Rogue PVE Guide - Assassination

[koxology]

Rogue PVE Guide - Assassination by Koxylól

Hi there. My name is Koxylól. I'm currently playing on Exodus realm, and on Ragnaros-EU with my retail main character.
I'm playing World Of Warcraft for 7 years now (6 as rogue). I'm gonna give you ideas about how should you use your character to preform perfectly during raid combats.

About Assassination
Assassination preforms pretty well during most of the raid combats. You can swap targets more effectively than a combat rogue, you can do much more DPS in a big AoE fight than a combat rogue, however on single target fights, you will fall behind combat rogues very slightly. Your dps relies on doing high poison damage with using your deadly poison procs and your bleed effects.

1.0 Gear
----1.1 Required minimum gear
----1.2 Stat priority
----1.3 Best-in-slot Gear list
----1.4 Reforge
2.0 Rotation
----2.1 Single target
----2.2 Multi target(AoE)
----2.3 Cooldown usage
3.0 Powering up your gear
----3.1 Enchants
----3.2 Gems
4.0 Talents
5.0 Usefull addons
6.0 Usefull websites


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1.0 GEAR
As assassination rogue you want 2 daggers. A slow one (1.8 speed) in your main-hand(with Instant Poison), and a fast one (under 1.5) in your off-hand(With Deadly poison).
If you use Throwing weapon for AoE fights, use Wound Poison(has a bit better proc rate so it's better than Instant for AoE)

1.1 Required gear
One of the strenghts of being assassination is that it requires the less gear to be able to make acceptable DPS.
When you ding 85, you can already do some decent dps for 5man HC fights, and on some normal mode bossfights also.

1.2 Stat priority
As I stated before your main dps(after Auto-attacks) should be your poison damage. This requires a total of 17.00% hit rating during the bossfight. This is the spell hit rating, this will prevent you from missing instant or deadly poison applications to the boss.

The next most usefull stat is expertise. You want 26 expertise. No more, no less. This will prevent the boss from dodging or parrying your special attacks like Mutilate or Envenom.

When you got the 26 expertise you should go for the most possible mastery. This will boost your poison damage. More poison damage, more dps, we love it.

The next stat is haste. Crit is weak for this spec. Haste will give you faster weapon attacks, therefore your poisons proc more often, your auto attack damage will grow, and you get a slighty energy regeneration bonus from haste (1% melee haste = 0.1 bonus energy regeneration). The worst stat for this spec is crit rating, because it gives a too weak boost to your dps.

1.3 BiS Gear List
--These item sets do not include reforge or gemming--
Bossfight(Without using Fan of Knives)
Bossfight/Trash(With using Fan of Knives)
--Mistral Circle has no stats in character planner. The best random encant for this is "... of the Zephyr" which comes with +321 Stamina, +214 Agility, +143 Haste Rating, +143 Mastery Rating.

1.4 Reforge
Reforge is a really cool option, and by using reforge on your gear you can maximize the DPS you can do.
YOU MUST GET THE HIT RATING AND EXPERTISE WITH REFORGE! This is very important. You don't want to waste gems on hit or expertise.
If you got those, you should start stacking mastery. If you can't get mastery, get haste instead.
The reforge priority should look like this: Hit(untill 17%)>Expertise(untill 26)>>>Mastery>Haste>Crit>>>>>>>>>>Hit(above 17%)=Expertise(above 26)


2.0 Rotation
Rotation is the order/priority of skills you should use during the fight. There are two different rotations for assassination spec. Single-target and Multi-target.

2.1 Single-target
You should start in stealth. When fight starts, you open on boss with garrote, then a Slice and Dice with your comopoints from garrote. After you should follow up with a shiv to apply deadly poison, then an envenom immediately after it. This will refresh your Slice and Dice to it's maximum duration and it shouldn't fall of then because of unlucky poison procs. You should always keep up SnD and Rupture for maximum DPS.
After this the real rotation starts. It looks like the following:
Mutilate to at least 4 como points -> Rupture -> Mutilate to at least 4 combo points -> Envenom -> Mutilate to 4 combo points -> Envenom(if rupture is present) OR Rupture
When the boss reaches 35% HP your rotation changes. You should do Backstab instead of Mutilate, you only do 1 or 2 combo point ruptures and only 5 combo point envenoms.

2.2 Multi-target(AoE)
When you must do DPS on 5 or more adds, you should do your AoE DPS rotation. I don't recommend doing this with 4 or fewer adds or you will do less DPS than single-target DPSing them.
You start with garrote-slice and dice-shiv-envenom also but then you should apply a rupture on the mob you're auto attacking and then just spam Fan of Knives. I never needed to reapply rupture to the mobs, because they died faster, but if they don't, just do it.

2.3 Cooldown Usage
As an assassination rogue you have 2 important cooldowns. Vendetta (wowhead link), Vanish (wowhead link) and Cold Blood (wowhead link).

Vendetta (wowhead link): You should try to use Vendetta along with the procs of a strong trinket(mostly on-use trinkets) or with Bloodlust/Heroism. This will boost your damage by a very high percent.

Vanish (wowhead link): On Cooldown. Try to pool up a little energy like 30-40 to be able to garrote right after you vanish. This will refresh your Overkill talent.

Cold Blood (wowhead link): Try to use it on cooldown but only on 5 combo point Envenoms. You want the highest damage skill to be crit.


3.0 Powering up your gear
There are 2 ways to boost the stats of your gear. Enchanting or Gemming.

3.1 Enchants
I'll give the list of the best enchants for this spec as a list. These are calculated by theorycrafts that I dont want to write in the guide, because it's the most boring thing in the world.
Head- Arcanum of the Ramkahen
Shoulders- Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal OR Swiftsteel Inscription (wowhead link) with inscription
Cloak- Enchant Cloak - Greater Critical Strike OR Swordguard Embroidery (wowhead link) with tailoring
Chest- Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats
Wrists- Enchant Bracer - Agility OR Draconic Embossment - Agility (wowhead link) with leatherworking
Gloves- Enchant Gloves - Greater Mastery
Waist- Ebonsteel Belt Buckle
Legs- Dragonscale Leg Armor
Feet- Enchant Boots - Major Agility
Rings-ONLY ENCHANTER Enchant Ring - Agility (wowhead link)
Weapons-Expensive(Landslide) - Cheap(Hurricane)

3.2 Gems
Like at the enchants I'll give you the best setup without boring calculations. Here it is:
Red slot: Delicate Inferno Ruby
Yellow slot: Fractured Amberjewel
Blue slot: Glinting Demonseye (if you have blue gem slots, put in the gems before reforing to hit rating)
Prismatic slot(belt): Delicate Inferno Ruby
Meta slot: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond


4.0 Talents and Glyphs
31-2-8 Decent/Endgame gear
31-3-7 Bad gear

5.0 Usefull Addons
To-Be-Added

6.0 Usefull websites
Chardev - character planner website (it is up-to-date so also has items from the new patches)
WoWhead - Full database of in-game stuff.
WoWWiki - Wikipedia-like Warcraft website.
ElitistJerks - Very deep theorycrafting, up-to-date guides but you can get the main idea of how-to.
Google - Your biggest friend on the internet.


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Thx for reading my guide, feel free to +rep if it helped