Post by Reuben on Mar 1, 2007 5:23:36 GMT -5
The Rogue
unning, deceptive, secretive and deadly: the Rogue. An assassin whose main purpose in combat is to devastate single targets in short order. In this guide, you will become educated on the many aspects of playing a Rogue, their talent trees, and their unique play style.
Rogues are damage-dealers, and that is their group role. You are in a group solely to take down single mobs and provide some limited crowd control (as well as pick locked chests and boxes). Rogues have the fastest (and arguably the most exciting) combat pace the game has to offer. Rogues attack the fastest because they are dual wielders and always use fast-swinging weapons (1-handed swords and maces and daggers). Rogues have to be versatile, patient and very articulate.
Basic Rogue Information
Allowed races: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Orc, Troll, Undead
Standard Bars: Health/Energy
Equipment: Cloth, Leather
Weapons: Daggers, Thrown, Bows, Crossbows, Guns, 1-handed Swords, 1-Handed Maces and Fist Weapons
Tanking: moderate
Healing: none
Damage: highest (for single target)
Utility and support: decent
Strengths
• Stealth allows Rogues to sneak around undetected
• Great lockpicking and poison abilities (without the use of tradeskills)
• Great DPS and solo capabilities.
Weaknesses
• Can only wear Cloth and Leather
• Are only allowed to use 1-handed weapons, daggers or fist weapons
• Certain abilities require a dagger in the main-hand, sometimes forcing you to use the weaker dagger as opposed to a sword etc, in order to make certain abilities effective
Attributes
Every class has five attributes that determine their. Each attribute helps each class differently. Let's look at how each of the stats affects Rogues:
Strength: Adds to your Attack Power: Damage-Per-Second (DPS). Strength does not affect Critical Hit chances at all. Strength does not improve your chance to block, but rather the amount blocked when you succeed. This amount is determined in part by Strength and in part by your shield.
Strength is considered the #3 attribute for Rogues. It increases your DPS, but does not give you higher rate to perform a critical hit. Since Rogues can't use shields, the blocking bonus is of little use.
Stamina: Increases Health points. Considered the #2 attribute, Stamina is important for Rogues. Because Rogues can only wear leather or cloth, their armor is quite weak and they need to get as many hitpoints as they can. A Rogue with a lot of hitpoints can dish out the damage quickly while being able to take a bit of damage themselves.
Intellect: Increases Mana points as well as chance to Critical Hit with magic spells. Intellect also grants a higher chance to increase melee skills. (It does not affect trade skills though.)
Intellect is the #5 attribute, and is of practically no use to a Rogue. The only bonus it gives is a faster weapon skill increase (meaning if you are starting a new weapon type that is at low skill, higher intellect will help the skill rise faster). This bonus is almost non-existent, and intellect should never be sought after in equipment or enchantments for Rogues.
Spirit: Increases Health and Mana regeneration. Spirit affects all characters' mana and Hit Point regeneration rates in and out of combat. Spirit also increases your chance to 'proc' with weapons.
Spirit is the #4 attribute. It is slightly more useful than intellect, but all the same it does not aid Rogues much. It increases hit-point regeneration, but since your hit-points stop regenerating during battle; spirit only kicks in when you are not at full health but also out of combat. Try to stay away from getting spirit equipment, as Agility and Stamina are much more influential for a Rogue.
Agility: Increases all characters' chance to Critical Hit. The amount of the bonus is higher per point on Rogues than other classes. Agility affects dodge. Rogues get more Dodge per point of Agility than other classes. Agility adds directly to Defense
The #1 attribute that all Rogues strive to get higher, Agility gives us a higher critical % as well as a higher dodge rate and increases the already low-armor Rogues have to deal with. Always try to get as much agility as you can, as it is the staple Rogues live off of. The higher your agility, the more you will perform critical strikes that will eventually win fights for you, or at least make them go by faster.
