Rogue Hero Talents — The War Within (11.0.5)

This page is specifically about Hero Talents in The War Within. If you want to learn more about the best regular talents for Assassination Rogue, check out our Talents page:

Deathstalker is the more involved Hero Talent Tree for Assassination, adding a variety of Plague (Shadow+Nature) damage to your toolkit by enhancing several of your abilities and having some minor rotational impact. Its key mechanic is the application of Deathstalker's Mark and the maintenance of the Mark through Darkest Night, which will greatly boost your Energy regeneration and direct damage.

Fatebound is the more passive Hero Talent Tree for Assassination Rogues. It is centered around the idea of 'flipping coins' whenever you use a damaging finisher while hoping that you flip the same side of the Fatebound Coin multiple times in a row. The more you roll the same side of the coin back to back, the more damage you will deal, while certain Hero Talents help you guarantee the outcome of your coinflips for added consistency.

Deathstalker is the slightly stronger choice performance-wise, but Fatebound is not too far behind (1-2%). At this stage, it is not possible to give any recommendations on which Hero Talent Tree might be the best going into the first Season of The War Within, as there are still many bugs, non-functional abilities and other issues that need fixing before any reliable recommendation can be made.

A bug currently exists that makes Deathstalker even stronger: By picking Ethereal Cloak, you end up gaining a DPS-Talent that was removed during the Beta of The War Within: Flensing Knives. This ends up being a 1-2% DPS gain for a talent that was changed into a defensive talent. This bug has existed for a long time now, and you may want to not miss out on this damage. Hopefully this gets fixed at some point.

The same situation as described above applies to Mythic+, with many mechanics not functioning as intended or described. As a result, it is currently not possible to give any recommendation on which Hero Talent Tree might come out ahead. As it stands, both Trees perform similarly, so feel free to play around with whichever you like more thematically.

4.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Assassination Rogue

Deathstalker Standard Build Fatebound Standard Build

5.

Best Deathstalker Build for Assassination Rogue

The Deathstalker build is the same for Mythic+ and Single-Target. While there are a few DPS choice nodes in the Deathstalker Tree, the chosen ones in the Tree below are numerically superior to the alternatives.

There might be some unique situations where Ethereal Cloak or Shroud of Night can make a difference, but unless you can leverage the extended duration for some tangible benefit, the currently selected options are more useful.

5.

Best Fatebound Build for Assassination Rogue

The Fatebound build is the same for Mythic+ and Single-Target. The tree is entirely passive, augmenting your flips and helping you generate longer chains of flipping your coin.

Two of the choice nodes are simply for Utility, with Death's Arrival allowing you to quickly Shadowstep to a ranged party member and back to the boss, potentially gaining you a second or two of additional boss uptime. You can pick between these choices freely, as they are all very low impact and situational, to the point where they do not make a big difference either way.

The only DPS choice node ends up with us picking Inevitable End, as it is simply stronger than the alternative talent by ~1% of our total DPS.

For more general information on your rotation, make sure to check out our rotation guide:

Make sure to always use your Envenom with 7 CP when you have Darkest Night active, in order to re-apply your Deathstalker's Mark to your main target.

Depending on your choice of talents in the Specialization Tree, there is one rotational adjustment you will be making. If you talented into Vicious Venoms instead of Sanguine Blades and Improved Poisons, you will be playing your rotation as normal. However, if you go for Sanguine Blades and Improved Poisons instead, you will want to use Fan of Knives once every time you gain the Clear the Witnesses buff.

Both builds offer almost exactly the same single-target DPS, but the Sanguine Blades version offers ~10% stronger burst DPS during Deathmark, while the Vicious Venoms build has higher sustained DPS instead.

Fatebound does not have the aforementioned choice between Vicious Venoms and Sanguine Blades, it always wants to play Sanguine Blades.

There are two minor rotational changes you can make depending on the amount of flips you have during your opener.

If you have a 5-flip in your opener and you have not used Vanish yet, you can use it to guarantee the next 2 rolls to hit your Fateful Ending proc early into the pull.

You will also want to avoid using Cold Blood before having used up your Edge Case proc after using Deathmark, so simply delay the use of Cold Blood to the second cast of Envenom after using Deathmark.