by Chase Christian

What is combat?

Combat is one of the main talent trees of the rogue class and home to the some of the most powerful cooldowns in the game. Combat is the bread and butter of every rogue PvE build, and you won’t see any serious spec neglecting to point several points in the center tree. Combat rogues focus on maximizing their physical damage and pass up many poison and subtlety options to become the masters of open combat. White damage (auto attacks) will make up the core of your damage, while yellow (special) and poison damage will fall behind. Combat is the least complex of any rogue spec, as it focuses on very simple ideas that lead to very powerful results.

Combat benefits

• Amazing multi-target and AoE DPS
• Potent cooldowns for every situation, ensuring you’re never out-muscled
• Flexible gear selection, since combat values both ArP and haste
• Works with many weapon combinations (just about anything except a main-hand dagger)
• Short ramp-up time and simple rotation allowing for powerful target swaps
• A fairly unique raid debuff: Savage Combat

Combat drawbacks

• Due to their simplicity, rotations that can feel very repetitive
• Can lose to Mutilate in raw DPS on certain encounters
• No movement speed buff means sacrificing an enchant and still moving slower
• Very weapon-dependent, due to high physical/poison damage ratio
• Weak against highly armored targets

Stats to look for

Get used to agility and stamina; you’ll be seeing them on just about every piece of gear you get. Luckily for combat rogues, we don’t really have a “bad” stat like mutilate does, and so just about any rogue gear will work for a combat build. The only catch is that gearing can be a bit complicated due to the unique scaling of armor penetration, which I’ll discuss in detail in a bit.

• Attack power Even though it’s disappearing in Cataclysm, you’ll still want plenty of attack power in the meantime. While it’s not our best stat (like it is for assassination), every one of our damaging attacks scales with attack power, so there’s never a downside to picking it up on your gear. You won’t find yourself gemming for it, but several of our enchants will be AP-based. We also get a great 4% boost to our AP through a combat talent, which means that it scales particularly well for us. AP boosts all of our damage.

• Agility While mutilate rogues can run into crit cap issues, most combat rogues don’t have that problem. We don’t typically have the 5% extra crit from Close Quarters Combat since we’re most often found using swords or axes, and so we have 5% extra crit to give. This means that agility is particularly valuable to us, as we get full benefit from the attack power and critical strike bonuses it provides. Since less of our damage is poison-based, it also means that a larger portion of our damage will see the critical strike boost, making agility a top stat for combat. If your armor penetration is low, be sure to investigate agility gems as your cut of choice. Agility boosts all of our damage via AP and our physical damage via the critical strike bonus.

• Critical strike Combat rogues see one of the highest critical strike damage modifiers in the game via Prey on the Weak, which ensures that crit remains a valuable stat for us. With a high enough crit rate, we begin seeing extra combo points from our Glyph of Sinister Strike. Otherwise, crits don’t have any special interaction with combat rogues, unlike mutilate, which gains both energy and combo points on critical strikes. Critical strike rating boosts both our physical and poison damage.

• Haste Because such a high percentage of a combat rogue’s damage will come from white damage, having a high haste value is key to ensure we’re attacking as often as possible. Additional haste also means additional procs from Combat Potency, which is the only way that a combat rogue’s energy regeneration scales with gear. Haste is not typically our most desired stat but it is valuable enough that we won’t shun a piece of gear with haste present. Mutilate rogues may snub our ArP gear, but we’re happy to take their leather off of their hands. Haste boosts our energy regeneration and our white and poison damage.

• Hit rating Again, combat rogues will do an incredibly large portion of their damage as simple auto-attacks. The more hit you have, the more of those auto-attacks will land and the more reliable your DPS will become. Obviously we want to aim for hitting the poison hit cap; additional poison after that point is still very valuable, as well. We get a free 5% hit from Precision that doesn’t show up on the character screen, so be certain to factor that into any equation. Hit rating boosts all of our damage.

• Expertise We pick up a free 10 expertise points from a combat talent, which means we’re already 40% of the way to our goal of 26 expertise. Unfortunately, with the high amounts of expertise on gear in ICC, this means that it’s far easier for us to go over the cap on accident. Planning around your passive expertise and the expertise you find on gear will be a constant challenge. Expertise is very important to a combat rogue, as it again boosts our white swing damage, which is the most efficient way to take your combat spec to the top. If you end up over the expertise cap, you can drop a talent point from Weapon Expertise and pick up another utility talent instead. Expertise boots all of our damage, as more white swings mean more poison procs as well.