Rogue Skills
The Rogue has three talent trees, which in essence is its three main areas of skills. The first is Assassination, and it has to do with doing a lot of burst damage quickly. Assassination focuses on improving your critical hit percentage, giving you more combo points and increasing your chance to land finishing and stun abilities. The second talent tree is Combat. Combat focuses on improving your combat skills that are the core of your character. The combat tree has all weapon-related talents, as well as the upgrades for Sinister Strike, Gouge and Backstab (all very commonly used Rogue abilities). The final talent tree is Subtlety. This tree offers all of the stealth-related talents, such as improving your skill in stealth and your movement speed while in it, as well as improving abilities that require stealth to pull off.
Combat Skills
Backstab An attack that deals 150% weapon damage plus additional damage to the target. You must be behind the target. The additional damage increases with each rank. Combined with gouge, this is a great ability to use in combat.
Evasion Increases your chance to dodge by 50% for 15 seconds. Evasion is on a long cool-down, so it's good to use on a boss, in a PvP battle or that duel you really need to win. This works great against other Rogues or melee enemies.
Feint The Rogue executes a "feint" which puts someone else first on the monster's hate list. Feint is a great ability to use in instance groups, when a mob is pounding you and you need to get him off. On a somewhat short cooldown, but you cannot spam it.
Gouge Gouge is a great Rogue ability that stuns the target for 4 seconds and causes a bit of damage. Gouge breaks on damage, and requires you to be in front of your target. Use in conjunction with backstab (Gouge then go behind the monster and use Backstab).
Kick Kick is the Rogue's primary way to disrupt a spell being cast. It interrupts the current spell being cast for 5 seconds and prevents casting of any spell in that school for 5 seconds. This works great against any kind of caster mob or class (i.e. Mage, Paladin).
Sinister Strike The bread and butter of the Rogue, SS is an attack that adds extra damage to your regular weapon damage. SS is used to rack up combo points quickly (1 second cooldown) while doing a bit of extra damage.
Assassination Skills
A devastating attack that deals 250% of your weapon damage. Ambush requires you to be in stealth as well as behind your target. Ambush is an opener best used against cloth-wearers or mobs with a small amount of hitpoints.
Ambush
Eviscerate is the Rogue's most used finishing ability. Eviscerate is purely damage, dishing out more damage with each combo point added. Eviscerate is used very widely, and is useful for almost any situation.
Eviscerate
Expose armor is another finishing ability whose effectiveness varies with the amount of combo points tacked onto your target when you pull off the finisher. Expose armor reduces armor on a target, useful when facing bosses or heavy HP mobs.
Expose Armor
Garrote is a useful opening attack that deals a large amount of damage over time. Garrote is a great opener when you purely need to damage a target that will take a long time to kill (bosses, higher level characters, tank mobs, etc). Must be stealthed and behind the target.
Garrote
Arguably the most useful Rogue opener, Cheap Shot is useable with any weapon and can be performed from any direction, but does require stealth. Cheap Shot stuns your target and adds on 2 combo points. A lot of people find the stun/2 combo points to be much more useful than Garrote or even Ambush. Great to open with and then use backstab while the mob is stunned.
Cheap Shot
Kidney Shot is a finishing ability that stuns the target. The more combo points, the longer the stun lasts. The stun does not break on damage, so you may attack your opponent. Kidney Shot is great to use when you need to keep a target under wraps, or under a stunlock.
Kidney Shot
Slice and Dice is a finisher that gives you a 20% attack speed bonus for X amount of seconds (duration increases with amount of combo points). This ability is great when you are grinding mobs that are close to each other.
Slice and Dice
Rupture is a finisher that deals a lot of damage over time. At times Eviscerate can deal the same or slightly less damage instantly, but a lot of the time Rupture can be great to use versus high HP/armor opponents, or against boss mobs.
Rupture
Subtlety Skills
Blind Blind is a an ability that disorients a target, causing it to wander around for up to 10 seconds at 40% movement speed. Blind requires Blinding Powder, which is made from Fadeleaf.
