Assassination Rogue Talents Guide

For the class tree in 10.2 there’s a lot of new additions, mainly for utility, but the big changes are in regards to the accessibility of Shadow Dance, which is very strong now.

Most of the picks should be no brainers, such as Cheat Death, the Sprint talents, and Graceful Guile. Let’s talk about some of the more interesting stuff.

• Airborne Irritant + Blackjack. This is a really cool combo which gives rogue access to an AoE crowd control. In raids this has niche usages, but I only included it into the base mythic+ tree where it would be auto-picked constantly. If you need the AoE crowd control in raids, you can drop other utility talents as you see fitting, or use the mythic+ class tree for inspiration
• Numbing poison vs Atrophic poison. This is a similar decision to Airborne Irritant + Blackjack. Atrophic poison is much better suited to Raids where you can reduce damage dealt to the entire Raid slightly. In dungeons, this can have niche usages as well in higher keystone levels, but I recommend numbing poison instead for the raw tank mitigation. The attack speed slow is highly potent in AoE pulls
• Subterfuge. This might seem weird at first, but unlike previous patches where Subterfuge was a negligible DPS gain, it is larger in 10.2 due to Nightstalker and provides a small gain that you will most likely want.
• Improved Ambush vs Tight Spender. This choice node is fairly straight forward. If you’re in more single target situations where Ambush is being cast repeatedly (through Shadow Dance and Blindside), you would want Improved Ambush. In AoE you would want Tight Spender.
• Deadly Precision vs Virulent Poisons. Virulent Poisons seems good on first glance since we are “the poison spec”, but our crit interactions are simply too important. Do not use Virulent Poisons

This build is our best raid setup currently. It takes the newly introduced Sanguine Blades, and has quite a different playstyle from the traditional setups in previous patches through the use of Shadow Dance and Kingsbane . If AoE is necessary, swap Internal Bleeding for Caustic Spatter.

This build is similar to the above Dance build. It does perform worse, but should be mechanically less challenging and prove to be an easier entry point into the spec if you’re new or simply trying to remove some of the complexities.

This is one of the highest prio damage builds in Mythic+ and utilizes a lot of talents together to form a cohesive group of utility and damage for all situations. It doesn’t sacrifice a lot of single target damage for AoE, but it also does not particularly excel at it.

This build is more focused on AoE. It loses out some single target damage, but this can be re-couped through combining powerful execute effects like Sudden Demise, Zoldyck Recipe, and Arterial Precision

This cleave build leaves Crimson Tempest behind in favor of pumping single target damage as high as it goes. Some might recognize this build as being very similar to a standard raid build to use on something like Council, and that’s cause it is! Using the power of the tier set however, it’s able to still pull off impressive numbers and delete priority targets.