The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Combat Leveling - Part 3 of 3
by Zasp
Wow, the slacker finally gave us part 3 of this “guide”. Psh, how can he even use that word? If you missed the first or second installment I’d recommend starting there.
Anyways on to the final part.
At level 51 you move to the Assassination Tree.
Tier 1
The first tier has Improved Eviscerate, Remorseless Attacks, and Malice.
Improved Eviscerate increases the damage done by eviscerate by 5/10/15% per talent point. Seeing how it is not a normal finisher it is a very weak return, when compared to other options. Perhaps I’ll touch on why Eviscerate is a weak finisher in the near future but for now, we’ll stick to leveling.
Remorseless Attacks gives you a 40% increased critical strike chance when using Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage, Backstab, Mutilate, Ambush or Ghostly Strike, after killing something that either results in experience or honor. Note this only triggers on you getting the killing blow, and is only up for 20 seconds. 20 seconds is a long time, especially in the densely packed area of questage, but there’s still room for your next strike not to crit because of the mean Random Number Generator.*Queue Eerie Monster Music* I can not justify this as a useful use of talent points no matter how I try.
Malice increases your critical strike chance by 1% per talent point regardless of weapon making it a very solid investment. Especially when compared to Improved Eviscerate and Remorseless Attacks. Simple,to the point, and always useful. Put your next 5 talents points here from 51-55.
Tier 2
Tier 2 Assassination brings us Ruthlessness, Murder and Puncturing Wounds.
Puncturing Wounds, while being very good for Backstab or Mutilate builds as it gives 10/20/30% chance to crit to Backstab while also giving 5/10/15% chance to crit to Mutilate, serves no purpose in our leveling build so simply ignore it.
Ruthlessness gives a 20/40/60% chance to add 1 combo point to your current target which can help maintain Slice and Dice uptime or bring you to a Rupture or another finisher quicker. It is too strong of a talent choice to ignore. The next 3 talents will be spent here from level 56-58 making your build look like this. Yes it won’t always give you returns but when it does you will appreciate them.
Which brings us to Murder, which gives 1/2% increased damage to all Humanoids,Giants, Beasts, and Dragonkins. That encompasses most of the mobs you will come across in your adventures. What it doesn’t tell you is it also increases crit damage by 2% on those mobs also making it a very solid choice.
The proof of this comes from an EJ post. I know its not the best post, but I can’t seem to find the one they break down the math.
If you’d like to see the proof yourself, go out to your noobie zone of choice and go kick wolves or the like. Anywhere Murder is going to be in effect is the key. Make sure you at least take off your Helm if you have a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond and take off your weapons for good measure. The reason you kick is because its damage is not affected by AP so it’s a flat range. The tooltip says you kick for 110 damage which with the crit multiplier means you’d do around 220 damage. Now if you factor in Murder your non crits go to 112 which is expected but Murder will also effect the crit damage multiplier to 2.02 which will make your kicks crit for around 228 or so which clearly illustrates it effects your crit damage.
The next 2 talent points spent here to get to the third tier in Assassination. While this may be fixed at one point, this has been a well known bug (Or it may be intentional) and even if it does get fixed I don’t see any other talent taking its place.
Tier 3
The 3rd tier brings us Relentless Strikes, Improved Expose Armor, and Lethality.
Improved Expose Armor gives a 25/50% bonus to the effect of Expose Armor bring a 5 point Imp. Expose Armor up to 3075 armor reduction which is far greater then a 5 stack of sunders which happen to clock in at 2600. So if your going around soloing a ton of heavy armored mobs it could be a very soild investment, but seeing how its situational not that much of a use in a solo leveling build.
Relentless Strikes gives 20% per combo point to have your finishing moves restore 25 energy making Slice and Dice free, Rupture free and reducing Eviscerate to a mere 10 energy if the effect takes place. A very solid investment as any return in energy is going to see a DPS increase. Making it your next talent placement at level 61.
Lethality, increases your critical strike damage bonus by 6/12/18/24/30% per talent point, for Sinister Strike, Gouge, Backstab, Ghostly Strike, Mutilate, Shiv, and Hemorrhage abilities. This makes it a very soild choice for increasing your damage output, as you should have a decent crit rate, the whole time while playing your Rogue. Slap your next 5 points into this talent.
Tier 4
This brings you to level 66 and to tier 4 in the Assassination tree, with the option of 4 Points of Vile Poisons, or Improved Poisons.
Improved Poisons increases your chance to apply poisons to the target by 2/4/6/8% which while useful is out shined by Vile Poisons, giving 4/8/12/16% extra damage to your poisons not to mention 16% extra damage to Envenom. The reason Vile Poisons out shines Improved Poisons is the immediate damage return is far greater the the low chance that a mob is going to resist your poison application. I did not mention the 8/16/24/32% to resist dispel effects because mobs do not dispel your poisons.
This brings to your final build at level 70 to look exactly like the cookie cutter sword build.
Wait, didn’t I say not all cookie cutter builds make the best soloing builds? Yes, yes I did. But, this build maximizes your damage output to the max making the killing of mobs easy. While the play style is not for everyone, in my opinion, it certainly gets the job done the best.
