Rogue PvE Guide (MUTILATE ONLY! It's Higher DPS Under Every Circumstance)

[B ALLEN]

Hey guys. Well to start, this is a hopefully detailed guide on everything you need to know as a rogue in PvE. Talents, Glyphs, Gear, Rotation, Situational Abilities, and every little trick i know.

Oh and no excuse for failing after reading this.

Talents

Well we'll start with talents. Your spec should be 31/2/8 and for those of you who have difficulty figuring out what increases your dps and what DOESN'T, here is a link Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Hopefully I don't have to justify my talent choices but if you have questions I will answer on this post.

Glyphs

For Prime Glyphs you will want to use Mutilate, Rupture, and Backstab. Slice and dice makes the rotation easier but won't increase your dps. A Major glyph you will want is Feint regardless. You want glyph of kick if you're raiding too, it allows you to handle more interrupts or pick up someone elses if they screw up in raids, and many of Cata's fights include interrupts.

Gear

When choosing gear, keep your stat priority in mind. Your stat priority is Agility>Hit until 1332>Mastery>Haste>Expertise>Crit>Hit after 1332

You want 1332 hit in order to reach the spell (or poison) hit cap for raids. Poisons are almost all of your damage, which is the reason mastery is the next most important secondary stat. Agi is FAR more valuable than any other stat.

On your weapons, of course, you should have Deadly Poison on your OH, Instant Poison on your MH

Enchants:
Head: Head enchant from Ramkahen
Cloak: +22 Agi until a better one comes out
Shoulders: Shoulder enchant from Therazane
Chest: +20 Stats
Bracers: +65 Haste
Gloves: +65 Mastery
Legs: Dragonscale leg armor or the LW equivelant
Boots: +35 Agi
Weapons: Landslide. It's VASTLY superior. Don't even get another enchant, save and get landslide. I have it on both of my weapons and I barely ever farm gold, so don't even bitch.

For gemming, you'll want to match the sockets based on stat priority for the most part, but use common sense, if the bonus is something like +20 crit, dont bother. Honestly, you lose a negligible amount of damage by dumbing it down and just getting +40 agi in everything. It isn't much.

Rotation

For your rotation, which is more important than gear spec and glyphs put together, you have to keep a few things in mind. The first is THERE IS NO ROTATION. Energy procs from Rupture and varying amount of combo points in finishers screws that up.

So your rotation is more like this: Open with Garrote, Use SnD off of that, hit a 4-5 point Rupture, whichever you get. At this point, if you can get a 4-5 point Envenom before SnD goes down, do so, if not, get a smaller Envenom to refresh SnD. Continue Mutilating to 4-5 points and using Envenom until Rupture is about to fall, then pop a 4-5 point Rupture. Your goal is to keep both Rupture and SnD up 100% of the time, but if you have to choose, Envenom and keep SnD up over Rupture. Pop Cooldowns as they come up and remember Vanish is an offensive cooldown.

After the boss drops below 35% replace mutilate with backstab and use 5 point finishers. This is your execute phase.

Situational Abilities

Feint: Feint can be used to reduce AoE damage by quite a lot. Use it on every AoE mechanic.

Edit:Removed Smoke Bomb...

Cloak of Shadows: Your best friend. Trivializes many mechanics. Drops a large variety of debuffs, even "Acquiring Target" on Omnotron Defense System, saving your raid from the flamethrower!

Recuperate: I know it isn't much... but in some fights it makes it WAY easier. On the Chimera boss in BWD you can use it to get your health up above 10k, which is ALL you need. When healing is needed on the entire raid, use it religiously when you have the energy and combo points to spare.

Redirect: Not a major one in most fights, but when you're switching targets a lot on certain fights it is quite useful, please remember you have it to maximize your DPS and keep your rotation running

Dismantle: Not useful in raids, but some heroic bosses can actually be dismantled, notably, the second boss in Grim Batol's swords.

Shiv: IT DROPS ENRAGES NOW WOOOOOT. NO MORE STUPID ASS ANESTHETIC POISON!

Tricks of the Trade: If you have aggro trouble, and you shouldn't if you properly follow this guide, because after overkill drops you should be vanishing, USE TRICKS, DONT BE STUBBORN.

What else can I say? You're ready to raid.

Feel free to post questions!

[haggle]

Pretty neat, covers up most of the things you need to know. However it can all be found more in depth on EJ.

[Vyre]

Just to make this more usefull, adding enchants, gemming etc would be cool aswell, just so that new people who tries playing rogues, don't have to look for more guides, after they find this, that's (imo) the goal of a guide.

Anyways, it's pretty nice, good work

[B ALLEN]

I assumed that with me listing stat priorities, enchants and gems would be common sense, however I'll edit it now for that since it was suggested. Also, haggle, I'm aware of this, but I made it a whole lot easier to understand then EJ... I hope.

Edit: Alright, added enchants and gemming under the gear section

[Blueice22]

Why would you put Deadly on your off hand? You put deadly on your MH and Instant on OH. When you get to 5 stacks of deadly on your target every time it re-applies deadly it will hit with Instant... You are losing a lot of DPS if you put deadly on OH. It is about 1k DPS difference if you have it on your MH.

