform well on both bosses and trash. If you want advice that is specific to Mythic+, you can find more information in our Mythic+ section.

Once you have selected all your talents you might wonder how some of these change your rotation or when best to use certain cooldowns. Answers to these questions can be found by heading over the our section that is specifically addressing all questions regarding your DPS rotation.

✘ Weaponmaster

✔ Quick Draw

✔ Ghostly Strike

Tier 1 talents focus on improving Combo Point generation.

• Weaponmaster causes your Sinister Strike to have a 10% increased chance to strike an additional time.
• Quick Draw causes Opportunity procs to generate 1 additional Combo Point and deal 50% additional damage when consumed.
• Ghostly Strike strikes an enemy, dealing Physical damage and causing the target to take 10% increased damage from your abilities for 10 seconds. Awards 1 Combo Points. Has a 30 second cooldown, which gets reduced by your finishers.

Quick Draw is the best choice for any multi-target situation.

Ghostly Strike is the best choice for pure single-target. As it increases the damage of all damage you deal, including damage from sources like enchants and trinkets.

Weaponmaster is simply inferior to Quick Draw and Ghostly Strike in terms of raw DPS.

✔ Acrobatic Strikes

? Retractable Hook

✘ Hit and Run

Tier 2 talents focus on improving your mobility.

• Acrobatic Strikes increases the range on all your melee attacks by 3 yards.
• Retractable Hook reduces the cooldown of Grappling Hook by 30 seconds.
• Hit and Run increases your movement speed at all times by 15%.

This tier is largely a matter of personal preference, or is specific to the encounter at hand.

Acrobatic Strikes is a good choice on cleave encounters as it also extends the length of your Blade Flurry. It essentially increases the radius of your Blade Flurry by 3 yards, which more than doubles the size of the area where enemies can be hit with Blade Flurry. It can also allow you to stay in range of your enemy and avoid melee-based abilities by outranging them.

Retractable Hook is a decent alternative if the repeated use of the hook allows for higher uptime on your main targets, or whenever it can be used to avoid knockback effects.

Hit and Run is only good for kiting or moving between targets.

✘ Vigor

✔ Deeper Stratagem

✔ Marked for Death

• Vigor increases your maximum Energy by 50 and increases Energy regeneration by 10%.
• Deeper Stratagem increases maximum Combo Points to 6, allows finishing moves to consume 6 Combo Points, and increases the damage of finishing moves by 5%.
• Marked for Death marks a target and instantly generates 5 Combo Points. The cooldown is reset if the marked target dies.

Vigor is the simplest to use while being slightly worse than either alternative choice.

Deeper Stratagem leads to a slightly slower rotation (as compared to Vigor) but your finishers will gain increased effectiveness and damage. This, combined with Dreadblades, allows for more damage and cooldown reduction on Flagellation for Venthyr Rogues.

Even without cooldown resets Marked for Death is usually the highest damage option. On AoE you are able to get regular CD resets, which allows for more maximum Combo Point finishers, leading to higher cooldown Uptime.

✘ Iron Stomach

✔ Cheat Death

? Elusiveness

Tier 4 talents improve your personal survivability.

• Iron Stomach increases the healing received from Crimson Vial, healing potions, and Healthstones by 30%.
• Elusiveness causes Feint to also grant 30% reduced damage taken from all sources.
• Cheat Death causes fatal damage to instead reduce you to 7% of your maximum health and grant 85% reduced damage taken for 3 seconds. Cheat Death cannot save you from damage greater than double your maximum health. It has a 6-minute cooldown.

Elusiveness is technically the best talent in most situations, but requires you to be extremely proficient with Feint usage and very aware of incoming damage.

Cheat Death is a good choice for players in a raid environment, as it is entirely passive and great for soaking raid mechanics when needed. Generally, Cheat Death is best for learning encounters and soaking high damage mechanics, whereas Elusiveness is great for soaking frequently occurring mechanics.

Iron Stomach is by far the best choice for leveling and solo content, as it improves your self-sustainability noticeably. Iron Stomach does not have much potential in a raid environment.

