Encrypted Text: Deftly handling your dual-spec rogue
by Chase Christian 
Mar 30th 2011 at 9:00AM
Dual talent specialization used to be an expensive upgrade reserved for players with good money management. As time has passed since its inception, its level requirement and cost have decreased dramatically. Everyone can afford dual talent spec now, and the benefits are easily recognized for hybrid classes. What once was a 30-minute trip to a capital city to respec between roles has become a short cast that can be performed anywhere. Pure DPS classes can still use dual spec to their advantage, and rogues are no exception.
I'm going to be honest and tell you that subtlety is still not competitive in PvE. While its unrivaled survivability does come in handy on a few heroic encounters, its damage output is simply not strong enough to warrant regular use. Combat and assassination are our two most potent talent trees, and so most rogues will be sporting these specs in raids. While assassination still holds the DPS crown on most encounters, combat's Blade Flurry can be useful for dungeons and even raid bosses like Halfus Wyrmbreaker. By properly planning our rogues, we can play both specs with a deadly efficiently.
Use shared keybinds
Binding the same keys for two different specs has been useful since day one, but it becomes even more important when players are switching specs all the time. Rogues have the luxury of having a relatively small number of abilities to bind, and most of them are cooldowns or other utility abilities.
The basic structure of using combo point generators and finishers allows us to make playing two different specs nearly identical in terms of bindings. For your assassination build, put Mutilate and Envenom on two keys, and simply reuse those keys for Sinister Strike and Eviscerate in your combat spec. Because action bar switching is built-in to the dual spec mechanic, there's no reason to not use identical bindings.
Reactive abilities like Feint and Kick should always be bound to shared keys in all of your specs. You need to be able to activate them instantly and without hesitation, so using the same key trains your muscle memory for when you need a quick reaction time. Secondary abilities like Recuperate and Sprint should also be bound to identical keys, if only because it makes them easy to remember. If you're looking for guidance in binding your keys, I have previously shared my tips on this topic.
Customize your addons for each spec
Many of today's popular addons are "dual spec-aware," and so they can tell which one of your dual specs is active. Each spec has its own things to remember.
You can customize your addons like Power Auras to only show specific auras when you're in a particular spec. I have my 35% life Backstab warning set up to only display when I'm using my assassination build, while my Revealing Strike reminder only pops up when I'm combat. Other addons like EventHorizon will automatically adjust themselves based on your spec and will only display bars and timers for abilities that you actually have available at the time.
Choosing the right gear modifications
Unfortunately for us, combat and assassination have very different stat valuations. It's not really possible to gear for both at the same time without weakening both. Assassination rogues are required to reach the spell hit cap as quickly as possible and then start stacking mastery. Combat rogues favor reaching the expertise cap instead, followed by tons of haste. Mastery is one of combat's worst stats, beating only critical strike rating and the white hit cap. Expertise is in the same boat for assassination, which puts the specs at odds when it comes to gems, enchants, and reforging.
What you can do is abuse agility's potency to minimize the amount of stat contention between your specs. By using primarily agility gems in your gear (except for those needed to match agility socket bonuses), you can eliminate the need to re-gem your gear when switching specs. Most of your enchants will be biased towards agility, with most slots only having one viable option, anyway. You can even choose to enchant your gloves with Greater Mastery, which is good for both specs, allowing you to keep all of your enchants the same.
Addons soothe your reforging pain
Reforging your gear, on the other hand, is going to be necessary to play both specs at their peak performance. An amazing rogue recommended Reforgerade and ReforgeSaver to me, and now I'm passing them on to you. You simply use any of the compatible reforge calculators (WoW Reforge, korner's Complete Rogue Reforger or bsoft's Java tool) and dump the output into Reforgerade, which will do the enchants for you. You can then follow that up by using ReforgeSaver to memorize all of your reforging sets, allowing you to maintain as many reforging profiles as you like. While it's not going to reduce the cost of reforging your gear, it does cut down the amount of time and effort you spend by a significant margin.
Practice, practice, practice
While having the ability to switch builds on the fly gives you a great deal of flexibility, you actually need to be able to play both specs for it to be valuable. I specifically mix up my builds when running dungeons or raid bosses that we have on farm, as it allows me to stay sharp on both of my specs. The only way to really learn the small nuances that define a build is to practice. There's no replacement for experience, and when your guild asks for you to swap to a particular build for a fight, you want to be ready to answer that call.
