Expansion Rogue Build

After playing the beta at WWI, those lovely people over at wowhead.com have put the current talent trees online that were available, sorry paladins and hunters.

I've had a look around the rogue talents and put together what I think will be my new raiding build once Crash hits level 80 and here it is.

I've gone back to a heavy assassination build (mainly because that's what a rogue should be about) but doesn't place a restriction on the type of weapons being used like the mutilate build does. The aim is that the extra poison talents will make up the damage, and deadly brew means that getting a stack of deadly poison on the target shouldn't be an issue. Also the quicker they can be reapplied the better as Envenom is going to become the alternative finishing move as it will refresh slice and dice. This also means that Instant Poison is likely to be on both weapons rather than just on the main hand as it is now.

Rupture is still going to be a key feature especially as the Blood Spatter talent has increased it's damage output and for all the good reasons it's used today whilst in a raiding group.

The 51-pt talent seems to be the most relevant to PvE as it stands so far, a cut down Cloak of Shadows that also increases damage output and is free if it actually clears something. Given that one of the raid instances is against the blue dragon flight there's likely to be a lot of magic damage flying around and if they keep mechanics like Moroes' garotte in fights then this'll be a good way to help the healers whilst taking down the boss quicker.

Having put 51pts into assassination, the final 20 have gone into combat mainly to get precision and dual-wield specialization as the hit cap for rogues is likely to be just as crazy high at level 80 as it is at level 70.

So now we have these new talents and some new ways of doing damage let's look at what the rotation (such as there can be one) might be.

Opening with garrote will be favourite due to the 20% improved damage and then using that combo point with eviscerate or envenom if poisons have been applied to get S'n'D up and running. Once this has happened it will be a case of alternating Rupture and Envenom to keep the bleed effect running, S'n'D up and Find Weakness. This will be a bit more challenging than what's going on with the current combat swords spec but does add some intricacies that mutilate had.

The final disclaimer for this build is that it may change as all the talents do given that these are beta talent trees and may well be balanced between now and the actual expansion being released, but if it turns out to be the max dps build for all those rogues defeating Arthas, remember where you saw it first :)