Here they come: vicious poisoners and hardened assassins who slaughter their victims with devious insidiousness.
As an Assassin Rogue, you rely on poisons and stealth to strike down your enemies. Alternatively, as a rogue you can deal damage with the specializations Subtlety and Outlaw.
The most important changes
Of the three rogue specializations, assassins get the fewest changes in Shadowlands. You already had poisons that the other specializations received first, and little changes to your abilities.
Your passive ability Improved Poisons, for example, lets you apply poisons to weapons 33% faster, which has no effect on your feats. Wound Poison, which is especially useful in PvP, can be stacked two more times for assassins, and Vendetta no longer falls under the global cooldown. In addition, the Dagger Fan now only hits a maximum of eight targets.uschung and Dispense Lawlessness.
There are also few changes to the talents. Importantly, however, Poisoned Blade has been dropped as a talent and ability, meaning that assassins no longer rely as heavily on burst windows. Instead, you now have Fervor as a talent, which already exists on the Outlaw Rogue. Fervor increases your speed when using finishing moves.
Wonder Point has an interesting new mechanic: It’s now a passive effect that grants Mutilate a 20% chance to use the next ambush for free and outside of stealth – Or 40% if the target has less than 35% health.
How to play the Assassin Rogue
| Stage | Talent | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | Elaborate Planning | Your finishing moves increase your damage done by ten percent for four seconds. |
| 25 | Subterfuge | Your abilities that require stealth can still be used for three seconds after exiting stealth mode. Also causes Choke to deal 80% more damage and have no cooldown if the ability is used from Stealth and within three seconds of exiting Stealth. |
| 30 | Vigor | Increases your maximum energy by 50 and your energy regeneration by 10%. |
| 35 | Cheat Death | Deadly attacks set your health to 7% of your maximum health instead of killing you. After that, your damage taken is reduced by 85% for three seconds. This effect can only occur once every six minutes. |
| 40 | Prey on the Weak | Enemies that you incapacitate with Nasty Trick or Kidney Chop take 10% more damage from all sources for six seconds. |
| 45 | Alacrity | Your finishing moves have a 20% chance per combo point to increase your speed by 2% for 20 seconds. This effect stacks up to five times. |
| 50 | Poison Bomb | When using Poison and Bleed, there is a 4% chance per combo point spent that you will break a vial of poison at the target’s location, forming a puddle of deadly acid. It deals 686 Nature damage to all enemies within its area of effect over the course of two seconds. |
Your attribute prioritization looks like this as an Assassin Rogue:
- Agility
- Versatility
- Critical hit chance
- Speed
- Mastery
Like all rogues, you use Energy to build up combo points and use them to perform powerful finishing moves. With the removal of Poisoned Blade, your only priority as an assassin is to maintain your damage-over-time effects on the target throughout.
To do this, use Bleed and Strangle before the respective DoT runs out. Since you now also have Chop, make sure that this buff doesn’t expire on you so that you don’t lose damage.
Vendetta should always be used in conjunction with Disappearance whenever possible so that you can benefit from the boosted attacks from Stealth – especially if you are using the Trickster talent.
The only important thing is that you only start the Vendetta when you have enough energy. Accumulate Energy and once again bring Bleed and Strangle on the target so you can take full advantage of Vendetta via the boosted damage for Poison.