• Armor penetration The elephant in the room! Maybe I should’ve started with this one. Armor penetration is one of the reasons that combat is still competitive today, as it provides combat rogues with a very powerful scaling option that ensures we have a shot at topping the DPS meters. Armor penetration scales such that the more you have, the more valuable it is. This means that there is essentially a “break even” point, at which point it becomes advantageous to swap all of our gems and gear for ArP all at once. It’s sort of a catch-22 where you need ArP to want ArP, and that can be confusing for a lot of rogues. The key is to just take whatever gear comes your way and continue to experiment with your setup in a spreadsheet until you see a point at which ArP begins to trump all else in terms of value. Armor penetration boosts all of our physical damage.

Stats to avoid

• Strength is pretty bad for us, as it costs more itemization points than agility and only yields 1 AP per point. Forget about any gear with strength on it; that match-up was simply not meant to be. That doesn’t mean that the plate classes will leave our agility leather alone. Leather is particularly attractive because it has five stats instead of four stats, so be quick to fight off any warriors or death knights try to mooch gear off you. Spell power is also pretty terrible for us, but luckily anyone wearing a dress is so afraid to upset a rogue that they don’t dare cross us.

Typical PvE talent setup

After the recent Rupture buffs, combat rogues are presented with two real spec options. The first is for an “Eviscerate only” cycle, which means that besides Slice and Dice, you’ll be using Eviscerate as your only damage-dealing finisher. The second choice is a Rupture cycle, which means that you’ll be striving for high Rupture uptime first and only using Eviscerate if both Slice and Dice and Rupture have a ton of time remaining. I would typically recommend the first build for any new rogue and for those just learning the combat playstyle. It’s far simpler to work with, it is more powerful in heroics and against trash, and it is still pretty competitive with a Rupture build. Unfortunately for the subtlety tree, there’s really not anything in there that would attract a combat spec, as poison damage has gotten so powerful that we need the assassination talents to keep pace.

Talent overview

Talents in italics are optional, and you can flex your build to pick up or drop these based on your particular desires. For example, if you choose to not take Weapon Expertise, be sure to pick up a few expertise gems to compensate. If a talent is struck out, avoid it, as it provides little or no benefit to a damage dealer. I’ll only be covering the combat and assassination talents that are relevant for a combat rogue to pursue.