Check back every Wednesday for the latest rogue strategies, from rogue basics and kicking your interrupts into high gear to how to handle your dual-spec rogue and how to pickpocket top tips from top-performing rogues.
Filed under: Rogue, (Rogue) Encrypted Text
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Keith Mar 30th 2011 9:13AM
"Unfortunately for us, combat and assassination have very different stat valuations. It's not really possible to gear for both at the same time without weakening both."
This isn't really as true as it seems on the surface - at least, once you've been raiding for a while and are able to suit up in mostly epics. In short, both specs want 4 pc T10, and there's generally only one good option for most other slots for either spec *anyway*. Gemming Agi/Haste instead of Agi/Mastery is a .5 DPS per/gem DPS loss as Mut, and is optimal for Combat, and both specs use the same enchants, as you noted.
At the end of the day, gearing for both Combat and Mutilate means keeping a second weapon, and, if you're really OCD about min/maxing and Al'Akir hasn't dropped an awesome 'Of the Zephyr' pair of pants for you (they don't exist!), possibly a 5th piece of Tier 10 and a Cho'gall offset helm to go along with the Toxitron shoulders to be 'BIS' for both specs.
Not only is Agility sufficiently strong to move the gear needs together, but Expertise and Hit capping via Reforging is easy, and realistically, Mutilate and Combat both like most of the same gear mainly because priority 1 in Itemization is 'Crit Is Bad'.
Sally Bowls Mar 30th 2011 3:01PM
Thanks for the info. It reinforces that there are many things, including character performance, that change somewhat as you move from starter gear to BiS.
However, what % of the people reading WOWInsider and especially an article on dual-spec have access to 4T10. IDK but I guess it is fairly low.
In fact, can anyone suggest a website/blog post that provides nice statistics for character boss kills of the 85s. I.e., not whether a guild is 5/13 but rather x% of the 85s have killed Magmaw and y% have killed Cho? WoWProgress is nice for seeing what guilds have done what but not population stats.
Tom Mar 30th 2011 9:16AM
All fair points. there aren't honestly many addons I can think of which you would need to change over between specs. Probably PowaAuras is the only one of mine I can think of and you are right that dual spec is built right in.
I was slightly surprised by you saying to enchant gloves with Mastery only because a couple of lines earlier you say Mastery is one of Combat's worst stats. Think you're still probably right, but it sounded odd.
What I struggle with more is getting in the practice with both specs. I don't swap often enough so I'm not very confident playing combat, even on the fights where it's obviously superior - Halfus for example.
Keith Mar 30th 2011 9:40AM
Mastery is actually pretty good for Combat after the buffs to Main-Gauche in 4.0.6. While it's true that you'd rather have Expertise, or Haste, in general, as Combat, you're going to be struggling to stay under the spell hit cap, so Hit isn't as desirable as it might first seem, which leaves you with Mastery.
More to the point, in general, Combat 'gets more' out of it's best stats than Mut does. In general, Mastery provides about as much DPS per point for Combat as it does for Assassination - the thing is that for Assassination, there isn't anything better than Mastery, and for Combat, there is.
As for the Glove enchant: Basically, the problem is this. There is a 65 Mastery enchant for gloves. The only other options are 50 Haste and 50 Expertise. Haste is better than Mastery, but not by enough to make 50 anything better than, at best, a break even with 65 Mastery. Meanwhile, using 65 Mastery means you can use the same gloves for both specs, which is a huge win, since the T11 set gloves are unquestionably BIS for both.
Pyromelter Mar 30th 2011 2:37PM
Keith... why are rogues locked into mastery or haste and expertise? The raw number isn't as large, but I thought agility was so good that http://www.wowhead.com/item=38967 would be viable.
Keith Mar 30th 2011 5:00PM
Pyro:
Agility is good. It isn't *that* good. For Mut, it's about twice as good as Mastery. It's about 2 and a quarter times better than Mastery for combat, and a bit less than twice the value of haste.
So, for the Agi enchant to be the better choice, it would have to offer AT LEAST half as much Agi as the new enchants do Haste/Mastery etc. It doesn't. If it was 30 Agi, it might be an interesting question (Mastery would still win, but it'd be close). At 20 Agi, it's simply not enough.
Kbs Mar 30th 2011 9:50AM
Ya know, as a rogue player i hope to see some information that is of use to rogues posted, as of late the rogue posts have all been nothing more than "Do your homework" style of "Macros, use them. Dual specs! Looky" or the like. Lets face it, information thats been posted so much im sick of seeing it. a post about Dual specs? Seriously??? This MAY have been relevant back when DS came OUT. But now? Its common knowledge!! We have to wait for the Rogue post to show up, and the last few have been disappointing. I could understand if we got more posts on a normal schedual (We get 1 posts for every 3 of another class, and normaly the last one up) But for the frequency of posts, i expect a little more out of it.
