Rogue Guide

viscerate. There’s only a few seconds before I kill the mob at that point, so expose armor is senseless here.

Some argue that expose is good to use against warriors in PvP. While I can buy the fact that it would be efficient in terms of DPS, it is not a smart move in PvP. I would use eviscerate, kidney shot and even rupture before I dedicated myself to taking whatever beating a warrior wants to throw at me while I get somewhat of a damage bonus for a few seconds.

Even with expose armor on a warrior our damage to tankability ratio is terrible compared to a warrior’s.

The only time a rogue in my guild uses expose armor is when we do 5 rogue stealth instance runs. It makes sense for one person to use it while 5 pure melee beat on a mob. Even then mobs drop so fast it becomes a wasted finisher.

Garrote- Our first DoT. This is very much a double edged sword. On one hand, DoTs ignore armor and garrote does a nice amount of damage. Even without talents to improve garrote it will outdamage ambush with opportunity and improved ambush. I’m not getting into any theorycraft math in this guide, but feel free to break out your calculators. Your calc will tell you that in a normal situation ambush will clearly outdamage garrote. Try those numbers against any mob past rend in Upper BRS and almost any boss in the game.

So why not use it as an opener? A few reasons. There are other openers that make more sense including the “inferior” ambush. Ambush gets the fight over with quicker while garrote must run its course. Cheap shot gets you to a 5 point combo much faster and controls the mob.

Garrote also breaks stuns from gouge and blind. It’s out of the question for me.

I like garrote against bosses that are immune to stun and/or have a ton of armor. Otherwise, I don’t use it at all.

Sinister Strike- Oh how I love thee. This is our bread and butter damage attack. It is best to use the highest max damage one handed weapon you can find for your main hand. The best weapon in the game is a 178 max damage sword. The damage this weapon would do on a sinister strike would be absolutely amazing. For the record, I led the raid in Molten Core where that sword was found. I was master looter and actually had to trade it to the person who won the roll. Very painful.

Sinister Strike ignores weapon speed. Energy permitting, you could do one every second in addition to your normal attacks. Again, we will get more into this in the daggers vs swords section.

Feint- This “attack” reduces the amount of hate an enemy has for you. Hence, you can put aggro on yourself and brush it back off on someone else in your group. This skill does nothing to lower my hate for how worthless it is. Far too often will you use it 5 times in a row right next to a warrior and still not be able to get aggro off of you. It costs far too much energy for a skill that doesn’t generate combo points. I was a big fan of it in beta and don’t use it at all now.

It has its place. I don’t use it because I have 6 awesome defensive spec warriors in my guild. I don’t have to shake the hate off me because they always do their jobs. In fact I always have a full guild only group that is on Teamspeak with me. If I had to get in pickup groups all the time, I would use feint a little more, especially if I weren’t typically the main assist.

Ambush- This is an opener that does huge damage. It requires a dagger. I have a lot to say about this in the daggers vs swords section.

Distract- This is a highly underused skill. You can use distract in or out of stealth. It can be used to increase your chance of sapping a mob, splitting roaming mobs and helping non stealthers to sneak by mobs. I don’t know what the exact range is, but you can get a LOT closer to a mob out of stealth when walking up from behind them rather then walking towards them.

To separate roaming mobs you distract one of the mobs in the back. This will split him off from the rest of the group for 10 seconds. If you stand there and do nothing afterwards he will snap out of it and run to catch up with the other roamers. If you wait 9 seconds and attack it, the other mobs will still be close enough to aggro afterwards. In most cases you can distract. Wait about 9 seconds, sap, wait another 10 seconds and attack the sapped mob. I don’t know if Blizzard considers this an exploit, but it does split mobs. It takes some practice. Find some non elite mobs your level to practice this on.

Rupture- This is a finisher DoT. Against extremely high armored elite mobs and bosses this is the first finisher that I will typically do. Don’t make the mistake of using this on a low to medium armored mob. 22 seconds is a long time. Some people will tell you that rupture is a good finisher to use against warriors. That is an EXTREMELY bad idea. Just like any other DoT, rupture will break gouge and blind.

Vanish- This is ho