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Sword and dagger rogue talent specs change a little bit going into phase 5, so here’s a breakdown of the phase 5 talent specs for rogues.
Video version of this guide:
Dagger rogue pve talent specs – 15/31/5
‘Take your pick’ filler talents:
These talent choices are personal preference. You have 7 ‘filler’ points in the combat tree and 2 in the assassination tree which is up to you to pick.
Here are the common choices:
Improved Gouge is very beneficial if you play pve spec outside of raids for general farming, occasional pvp and overall utility. It’s what I tend to pick if I don’t intend to respec much outside of raids.
Lightning Reflexes is a good choice if you want purely the best benefit for raiding (it adds a tiny bit of survivability if you get aggro, albeit a very small amount).
You can only really get 2 out of these 3 sets of talents. What 2 options you pick is up to you.
Endurance is useful if you want to prioritise survivability and utility. It also has benefits outside of raiding in farming/pvp.
Imp Sprint is useful for occasional utility and can be very useful outside of raiding for breaking snares/roots. You don’t typically get all that much benefit in raids from this.
Aggression is the choice if you want to absolutely min/max raid dps. You do not eviscerate much as a dagger rogue, so the bonus is very very minimal, but out of the 3 options it’s the only one that causes a direct dps increase.
Ruthlessness is the popular pick for AQ daggers mostly because the other 2 options aren’t very good for AQ or dagger rogues.
Murder is a great talent, but unfortunately most AQ mobs are ‘unclassified’ meaning it doesn’t work in AQ. You can still take this talent if you want to parse in BWL for example, but just know that it doesn’t really help you in AQ.
Improved Eviscerate is another great talent, but dagger rogues just don’t use eviscerate all that often. Dagger rogues typically only get to eviscerate maybe once per fight, and usually only if you burn energy boosting cooldowns.
Here is an example of a typical dagger rogue pve talent spec for phase 5 AQ:
Sword/fist rogue pve talent specs (non human) – 19/32/0
Note: Fist spec just takes the 5/5 Sword Specialization talents and swaps it over to 5/5 Fist Weapon Specialization. Everything else is the same.
‘Take your pick’ filler talents:
Sword have a slightly bigger range of talents to play around with in the combat tree in particular. You have 8 ‘filler’ talent points that need to be assigned in the early section of the combat tree and 2 in the assassination tree.
Here are the common choices:
You have 8 ‘filler’ talents to spend in combat. You can pick:
Improved Gouge is very beneficial if you play pve spec outside of raids for general farming, occasional pvp and overall utility. It’s what I tend to pick if I don’t intend to respec outside of raids.
Lightning Reflexes is a good choice if you want purely the best benefit for raiding (it adds a tiny bit of survivability if you get aggro, albeit a very small amount).
Improved Backstab isn’t useful in AQ. It’s mostly taken for Vael fights in BWL, so if you don’t care about Vael parses anymore than you can skip improved backstab if you wish.
Endurance is useful if you want to prioritise survivability and utility. It also has benefits outside of raiding in farming/pvp.
Imp Sprint is useful for occasional utility and can be very useful outside of raiding for breaking snares/roots. You don’t typically get all that much benefit in raids from this.
Deflection is not bad, but it’s mostly just taken to fill in an extra talent if you end up needing to spend 1 more talent point to move further down the talent tree.
You have 2 ‘filler’ talents to use here. You can pick:
Murder is a great talent, but unfortunately most AQ mobs are ‘unclassified’ meaning it doesn’t work properly in AQ. You can still take this talent if you want to parse in BWL for example, but just know that it doesn’t really help you in AQ.
Improved Eviscerate is great for sword rogues in general. Overall it’s the best dps increase for the majority of sword spec weapon combinations.
Improved Poisons is a decent choice if you are alliance due to using 2 poisons. It performs best if you have a fast offhand (even sometimes beating out imp evis for ally in some cases).
Vile Poisons is another decent choice for alliance, although I found improved poisons typically beat it when choosing a poison talent. This talent performs better if you have a fast offhand and are using 3 piece Bloodfang set.
Here’s a fairly standard example of a typical sword rogue pve talent spec for phase 5 AQ:
Sword rogue pve talent specs (human) – 20/31/0
Note: Humans follow all the same choices as the non-human sword rogues above, except they get 1 extra talent point to use because they only need 1/2 Weapon Expertise due to human +sword racial.
I’d recommend you put that extra point into either improved eviscerate or improved poisons (depending on which you pick/prefer).
Here’s a fairly standard example of a Human sword rogue spec:
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