WoW Classic Rogue Leveling Guide 1-60

This guide will aim to provide you with a clear skill and gear path to max level in WoW Classic. While detailing every single quest and the optimal leveling routes is beyond its scope, we will provide some information on your class-specific quests and some general leveling tips.

Rogues have three talent trees: Assassination, Combat, and Subtlety.

A Combat and Assassination hybrid is the recommended leveling build, due to the access to two powerful cooldowns, as well as supporting choices, such as Relentless Strikes, and strong passives. The strongest build for leveling uses swords in both your Main hand and Off-hand.

While Swords are better for solo play, Daggers are better for group play. Playing with Daggers will lead to higher DPS in groups, but when it comes to solo play it is much more difficult to play, since "Frontstabbing" does not work in Classic.

Subtlety sacrifices some damage for safety and for the ability to creep through the shadows. It has a couple of the safest talents in the entire game.

Because the travel times between quests can be long, and the experience gained by doing quests alone is not always enough to get you to the next zone, you should aim to kill every enemy close to your level that you travel by.

The experience you get for each kill quickly, and drastically, drops as you level past the enemies you are killing. It is also much more difficult to kill enemies past your level, because you often miss and your attacks glance off of them, due to a mismatch of weapon and defense skills.

Also, to reduce travel times as much as possible, you should aim to save enough gold to buy your first mount right after you hit Level 40. To help towards this goal, you want to buy only the most impactful skills from your trainer (we will provide a list ahead).

Finally, as WoW Classic leveling can be long and arduous, we would like to recommend that you befriend people who are also leveling in your zone as you go by, as leveling in a pair (large groups are not advised due to problems with quest item drop rates and experience splitting) can not only make things faster and safer, but will also provide you with someone to chat with.

Make sure you buy Dual Wield at level 10, this will significantly increase your damage output.

Learning professions early on is very useful, as you can naturally level them as you go, avoiding extra work at max level. This is especially true for gathering professions, but crafting professions compensate by giving you extra tools to level with.

We recommend that you learn First Aid as soon as possible for easy self-healing. Herbalism and Skinning are great primary professions for a leveling Rogue, allowing you to make extra gold, or accumulate materials that you can use to level crafting professions later. There is also a case to be made for leveling Engineering early on, since its crafts can allow you to immediately solo quests that would otherwise have to wait for later levels.

While leveling, one of the most important things to look for is weapon upgrades. As a Rogue, a large chunk of your damage comes from auto attacks and some of your important abilities scale off of weapon damage, such as Backstab.

The best stat for Rogues is Agility/Strength for damage, since they both increase your attack power, however Agility also increases Critical Strike Chance and Dodge as well. Spirit is also a very useful stat while leveling, especially since it increases your health regeneration out of combat.

There is no Dungeon Finder in Classic WoW, so you will have to either find a group using people you know or look for groups in town. Dungeons can take a while to get to and a group wipe can set you back a lot of time, since you spawn at the closest graveyard outside of the dungeon and have to run back in. They do offer some of the best gear and dungeon quests give much more XP than normal quests, with some dungeons offering multiple quests for you to do. This is covered more in-depth in our Dungeon section.

Getting upgrades on any piece of gear will help the leveling process, but the single most important upgrades to look for are weapons. Sword or Dagger upgrades can greatly improve your leveling speed. A weapon upgrade is typically something with higher DPS and offers you more Agility. You should also be on the lookout for potential ranged weapon upgrades which have a higher DPS than your current weapon.

Rogues have an extremely important quest that will greatly speed up your leveling process. That quest is broken down in great detail down below.

Congratulations on reaching Level 60! Now that you are max level, we recommend looking at our Talents section and the rest of the guide in order to learn how to play at max level.

The best individual pages to read through are as follows.

• The DPS Rogue Talent builds guide has the best builds for Level 60 covered. We propose builds for all specializations, with a focus on Combat for raiding.
• Our PvP Rogue guide is where you can find the best PvP builds for Rogue.
• Goldmaking Guide for Rogues is a page with details on where / how to farm gold quickly as a Rogue when you are Level 60.
• The DPS Rogue Rotation guide is where you can read on how to optimize your PvE damage and how to prioritize your abilities.
• DPS Rogue Stats guide contains detailed information on all Rogue stats, including a list of their priority for damage dealing.
• Our Gear guide for DPS Rogues lists all the optimal pieces of gear that you will want to farm at Level 60, in order to optimize your damage with a pre-BiS list for those trying to gear up for raiding.