Assassination Rogue Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation:

• Always maintain Garrote, Rupture, and Slice and Dice
• Use a finisher with 5 or more combo points
• Line up cooldowns and cast them on cooldown (trinkets + shiv + kingsbane + deathmark + vanish)
• Dump energy and combo points into envenom

Opener:

Deathstalker without Vicious Venoms:

Multi Target:

Deathstalker:

Dry Shiv

The more considerable optimization, which is new to Season 2, is for single target and is what is referred to as a "Dry Shiv", or a Shiv that is not connected to any cooldowns.

This strange rotational anomaly sometimes happens when Kingsbane is weak, like in the current season. To properly cast this Dry Shiv, several buffs need to be active, the main one being Lingering Darkness in addition to Darkest Night. Should these both be active when you have a Shiv available, you would want to Shiv to buff the subsequent Envenom. Your next Kingsbane will then not have a Shiv immediately before it, but instead a single Shiv which covers the last 8 seconds of Kingsbane. With your Deathmark coming off cooldown, you should again have two charges of Shiv, and the cycle will repeat.

This line up of Shiv, Lingering Darkness, and Darkest Night happens very consistently towards the end of the Lingering Darkness window.

For AoE, Shiv is not worth using for overall damage with five or more targets present, unless you are talented in Arterial Precision. To buff the damage an enemy takes from Caustic Spatter, the target taking the damage must also be affected by Shiv, which is to say that the value is very low in AoE.

If there is a Priority Target available, you should still consider casting Shiv on it to take the target down quickly. If you are talented into Arterial Precision, Shiv logic changes slightly in AoE; players will want to Shiv past five targets again, and when additionally talented into Crimson Tempest, Dry Shiv's return as it is no longer optimal to cast Shiv with cooldowns, instead opting to buff the bleed damage in AoE using Arterial Precision.

Pandemic

Pandemic Timers are important to understand on Assassination and vital for some talents.

Pandemic is the term used to describe how timed buffs and debuffs refresh. When refreshing most things, garrote for example, a portion of the remaining duration is applied to the new garrote. This has a maximum added duration equal to 30% of the newly applied buff/debuff, and any damage bonuses are either dynamic or calculated based on the new application.

Let’s do a couple examples to go over situations where this is important

Easy Question:

• Garrote has 3 seconds remaining when you reapply a new Garrote. What is the duration of this new garrote?

Easy Answer:

• 21 seconds. Garrote is an 18 second bleed, and pandemic will transfer this remaining duration onto the new dot, since it is less than the 30% cap. We simply move the remaining duration onto the new duration.

Medium Question:

• Garrote has 10 seconds remaining when you reapply a new Garrote. What is the duration of this new garrote?

Medium Answer:

• 23.4 seconds. Garrote is an 18 second bleed, and pandemic has a maximum added duration equal to 30% of the newly applied garrote. 30% of 18 is 5.4 seconds, leaving us with a duration of 23.4 seconds

Hard Question:

• The 5 combo point Envenom you cast has 1.5 seconds remaining when you accidentally cast a 2 combo point Envenom. What is the duration of this new Envenom?

Hard Answer:

• 2.6 seconds. Envenoms duration changes based on the combo points it is cast with. A two combo point envenom has a duration of 2 seconds. While a 5 combo point envenom has a duration of 5 seconds, and thus also a pandemic timer of 1.5 seconds, the duration transferred is calculated from the new application. 30% of 2 seconds is 0.6 seconds, leaving us with a 2.6 seconds duration on the new application.

AoE Concepts

Assassination is quite unique in how it deals AoE damage. It has both Caustic Spatter, which is a blade flurry type of ability, but additionally has bleeds to manage and apply. Because of this, there’s a balance and a cadence to when each of these should be focused around. Bleeds are especially complicated due to some added benefits such as Venomous Wounds and Scent of Blood.

The most straightforward explanation is that there is a priority that goes as follows:

• Bleed maintenance first
• Caustic Spatter + Cooldowns (Kingsbane)
• Envenom for Caustic Spatter damage

This list can be further broken down:

• Casting Improved Garrote and Rupture from stealth, utilizing Indiscriminate Carnage
• Having enough energy through Rupture to stay above 50% and fill every GCD with an ability
• Maintaining Crimson Tempest
• Maintaining Caustic Spatter
• Getting Maximum Scent of Blood stacks
• Using Kingsbane and other big cooldowns on a priority target
• Casting Envenom as a filler

As you can see, there’s a lot of weight placed especially on Rupture in our AoE rotation. While Rupture might only account for roughly 8-10% of your damage overall in a mythic+ dungeon, it has a lot of extra benefits that are hard to see from a quick details check. This is the #1 issue Assassination Rogues encounter in AoE.

Here are all the benefits of Rupture that are hard to see:

• Energy through Venomous Wounds to cast more abilities and have higher uptime on Sanguine Blades
• Combo points with Serrated Bone spike
• Additional damage directly through Sanguine Blades
• Strong agility buff with Scent of Blood.
• The ability to apply Caustic Spatter to targets
• Stacks of Lethal Dose
• Proccing the two piece of our Tier set bonus

As you can see, rupture is a very complex spell with a lot of interactions and special procs that makes the spec work. Most of these however are passive, so in order to optimally play around you, I think about it in terms of breakpoints:

1. Rupture at least the main target for Caustic Spatter
2. Rupture until you have enough energy rotationally
3. Rupture until you have reached maximum scent of blood stacks should the targets live long enough

Cooldown Usage

Before entering your cooldowns, you want to have your bleeds up and running already. After that, it becomes a simple process of making sure all your cooldowns are cast closely together. You can see some example openers in the rotation/opener section, however the structure is always the same.

• If vanish is up and you can apply Improved garrote before deathmark, do so
• Deathmark is the longest cooldown and comes first
• Shiv with 2 charges is the next longest and comes right after
• That shiv then buffs the initial hit of kingsbane, which ramps up twice as fast as normal with deathmark active
• When the first shiv drops, cast the second shiv to cover the rest of kingsbane. If you only have 1 charge, this would be where you cast it

Defensives

Your main defensives are:

• Cheat Death (most situations)
• Cloak of Shadows
• Feint
• Evasion

Cloak of Shadows cheeses a lot of mechanics in the game and can make you immune to all sorts of debuffs. This is generally the primary situation to use it.

Feint is a very strong defensive with a short cooldown, however it only works on AoE attacks. What is counted as “aoe” by the game can be bit inconsistent at times, but Feint is your friend in all PvE content.

The last is evasion. This is mostly used to cheese charges in mythic+, or in combination with either bait and switch from deathstalker, or elusiveness from the class tree. Elusivenss is one of those talent that is REALLY good if you know when the damage is coming, but really bad if you can’t press Feint or Evasion ahead of it.