Outlaw Rogue PvP Guide (The War Within Pre-Patch)

Outlaw Rogues have strong sustained damage, excellent crowd control tools, and multiple ways to reduce the cooldown of key abilities, such as Blind or Vanish, allowing them to desync their offensive abilities from the enemy defensive toolkit and trinkets. It will be almost impossible for the enemy team to know when the Outlaw Rogue will next have their powerful cooldowns available, making it very hard to counter them and allowing the Outlaw Rogue to land a kill. Outlaw Rogues are also much tankier than other specializations, especially versus other melees, giving them more time to find a kill.

The most important feature of The War Within are Heroic Talents. However, since these Heroic Talents will not be available during the Prepatch, they will be added and discussed near the beginning of the expansion. That being said there are a few important talent changes that are worth being highlighted:

• Shadow Dance has been removed from the class tree and replaced by Without a Trace, granting all Rogues an extra charge of Vanish. This may be a buff to Outlaw as the passive Restless Blades reduces the cooldown of Vanish, but not of Shadow Dance. Vanish and the following 6s Subterfuge provide the same bonuses to Outlaw as Shadow Dance used to.
• Acrobatic Strikes now provides extra attack speed rather than extra range. This is a significant nerf because with less range it will be much harder to CC multiple enemies while dealing damage to your main target
• The Oultaw tree has been moved around a bit but with no significant change to the talents themselves.

Strengths

• Great control.
• Great sustained damage.
• Great mobility.
• Very durable.
• Excellent utility.

Weaknesses

• No defensive abilities when stunned.
• Mediocre burst damage.
• Reliant on luck regarding Roll the Bones.
• Suffers greatly from loss of uptime because of Restless Blades.