Hello fellow rogues!
The journey towards become the ultimate damage dealer is a long one, and as a rogue you'll always want to be thinking of ways to increase your overall effectiveness. It starts at the low levels by planning around good soloing, and gradually as you level, you have to heavily consider your performance within a group and eventually a raid. I'm here to help make these transitions easier for you, and to provide you with advice on how to reach those extra points of damage so feel free to contact me about any questions you may have!
I'll try to put these random pieces of advice into some kind of order as best I can. When you first start out as a rogue, for the first many levels (maybe even up to 30th) the way you spend your talent points and the tactics you use to fight will largely depend on the best weapons you have available to you at the time. Obviously as a rogue, gear with added agility bonuses and talents that add to your critical strike or hit rate are going to be crucial. As you gain more levels though, you're going to be faced with a lot of choices that may or may not be influenced by the gear you've accumulated.
Rogues beyond this point come in many forms; dagger rogues, sword rogues, backstab rogues, hybrids, etc. The talent points you spend will definitely need to reflect the way you want to fight. My personal choice has been to dual wield daggers, as I personally feel there is more variety to choose from in this area than swords, and focus on a backstabbing build. However, if you happened upon a really sweet rogue sword, you might want to consider sticking with that option.
Okay, so why backstab? A short and unhelpful answer is "I like to see 1/3 of my opponent's health gone in one hit", but I'll explain in further detail why I've chosen to focus on this. It's probably not the best build if you want to solo all the time and don't do a lot of instances, but in a group I feel it offers the maximum potential for damage. Coupling the talent that adds 5% to crit rate with the added 5% crit rate from the Dagger Specialization talent, increasing my critical rate by a further 30% through Improved Backstab and finally topping it all off with an additional 20% to my damage total from the Opportunity talent... I pity the fool that turns his back on you.
I don't necessarily want to dissuade you from spending your talent points the way you like, but I will put forth an argument against spending the necessary points into the Subtlety talent tree in order to gain Improved Sap. Is it useful? You bet! But even though members of your party will constantly ask if you have it, it is in no way needed to be a valuable member of a group or raid. As a matter of fact, those talent points could be much better spent making sure that you put foes down for the count very quickly. The idea of improved sap is that it buys your group time to make a pull and stops you from grabbing all the initial aggro, but a well organized group will have it's crowd control (sap, sheep, sleep, shackle etc) ready to go anyway, and your tank should be ready to suck up any aggro you pull. Not to mention that while improved sap grants extra time to make decisions, the time on your sap ticks down for every second wasted stalling.
Combat builds are my personal choice, but assasination has it's perks. You can build a very effective rogue using combo points as the focal point of your build, though I would caution against putting too much stock into certain finishing moves. Initially, without a doubt your best finishing move will be Eviscerate. Nuff said. However... around the time you gain the skill Kidney Shot, you may find that you'll be using that more and more often than Eviscerate. Sadly, as the levels roll by Eviscerate becomes one of the weaker choices for a finishing move, particularly against elites and bosses. The damage from Eviscerate will be mostly soaked up by your opponent's armor. This being the case, I would recommend that at the later levels you start concentrating on using Kidney Shot to stunlock, or against elite boss mobs you should definitely use Slice and Dice. I know, Slice and Dice! I barely ever used it myself, but as you draw closer and closer to level 60, I think you'll find this finishing move to reap the greater rewards.
I encourage anyone, but particularly sword rogues, to offer their analysis or tips on how to keep the damage rolling in high and maybe even post their talent distribution if they so desire. No one build is "correct", but we're all about maximizing the pain! Share your roguely wisdom, for there's always a chance we will all benefit from it.
One last thing, rogues... if you're in an instance with a group, use Feint like it just might not be there tommorow. It costs energy but keeps the aggro off, and you really should not be tanking anything unless your clothies are in dire straits. When you have aggro chances are you're not doing as much damage as you could be, so always keep it in mind!
Disaresta out!
Subject: Roguing it up: The Basics and Beyond 
Mon Oct 23, 2006 2:32 am
