Rogue Guide

At the very least get your hands on a Skullforge Reaver. It has a dot on it which will disrupt gouge and blind, but it is a fairly easy sword to get at the end of Stratholme on the undead side.

If you are a dagger rogue your holy grail is the Deathstriker. Or you could get a Keris of Zul'Serak from Voone in LBRS.

Everyone asks what kind of weapon they should carry in their offhand. I prefer a dagger or fast sword in my offhand. Max damage isn’t as big of a deal. Speed becomes more important for applying poisons. I actually spoke with someone the other day who had several people tell him that “Every idiot knows that you are supposed to have a sword in your offhand.” I happen to carry a Dal'Rend's Tribal Guardian. It’s as fast as most daggers.

We can’t ignore maces. There are some really nice maces out there. In my eyes they are no different than swords. If the min/max damage is superior, then that’s what I’m going to equip. I have thoroughly tested a mace build utilizing the mace specialization talent. Generally a 6% proc is pretty nice. However, even with dual maces with the best speeds I could find, the stun proc from that talent happened far too seldom. It would stun maybe once every other fight and never when I needed it. It would stun from my gouge, stun from my cheap shot and stun from my kidney shot. What’s nice is when it stuns after you eviscerate. Chances are you will see that once a day if you grind all day.

Armor

Armor gets expensive if you get in a rut of buying minor upgrades in the AH. Upgrade, but upgrade wisely. I always get my stuff in instances and from quest rewards. There are too many to name, but

Stat Builds

Ah the next great debate. Let’s take a look at all of your options:

Agility- This is our primary stat. It increases our chance to get a critical strike, chance to dodge and increases our armor.

Stamina- Each point of stamina increases our hit points by 10. The more stamina we have, the longer we last in combat.

+Accuracy/+Crit- Most of your best high level armor will increase your chance to crit, chance to dodge and/or will increase your accuracy.

So which is best? The best means of increasing your DPS seems to be +accuracy gear. I don’t have the numbers behind this nor do I have the formula for chance to hit and how stats affect it. What I do know is if I get cursed by a banshee that reduces my chance to hit by 10% I will almost never hit her. Not my most scientific discovery but it is logical. +crit gear is nice. With all of my +crit stuff on my chance to crit is about 24%. 31% is possible, maybe more.

Let us not forget about stamina. My highest stamina build put me over 4700. A rogue could never be a tank but with 1300 more HP than most rogues you will be VERY tough to beat in PvP. A lot of the time that we lose in PvP it is a matter of failing to keep the stunlock on and a good PvPer finishing the job that you failed to do. I have found that 4700 HP puts me over the threshold of getting a second chance.

You can’t ignore agility. But it does take 30 agility at level 60 to get 1% crit. Dodge isn’t critical for the rogue. The armor bonus merits sticking with agility to some extent. However the best agility build I could come up with did not offer a tremendous amount of benefit and sacrificed a lot of everything else.

So which is best? To say that a combination of all of the above is too wishy washy. But the truth is the gear you will find at 60 has a pretty broad mixture. My short term goal is to get over 4300 HP have at least 2% to accuracy and a 25% to crit. I’m close right now. But I do have my pure stamina gear, my pure agility gear, my shadowcraft build and my variety of “best” pieces.

You’re going to have to figure out what you like for yourself. I strongly suggest testing things in extremes. If you stay too “middle of the road”, you will likely not get a strong feel for which is best for you even if middle of the road might be precisely what you need.

LEVELING GUIDE

Questing is the fastest way to level. HOWEVER, this requires that you can knock them out quickly without the aid of a high level friend or guildmate. Many people make the mistake of trying to find a quest location and die dozens of times trying to do a quest too difficult for them or insist on running around for hours to find a quest’s location. Three hours pass, you finally finish the quest and have only gained about 3000 XP. If you had just killed appropriate level mobs in that time you would have made 5-10 times that amount.

Have a strong game plan when it comes to questing especially in huge areas that give a lot of quests. Know the destinations of them all and figure out the best order to do them. Go to your furthest point and work your way back to town.

To be efficient in your questing ALWAYS look them up on http://www.thottbot.com first. In most cases Thottb