Detect Traps This ability allows you to see all invisible traps for 3 minutes. Good to use when against hunters, or for certain Rogue missions.
Vanish Requiring a vendor-bought reagent, vanish allows a Rogue in-combat to immediately get into stealth. Vanish will fail if an Area of Effect spell hits you, or a Damage-over-Time spell damages you.
Disarm Traps Disarms a target trap that you detect.
Ghostly Strike (TALENT) A strike that deals 125% weapon damage and increases your dodge by 15% for 7 seconds. Awards one combo point. Bad to use against warriors since the more you dodge a warrior, the more he can overpower you (and if the Warrior has Improved Overpower means critical hits every time you dodge). Good against a mob or player who's hitting slow, but not warriors.
Hemorrhage (TALENT) Hemorrhage awards you one combo point and increases the physical damage dealt to a target. This is a good talent to get, as putting this on a target during the fight will give you a good boost in DPS.
Pickpocket Picks the pockets of a humanoid (doesn't work on other player-controlled characters), stealing money and items. Pickpocket is a great way to find junkboxes that you can unlock to get your lockpicking skill up. it can also generate some extra silver if you pickpocket a mob before you kill it. Certain mobs will also have food on them, so you won't have to buy food or ask a mage to summon it for you. Does not reduce the mobs after kill loot.
Premeditation (TALENT) Instantly adds 2 combo points to a target. You must be in stealth and the target must not be in combat. After using the talent, the monster must engage in combat in 5 seconds or the combo points are lost.
Preparation (TALENT) When used, this talent finishes the cooldown on all other abilities (except for its own timer).
Safe Fall A passive ability that reduces Rogue's falling damage. Great for when you have to make a big jump. Especially useful for all those Rogues who love jumping off the Zeppelin or jumping down into Un'Goro Crater from Tanaris.
Sap Sap is a Rogue's primary form of crowd control. Sap is a stun that can only be used on humanoids (including player characters), requires you to be stealthed and behind the target.
Stealth Stealth is the Rogue's class defining ability. Stealth is a state in which the Rogue is concealed/camouflaged. Higher level players can detect lower levels Rogue's very easily. However, at level 60, it's very tough to spot a Rogue. Especially with a talent from the Subtlety tree, Rogue's stealth can be quite hard to spot. However, Rogue's cannot stealth if they have a DOT (Damage-over-time debuff) on them, or an ability like Faire-Fire. You cannot enter stealth while in combat.
Poisons
At level 20 you can begin a quest that will give you the ability to create and utilize poisons upon successful completion. Poisons are add-ons that you create from buying vendor materials and apply to your weapons. Poisons are not overly costly but will run up a bill for you. Poisons come in a variety of fashions, including instant damage, damage over time, anti-spell casting poisons and much more. Here are the poisons available to Rogues:
This is a very effective and useful poison that has a 30% chance to slow your enemy to 30% of normal movement speed. I find this useful when I am soloing or when I am in an instance because it helps to slow runners.
Crippling Poison
Instant Poison is a great poison that has a chance to deal instant poison damage to a target. Instant poison is great for any situation, especially PvP where any extra damage can be the difference between living and dieing.
Instant Poison
Each strike gives you a 20% chance to increase the target's casting time by 60% of 12 seconds. This is a good poison to use against casters, but sometimes seems like a waste because of the many stuns a Rogue can use to interrupt casting (Kick, Gouge, Kidney Shot, Cheap Shot).
Mind-Numbing Poisons
Deadly Poison is a DOT (Damage over time) poison that has a chance to infect your target with poison damage that damages over a set amount of time. This can be useful for long-winded fights or to prevent bandaging or stealthing.
Deadly Poison
This poison reduces healing effects on a target if it procs. This is useful against mobs that can self-heal, heal each other or have some form of healing which is hard/impossible to stop. This is great against Paladins and Priests.
