World of Warcraft: Dragonflight introduced a complete overhaul on the talent systems for all classes, not just the Assassination Rogue. Players now have much more robust set of choices to make with their talents compared to the Shadowlands talent trees. The new talent system overhaul seems to have a focus on bringing back what people loved about the game back in World of Warcraft Classic.

The new talent system allows you to select talents from a class-specific tree, such as the "Rogue Tree", and also have separate talent points to spend on your specialization tree such as the "Assassination Tree". The Assassination Rogue has a copious amount of great choices in both the Rogue Tree and the Assassination Tree. In this guide we go over our recommended choices for talents in order to have the best experience, depending on your goals in the game.

Best Overall Talent Build for Assassination Rogues in WoW: Dragonflight

When you first launch WoW Dragonflight on or after Pre-patch day (October 25th, 2022), you will notice the new talent trees are available. When you open your talent system UI, you can actually select a "Starter Build" from the drop-down menu on the bottom-left side of the UI. This offers players a general build that is excellent in many aspects of the game, and the best build for your overall usage.

We will now go over the best build for overall use. As not much data has been gathered on the many different talent choices available in Dragonflight, we will add in Best Meta Talent Builds later for raids specs and PvP specs.

Dragonflight Rogue Class Talent Build

We won't go over every choice in these trees, but we will highlight most of the key choices and why they are chosen. The beginning of the tree covers some of your main abilities you want to make sure you have in both PvE and PvP settings including Blind, Sap, Cloak of Shadows, Evasion, and Tricks of the Trade. Shadowstep is also chosen as it is incredibly useful and let's face it, downright fun to use.

Some other key choices for the Rogue Class Tree we like are:

• Fleet Footed - The increased movement speed is also useful both in combat, out of combat, and in between pulls in raid.
• Cheat Death - Every rogue knows Cheat Death, and it can be incredibly useful to survive a heavy attack and get away, or be healed in the meantime back up to full health.
• Subterfuge - This will allow you to use stealth abilities for 3 seconds after breaking stealth. Make sure to use this to your advantage when opening an attack.
• Acrobatic Strikes - This will allow you to be a bit farther away from your target and still hit them. This can be very useful in raid situations where the enemy needs to be moved around the room, so you can make sure you land all of your blows.
• Leeching Poison - This will add more survivability to your build to have some sustained health back as you pump out damage.
• Cold Blood - You can use this whenever it is off cooldown to ensure a critical hit on your next ability
• Marked for Death - An essential part of the Rogue build. As the cooldown resets when the target dies, you can use this on every enemy you fight.
• Echoing Reprimand - Choosing this coupled with Resounding Clarity, you will be able to turn 4 combo points into super-charged damage sources. The finisher move will then burst even harder due to the effects of this talent.

This Dragonflight Rogue Class Build leaves out mostly talents that involve stuns and crowd control. The idea here is to give you the best damage output, but it is also notably missing Find Weakness and Shadow Dance near the bottom of the talent tree. While venturing down the right path to obtain these would seem to be a wise choice, we believe that the center of the tree is more important to the build and will result in better damage and use overall.

Dragonflight Rogue Assassination Tree Talent Build

Our selections for the Assassination Rogue Talent Tree in Dragonflight are centered around what currently appears to provide the most sustained damage in single target (most boss) fights. We notably leave out talent selections such as Thrown Precision, Crimson Tempest, and Flying Daggers. This decision is to focus on other talents that deal more focused damage for boss fights, as they are usually the Rogue's most important enemies to burst down.

Key choices we have made revolve around bleed and poison damage all the way down to include both Amplifying Poison and Dragon-Tempered Blades to apply even more poisons to your weapons.

Here is some context behind some of the key selections and what they do to benefit you:

• Most of the top rows are selected as they need to be spent anyway, and the selection into Shadowstep will give you 2 charges of the skill, since you took it in the Rogue Class Talent Tree as well.
• Cut to the Chase allows you to keep Slice and Dice up more naturally without needing to recast it. This will simplify your rotation and allow you to focus on damage-dealing skills.
• Most skills that involve increasing poison damage or bleed damage are all selected.
  • Notably, Zoldyck Recipe and Kingsbane have been left out in favor of choosing the middle tree to get Dragon-Tempered Blades. DTB is currently expected to produce higher damage overtime.

• The bottom-right tree focuses again on spreading Garrote and Rupture to many enemies which while useful great for AoE, is not our current focus for this build.

The PvP Talents are usually a matter of choice for the player. Choose what you like in terms of play style, as it will not have bearing on your raiding DPS.

Stay tuned for more WoW Dragonflight content. For now, check out our WoW WotLK Classic Directory!