Assassination Rogue Gearing Guide

Season 1 Assassination Rogue Tier Set:

• (2) Set Bonus: When your bleeds deal damage, they have a chance to grant you Vile Tincture for 8 sec, increasing your poison damage by 1.0% per stack (up to 10 stacks).
• (4) Set Bonus: While you have 5 or more stacks of Vile Tincture, Garrote, Rupture and Crimson Tempest deal 10% additional damage.

You should still prioritise the gear you use by running a sim for your character, but the lists below will give you a good idea of what items are considered good for Assassination Rogue, and help you target the right content for each piece of loot.

For all of these lists it’s important to note that secondary stats are very close for Assassination Rogues and non-special gear pieces can very easily swap to other items when you are simulating. Dropping any of the tier pieces is also possible and there is not a specific slot we are trying to avoid. These BiS lists are created to show unique gear slots and trinket choices, not be used to copy or chase very specific items.

• Overall
• Raiding
• Mythic+

For Assassination we use a very standard setup of one slot stat on-use for our cooldowns, second slot passive/alternate trinket that doesn’t impede. Because of this, standard lists of ranking trinkets don’t make much sense. Having ANY stat on-use to line up with your cooldowns will be a large gain, regardless of the perceived quality of the trinket.

For our on-use slot, we have a couple options:

• Skardyn’s Grace - This trinket is a very classic 2 min on use with a big mastery buff. It might not be peak Best in Slot, but there are not a lot of alternatives for the on-use slot, and the ease of use alone puts it above Treacherous Transmitter
• Treacherous Transmitter - This is the other “good” 2 min on use available in the first season. The issue with this one is that it is incredibly difficult to use, as it picks one of 3 mini-games for you to complete, often forcing you off of the boss or into mechanics
• Imperfect Ascendancy Serum - This is a delve-only trinket and suffers from being low item level mostly. If you manage to get one from your vault, it can be good
• Quickwick Candlestick - Again a delve-only trinket but with a bit of movement speed on top. This is generally around the same strength as the Imperfect Ascendancy Serum and has similar pitfalls
• Horn of Declaration - Another delve trinket here, this should only be your absolute last resort, but can still be okay as a little party-buff. This is really difficult to line up properly amongst a raid or dungeon group and loses a lot of value because of it

For our second slot, there’s a lot of trinkets to use in this slot you could use, the vast majority of which are completely passive:

• Ara-Kara Sacbrood - Delayed damage and consistent agility makes this numericaly pretty good
• Shadow-Binding Ritual Knife - This suprisingly strong Delve trinket makes an appearance as one of the best passives available
• Dead-Eye Spyglass - A crowd favorite from Battle for Azeroth, this was BiS for most of the expansion and makes a triumphant return as another great passive option
• Empowering Crystal of Anub’ikkaj - Another bit of RNG uptime but still a strong proc. Assassination enjoys all secondary stats and doesn’t have a “bad” stat it could proc in this regard. Versatility is a little behind but not enough to hamper the value of the trinket
• Bottled Flayedwing Toxic - Oddly enough, this awful shadowlands trinket rises from the ashes as a pretty solid option compared to the rest of the field
• Ovi’nax’s Mercurial Egg - While this is technically an on-use trinket, the on-use only locks in the current stacks, rather than providing a bonus. For the most part the benefit of this trinket is purely passive stats

For all content, you will want to craft two pieces with Dawnthread Lining.

The most common slots for this will be Wrists (Rune-Branded Armbands), and Belt (Rune-Branded Waistband).

At the time of writing, many embellishments are incredibly weak. Dawnthread Lining is a safe option that will most likely be generically good even if better combos are found. Remember that Embellishments only provide minor increases around 1% dps. The difference between any two Embellishments is statistically insignificant to your performance and I would not worry too much about crafting the exact perfect slot or embellishment.