Wound Poison
unning, deceptive, secretive and deadly: the Rogue. An assassin whose main purpose in combat is to devastate single targets in short order. In this guide, you will become educated on the many aspects of playing a Rogue, their talent trees, and their unique play style.
Rogues are damage-dealers, and that is their group role. You are in a group solely to take down single mobs and provide some limited crowd control (as well as pick locked chests and boxes). Rogues have the fastest (and arguably the most exciting) combat pace the game has to offer. Rogues attack the fastest because they are dual wielders and always use fast-swinging weapons (1-handed swords and maces and daggers). Rogues have to be versatile, patient and very articulate.
Basic Rogue Information
Allowed races: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Orc, Troll, Undead
Standard Bars: Health/Energy
Equipment: Cloth, Leather
Weapons: Daggers, Thrown, Bows, Crossbows, Guns, 1-handed Swords, 1-Handed Maces and Fist Weapons
Tanking: moderate
Healing: none
Damage: highest (for single target)
Utility and support: decent
Strengths
• Stealth allows Rogues to sneak around undetected
• Great lockpicking and poison abilities (without the use of tradeskills)
• Great DPS and solo capabilities.
Weaknesses
• Can only wear Cloth and Leather
• Are only allowed to use 1-handed weapons, daggers or fist weapons
• Certain abilities require a dagger in the main-hand, sometimes forcing you to use the weaker dagger as opposed to a sword etc, in order to make certain abilities effective
Attributes
Every class has five attributes that determine their. Each attribute helps each class differently. Let's look at how each of the stats affects Rogues:
Strength: Adds to your Attack Power: Damage-Per-Second (DPS). Strength does not affect Critical Hit chances at all. Strength does not improve your chance to block, but rather the amount blocked when you succeed. This amount is determined in part by Strength and in part by your shield.
Strength is considered the #3 attribute for Rogues. It increases your DPS, but does not give you higher rate to perform a critical hit. Since Rogues can't use shields, the blocking bonus is of little use.
Stamina: Increases Health points. Considered the #2 attribute, Stamina is important for Rogues. Because Rogues can only wear leather or cloth, their armor is quite weak and they need to get as many hitpoints as they can. A Rogue with a lot of hitpoints can dish out the damage quickly while being able to take a bit of damage themselves.
Intellect: Increases Mana points as well as chance to Critical Hit with magic spells. Intellect also grants a higher chance to increase melee skills. (It does not affect trade skills though.)
Intellect is the #5 attribute, and is of practically no use to a Rogue. The only bonus it gives is a faster weapon skill increase (meaning if you are starting a new weapon type that is at low skill, higher intellect will help the skill rise faster). This bonus is almost non-existent, and intellect should never be sought after in equipment or enchantments for Rogues.
Spirit: Increases Health and Mana regeneration. Spirit affects all characters' mana and Hit Point regeneration rates in and out of combat. Spirit also increases your chance to 'proc' with weapons.
Spirit is the #4 attribute. It is slightly more useful than intellect, but all the same it does not aid Rogues much. It increases hit-point regeneration, but since your hit-points stop regenerating during battle; spirit only kicks in when you are not at full health but also out of combat. Try to stay away from getting spirit equipment, as Agility and Stamina are much more influential for a Rogue.
Agility: Increases all characters' chance to Critical Hit. The amount of the bonus is higher per point on Rogues than other classes. Agility affects dodge. Rogues get more Dodge per point of Agility than other classes. Agility adds directly to Defense
The #1 attribute that all Rogues strive to get higher, Agility gives us a higher critical % as well as a higher dodge rate and increases the already low-armor Rogues have to deal with. Always try to get as much agility as you can, as it is the staple Rogues live off of. The higher your agility, the more you will perform critical strikes that will eventually win fights for you, or at least make them go by faster.
