How To Improve As Assassination Rogue — The War Within (11.0.5)

Since all of Assassination's damage is tied to resources, it is important to waste as little of them as possible. You should make sure you do not find yourself being energy-capped or casting Combo Point-generating abilities when at maximum Combo Points.

One issue that players tend to run into, is not immediately re-applying their Deathstalker's Mark when Darkest Night is active. You will want to re-apply the Mark as quickly as possible, even if you were to over-cap Combo Points before casting your 7 Combo Point Envenom. Make sure to keep track of your Deathstalker's Mark charges, so you do not run into the issue of having to refresh your Rupture while Darkest Night is active.

Pooling Energy has been a vital part of optimal Assassination gameplay for a long time now. Often, players tend to spam builders/finishers without paying attention to the Energy, thus preventing them from maximizing Envenom windows. This is particularly important right before using Shiv, as you will want to start each Shiv with as much Energy as possible, as well as when talenting into Kingsbane.

You will want to ensure that you cast Garrote while Improved Garrote is active, so make sure to cast it once within 6 seconds of opening from stealth or after casting Vanish. The bonus Damage over Time will be retained for its entire duration or until you refresh it.

The only requirement for using Deathmark is that your target has Rupture and Garrote up and that, ideally, it will not die before it expires. However, there are no other requirements, so often enough people hold on to Deathmark for too long and lose damage as a result of it.

You will also want to hold Shiv for each Kingsbane, and disregard its Combo Point generation, meaning you will use it even when at maximum Combo Points already.

Aim to have 100% uptime on Garrote, Rupture and Slice and Dice. In some fight situations, it is better to refresh your bleeds before you would normally have to if you know that you are going to lose uptime on the boss to hit a different target and might not be able to refresh it at the optimal time. An extension of that is to also manage Deadly Poison in multi-target situations. If you are not using Fan of Knives you might need to pay extra attention to it and make sure it stays on all targets, so you do not lose out on extra Energy regeneration. In case you have your bleeds applied to a target, but it is about to lose the poison debuff, it might be worth using Poisoned Knife or Fan of Knives if the target is outside of melee range, to not lose any uptime.

It is impossible to correctly play and optimize an Assassination Rogue without using Raidbots to sim your own character, there are simply too many variables involved to intuitively figure out what gear to wear and so on without simming it first. Generally speaking, a simulation should be the first and final say in the gear you end up wearing for any given situation.

On top of this, simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn and the Raidbots website. Below, you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.