• Improved Gouge A PvP-only talent, this has seen its usefulness drop quite drastically, since there aren’t many abilities that still require us to be behind our target.
• Improved Sinister Strike A core DPS talent, this improves the efficiency of our main nuke and allows us to maintain a smooth combo-point-to-finisher rotation.
• Dual Wield Specialization A mainstay of every rogue DPS build, our weapon damage has been becoming a larger and larger part of our overall damage package. Since combat rogues focus on white damage as the key factor in their success, DWS is an important part of that equation. It also gives a boost to Killing Spree, one of our most potent cooldowns.
• Improved Slice and Dice By increasing the duration of Slice and Dice, this talent allows us to get more Eviscerates or Ruptures in before having to refresh SnD. It allows our rotations to use fewer points on SnD, which means a solid DPS boost. There’s also nowhere else to put these points, and so Imp SnD is really a no-brainer.
• Deflection A PvP or leveling talent, Deflection provides a sizable 6% boost to our parry chance. Its value becomes even more evident when looking at Riposte; however, since we are not struck very often in PvE content, the value of parry is low.
• Precision A free 5% hit and another mainstay of every other DPS spec, as well. The damage benefit per point is insane, and without Precision, every gem on your character would likely be a Rigid King’s Amber.
• Endurance Many rogues throw a point in here to move onto the next tree, as the other talents at this tier are pretty weak. By adding a bit of survivability and lowering the timer on some of our cooldowns, it can actually be pretty useful. If this talent lets you get an extra Sprint in on a particular fight, that is actually a true DPS boost.
• Riposte An amazing leveling talent but a terrible PvE talent. We don’t parry unless we’re being attacked, which would mean we were doing something wrong to start with. Pass this one up; there are plenty of other classes who can slow the target’s attack speed.
• Close Quarters Combat Great for the fist/dagger rogue, though swords and axes actually provide top DPS for us at the moment. If you do decide to raid as CQC rogue, be sure that you’re not running into the white crit cap in ICC gear. Sword and axe rogues don’t run into that issue, as we don’t see the 5% crit from CQC.
• Improved Kick PvP only, and not that powerful now that silences share diminishing returns. It can be used to extend your stunlock by an extra two seconds if used properly against a caster.
• Improved Sprint PvP only and really a waste of talent points, with so many good DPS options on this talent tier.
• Lightning Reflexes Formerly a terrible talent that boosted our dodge, Lightning Reflexes is now one of the best DPS talents in the game. By giving us 10% haste for only three talent points, we see a significant boost to our white damage, poison damage and energy generation.
• Aggression While white damage will always be at the top of our damage parses, that doesn’t mean we should ignore our special attacks. Aggression boosts the only two specials we’ll be using by 15%, so it’s really a win-win for us.
• Mace Specialization While the top DPS build in ToC may have been a mace MH build, that was only due to the amazing mace that dropped from heroic Anub’arak. Now, the top-tier weapons are all axes or swords, so mace spec hasn’t really seen any love at all.
• Blade Flurry Double damage for 15 seconds? No, even better: It’s 20% haste and double damage for 15 seconds. Blade Flurry is a potent CD even on a single target, due to the haste bonus. See if you can coordinate your BF usage with Bloodlust, as haste from different sources stacks multiplicatively, so you want to pop all of your haste boosts all at once. Rogues have no haste cap to speak of, so using Blade Flurry, a Potion of Speed and Bloodlust in unison provides us with the largest benefit. It’s also valuable to use any time there are two targets to attack (Twin Val’kyr come to mind) and can also replicate our Fan of Knives attacks. A BF + FoK combo is the most potent AoE attack in the game, and when coupled with Adrenaline Rush to maintain the highest number of FoKs per minute, we are literally gods of AoE damage. Just make sure to give your Tricks of the Trade to a pompous mage or warlock first.
• Hack and Slash Formerly Sword Specialization, the new Hack and Slash also includes axes under its list of approved weapons. This provides us with a significant DPS boost, as off-hand attacks proc an extra main-hand swing, meaning that it actually boosts our white damage by more than 5%.
• Weapon Expertise A great DPS talent, as 10 expertise reduces our chance to be parried or dodged by several percent. If you’re finding yourself swimming in expertise on your gear and you can’t budge, you can drop a point or two from here and fill out Endurance.
• Blade Twisting A free 10% buff to our main combo point generator and a free chance to snare our target is hard to pass up. This is also pretty useful on an encounter like the Lich King, where snaring a Val’kyr could literally save a life.
• Vitality This bumps our passive energy regeneration rate up from 10 per second to 12.5 per second, allowing us to get more yellow damage done in less time. This doesn’t boost the energy gains from anything else like Combat Potency, though it does boost the power of Adrenaline Rush.
• Adrenaline Rush The signature rogue cooldown, Adrenaline Rush provides us with a quick infusion of extra energy. All told, it will yield about 190 extra energy over 15 seconds. This can be very powerful for getting your rotation started quickly when starting a fight or if you are somehow interrupted. Your average five-point Eviscerate (including the Sinister Strikes to get to five points) will cost about 190 energy, meaning that you add a nice boost to your yellow damage while this cooldown is active. It’s also particularly effective when coupled with Fan of Knives or Blade Flurry, as this allows you to maximize the effect of both CDs together. Be sure to not use Killing Spree while Adrenaline Rush is active, as you are likely to cap your energy during the Killing Spree duration and lose any energy that you would’ve been gaining.
• Nerves of Steel A PvP-only talent; no serious rogue will be down the combat tree this deep for PvP, anyway.
• Throwing Specialization Once a powerful addition to our Fan of Knives spam, it’s now relegated to being ignored.
• Combat Potency Here’s the talent that allows our energy regeneration to scale with our improving gear. This talent alone is the reason that combat is forced to use a quick off-hand weapon, and this talent is what makes haste even more attractive to a combat rogue. Many of the choices a combat rogue makes in terms of gear and weapons will be based on the necessity to maximize the energy gain from Combat Potency.
• Unfair Advantage Possible candidate for coolest attack in the game; unfortunately, it’s pretty much a leveling-only talent. Pick this one up for fun on your way to 80!
• Surprise Attacks Originally a DPS loss, Blizzard finally fixed this talent in TBC and it’s been great ever since. A nice 10% boost to our only combo point generator is sweet, and the only benefit since having our finishers not be concerned with dodge actually doesn’t do anything. Combat rogues have tons of expertise, and so getting dodged doesn’t happen to us. It is useful in PvP and against an enemy rogue who has Evasion up (always landing our Kidney Shots rules). At least we get the 10% SS boost!
• Savage Combat Finally, our raid buff! Or, well, our raid debuff! An extra 4% physical damage to any affected target is a pretty big deal, and considering how bad arms warriors are currently, we’re really the only raiding spec bringing this to the table. And Blizzard was kind enough to toss in a free 4% boost to our attack power to boot! Savage Combat really saves this tier of talents from being lackluster.
• Prey on the Weak An extra 20% critical strike damage modifier most of the time means that our crits are going to be hitting for huge numbers. Considering we will also have a ton of armor penetration to make us hit even harder, combat rogues can crit for some pretty huge numbers. This talent is active most of the time as our HP is typically topped off (though on certain fights like heroic Anub’arak, that may not be the case).
• Killing Spree Most awesome talent? Definitely. We get to pull off some ninja moves and teleport around, destroying our targets. This can be used to avoid certain boss abilities, like knockbacks or fears. It’s affected by Blade Flurry, which means you can completely devastate two targets at once by chaining CDs. If you want to really see the power of Killing Spree, check out this video from my buddy Krytical.

