Playstyle & Rotation
Assassination Rogues Rotation is handled through mostly Damage over Time effects and a set of cooldowns. As long as you can manage your cooldowns and track all the maintenance buffs/debuffs, you will be on your way to victory!
General Rotation:
- Maintain Garrote, Rupture and Slice and Dice
- (When talented into Crimson Tempest) Maintain Crimson Tempest
- Exsanguinate on cooldown, as long as it is not during Deathmark
- Deathmark on Cooldown
- Vanish with Deathmark
- (When talented into Kingsbane) Kingsbane every minute, every other Kingsbane inside of Deathmark
- (When talented into Kingsbane) Hold both charges of shiv for Kingsbane
- (When not talented into Kingsbane) Shiv on cooldown
- Use Serrated Bone Spike to avoid overcapping stacks
- Generate combo points with Ambush via Blindside on less than 3 targets
- Generate combo points with Mutilate on less than 3 targets
- Generate combo points with Fan of Knives on 3 or more targets
- Envenom for the buff
- (When talented into Crimson Tempest) Crimson Tempest in 4+ Target AoE
- Envenom as a filler in less than 4 target AoE
Opener:
With Exsanguinate:
- Garrote
- Slice and Dice
- Garrote
- Rupture
- Echoing Reprimand
- Rupture
- Serrated Bone Spike
- Vanish (use haste buffs here)
- Garrote
- Exsanguinate
- Deathmark (potion and non-haste trinkets here)
- Envenom
- Kingsbane (If talented)
- Shiv
Without Exsanguinate:
- Garrote
- Slice and Dice
- Garrote
- Serrated Bone Spike
- Rupture
- Echoing Reprimand
- Vanish (use haste buffs here)
- Garrote
- Deathmark (potion and non-haste trinkets here)
- Envenom
- Kingsbane (if talented)
- Shiv
Multi Target:
Mythic+ Build:
- Indiscriminate Carnage in Stealth
- Garrote
- Crimson Tempest (Or Slice and Dice if you do not have the buff up already)
- Echoing Reprimand
- Rupture
- Exsanguinate
- Deathmark
- Fan of Knives to 5+ combo points or an Animacharged combo point
- Crimson Tempest
- Shiv
- Kingsbane (if talented)
- Envenom
Playstyle
This is up to you how detailed you are and the headings used for your class/spec.
Examples: Cooldown and Ability usage, Pandemic, Movement, Survivability & Defensives
Pandemic:
Pandemic is a powerful tool that should be utilized in order to refresh your bleeds. It works as follows.
Pandemic takes up to 30% of the duration of an applied dot/buff and adds it to your new applied one. The duration depends on the new instance.
Example: Garrote (18 sec) can be extended by up to 5.4 seconds from an existing instance.
The damage of the new bleed is entirely based on the new bleed, and there is no carry-over from the previous bleed, only time. Because of this, you will want to let empowered bleeds finish ticking in their entirety. These include bleeds from Exsanguinate, as well as Stealth empowered Garrotes.
Cooldown usage:
Thistle Tea - Use for 100 energy only
Echoing Reprimand - Use on cooldown, do not force the anima charged combo points, just play normally
Exsanguinate - Use on cooldown, but NEVER during Deathmark. Refresh your bleeds to max beforehand
Deathmark - Use on cooldown with Vanish
Vanish - Use with Deathmark or in Mythic+ to get more stealth garrotes
Kingsbane - Use every minute, with every other being inside of Deathmark
Shiv - Hold both charges of shiv for Kingsbane, otherwise use on cooldown
Indiscriminate Carnage - Use from Stealth before a pull or on cooldown for AoE if stealthing / vanish is not an option