Class Talents
The main thing with the new tree is that utility no longer costs us lots of damage overall. Although getting Acrobatic Strikes does cost around 1% damage to take, the range is still huge for certain encounters and M+ so it’s a sacrifice worth making. Other than that, the few important damage nodes we do want to grab are Improved Ambush, Shadow Dance, Vigor, and Deeper Stratagem.
A lot of these talents are picked for fairly simple reasons. Energy is very important for all rogue specs, so Vigor ends up being pretty core for all of them. Improved Ambush and Shadow Dance are essential into making the spec function, it’s a huge source of our combo point income, damage and energy efficiency overall. Lastly is Deeper Stratagem, a simple talent that’s main benefit is the added 5% damage on finishers, the extra combo point is also a nice bonus.
Talent Builds
Overall the utility is pretty flexible, as long as you are getting the same nodes at the bottom as listed below you should be fine. Feel free to experiment as talents such as Stillshroud, or Superior gain more value in M+, while Featherfoot might be more relevant in raid.
If you want to play with Acrobatic Strikes for any reason, drop Lethality since it’s about a 1% DPS loss.
Build 1 - Raiding (Single Target)
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This talent tree is specifically optimized for Single Target.
The key talents for this build are Audacity, Fan the Hammer, Keep it Rolling, Hidden Opportunity, Crackshoot, and Shadow Dance.
Build 2 - Raiding & M+ (Cleave)
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This is generally the build you will play in most raid encounters, especially on Mythic.
This raid is extremely cleave heavy overall so we grab the key AoE Talents in Deft Maneuvers, Precise Cuts and Dancing Steel over some of the less powerful talents we have.
Some utility here is also flexible, you can drop talents such as Acrobatic Strikes, Atrophic Poison, and even Evasion to pick up other things like Tricks of the Trade, Gouge, Shadowstep or Master Poisoner.