✘ Dirty Tricks

✘ Blinding Powder

✔ Prey on the Weak

Tier 5 talents focus on improving your crowd control utility.

• Dirty Tricks removes the Energy cost from Cheap Shot, Gouge, and Sap.
• Blinding Powder reduces cooldown and increases range of Blind.
• Prey on the Weak causes targets afflicted by your Cheap Shot or Between the Eyes to take 10% increased damage from all sources for 6 seconds.

Prey on the Weak is the strongest option in this tier, as it allows you to increase everyone's damage by 10% for 6 seconds, on stunnable enemies. While many enemies are immune, this is still the best of all available options.

Blinding Powder can be useful, if you need to hard crowd-control some mobs, as it gives you more range for it, and lowers the cooldown. However, there are generally better crowd control abilities available from other classes.

Dirty Tricks has practically no raid usage as most enemies in raid instances are immune to any of the listed abilities. It is however the best option for Mythic+, as it allows you to freely use Gouge to disrupt enemies.

✘ Loaded Dice

✔ Alacrity

? Dreadblades

Tier 6 talents offer finisher modifiers.

• Loaded Dice makes activating Adrenaline Rush cause your next Roll the Bones to grant at least two buffs.
• Alacrity causes finishing moves to have a 20% chance per Combo Point to grant 2% Haste for 20 seconds, stacking 5 times.
• Dreadblades is a buff that allows you to genereate maximum Combo Points with a single generator while draining health whenever you use a finishing move.

Alacrity is the best choice in raids and dungeons, provided you are able to consistently maintain your stacks for most of the encounters.

While Loaded Dice does help reduce the random aspect of Roll the Bones a bit, it currently lags too far behind Alacrity to be competitive for damage.

Dreadblades is a decent option due to the amount of burst damage you can deal during its duration, but still performs worse than Alacrity. For Venthyr Rogues this is the best talent, as it works very well with the Covenant Ability Flagellation.

✘ Dancing Steel

✔ Blade Rush

? Killing Spree

Tier 7 talents focus on shifting the playstyle in new directions.

• Dancing Steel increases the duration of Blade Flurry by 3 seconds and its damage by 5%.
• Blade Rush charges you towards the target, damaging all of nearby enemies, and generating 25 Energy over 5 seconds. While Blade Flurry is active, it will increase the damage of the AoE component by 100%.
• Killing Spree teleports you to your target and attacks 6 times over 2 seconds. Killing Spree is affected by Blade Flurry and will hit nearby enemies for 100% of the damage during it.

Killing Spree is the best choice for 3-5 target encounters and can be quite potent in Mythic+. It does, however, force you to jump around your enemies during its duration which can put you in dangerous spots or even in front of a cleaving enemy, so it is best used with care.

Blade Rush is often the best for single-target and always best for larger-scale AoE as its AoE component does not have a target cap.

Dancing Steel is only helpful for ease of use, as you should already be able to maintain close to 100% uptime on Blade Flurry. If you struggle with your Blade Flurry uptime in Mythic+, this talent is a good alternative, but should never be required.

In Shadowlands, there will be the option to go into "War Mode". Enabling War Mode provides the following benefits:

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 10% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended to enable the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open world PvP, and the possibility to be "ganked" while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of both General PvP Talents and Outlaw Rogue-specific PvE talents.

1. Take Your Cut causes you and allies within 15 yards to gain 15% Haste for 8 seconds after you use Roll the Bones. It is fairly good, since it acts as a mini- Adrenaline Rush and has decent uptime when you are questing in the open world.
2. Boarding Party makes Between the Eyes increase the movement speed of all friendly players within 15 yards by 30% for 5 seconds. Movement speed is always nice while world-questing, so this highly recommended.
3. Enduring Brawler increases the chance for your Sinister Strike to hit an additional time the longer you remain in combat. While this will be only a small gain in most engagements with enemies in the open world, it is very potent when trying to kill Elites, chain-pulling, or fighting World Bosses.