Rogue Skills
The Rogue has three talent trees, which in essence is its three main areas of skills. The first is Assassination, and it has to do with doing a lot of burst damage quickly. Assassination focuses on improving your critical hit percentage, giving you more combo points and increasing your chance to land finishing and stun abilities. The second talent tree is Combat. Combat focuses on improving your combat skills that are the core of your character. The combat tree has all weapon-related talents, as well as the upgrades for Sinister Strike, Gouge and Backstab (all very commonly used Rogue abilities). The final talent tree is Subtlety. This tree offers all of the stealth-related talents, such as improving your skill in stealth and your movement speed while in it, as well as improving abilities that require stealth to pull off.
Combat Skills
Backstab An attack that deals 150% weapon damage plus additional damage to the target. You must be behind the target. The additional damage increases with each rank. Combined with gouge, this is a great ability to use in combat.
Evasion Increases your chance to dodge by 50% for 15 seconds. Evasion is on a long cool-down, so it's good to use on a boss, in a PvP battle or that duel you really need to win. This works great against other Rogues or melee enemies.
Feint The Rogue executes a "feint" which puts someone else first on the monster's hate list. Feint is a great ability to use in instance groups, when a mob is pounding you and you need to get him off. On a somewhat short cooldown, but you cannot spam it.
Gouge Gouge is a great Rogue ability that stuns the target for 4 seconds and causes a bit of damage. Gouge breaks on damage, and requires you to be in front of your target. Use in conjunction with backstab (Gouge then go behind the monster and use Backstab).
Kick Kick is the Rogue's primary way to disrupt a spell being cast. It interrupts the current spell being cast for 5 seconds and prevents casting of any spell in that school for 5 seconds. This works great against any kind of caster mob or class (i.e. Mage, Paladin).
Sinister Strike The bread and butter of the Rogue, SS is an attack that adds extra damage to your regular weapon damage. SS is used to rack up combo points quickly (1 second cooldown) while doing a bit of extra damage.
Assassination Skills
A devastating attack that deals 250% of your weapon damage. Ambush requires you to be in stealth as well as behind your target. Ambush is an opener best used against cloth-wearers or mobs with a small amount of hitpoints.
Ambush
Eviscerate is the Rogue's most used finishing ability. Eviscerate is purely damage, dishing out more damage with each combo point added. Eviscerate is used very widely, and is useful for almost any situation.
Eviscerate
Expose armor is another finishing ability whose effectiveness varies with the amount of combo points tacked onto your target when you pull off the finisher. Expose armor reduces armor on a target, useful when facing bosses or heavy HP mobs.
Expose Armor
Garrote is a useful opening attack that deals a large amount of damage over time. Garrote is a great opener when you purely need to damage a target that will take a long time to kill (bosses, higher level characters, tank mobs, etc). Must be stealthed and behind the target.
Garrote
Arguably the most useful Rogue opener, Cheap Shot is useable with any weapon and can be performed from any direction, but does require stealth. Cheap Shot stuns your target and adds on 2 combo points. A lot of people find the stun/2 combo points to be much more useful than Garrote or even Ambush. Great to open with and then use backstab while the mob is stunned.
Cheap Shot
Kidney Shot is a finishing ability that stuns the target. The more combo points, the longer the stun lasts. The stun does not break on damage, so you may attack your opponent. Kidney Shot is great to use when you need to keep a target under wraps, or under a stunlock.
Kidney Shot
Slice and Dice is a finisher that gives you a 20% attack speed bonus for X amount of seconds (duration increases with amount of combo points). This ability is great when you are grinding mobs that are close to each other.
Slice and Dice
Rupture is a finisher that deals a lot of damage over time. At times Eviscerate can deal the same or slightly less damage instantly, but a lot of the time Rupture can be great to use versus high HP/armor opponents, or against boss mobs.
Rupture
Subtlety Skills
Blind Blind is a an ability that disorients a target, causing it to wander around for up to 10 seconds at 40% movement speed. Blind requires Blinding Powder, which is made from Fadeleaf.