Chase Christian Mar 30th 2011 11:13AM
What type of information are you looking for? Your comment only tells me that you're not interested in what I've been posting, but has no details about what you'd like to see. I try to write ET to serve the every rogue, and there's a lot of rogues who needs to hear things like "set up the right addons" and "use WoL to track your DPS" because they won't hear those things elsewhere. If you have something you'd like information on, I am always more than happy to oblige. I just need to know what those topics are.
Harvoc Mar 30th 2011 11:15AM
You're not the only one who gets one post per week. You know which other classes do? The pure damage classes because they only have one role. The other classes have more posts because they have more than one role that they can fulfill. Now this isn't true for all specs. Death Knights only have one post, Druids only have 3 posts, Paladins only have 2.5 posts (Retribution is every other week), Shamans have 2.5 posts as well (Elemental is every other week too), and Warriors only have one post. Sure this is because of a lack of writers but still. I think that what's going on now is perfectly fine, more roles equal more authors and thus more posts.
Pyromelter Mar 30th 2011 2:40PM
Maybe Chase should write a post on pvp and ganking and how awesome rogues are with that... oh wait, he did that, and lots of people complained in the comments about it.
If you're going to complain, at least tell the guy what you want to see. While today's topic might not have been exciting, it was informative, showing the different stat weights of mut/combat and how to deal with reforging for both.
Therar Mar 30th 2011 9:50AM
This is what I did with my feral druid (as well as my rogue). The main action bar has the abilities I use in a certain form, while everything else can be used in almost any form. Stuff like stampeding roar and feral charge are the same keybind.
Nathanyel Mar 30th 2011 10:05AM
At first I misread the title to be about something left-handedness-related. Would be great if you could set your character's main hand to be left or right...
Telwar Mar 30th 2011 12:43PM
Keeping ability types on the same key is good for alts, too. I keep Rebuke on my 3 key, same place as Kick.
Pyromelter Mar 30th 2011 2:45PM
Mouse button 5 (forward thumb button) is:
Rebuke
Counterspell
Wind Shear
Mind Freeze
Pummel
Solar Beam
...it definitely helps to have standardization with multiple alts when you have similar abilities. I have channeled AOE on the same keybind, same with cleanse/decurse, my hearth is always Ctrl-H, flying mount is shift-F. Makes life a lot easier doing things that way.
Hail Mar 30th 2011 3:52PM
Yeah, I need to rebind my prot war's keys. I have often instinctively taunted after having seen an interruptable cast.
Zarnah Mar 30th 2011 12:31PM
I think it is hard balancing the two specs and have found that unless you have the ability to have separate sets of gear with only a few pieces overlapping you will be giving up some of the min/max stats that rogues use as law. I personally am more comfortable as Combat but my guild asked me to be able to adjust to Assassination on fights and even with all my gear min/maxed for Combat my Assassination numbers on single target are still very, very strong. Not ideal, but if you are getting those Agility socket bonuses and can be effective with the different rotations you should be able to do good damage.
Garthix Mar 30th 2011 1:05PM
Nice article as usual :-) I have to disagree a little I've been a combat rogue for a long time but changed to muti at my guilds request Nd the numbers I have been getting far outstrip my combat numbers in pretty much ever situation
The example you give of the halfus fight is a good one as you get two targets to hit with blade flurry so combat should pull ahead, the one problem is though first that you want one of those dragons down ASAP to take the pressure off the tank and healers so assassination has an advantage and once the first dragon is down blade flurry loses it's advantage
At the moment assasination just does way more damage, something really big would have to happen with combats mastery I think for this to change in the near future which is a shame as I miss using a sword and dagger :-)
I think for the time being dual spec for rogues is just going to be either muti or combat play a pvp spec
Hail Mar 30th 2011 3:50PM
Rogues are often on kicking duty, so I would imagine that most raids would put combat rogues on halfus and let the cleave help on adds.
Rynos Mar 30th 2011 1:58PM
Since when has combat daggers been an option?! :O
Telwar Mar 30th 2011 4:10PM
Last time I recall it being viable was TBC. I remember backstabbing for a while, and then I went straight swords for the rest of the expansion.
I couldn't do Combat now, though.