Overview
A stealth melee fighter who turns preparation into control and efficient finishers. Match weapons to your attacks, maintain poisons and use control before a pull becomes chaotic.
- Role
- Melee DPS
- Primary stats
- Agility · weapon damage
- Combat range
- Melee
- Resource
- Energy · combo points
Keep Your Poison When Adding a Weapon Stone
Rogue poisons can coexist with temporary weapon enchantments such as sharpening stones and weightstones in WoW Forever. You no longer have to treat those preparation choices as replacing one another. Poison charges also increased, while Improved Poisons can further conserve charges when effects trigger.
Before a dungeon, check the actual poison and weapon in each hand. A talent that improves poison damage is not a substitute for applying poison, and a newly equipped weapon needs its own preparation. Use your current poison tooltip for charge counts instead of buying around a fixed count from an older Classic guide.
Weapon access also expands: Rogues can learn one-handed axes. That creates more equipment options, but the ability you intend to use still determines which weapons work.
Choose Weapons Around the Attack You Will Press
Weapon and proc conditions worth checking before a respec
| Ability or talent | What the current rules mean |
|---|---|
| Mutilate — Assassination, 21 points | Requires daggers in both hands. Costs 60 Energy, strikes with both weapons and awards two Combo Points. Damage increases against poisoned targets. |
| Seal Fate with Mutilate | Triggers exactly once if either or both hands critically strike. Two critical hands do not mean two Seal Fate activations. |
| Hack and Slash — Combat | Combines the former weapon specializations and adds axes. Axes and swords share an extra-attack benefit; maces ignore some armor instead of providing the old stun chance. |
| Ghostly Strike and Hemorrhage — Subtlety | Have increased percentage damage with a dagger compared with another weapon. This is support for that loadout, not a requirement that every Subtlety attack use two daggers. |
If you choose Mutilate and then replace one dagger with an attractive axe, you have changed whether the attack meets its equipment requirement. Inspect the planned loadout before spending for the respec; an item’s damage number alone cannot tell you whether your main attack remains available.
Combat’s Precision now improves hit chance for spells and attacks, including poisons. Weapon Expertise instead reduces the target’s chance to dodge or parry. Those are distinct effects, so do not read a dodge/parry reduction as an identical amount of poison hit chance.
Set Up Sap Before the Group Starts Area Damage
Sap no longer breaks Stealth as a baseline rule. Dirty Tricks is not required to obtain that behavior; it now reduces the Energy cost of Sap and Blind. This lets the party plan around your control without requiring the old Improved Sap investment.
Before the pull, agree which enemy you will control and where the tank will hold the others. Let the group establish the intended separation instead of dropping area damage onto the controlled target immediately. Staying in Stealth after Sap gives you another setup decision; it does not automatically make every nearby enemy safe to approach.
Distract now reduces affected enemies’ Stealth detection for ten seconds. Improved Distract increases its radius and detection penalty. Use that window to approach for your intended setup, while watching the actual pack’s position. Against players, the debuff also advertises that a Rogue is nearby, so it is not an invisible warning-free approach tool.
Using Sap on a PvP-flagged target correctly flags the Rogue after the September fix. On a ruleset where flagging changes who can attack you, include that consequence in the decision to use control.
Expose Armor No Longer Blocks the Tank’s Sunder
Expose Armor now matches approximately same-level five-stack Sunder Armor reduction. A Warrior can still use Sunder Armor for threat while Expose Armor is present; the effects do not simply add their armor reductions together.
Improved Expose Armor changes the cost and Combo Point handling rather than increasing the armor-reduction amount. It reduces Energy cost and refunds Combo Points when used at five points. If you took the talent to help maintain that debuff, use the qualifying five-point case rather than assuming every low-point cast earns the refund.
October 1 fixed missing with Expose Armor causing loss of all Combo Points. That bug is no longer a reason to describe the finisher as deliberately consuming every point on a miss. Feint’s threat reduction has also doubled, but that does not turn it into a damage-immunity button.
Assassination: Maintain Poison Support, Then Spend
Cold Blood is the 16-point milestone and applies to Mutilate. The October 16 fix makes the effect correctly get consumed when Mutilate critically strikes; do not plan around retaining it after that critical attack.
Venom is the 31-point talent: a 25-Energy finisher that increases poison damage by 30% and poison application chance by 10%, with duration based on Combo Points spent. Blizzard describes Assassination’s intended finisher emphasis as maintaining Venom and Slice and Dice before damaging finishers such as Rupture and Eviscerate. That is a stated design direction, not a tested universal priority for every enemy’s remaining lifespan.
Improved Kidney Shot’s damage increase applies only to your own attacks and poisons. Do not count it as an additional damage bonus for every party member hitting the stunned target. Murder now includes Giants but no longer includes Beasts and Dragonkin, another reason an old talent description can mislead your target-specific expectations.
Subtlety: Use the Right Follow-up for Your Proc
Premeditation moves to the 16-point milestone and its duration increases to 20 seconds. Hemorrhage increases your Rupture damage to the target for 15 seconds, connecting those two attacks rather than merely providing a generic damage button.
Cutthroat gives Backstab a chance to make the next Ambush usable without Stealth. Watch for that specific effect before trying to use an in-combat Ambush. Dirty Deeds separately allows Garrote without being behind the target; these are different exceptions for different attacks.
Thousand Cuts is the 31-point talent. Each Rupture damage tick reduces the Energy cost of your next Hemorrhage or Backstab by three, stacking up to five times. Quietus instead improves Sinister Strike, Ghostly Strike and Hemorrhage against targets below 35% health. Check which attack and condition your chosen talent actually supports.
Setup now adds Combo Points to your current target only when that target caused the dodge or resisted spell. Evading an unrelated enemy’s attack does not supply the same trigger against the opponent you have selected.
Talents start at level 10; changing them requires a trainer, and Dual Specialization opens at level 40. Use the race/class reference for creation options and our leveling guide for route planning. This article covers mechanics and loadout decisions rather than claiming an optimal 1–60 build from prelaunch data.
Updated November 1: checked against Blizzard’s Rogue deep dive, October 1 fixes and October 16 fixes.
Cover: adventurers resting by a campfire in Blizzard’s launch preview. It is game scenery, not a demonstration of poison crafting. © Blizzard Entertainment.
