Rogue Skills and Talents

Skills and Talents

Assassination
Assassination is the tree which includes most of the finishing moves that rogues are going to be use. You should be able to look over these skills in-game and figure out what each one does fairly easily; Eviscerate is generally the favorite finisher, due to its straightforward damage bonus. In addition, there are a number of opening combo moves, such as Ambush, Cheap Shot, and Garrote.

For the finishers, it’s important to remember that you don’t need a full five combo points to use them. For example, if your Kick hasn’t refreshed, and a caster enemy is about to heal itself, you can use your Kidney Shot ability with just a single combo point to stun your target and interrupt the spell. In general, yes, you’ll want to wait until you have all combo points filled before using your finisher, but keep in mind that you gain no benefits from combo points if the enemy dies before you can use a finisher. If you have three combo points on an enemy that a friendly warrior is about to finish off, then, go ahead and use Slice and Dice, which will improve your melee attack speed when you switch to another target.

The talents in the Assassination tree focus on increasing your critical skill chance and increasing the benefits you gain from landing critical hits. For a tier one ability, Malice is fantastic, and is something that all rogues will probably want to max out, as a 5% increase to your critical chance, in addition to whatever you get from a huge Agility stat, should let you convert a significant percentage of your hits into critical hits. One notable special talent is Cold Blood, which will guarantee a critical hit on one of your next combo skills. This is fantastic to use in coordination with Ambush for truly spectacular damage to open a fight, especially against a PVP target, and has a relatively short cooldown period.

Combat
Your Combat abilities will tie in with the Assassination abilities somewhat, as there are a lot of combo skills here, including Backstab, Gouge, and Sinister Strike; this last is probably going to be the skill you use more often than any other, as it will let you consistently add damage to your normal weapon swings while building up combo points for an Eviscerate. You’ll also have the useful Feint, which will lower the aggro that you’ve gained and encourage the enemy to flip back over to the tank of the group, and Kick, which will let you interrupt spellcasting.

Your Combat talents are mostly straightforward Improved versions of your skills, with a few weapon specializations thrown in there for variety. Most of the Sinister Strike/Eviscerate rogues will get a lot of mileage out of Improved Sinister Strike, Dagger Specialization, and Aggression, while any rogue will benefit from Adrenaline Rush, which will essentially double the number of number of special skills that you can use for a fifteen-second period.

Subtlety
The most distinctive feature of the rogue is their ability to use Stealth, which effectively makes them invisible to all nearby enemies. This ties in with some of your combo moves, such as Ambush and Garrote, which require you to be stealthed in order to go off, but will also let you scout areas, evade groups of mobs in favor of solo enemies, and use the super-useful Sap ability. Sap is great for soloing or group play; when you’re stealthed, you can Sap a foe to stun them for an extended period of time. This will bring you out of stealth mode, but will reduce the number of foes that you’ll have to deal with in the ensuing fight, or at least delay their entrance into the battle.

Almost all of your Subtlety talents will, again, be Improved versions of your normal skills. The best among these is arguably Improved Sap, which will let you Sap targets without dropping out of stealth mode. You can combine this with a long-distance puller party member to quite effectively break up groups of mobs without necessarily having them all target you automatically; your warrior friend can instead use his gun to shoot at one of the non-Sapped mobs, letting them scurry away from you and allowing you to follow up and get going with your Backstabs.