Hopefully this shines a little bit of light as far as why this is a solid leveling build instead of people just saying go spec this and stop being “terrible”.
Till later,
Zasp
April 30th, 2008
This could well be filed under the “your mileage may vary” category, but I tend to see better performance from Imp Evis over Envenom and Vile Poisons. I’m interested in seeing your reasoning behind this decision. The other decision I find curious is taking only one point in Nerves of Steel, as that is primarily a PvP talent, rather than a PvE or leveling talent. Granted, the extra stun resistance could come in handy in certain situations, but most of the time in PvE, we don’t have to worry too much about stuns and fears. I would think that point could be better spent finishing out Vile Poisons. Lastly, while Murder is nice, I found I got better performance by having the increased damage mitigation provided by the improvement to Parry, and the extra DPS provided by Riposte. I’m surprised to see those two talents omitted in this build, as many sword rogues consider them a bread and butter talent set. I’m not trying to say your build is wrong or anything, just curious why you made some of the decisions you did.
Overall, this is a great set of articles that I’ve linked to on my guild forums for my new rogues to read. Well done, Zasp!
P.S. Did you mean for your name to be an anagram of Spaz?
April 30th, 2008
@teh Khol
As for the easy question. No I didn’t even think about my name being an Anagram of Spaz, but it has been pointed out by a couple people.
Nerves of Steel is my preferred “Filler Talent” as I said when recommending it over Endurance or say Imp Kick you need 1 point to get to Combat Potency and thats what I happened to pick. Because I feel its a better use, again if you want a point into say Endurance thats your call and I can’t fault ya for it, as it’s a “Filler”.
Perhaps I shall cover why I despise Eviscerate Next week(Or in the near future), because that deserves a full post rather then a little response, hope you can understand.
With, Riposte I can’t justify 6 talent points for one Skill. Sure extra parry is nice but its rarely going to be the deciding factor in living or dying. It gained a lot of popularity back in the day because of its use in PvP. But in order to work that into my build I give up Vitality, Imp Sprint and one point into Vile Poisons, I personally can not justify that, mostly because I LOVE Imp Sprint and Vitality helps more then 5% parry for surviving a mob.
As for Vile Poisons it increases all your Poison damage by 16% if you have 4 points into it. Since your main poison while grinding(or leveling but I don’t recommend it till the last 4 levels)is instant poison. It increases the average damage of Rank 7(Learned at level 68) Instant Poison to 197. Which is 3 more damage over the old max. Its a decent increase and Instant Poison can be 3 to 4% of your damage. Not to mention I can’t find a better consistent Damage increase anywhere else.
While I try to back up all of my info with Math and Facts it sometimes boils down to personal preference.
April 30th, 2008
You’re right, there is a lot of personal preference choices in there, which is one of the nice things about rogue cookie-cutter builds, there is some flexibility for preference.
I can fully understand despising Eviscerate…until it got it’s scaling, I hated it with a passion. Now, however, we’ve come to terms. Evis’ damage is pretty lackluster until about 1300 AP and then it really starts to come together, at least that was my experience with it. As for things like Imp Sprint (totally with you on Vitality, in my build I give up Murder, as it doesn’t equate to THAT much of an overall increase) that’s definitely a preference. Since I built out for raiding and soloing, I didn’t bother at all with the PvP talents.
In my opinion, Riposte really is where the love is, though. Since it equates to a 10 energy SS hit (although it only has a 200% crit multiplier) and, more often than not, you’ll have it available every time the cooldown is up, it puts out quite a bit of damage. I’ll have to run a WWS report and see what percent of my damage actually comes from Riposte when I’m grinding/soloing versus my percent damage from poisons. I’d be willing to bet they’re pretty comparable. When I first got it way back in the dawn of time, I wasn’t sure how useful it would really be, now I find myself relying on it heavily.
You have some good points here and I think I’ll respec out of Riposte tonight and take Vile Poisons and see how that works for me. Never let it be said I’m unwilling to try something new.
May 1st, 2008
Wow, you’re back!
I don’t have to ask what’s new, I just have to catch up on the reading =)
May 1st, 2008
So what is your “rotation” like? (I have no idea what the proper term for rogues is). I’ve heard the rogues in my guild mostly saying they do 1SnD 5Rupture with two pieces of T4, or 3Snd 5Rupture without it… Basically, the idea being to keep SnD up at all times. And I guess everything bleeds now so they can do Rupture, with Eviscerate only being used if bleed-immune.
I guess this isn’t really in line with the post - maybe a future one on this subject? But it is part of leveling in a sense - you have to know which abilities you should be using.
May 1st, 2008
@Esoth
For Leveling I keep Slice and Dice up pretty much no matter what. I’m not very Rogue like unless it benefits me skipping mobs. I’ll run up hit Sinister Strike once, then slice and dice and proceed to kill the mob. Depending how much life the mob has I get up to around 3 to 4 combo points when theres barely any health left. I usually end up popping slice and dice if theres another mob in a couple steps which most often there is I’ll simply hit slice and dice, and move to that next mob. Move on to the next mob if theres 10 or more seconds left on my current slice and dice I’ll evis if not more Slice and Dice action. And thats my “grinding” or “leveling” rotation.
For raiding I plan on covering in a future post.