mutilate vs combat for leveling past 70Follow

What ever you do, don't level with Hunger for Fail. It's so retarded to keep up while leveling that it's not worth the migraine.

Level as mut/prep if you're going to level mut. You'll probably need to go sub or combat til 73 or so--when you start getting 97+ DPS weapons from quests--and then you'll be alright to go mut.

Mut with Wound/Wound is waaay faster than combat for leveling. I usually drop a mob inside a CS.

I can vouch for that. I was (at the time) level 70-something in Howling Fjord, as Muti/Prep. Got a nice little quest to gank a Pirate for his... whatever. He committed suicide by bear and I had to gank the bear. Didn't quite work that well though... I got it down to 10-20% several times, with the use of PoTs and all manner of funny things and failed miserably every last time.

Then I spent the next five minutes sitting on my ***** stealthed, waiting for a guildie to show up. During that time, this tiny little gnome cunt came running into the cave, equal level to me. I decided not to engage in some lighthearted ripping-spines-out-of-nostrils-and-beat-gnome-to-death-with-it or "world PvP" as it's also known. Instead, I'd watch the gnome get eaten by a bear.

... holy ****. It took the gnome about not much time at all to rape the pirate and then make tiny bear filets. All without losing more than about 60% health. I was amazed. I know I had helluvalot more burst than she did, but that kind of survivability? Where the hell did she get that? I quickly fired up my trusty browser to armory the lass, and she had the same leveling gear I did, with a combat specc + different weapons. Poring over the build, I couldn't really figure out how she did it, but somehow Combat definitely is the way to go if you like to solo everything around you. Less PvP oriented, less burst, but apparently helluvalot better to kill giant polar bears with.

With this newfound realization, I got back into the game to find my guildie had come and gone, as I was apparently afk.
***** combat rogues. I'm ganking every bloody last one of them. On a totally unrelated note, LFG Suicidal Pirate + Bear.

This is how my specc looked at 72. But this is sub-optimal for PvE, though. I specced like this because I'm more into PvP and spend most of my time looking for that respawning Alliance before I kill the questmobs. When I hit 80, it looked something like this. Again, mostly for PvP with soloing capability. Still very sub-optimal for PvE.

Stick with Sticky builds for leveling. There's at least one 70 build in there in addition to the 80 build. Just fill in the blanks as you level.

From another thread, here's my mutilate leveling build. Fast and efficient in my experience.