[B ALLEN]

If you have a brain you have a 1.4 speed or faster OH. Would you like to see a meter of me doing 20k+ on magmaw?

[Rynos]

Well my main is a rogue, not great geared, average heroic gear :3 but ive tried poisons both ways, and have found that instant on OH is less dps.

[Blueice22]

I always top the DPS charts and use Instant on my OH. They will average out close to the same on really long fights (less then 50 DPS difference and it is in favor of using instant on your OH) but on the shorter fights (Heroic bosses) it works out in favor of using instant on your MH.

[B ALLEN]

I always top dps charts too. Did you rank nationally on world of logs? =P

I'm using vicious weapons 1.8/1.4, poison hit capped, and reforged to mastery (figured that may be relevant), and deadly on OH ALWAYS brings me more dps...

Also I couldn't give less of a shit about heroics lol I'm raid geared for the most part.

I'm curious as to why you get more dps from that though...

[bloodforsilence]

I always top the DPS charts and use Instant on my OH. They will average out close to the same on really long fights (less then 50 DPS difference and it is in favor of using instant on your OH) but on the shorter fights (Heroic bosses) it works out in favor of using instant on your MH.

Deadly on the oh is superior because of how deadly now procs your mh poison upon refreshing the deadly 5 stack. I mean if your using 2 daggers of the same speed it doesn't really matter. But just like rotations/openers it's all about how you want to play your rogue.

Good guide and plus rep for a beginner rogue.

As far as landside is concerned it is optimal, however lower end weapons really only require hurricane it's still really decent.

Smoke bomb is useless for pve encounters now.

[B ALLEN]

I avoided flamethrower with it around the start of cata... Did they **** that up? **** BLIZZ.

I have vicious weapons and no shortage of gold so I go with landslide for sure. It's insane, let alone optimal.

Removed Smoke Bomb

It's still a hella useful ability for PvP at least.

[Toothpaste]

Deadly Poison is used on your offhand, because if you get really bad luck and need to Refresh S&D, and DP isn't on the target - you can Shiv it on.
Well, that's one of the reasons anyway.

And if your in raids already, you should have a decent tank and can afford to pop ToT on another dps, on another rogue preferably since there is no aggro gain/loss in that situation

I haven't done a lot of testing on it, but I open with Ambush or Mutiliate, Mutiliate to 5cp, Rupture, mutiliate to 2 CP S&D Mut to 5CP and Cold Blood+ Envenom. Only using 5CP's, I find I can easily manage to keep everything up while using 5CPs for all my moves, and I pull around 15k dps in Bloodthirsty PVP Gear.

I will try the prefered opening with Garrote and using S&D on that to see any improvements..

As for the spec you provided, wouldn't the 1 talent point you put in Deadened Nerves be more useful in Deadly Brew?
As DPS you shouldn't be taking a lot of damage anyways, and depending on the situation Crippling Poison can be useful.

For major Glyphs, Feint, TotT and Sap would be optimal wouldn't it? Feint for obvious reason, TotT could possibly be a DPS increase saving 15 energy? As for Sap, having a 2 Min CC is pretty reliable and should be taken by most raiders.

And for stat priority, shouldn't Hit rating be priority until the special cap (8%) > Agi > Mastery/Hit to the Spell cap. I mean, because honestly Poisons proc a lot and rarely miss as it is. My hit is 10.38% (766) and I rarely miss. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Should also list best races and professions for the Mut Spec (gnomes ftw ;3)

Good guide, nothing I didn't already know except for popping SnD first. +repped anyway

[Syncness]

DPS on Magmaw cannot be used for "epeen" comaprisons.

There's a bonus damage buff on Magmaw, as well as AoE.

Pull up a log of Argaloth.

[bloodforsilence]

I avoided flamethrower with it around the start of cata... Did they **** that up? **** BLIZZ.

I have vicious weapons and no shortage of gold so I go with landslide for sure. It's insane, let alone optimal.

Removed Smoke Bomb

It's still a hella useful ability for PvP at least.

I mean i have the mh off omnitron and scaleslicer for my oh. I have landslide on both but for those rogues using blues and those that are kinda strapped for cash(maelstorm crystals on my server are at 2k each now that at least 20k for 2 landslides) hurricane is more then viable. Heck i was using it until i got my upgrades.

Yea smokebomb is completely worthless in pve now. you can't drop anything or keep from being targeted by anything anymore

---------- Post added at 04:21 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:16 AM ----------

DPS on Magmaw cannot be used for "epeen" comaprisons.

There's a bonus damage buff on Magmaw, as well as AoE.

Pull up a log of Argaloth.

argaloth is a really bad example. terrible boss since were not behind him and since any reasonable rogue is reforging away from expertise for spell hit cap and then mastery. Still pull ahead on the fight but it's just a really bad fight in general to compare to. Maloriak/Atramedes/ Chimaeron are better fights to compare dps. Also a neat sheet for those looking to see the current rends of dps check out stateofdps.com pulls all the top 200 parses from every class and gives averages of what classes are looking like.

[Toothpaste]

argaloth is a really bad example. terrible boss since were not behind him .

If you stand correctly, you will be facing the side of him and will be able to get off Backstab hits.