Assassination Rogue DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — 12.0.5

Chaining Envenoms is a core aspect of Assassination Rogue gameplay. This refers to the mechanic of casting Envenoms while the previous one is still active, instead of letting the short-duration buff from Envenom fall off before casting a new one. Assassination has a variety of talents and passives that boost your DPS when casting Envenoms while the previous one is still active, but you will want to take special care to not do so too early.

Some of the talents supporting this playstyle are:

• Inspiring Strike
  A new choice-node talent at the bottom of the tree, that boosts all of our class-damage when chaining Envenoms.
• Poisoner's Drive
  The alternative talent to Inspiring Strike, which grants 1 Combo Point instead when chaining properly.
• Rapid Injection
  This talent was massively buffed to grant 30% increased Envenom damage when chaining.
• Implacable
  Our upcoming Apex Talent in Midnight, which grants powerful bonuses once the Envenom chain falls off.

Midnight offers us a new type of talent, the Apex Talent(s). This is a 4-point talent that lets you allocate multiple points in it, providing different effects based on how many talent points you put into it. Assassination gains the Implacable talent, which does the following:

• First Point: Implacable will grant you bonus Energy recharge after your Envenom drops, based on how often you chained your Envenoms.
• Second and Third Point:: Implacable will grant you additional Bleed and Nature damage.
• Fourth Point: Implacable will cause additional damage when using Kingsbane and you will also generate 5 Combo Points passively in the next second.

Our Apex talent softens our weaknesses a little bit, letting us recharge Energy faster once we run out of Energy, similar to what Thistle Tea already does, which smooths out our rotation so we do not spend long periods of time without any buttons to press. The Kingsbane bonus is also quite nice, letting us quickly generate maximum Combo Points after using KB, without having to waste another GCD on a Combo Point builder.

Overall this is a solid set of talents that aims to make our weaknesses less pronounced, instead of further boosting our strengths.

There is a small min-max for a minor DPS gain, that is built around optimizing your Implacable benefits. Once you hit the final stage of the buff, which grants an 80% increased Energy regeneration rate when Envenom expires, you do not extend your Envenom anymore.

Instead, you let it fall off on purpose, even if you still have Energy left to use, to gain the full benefits of the debuff. You Envenom immediately after it falls off, and then build up to maximum stacks again.

Pandemic is a game-wide mechanic that applies to all kinds of buffs and debuffs that have a duration. When you refresh Rupture, Garrote, or Slice and Dice before they expire, the remaining duration is added to the newly applied effect, up to 30% of the newly applied base duration.

Example — You can safely refresh a 5-Combo Point Rupture when it has 7.2 seconds or less remaining because its base duration is 24 seconds. Deeper Stratagem allows for 6 Combo Point Ruptures, which last 28 seconds. 6-Combo Point Ruptures can be refreshed safely when they have 8.4 seconds or less remaining. With Sanguine Stratagem and 7 maximum Combo Points, this changes to 9.6 seconds.

Safe Pandemic refresh timing is based on the newly applied base duration and not the original length of the effect. Therefore, a 2 Combo Point Rupture can still benefit from full Pandemic if it is refreshed by a 5 to 7 Combo Point Rupture.

This is an important mechanic to pay attention to throughout your gameplay, as letting your bleeds drop entirely will make you lose out on Energy, while chaining Envenoms is a huge boost to your DPS, as explained in the previous section.

It can be very beneficial to "pool" your Energy and Combo Points, which involves auto-attacking while your Energy regenerates. The advantage this provides is variable, meaning that pooling does not always result in damage gained. Situations where pooling Energy and Combo Points is beneficial include:

• After your Envenom-chain drops, you will want to wait until high Energy before beginning the process anew
• Before an important add spawns, so that you can apply as much instant pressure as possible
• An encounter-specific buff or damage phase is imminent

Pooling Energy is not a magical DPS gain by itself. It allows you to slightly adjust the timing of your abilities so that you fit more attacks during periods of increased damage, provided you can properly identify when such periods are going to happen.

When playing the Deathstalker Hero Talent tree, you will be playing around your Deathstalker's Mark and Darkest Night debuff and buff. The Mark applies to a single enemy, and whenever you finish you lower its count by one. Once consumed, you will be granted Darkest Night which massively boosts the damage of your next Envenom, while also re-applying the Mark to the target you cast it on.

