PvE Combat Rogue Talents, Builds & Glyphs

PvE Combat Rogue

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Stat Priority

Best Races

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Rotation & Cooldowns

Best Professions

Best in Slot (BiS) & Pre-Raid Gear

Addons & Macros

Rogues have a talent build that they will generally gravitate towards for the entire expansion, which we call the standard build. However, we also offer a modification of the standard build, which can situationally be useful in specific circumstances.

Notable Talents

• Prey on the Weak: Increases your critical strike damage by 20% as long as your health, as a percentage, is higher than your targets. As long as your healers manage to keep you at 100%, this means that your crit damage is increased by 20% permanently — which is amazing, other classes would die for a talent like this.
• Hack and Slash: Sword spec is back, except now it includes axes too! Your attacks have a chance to trigger an additional attack, which is pretty straightforward yet incredibly powerful. This helps you do more damage, and get more procs — a win-win talent.
• Combat Potency: A staple Combat talent, causing your offhand attacks to have a chance to generate 15 energy. Coupled with our various attack speed increase effects, this talent will give you a lot of energy over a fight’s duration.
• Weapon Expertise: Grants +10 expertise (not rating, flat expertise). Fantastic talent, helps you cap expertise with very little effort.
• Savage Combat: Increases your attack power by 4%. More importantly, any target afflicted by your poisons (most often Deadly Poison IX) is also afflicted by the 4% increased physical damage taken debuff. That debuff does not stack, so only 1 Rogue needs to have this talent technically, but in practice every Rogue will have it, ensuring you have maximum uptime on it, buffing your raid’s overall damage.
• Killing Spree: The crown jewel of the Combat tree is a big nuke button that you get to press every 2 minutes. You can use it on cooldown or macro it with your other cooldowns, but it’s also a great idea to save it for when something needs to die very quickly, as it deals a LOT of damage.
• Vile Poisons & Improved Poisons: Poisons are buffed in WotLK, so these poison-related talents are more important than they used to be.

Talent Builds

Standard Build

The standard build is a well-rounded Combat Rogue build, offering all of the important talents discussed in the Notable Talents section, such as Prey on the Weak, Hack and Slash and Combat Potency. After we’ve taken all of the important Combat talents, we spend the rest of our talent points picking up Assassination staples, such as Ruthlessness.

Note that you have some leeway with picking up different amounts of points in the Improved Poisons and Vile Poisons talents. Everything else besides those 2 is, well, standard.

Mace Specialization

This build is nearly identical to the standard build. Its only difference is that we forego Hack and Slash, picking up Mace Specialization. This build is obviously intended for Rogues using maces, which will be desirable during the Ulduar raid tier, as the strongest one-handed weapons then are maces.

Glyphs

Major Glyphs

• Glyph of Sinister Strike and Glyph of Killing Spree are must-have glyphs, increasing your combo point generation speed and reducing the cooldown of your Killing Spree by a significant amount.

The last glyph slot has multiple options, of varying viability:

• Glyph of Tricks of the Trade is a very powerful option, increasing your raid’s DPS. This is what a selfless Rogue should use!
• Glyph of Rupture is a good choice in the earlier phases, where bleed effects are at their most powerful.
• Glyph of Adrenaline Rush is a slightly meh choice, only really competing with the other options on shorter fights. The shorter the fight, the better this glyph becomes, essentially.
• Glyph of Expose Armor is a solid choice on paper. In practice, your Warriors will be applying Sunder Armor most of the time, and the two don’t stack. This means that you only use this glyph if your raid has no Warriors, and if your guild hates you, forcing you to be the Expose Armor user.

Minor Glyphs

Your 3 minor glyphs should be Glyph of Vanish, Glyph of Blurred Speed and Glyph of Safe Fall. Other glyphs can be considered, but none are particularly great, which is unfortunate as these 3 aren’t exactly amazing either.