I don’t like daggers.
There, I said it, and I’m only saying it because I want you guys to understand how difficult it was for me to switch. Do you know the irony of making the decision to use daggers and then have this thing drop the next day? My bad luck with dice rolls is crossing over to my drops.
Anyway, this post isn’t about liking or hating daggers. It’s about the current Assassination tree and what you can expect from it. This is purely from a PvE perspective, so let’s get that out of the way while we’re at it.
Like I keep saying, going from Combat to Assassination means giving up swords and replacing them with daggers. Mutilate requires you to have two daggers, so you won’t be doing the sword-fist-dagger combination that Combat allows. Be prepared to wield one weapon type only. I know it’s redundant at this point but I’m really struggling with the aesthetics involved. With Mongoose, my weapons look like electric grow sticks.
Fighting becomes a one-on-one affair. Thanks to Combat talents, it was easy to hit Evasion, aggro four to five mobs, hit Blade Flurry followed by Killing Spree and then watch all of them drop before KS ends. You lose the multi-mob killing with Assassination, but don’t worry, it’s offset by the next item.
Expect shorter fights. I’m talking 6- to 7-second encounters here. If you’re lucky, mobs will drop quicker than you can stealth back in. You can even use your stealth cooldown as a of sorts. If you can kill a level 70 mob before you can re-stealth, you know you’re doing good.
Crits, crits, crits. This is the most obvious, if not the biggest, benefit that you can get out of the tree. You should see crazy numbers out of the build so turn on floating combat text (or even better, get a combat addon) and compare. Not only should you be getting more crits, they should also surpass your old crits from Combat. The downside is that you also generate more threat, so you may want to hold off on attacking too early during raids.
That’s it so far. Hopefully I’ll hit 80 before next week.
by Oriniwen, on December 4 2008 @ 1:27 am
I have been so focused on getting to 80 as well that I havn’t had a whole lot of time to think about how I’m go to gear myself for Naxx. I highly reccomend the MaxDPS site. It was a huge help for me to make up my ‘wishlist’ of items for each slot. Looks like I get to do a *lot* of Heroic UK.
by zeroinitiate, on December 5 2008 @ 12:01 pm
you know what? that is some serious advice right there. thanks again for the site. i’ll start checking out the gear that the site enumerates. again, my thanks.