Assassination

• Improved Eviscerate 20% boost to our main finisher? Yes, please!
• Malice A free 5% crit, Malice is one of my favorite talents. Simply and to the point, you’ll be critting more often.
• Ruthlessness An unpredictable source of extra combo points; when combined with the Glyph of Sinister Strike, you may be confused when you Sinister Strike once after an Eviscerate yet have three combo points left. It’s a DPS boost; just be sure to monitor your CP counter carefully so that you don’t waste any procs.
• Blood Spatter Useful if you’re going with a Rupture build; otherwise, worthless.
• Lethality Another 30% boost to the critical strike damage bonus of Sinister Strike. When added to Prey on the Weak, Sinister Strike’s critical modifier is 50% higher than normal.
• Vile Poisons A simple boost to our poison damage, since the Envenom bonus and dispel protection don’t really apply to us.
• Improved Poisons With the newly buffed Deadly Poison mechanic, we really are forced into picking up Improved Poisons to maximize the effect. The particular ratio of talents between Vile and Improved Poisons is very strange, but if you sit down and do the math, 1 to 4 becomes the optimum ratio.

Leveling as combat

Sinister Strike your opponents in the face. Let go of any notion of being an assassin; the leveling combat rogue is a pure brawler. With 11% extra avoidance from Deflection and Lightning Reflexes, you are the tankiest build of rogue around. Don’t bother with Stealth. Just run up and attack mobs right in the face. It will be quick and painless (though incredibly dull). Use a CD to wreck a group of mobs, use Blade Flurry to pull two mobs at once, and use Evasion as a DPS cooldown via Unfair Advantage. Find yourself a very slow weapon, and start hitting mobs in the face with it. That’s really all there is to it.

The rotation

Luckily, combat has one of the simplest rotations around. I’m going to specifically be covering the Eviscerate-only cycle, since that will be the easiest one to get acquainted with. Your first priority as a combat rogue will be using Sinister Strike to generate combo points and then using those CP to activate Slice and Dice. Get this done as soon as possible, as SnD is very key to keeping up our DPS. You’ll then want to refresh SnD any time it gets low.

My rule of thumb is about 12 seconds: If SnD has less than 12 seconds remaining, I need to start planning to use my next few CP to refresh it. After that, you’ll basically be spamming Sinister Strike and using Eviscerate any time you get up to 5 or if you need to dump CP to begin working on refreshing Slice and Dice. That’s really about it in terms of your major abilities: Sinister Strike, Slice and Dice and Eviscerate are really going to be your core DPS buttons.

Now, that’s not to say there isn’t plenty else to do. We’ll want to time our CDs for the maximum benefit and focus on maximizing our uptime on the boss. I like to open with Adrenaline Rush so that I can quickly activate Slice and Dice, and then use Blade Flurry and Killing Spree right as Adrenaline Rush is fading. From then on, look for opportunities to use Blade Flurry to attack two targets, and use Adrenaline Rush any time you’ll have a solid 15 seconds on the boss. Be sure to watch for secondary targets for your killing spree, as this can often be undesirable.

