Rogue Leveling.Follow

The BEST leveling spec is what works for you.

If you want what the best on paper, then Combat is still pretty much the way to go until you get decent daggers for mutilate.

I personally leveled Combat swords until Northrend. I don't remember finding any decent daggers until then.

Combat is definitely the way to go until at least 50-60, but once you hit outlands you should be able to find a couple of decent green ah daggers. at which point its well worth at least trying mutilate, its exciting to watch mobs explode with burst dps, as opposed to the pretty consistent dps of combat. some people just prefer combat, but you owe it to yourself to at least try mut and make your own mind up whats best for you.

IMHO combat is leagues ahead of every other spec for leveling, even mut. The burst dmg is nice with Mutilate, but with Combat you can take on 4-6 mobs at once, hit killing spree and blade furry and watch them die before the KS animation is done. But yeah, what they are saying is true - mut is certainly fun to play, so by all means grab some daggers in the 60's and give it a shot.

I leveled/played as a combat specc'ed rogue for two years, but finally switched to mutilate around 72 and never looked back. I used one of the builds discussed by Theo and Therion (I'll see if I can dig up the link, it was a while ago). I know that this isn't all that relevant at level 46 and like I said, I used a combat spec then and found it perfectly adequate. It's just that I found Northrend leveling to be so much quicker with a basic mutilate build, so I would have been curious to see how it went in the early 50s...

In any case, like others have said, combat can be fun and works just fine for leveling/taking on multiple mobs, but if you have the money for a few respecs you might want to try out mutilate when it comes available. Better daggers certainly make a huge difference, but you should still be ok with single mob targets of your level even with what's available to you. Good luck!