I’ve mained an assassination rogue for a few years, and with the launch of TWW I decided to switch to my warlock and just do occasional M+ on the rogue.
However after spending a long time trying to make any build be decent I think I’m finally done trying to make this class work nice.
We all know the most common issues around stealth breakages and the arbitrary effort of keeping slice and dice up. But for me the glaring issues really came to the fore with the interplay around the hero talents.
I did try both, found Fatebound too passive to care about. Deathstalker is “ok” I guess, we might as well keep on that track of focussing on a single mob and spreading the damage around. However, what really got me was the initial and re-application of it. I can kind of gloss over the initial application not being based on Garrote, but the reapplication being based on using maximum combo points is just plain stupid.
So I did some experimenting with builds to see how I could maximum dps output balanced with energy consumption. In the end I discovered that the best thing to do was to not take any talents that give you any extra combo points at all - just stay at the minimum of 5. What this does is make it so you can both reapply Deathstalker much quicker and with less energy and have generally more Envenoms going out. It genuinely increase my dps by x1.5 at least.
This just highlights how stupid this is: if you talent into extra combo points, yes you’re spenders will hit harder, but you’ll be more energy starved trying the reapply you’re hero talent primary feature.
I rolled a Fury warrior yesterday to see what it’s like as a different melee - my god the difference, in comparison it’s like child’s play and you can spam those big hitters as fast as you like. So I’m going to switch until Blizzard comes to their senses and totally overhauls Rogues.