Assassination Rogue playstyle and rotation guide

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:

1. Maintain Garrote, Rupture and Slice and Dice
2. (When talented into Crimson Tempest) Maintain Crimson Tempest
3. Exsanguinate on cooldown, as long as it is not during Deathmark
4. Deathmark on Cooldown
5. Vanish with Deathmark
6. (When talented into Kingsbane) Kingsbane every minute, every other Kingsbane inside of Deathmark
7. (When talented into Kingsbane) Hold both charges of shiv for Kingsbane
8. (When not talented into Kingsbane) Shiv on cooldown
9. Use Serrated Bone Spike to avoid overcapping stacks
10. Generate combo points with Ambush via Blindside on less than 3 targets
11. Generate combo points with Mutilate on less than 3 targets
12. Generate combo points with Fan of Knives on 3 or more targets
13. Envenom for the buff
14. (When talented into Crimson Tempest) Crimson Tempest in 4+ Target AoE
15. Envenom as a filler in less than 4 target AoE

Opener:

With Exsanguinate:

1. Garrote
2. Slice and Dice
3. Garrote
4. Rupture
5. Echoing Reprimand
6. Rupture
7. Serrated Bone Spike
8. Vanish (use haste buffs here)
9. Garrote
10. Exsanguinate
11. Deathmark (potion and non-haste trinkets here)
12. Envenom
13. Kingsbane (If talented)
14. Shiv

Without Exsanguinate:

1. Garrote
2. Slice and Dice
3. Garrote
4. Serrated Bone Spike
5. Rupture
6. Echoing Reprimand
7. Vanish (use haste buffs here)
8. Garrote
9. Deathmark (potion and non-haste trinkets here)
10. Envenom
11. Kingsbane (if talented)
12. Shiv

Multi Target:

Mythic+ Build:

1. Indiscriminate Carnage in Stealth
2. Garrote
3. Crimson Tempest (Or Slice and Dice if you do not have the buff up already)
4. Echoing Reprimand
5. Rupture 
6. Exsanguinate
7. Deathmark
8. Fan of Knives to 5+ combo points or an Animacharged combo point
9. Crimson Tempest
10. Shiv
11. Kingsbane (if talented)
12. 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