On the topic of weapons and poisons, combat has a few hard rules on how what to use. You need a slow weapon in your main hand, no matter what. You need a fast weapon in your off hand, no matter what. You need Instant Poison on your slow hand, which means your main hand. You need Deadly Poison on your fast hand, which means your off hand. So slow/fast and IP/DP becomes the optimal way to play your combat rogue, and there’s really no variation or flexibility here.

To recap:

• Keep SnD up at all times
• Eviscerate as often as possible
• Use all your cooldowns as often as possible
• Don’t let your energy cap

Gems

spreadsheet it! Combat specs love pretty much every DPS stat, and based on your own values and your proximity to all the various caps and balances, you will need specialized advice. Armor penetration alone makes any sort of off-the-cuff evaluation impossible. Typically you’ll be gemming for a DPS stat like attack power or agility, armor penetration if you already have a lot of it on your gear, or hit and expertise if you’re below a particular important cap.

Use one Nightmare Tear to meet your meta requirement, preferably in a blue socket that will grant you the item’s socket bonus. Choose the item with the biggest socket bonus but that only requires one blue gem. Speaking of the meta gem, you’ll be sporting the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond (RED for short). It sports another 3% increased critical strike damage which stacks with the other critical strike damage modifiers that combat has.

Glyphs

As with any traditional rogue spec, we glyph the big three: our CP generator, our finisher and our 51-point talent. While your glyphs will vary based on your particular cycle, I will be covering the Eviscerate-only cycle glyphs here.

• Glyph of Eviscerate I bet you saw this one coming! A nice 10% boost to Eviscerate’s critical strike chance means a 10% higher chance for big numbers on your screen.
• Glyph of Sinister Strike Nothing beats a Ruthlessness proc into double Glyph of Sinister Strike procs for a quick five-point Eviscerate. While the CP gain from this can be random, your buffed crit chance will ensure you see at least a few procs on any given fight.
• Glyph of Killing Spree By lowering the cooldown on KS, it opens it up for usage on many more targets per fight. I like using to ensure high priority mobs die first, like the slimes on the Professor Putricide encounter.

We do have a few cool minor glyphs, specifically Glyph of Safe Fall, which will save you on a couple of PvE fights but also helps when you accidentally dismount midair. Glyph of Vanish is also valuable for avoiding attacks while in stealth. The third minor glyph is really up to you, but I like Glyph of Blurred Speed for traversing water quickly and running over the rivers in Gun’drak.

Enchants for the end game

• Weapon Berserking, or Mongoose based on gear levels
• Helm Arcanum of Torment
• Cloak Major Agility or Greater Speed (or engineering / tailoring alternative)
• Shoulders Greater Inscription of the Axe (or scribe alternative)
• Chest Powerful Stats
• Bracers Greater Assault (or leatherworking alternative)
• Gloves Crusher (or engineering alternative)
• Belt Eternal Belt Buckle
• Pants Icescale Leg Armor
• Boots Cat’s Swiftness (or Icewalker)
• Rings Assault (enchanter only)

Links to Combat resources Finally, here are a few links to some great sites that will help answer any questions you may have about the Combat spec (or any rogue spec, for that matter), as well as keep you up to date on current best practices. If you have additional questions, feel free to email me using the contact link here!

• Encrypted Text – WoW.com
• Elitist Jerks rogue forums (lurk for a bit and read the rules before posting!)
• RogueDPS (I recommend the guide section: great info and cheat sheets of common numbers)
• ShadowPanther (my favorite site for drooling over new gear)

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Check out the secret tactics you can use to legally and easily generate up to 427 gold per hour or more in World of Warcraft without using hacks or cheats.

Get ready to make more gold playing WoW than you have ever seen before.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

Related posts:

1. Rogue PVE Combat Guide (Raiding) here comes my rogue pve guide. Feel free to suggest...
2. ~Rogue Stunlocking~ NOTE: I did not write this. I got it from...
3. Patch 3.0.2 Rogue – Trunks of the Trees, Assassination and Combat If you ask 75% of the top Rogues worldwide what the premier...
4. WoW Rogue Guide: The rotation system by Chase Christian Let’s face it, rogues don’t really have...
5. [PvE] Rogue Guide (Gear, rotation, specs etc.) I’ve played rogue since 2005-2006 and only PvE, and I...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: Guide, guide-to-rogues, rogue-guide, rogue-info, rogue-talents, talent, talents, world-of-warcraft-class-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, wow-class-guide, wow-class-help, wow-guide, wow-rogue, wow-rogue-info, wow-rogues, wow-talent-guide