Season of Discovery Combat Rogue Tank Talents and Runes

This talent build is focused largely on optimizing for what limited damage reduction talents can be found throughout the Rogue talent tree while also maximizing the amount of energy we are able to generate and maximize our threat and damage output. This build is fairly flexible and the points found in Improved Expose Armor can easily be shifted into Endurance if your group already has a source of armor reduction.

• Gloves — Main Gauche
• Pants — Blade Dance
• Chest — Just a Flesh Wound
• Waist — Shadowstep
• Feet — Rolling with the Punches
• Head — Honor Among Thieves
• Wrist — Unfair Advantage
• Back — Fan of Knives
• Ring — Sword Specialization
• Ring — Defense Specialization

Main Gauche is a great choice to maximize the amount of damage we deal while also allowing for us to mitigate the next incoming physical attack. It also greatly reduces the cost of our Sinister Strike ability which acts as our primary form of Combo Point generation and causes it to deal additional damage and generate additional threat.

Blade Dance will be our primary combo point spender as a Tank Rogue, with the focus on being mitigating as much damage as possible this is a great way to maintain active mitigation. It also works great paired with Rolling with the Punches and Just a Flesh Wound in situations where we are not able to avoid an attack.

Just a Flesh Wound is essential as a Tank Rogue as it greatly reduces the amount of damage taken while Blade Dance is active, reduces your chance to be critically hit by 6% and massively increases the threat generated by all of your abilities. It also allows us access to the ability Tease which acts as our taunt.

Shadowstep is an incredible mobility cooldown that teleports you behind your target and increases your movement speed by 70% for 3 seconds. As a Tank it is crucial to maintain as much uptime as possible and this is a great tool in a situation where you may have lost aggro on a mob running to another party member or just closing the gap to maximize up time. AoE threat Rogues single greatest weakness, even with Blade Flurry so should you find yourself in a situation where consistent AoE is required definitely switch to Shuriken Toss.

Rolling with the Punches increases your health whenever you Dodge or Parry an attack, this creates a great buffer for when you are unable to avoid incoming damage or may be facing a spell caster you are unable to interrupt. This rune synergizes incredibly well with Blade Dance as the more you are able to avoid the more uptime you will have on your bonus health.

Honor Among Thieves greatly increases the amount of Combo Points generated when in a party allowing you to more easily maintain each of your Blade Dance buff and maintain debuffs like Rupture on the target and cast even more Eviscerates to deal extra damage. This also scales incredibly with gear as the higher your party members crit chance the quicker you will be gaining bonus Combo Points.

Rolling with the Punches is a great passive damage increase. As a Rogue tank you will always have a considerable amount of Dodge rating thanks to the amount of Agility found on gear. Carnage is another great option but finding the combo points to maintain Blade Dance, Slice and Dice and the Rupture you would need to activate Carnage can be difficult to manage for what may not even be a damage increase depending on your Dodge chance.

Fan of Knives fills a massive void we have as Rogues allowing us to now have a spammable AoE ability. As a tank especially having the ability to instantly generate threat on multiple targets is a massive bonus and while the other two options have situational uses Fan of Knives will be the most consistently useful as we will be primarily spending our Combo points on maintaining Blade Dance and Slice and Dice.

Sword Specialization and Defense Specialization increases our Sword Weapon skill by 5 and our Defense skill by 25. This allows us to much more easily hit our Melee hit cap and allows us to focus on gearing towards other stats. The Defense rating helps mitigate incoming damage for any attack we are unable to avoid.

More engravings are likely to come out as we reach higher level caps so make sure to checkout our general Runes guide to get a better understanding of what all tools you have available to your Rogue.

Riposte while not all enemies are able to be disarmed Riposte is a great tool both to generate threat and lessen the damage output of an enemy that can be disarmed.

Blade Flurry increases your attack speed by 20% and your attacks will strike an additional nearby enemy. AoE threat is the single largest issue as a Tank rogue so the added cleave from this ability greatly helps resolve this.

Relentless Strikes gives you finishing abilities a chance to return 25 Energy allowing you to cast even more Saber Slashs.