Rogue Class Guide

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Posted March 7th, 2005 by Xerin

Our Rogue Guide, everything a Rogue needs!

In World of Warcraft there is only one class that achieves perfection at melee DPS. That is the Rogue, WoW’s stealthy cunning thief like class that is 100% pure melee DPS with an emphasis on stealth, poisons, and jabbing things with daggers, axes, maces, and swords. As one of WoW’s few pure classes, the Rogue excels at doing one thing and one thing only: hitting things. While Priests melt faces and heal their friends, the Rogue sits with the other pure DPS classes in doing one thing: killing. There isn’t any tanking (unless you count evasion tanking), healing, or anything else.

Our Rogue Guide goes over all of the details you need to know for both new and seasoned Rogues. It’s constantly updated and evolving to meet the changes that WoW keeps pushing out. If you need a good starting point then see our Basics Page which goes over everything that a Rogue is, includes hit caps, and more. Need to know how to beat enemies down? See our Playing a Rogue Guide.

You can navigate this guide by using the menu above for all of our core guide pages or the table of contents below to see everything relating to the Rogue.

Rogue Overview

Rogue Overview

Pure melee DPS class that doesn’t suffer from the hybrid tax. Major focus on doing damage.
Capable of using stealth to avoid enemies.
Has access to poisons for additional weapons effects.

Rogue Strengths

Capable of dealing massive melee damage while interrupting the enemy.
Stealth can be used to avoid pointless battles, make soloing easier, and to surprise enemies in PvP.
Poisons provide an additional enchant on an already enchanted weapon and can have secondary utility effects.
Rogues have a large amount of cooldowns ranging from increasing damage to escape, making them tough opponents in any circumstance.

Rogue Weaknesses

As a pure class the Rogue is unable to heal or tank, making them a DPS only character that can only fill in DPS roles in groups making grouping a little bit more difficult.
Has the lowest armor of any character in the game (including cloth wearers who gain magical armor boosts). This is countered with a fist full of escape mechanisms, but still becomes an issue.
Stealth plays little to no role in endgame PvE.
Highly gear dependant.

mage in epics

Races: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Blood Elf, Forsaken, Orc, Troll
Armor: Cloth, Leather
Weapons: One-handed - Maces, Daggers, Axes, Swords

Melee DPS

Rogue Guide Contents

Name	Description
Basics	The basics to Rogues, including info about poisons, hit rating, Energy, stats, professions, and more!
Combat	How do you fight as a sneaky stealthy Rogue? Come here to find out the "tricks of the rade".
Diminishing Returns	How diminishing returns affect a Rogue.
Cooldowns	When do you pop your cooldowns? Find out here.
Soloing 1-40 \| Soloing 41-60 \| Soloing 61-80	Our Rogue Soloing Guide, which takes you 1-80.
Abilities	A list of Rogue abilities.
Finishers	Finishing moves for Rogues.
Macros	Rogue Macros.
Managing Aggro	Dealing with aggro as a Rogue.
Poisons	A guide to all of the Rogue poisons.
PvP Basics	The basics to PvP as a Rogue.
UI Mods	Rogue U.I. Mods.

Archived Pages

These pages are no longer up to date or near up to date or in the queue to get updates anytime in the near future. Some of the information may still be very accurate, but since they are lacking in updates we can not vouch for 100% accuracy.

Patch 3.1: Gearing Up | Talents | Enhancements | Glyphs | Trinkets