You need to make sure that your uptime on Deathstalker's Mark is close to 100%. For example, while Energy pooling is an important aspect of your gameplay, do not do so if it means your Mark is not active for a prolonged period of time.

There is also an added layer of difficulty to Deathstalker on encounters where you frequently have to switch targets, or bosses end up submerging without clearing their debuffs. In order to still benefit from your Hero Talent choice, you need to ensure that you get a Darkest Night proc before the boss disappears or a new target spawns, so you can quickly transfer the Mark to the new target. On encounters where this is very difficult to accomplish, your may be better off playing Fatebound instead.

You can swap your Mark with the Mark for Death ability that you will learn automatically as you talent into Deathstalker. This is useful to change marks when you're still multiple finishers away from getting a Darkest Night proc, or when an add spawn surprises you.

The damage buff from Improved Garrote is removed when you overwrite the bleed you empowered by re-applying an unempowered one. Therefore, it is best to let the DoT run its full duration before refreshing it. This bonus damage gets doubled during Deathmark.

Deathmark is our main cooldown, available every 2 minutes. It grants increased damage to your bleeds and duplicates your Poison procs, allowing for much quicker build-up of your Kingsbane stacks. It is paramount to ensure that you use Deathmark on targets that do not die during its duration.

Sometimes it can be beneficial to not use Deathmark the moment it comes up. You may want to pool a little Energy before doing so, to ensure you can use every Global Cooldown during its duration, and you want to pay attention to upcoming boss mechanics that might force you out of melee. Since it is a 2-minute cooldown, you can safely delay Deathmark, provided you do not lose out a full use of it over the course of a fight or dungeon run.

i.e. On a 7-minute encounter, it makes no difference if you use DM on pull, and then every 2 minutes, or if you end up delaying a cast, and instead use it on pull, 2:30, 4:30, and 6:30 into the fight. The amount of DM casts is the same.

The same applies for situations where delaying the CD would make it line up with the enemy's HP threshold for Zoldyck Recipe. Try to avoid using DM at 40% boss HP, when you can delay it a little to get the full Execute benefit — as long as you do not lose out a cast at the end of the fight.

Kingsbane is a 1-minute cooldown that we want to use on CD as much as possible. It deals up-front damage, and then damage-over-time, and its DoT tick-rate does not scale with Haste.

The damage over time increases with each Poison proc, up to a cap, which makes it synergize exceptionally well with Deathmark thanks to its Poison duplication effect. It is absolutely paramount that you maintain 100% melee uptime and 100% Envenom uptime while Kingsbane is running. Similar to Deathmark, delaying KB can be beneficial, but as it is on a 1-minute cooldown, it is challenging to do so without losing out on a full cast of it.

This is where our incredible survivability kit comes into play. Skills like Evasion or Cloak of Shadows allow us to ignore certain mechanics without getting hit or affected by them, and where other Melee DPS may have to run away from the boss to avoid taking lethal damage, we can safely maintain uptime to further boost our DPS. This makes these defensive abilities act as DPS boosts in certain encounters, and planning around their usage to potentially overlap with dangerous boss mechanics is what separates a good from a great Assassination Rogue.

Thistle Tea is a multi-charge ability, generating one charge a minute. It grants Energy on use, and can be very useful to maintain Envenom Chains during damage amplification phases on a boss, or to ensure you use every GCD during your Deathmark. It auto-activates at below 30 Energy, and there's no benefit to trying to play around it manually.

Blind is not part of our DPS kit, but still has some interesting use-cases in Mythic+ that may not be immediately apparent. While Sap allows a player to safely pass a CC-ed creature without getting into combat, a blinded enemy will walk around confused and still get into combat with the first player that gets close to it. Once the Blind debuff ends, it will engage said player. It will not, however, get into combat with any other player that gets close to it.

You can still make great use of Blind to pass enemies by abusing the fact that only one player gets into combat with it. The best and easiest way to do this, is to ensure that after blinding the target, you get close enough to enter combat with it, and then you and your entire group can pass the enemy. Once you are far enough away from it, you can safely Vanish, drop combat, and skip the enemy.

This is particularly useful in situations where an entire pack of enemy is in your way that you would like to skip, but one or two enemies are too close to pass by without body-pulling them. As a Rogue, you can Sap one, and then use the above trick for the other, allowing you to skip past enemies that would either detect you if you were to use Shroud of Concealment, or if Shroud is on cooldown.