first few pointsFollow

I have just made a rogue and just got to level 10. I was wondering what is a good path to go down for leveling, assassination, combat or subtley. I have read the sticky and I was thinking of doing a mix between combat and subtley. but now that I look at the assassination build it looks like I would get more powerful moves and now I cant decide. I am also going to be using dual swords to level thanks for the help.

Edited, Jul 9th 2008 7:57pm by dxrules

the builds in the sticky are cookie cutter for a reason. if you want to make your own go head if not stick to whats proven to work the best.

I've never understood why people prefer 2% hit rating above remorseless for levelling...

1 reason - you can't crit on a miss.

The mass of your damage output, at all levels, is "white damage" (auto-attack). Increasing hit rates has statistically shown, time and time again, to be a greater increase in overall damage output than any other single stat. The most complete analysis I've seen was on Elitist Jerks.

Also, Remorseless is useless when you have to bandage, run a bit to the next target, stealth/sap/retarget, etc... Basically all the things that might increase the time between attacks removes it's utility completely. Now that questing generally garners more XP/hour than traditional grinding, you are not rushing between targets to up your XP/hour anymore (or at least as often). You're more likely to avoid most of the mobs around a quest goal now than back in the day when it was better to just sit there in the Arathi farms and grind humanoids endlessly (oh, how I miss grinding!). This is especially true in the early levels where you can bounce between areas (Silverpine/Ghostlands/Barrens for example) and the quests are all very XP generous.

There is, theoretically, the possibility that a high-enough crit rating would out pace +hit in damage output. But from what I've seen there is no way any WoW toon can come close to the amount needed (which I believe was well over 75%, but can't recall exactly). If someone wants to do a quantified analysis I'd love to see it!