Detect Traps This ability allows you to see all invisible traps for 3 minutes. Good to use when against hunters, or for certain Rogue missions.
Vanish Requiring a vendor-bought reagent, vanish allows a Rogue in-combat to immediately get into stealth. Vanish will fail if an Area of Effect spell hits you, or a Damage-over-Time spell damages you.
Disarm Traps Disarms a target trap that you detect.
Ghostly Strike (TALENT) A strike that deals 125% weapon damage and increases your dodge by 15% for 7 seconds. Awards one combo point. Bad to use against warriors since the more you dodge a warrior, the more he can overpower you (and if the Warrior has Improved Overpower means critical hits every time you dodge). Good against a mob or player who's hitting slow, but not warriors.
Hemorrhage (TALENT) Hemorrhage awards you one combo point and increases the physical damage dealt to a target. This is a good talent to get, as putting this on a target during the fight will give you a good boost in DPS.
Pickpocket Picks the pockets of a humanoid (doesn't work on other player-controlled characters), stealing money and items. Pickpocket is a great way to find junkboxes that you can unlock to get your lockpicking skill up. it can also generate some extra silver if you pickpocket a mob before you kill it. Certain mobs will also have food on them, so you won't have to buy food or ask a mage to summon it for you. Does not reduce the mobs after kill loot.
Premeditation (TALENT) Instantly adds 2 combo points to a target. You must be in stealth and the target must not be in combat. After using the talent, the monster must engage in combat in 5 seconds or the combo points are lost.
Preparation (TALENT) When used, this talent finishes the cooldown on all other abilities (except for its own timer).
Safe Fall A passive ability that reduces Rogue's falling damage. Great for when you have to make a big jump. Especially useful for all those Rogues who love jumping off the Zeppelin or jumping down into Un'Goro Crater from Tanaris.
Sap Sap is a Rogue's primary form of crowd control. Sap is a stun that can only be used on humanoids (including player characters), requires you to be stealthed and behind the target.
Stealth Stealth is the Rogue's class defining ability. Stealth is a state in which the Rogue is concealed/camouflaged. Higher level players can detect lower levels Rogue's very easily. However, at level 60, it's very tough to spot a Rogue. Especially with a talent from the Subtlety tree, Rogue's stealth can be quite hard to spot. However, Rogue's cannot stealth if they have a DOT (Damage-over-time debuff) on them, or an ability like Faire-Fire. You cannot enter stealth while in combat.
Poisons
At level 20 you can begin a quest that will give you the ability to create and utilize poisons upon successful completion. Poisons are add-ons that you create from buying vendor materials and apply to your weapons. Poisons are not overly costly but will run up a bill for you. Poisons come in a variety of fashions, including instant damage, damage over time, anti-spell casting poisons and much more. Here are the poisons available to Rogues:
This is a very effective and useful poison that has a 30% chance to slow your enemy to 30% of normal movement speed. I find this useful when I am soloing or when I am in an instance because it helps to slow runners.
Crippling Poison
Instant Poison is a great poison that has a chance to deal instant poison damage to a target. Instant poison is great for any situation, especially PvP where any extra damage can be the difference between living and dieing.
Instant Poison
Each strike gives you a 20% chance to increase the target's casting time by 60% of 12 seconds. This is a good poison to use against casters, but sometimes seems like a waste because of the many stuns a Rogue can use to interrupt casting (Kick, Gouge, Kidney Shot, Cheap Shot).
Mind-Numbing Poisons
Deadly Poison is a DOT (Damage over time) poison that has a chance to infect your target with poison damage that damages over a set amount of time. This can be useful for long-winded fights or to prevent bandaging or stealthing.
Deadly Poison
This poison reduces healing effects on a target if it procs. This is useful against mobs that can self-heal, heal each other or have some form of healing which is hard/impossible to stop. This is great against Paladins and Priests.
Wound Poison
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