Rogue Leveling Guide from 1 to 80

Welcome to our Rogue leveling guide. Here you will find all you need to know to level up your Rogue efficiently. In addition, you may wish to check out our general Leveling guide, complete with detailed information on XP, mounts, addons, consumables, tips, and more. We encourage to read it to increase your leveling speed even more.

Leveling a Rogue can always feel a bit sluggish due to the inherently slow generation of resources, which will improve as you level up and gain access to new passives and abilities that improve your Energy and Combo Point generation. While not having access to these benefits from the get-go might make the initial stages of leveling feel a bit boring, you will immediately notice whenever you gain access to some of the more powerful abilities that make your rotation feel smoother and more fluent.

Rogue also gains access to some of the most powerful defensives in the game, which translates very well into its ability to finish quests that ask you to kill enemies that have high health pools or that would usually require a group of 2 or 3 people to defeat.

Out of all three Rogue specs, we recommend Subtlety as the best choice for leveling. It offers the best single-target burst damage and allows you to dispatch enemies within only a few seconds, jumping from enemy to enemy in quick succession. It also has the best self-healing toolkit out of all the Rogue specs, so you do not have to take a break to sit down and regenerate your health as often. While its AoE damage is not quite as good as that of the other specs, it is only trailing behind by a small margin, so you can easily pull multiple targets at once and still be healthy enough to immediately jump into the next pack of enemies.

Outlaw is a very good leveling spec in its own right and plays smoothly at all stages of the leveling process. As you level up, you will gain access to a variety of maintenance buffs that freshen up the playstyle, as well as several mid-range abilities that allow you to pull and damage enemies from further away. It has very powerful AoE, high burst damage, and lower cooldowns on most of its defensive abilities.

Assassination will feel the most sluggish since it relies heavily on passive abilities that boost its resource generation. Once you gain access to some of the key talents and abilities, Assassination feels very rewarding, as it has good single-target and multi-target damage. If you prefer playing a damage-over-time melee spec, and watching the enemies bleed out as you already move on to the next set of objectives, Assassination is the right choice for you.

Most of the information regarding your leveling specs DPS rotation as well as its survivability and healing abilities can be found on the individual spec pages that we linked above. There are, however, a variety of other abilities that are much more situational that you slowly unlock as you level from 1 to 60.

Some of these you might not use for hours after gaining access to them, others you will want to try out the moment you get the level-up that unlocks them. Be sure to familiarize yourself with every ability in your toolkit so you are as well prepared as you can be for the journey to max level.

• At Level 1, you only know one ability: Sinister Strike. It is a Combo Point generator that deals damage to your target.
• At Level 2, you unlock Eviscerate, your first finisher that consumes Combo Points to deal increased damage to your target.
• At Level 3, you unlock Cheap Shot alongside Stealth. This is your first of several abilities that can only be used from Stealth and stuns your target for 4 seconds.
• At Level 4, you unlock Fleet Footed, which permanently increases your base movement speed by 15% as well as reducing the falling damage you take.
• At Level 5, you unlock Sprint, which increases your movement speed by 70% for 8 seconds. It has a 2-minute cooldown and can be used while stealthed.
• At Level 6, you learn Kick, a melee-ability that allows you to interrupt spells that are being cast.
• At Level 7, you unlock Ambush, a Combo Point generator that can only be cast from Stealth. It deals high damage and generates 2 Combo Points.
• At Level 8, you unlock Crimson Vial, a self-healing ability that restores a percentage of your health over 4 seconds at the cost of some Energy.
• At Level 9, you unlock Slice and Dice, a finishing move that consumes Combo Points to grant you increased attack speed for a long duration.
• At Level 10, you unlock your first poisons, Instant Poison and Crippling Poison. They last for 60 minutes when used. Instant Poison has a chance to deal damage whenever you strike a target with your melee attacks and abilities, while Crippling Poison slows down your opponents. You can only have one lethal and one non-lethal poison active at the same time.
• At Level 11, you unlock Sap, a powerful crowd-control ability that takes out a target for up to a minute, unless it receives damage from any source. Can only be used against specific types of enemies.
• At Level 12, you unlock Feint, an ability that allows you to drastically reduce the damage you take from area-of-effect spells and abilities.
• At Level 13, you unlock Kidney Shot, a finishing monve that stuns your target for a number of seconds, based on the amount of Combo Points you used.
• At Level 14, you unlock Pick Lock. Pick Lock allows you to open locked doors, chests, and the occasional lockbox that you may find on enemy corpses. These can contain gold, items, and a variety of consumable items.
• At Level 17, you unlock Vanish, a cooldown that allows you to leave combat with any enemy you are engaged with, and granting you the benefits of Stealth immediately.
• At Level 18, you unlock Cut to the Chase, a passive that allows you to extend the duration of Slice and Dice when using certain finishers.
• At Level 23, you unlock another lethal poison, Wound Poison. It reduces the effectiveness of any healing effects on the target by 8% per stack. Stacks up to 3 times.
• At Level 24, you unlock Pick Pocket. Pick Pocket has a chance to steal health potions or lockboxes that that can contain similar items and small amounts of gold.
• At Level 25, you unlock Safe Fall. It further decreases the amount of falling damage you take, allowing you to jump off of ledges, cliffs, and roofs from roughly three times the height as other classes without taking a single point of damage.
• At Level 28, you unlock Distract. Using this ability allows you to target an area. Once successfully cast at the area you targeted, all mobs within the targeting circle will stop any movement and face towards the center of the targeting circle. This can be incredibly useful to stop patrols from running into you while you are already engaged in a fight, as well as turn mobs away from you so you can safely Stealth past them on your way to your objective. Enemies with Stealth detect have a lower detection radius when they are turning away from you.
• At Level 28, you unlock Shroud of Concealment. When used, any friendly party member within an area around you will be stealthed. These players can move while stealthed without breaking it, but they can be detected much easier by hostile targets. Use it in conjunction with Distract to allow your entire group to Stealth past enemies you do not wish to fight.

When purchasing Heirloom Items for Leveling in general, we recommend picking the Heirloom items that have as high an amount of Critical Strike as possible. All Rogue specs benefit a lot from critical strike, giving you more burst in your openers as you strike from Stealth, as well as having spec-specific interactions with Critical Strike.

Haste is also useful for allowing you to generate more resources while leveling, as you will oftentimes find yourself out of energy and waiting to be able to use your abilities again once you have regenerated a bit of energy. For more information on Heirlooms, check out the Heirloom section below.

Once you've reached Level 80 and your leveling journey has found its end, you definitely want to check out the in-depth information on how to excel in all types of PvE content by checking out our Rogue Specialization Guides!