New Series: Leveling a Rogue
March 5, 2009 4 Comments
I’m currently doing the prep work on a new series, called Leveling a Rogue. I’ve already started writing the first part, entitled “Baby Rogue – Levels 1-10.” I don’t anticipate that the whole guide will be written in 10 level segments, but it seems to make sense that the first part should just be the early levels.
To test (relive) the experience of leveling a Rogue, I’ve rolled Samueltempus, the gnome rogue (original, I know), on the newish Borean Tundra server. This should help me remember what leveling a rogue is like; it has been quite a while since I’ve done it.
Samueltempus (level 80) died a fair number of times in the Dun Murogh, and don’t ask me why, because Samuel (level 7) has yet to lose more than 25% of his lifebar. To be honest, looking back on leveling the original Sam, I can’t see how I found so many ways to die.
For the series, I’ll be using a Combat spec, though I’ve already given some though to a post on leveling Assassination,which I’ve never done. For the guides I’ll provide a level by level talent point suggestion, including my reasoning, as well as ability and rotations to use for efficient leveling.
As always, there’s more than one way to do things, so as always, take what I say with a grain of salt. If anyone has any alternate views on how to level a rogue, I’d love to hear them, and I might even edit the guide to incorporate them.
– Sam
Slice and Dice 
I play a priest as my main, and I’ve recently started rolling a rogue as my primary alt. That said, your current series is a lot of fun and timely for my new adventure. I’m enjoying the posts.
I know you mention detailing combat levelling, which I know is the fastest, but I would love to hear your thoughts on assassination progression. I’m trying to be disciplined about not trying to hurry this character, and I think levelling in trees other than combat is more interesting and more ‘representative’ of the class.
Porf,
I will writing an alternate post on my thoughts about assassination, but it’s my personal opinion that combat is the strongest leveling spec. The problem with leveling Assassination is that its strongest combo point move, Mutilate, isn’t available until you reach level 50. All of the standard abilities in the Combat rotation are baseline.
Still, as I said, I am writing a how to level Assassination post, and though it will be a challenge to create a way to level that’s close to the efficiency of Combat, I look forward to writing it. Besides, you nailed it, as I learned, Assassination feels more Roguish than combat.
Thimble,
I’d love to do a leveling subtlety post, but it’s going to require some serious research on my end, as I’m fairly unfamiliar with the spec. I am, however, willing to give it a try.
– Sam
I leveled mostly sub until the very high levels. I just really enjoyed the ambush/ghostly/eviscerate rotation, which was good enough to kill just about anything, and for tougher mobs, having prep for double evasions was nice. Certainly I know it’s way off the beaten path, but it’s a very fun, and very rogue-feeling way to go. And once you hit 80, you more or less won’t use ambush in PvE at all, so there’s something to be said for enjoying it while you can.
The fun of sub leveling is that once you’ve got remorseless attacks and improved ambush, as long as you keep moving, you’re going to open every combat with an ambush crit. And assuming you’ve got yourself a nice slow dagger that’s relatively level appropriate (and there are a good group of them that are self-farmable), you’re going to knock off at least half the health of a level appropriate mob before it can blink. Somehow that stays fun.
Some of the most fun I had was solo stealth-running Aggem Thorncurse in RFK to get myself a pair of thornspikes. You can do it when they’re level appropriate, it’s hard, and it’s super roguish.