Rogue Dragonflight Leveling Guide from 1 to 70 (2024)

Table of Contents

• 1. Leveling in The War Within
• 2. Best Leveling Spec for Rogue in The War Within
• 3. Ability Unlocks for Rogue Leveling in The War Within
• 4. Best Heirloom Items for Rogue Leveling in The War Within
• 5. Changelog

Welcome to our Rogue leveling guide. Here you will find all youneed to know to level up your Rogue efficiently. In addition, you may wishto check out our general Leveling guide,complete with detailed information on XP, mounts, addons, consumables, tips, andmore. We encourage to read it to increase your leveling speed even more.

Leveling a Rogue can always feel a bit sluggish due to the inherently slowgeneration of resources, which will improve as you level up and gain access tonew passives and abilities that improve your Energy and Combo Point generation.While not having access to these benefits from the get-go might make theinitial stages of leveling feel a bit boring, you will immediately noticewhenever you gain access to some of the more powerful abilities that make yourrotation feel smoother and more fluent.

Rogue also gains access to some of the most powerful defensives in the game,which translates very well into its ability to finish quests that ask you tokill enemies that have high health pools or that would usually require a groupof 2 or 3 people to defeat.

Out of all three Rogue specs, we recommend Subtlety as the best choice forleveling. It offers the best single-target burst damage and allows you todispatch enemies within only a few seconds, jumping from enemy to enemy inquick succession. It also has the best self-healing toolkit out of all the Roguespecs, so you do not have to take a break to sit down and regenerate your healthas often. While its AoE damage is not quite as good as that of the other specs,it is only trailing behind by a small margin, so you can easily pull multipletargets at once and still be healthy enough to immediately jump into the nextpack of enemies.

Outlaw is a very good leveling spec in its own right and plays smoothly atall stages of the leveling process. As you level up, you will gain access to avariety of maintenance buffs that freshen up the playstyle, as well as severalmid-range abilities that allow you to pull and damage enemies from further away.It has very powerful AoE, high burst damage, and lower cooldowns on mostof its defensive abilities.

Assassination will feel the most sluggish since it relies heavily on passiveabilities that boost its resource generation. Once you gain access to someof the key talents and abilities, Assassination feels very rewarding, as it hasgood single-target and multi-target damage. If you prefer playing a damage-over-time melee spec,and watching the enemies bleed out as you already move on to the next set of objectives,Assassination is the right choice for you.

Most of the information regarding your leveling specs DPS rotation as wellas its survivability and healing abilities can be found on the individualspec pages that we linked above. There are, however, a variety of other abilitiesthat are much more situational that you slowly unlock as you level from 1 to60.

Some of these you might not use for hours after gaining access tothem, others you will want to try out the moment you get the level-up thatunlocks them. Be sure to familiarize yourself with every ability in your toolkitso you are as well prepared as you can be for the journey to max level.

• At Level 1, you only know one ability: Sinister Strike. It is a ComboPoint generator that deals damage to your target.
• At Level 2, you unlock Eviscerate, your first finisher thatconsumes Combo Points to deal increased damage to your target.
• At Level 3, you unlock Cheap Shot alongside Stealth. Thisis your first of several abilities that can only be used from Stealth and stunsyour target for 4 seconds.
• At Level 4, you unlock Fleet Footed, which permanently increases yourbase movement speed by 15% as well as reducing the falling damage you take.
• At Level 5, you unlock Sprint, which increases your movement speedby 70% for 8 seconds. It has a 2-minute cooldown and can be used while stealthed.
• At Level 6, you learn Kick, a melee-ability that allows you tointerrupt spells that are being cast.
• At Level 7, you unlock Ambush, a Combo Point generator that canonly be cast from Stealth. It deals high damage and generates 2 Combo Points.
• At Level 8, you unlock Crimson Vial, a self-healing ability thatrestores a percentage of your health over 4 seconds at the cost of some Energy.
• At Level 9, you unlock Slice and Dice, a finishing move that consumesCombo Points to grant you increased attack speed for a long duration.
• At Level 10, you unlock your first poisons, Instant Poison and Crippling Poison. They lastfor 60 minutes when used. Instant Poison has a chance to deal damage whenever you strikea target with your melee attacks and abilities, while Crippling Poison slowsdown your opponents. You can only have one lethal and one non-lethalpoison active at the same time.
• At Level 11, you unlock Sap, a powerful crowd-control abilitythat takes out a target for up to a minute, unless it receives damage fromany source. Can only be used against specific types of enemies.
• At Level 12, you unlock Feint, an ability that allows you to drasticallyreduce the damage you take from area-of-effect spells and abilities.
• At Level 13, you unlock Kidney Shot, a finishing monve thatstuns your target for a number of seconds, based on the amount of Combo Pointsyou used.
• At Level 14, you unlock Pick Lock. Pick Lock allows you toopen locked doors, chests, and the occasional lockbox that you may find on enemycorpses. These can contain gold, items, and a variety of consumable items.
• At Level 17, you unlock Vanish, a cooldown that allows you toleave combat with any enemy you are engaged with, and granting you the benefitsof Stealth immediately.
• At Level 18, you unlock Cut to the Chase, a passive that allows you toextend the duration of Slice and Dice when using certain finishers.
• At Level 23, you unlock another lethal poison, Wound Poison. Itreduces the effectiveness of any healing effects on the target by 8% per stack.Stacks up to 3 times.
• At Level 24, you unlock Pick Pocket. Pick Pocket has a chanceto steal health potions or lockboxes that that can contain similar items andsmall amounts of gold.
• At Level 25, you unlock Safe Fall. It further decreases the amountof falling damage you take, allowing you to jump off of ledges, cliffs, and roofsfrom roughly three times the height as other classes without taking a singlepoint of damage.
• At Level 28, you unlock Distract. Using this ability allows youto target an area. Once successfully cast at the area you targeted, all mobswithin the targeting circle will stop any movement and face towards the centerof the targeting circle. This can be incredibly useful to stop patrols fromrunning into you while you are already engaged in a fight, as well as turn mobsaway from you so you can safely Stealth past them on your way to your objective.Enemies with Stealth detect have a lower detection radius when they are turningaway from you.
• At Level 28, you unlock Shroud of Concealment. When used, any friendlyparty member within an area around you will be stealthed. These players can movewhile stealthed without breaking it, but they can be detected much easierby hostile targets. Use it in conjunction with Distract to allow yourentire group to Stealth past enemies you do not wish to fight.

When purchasing Heirloom Items for Leveling in general, we recommendpicking the Heirloom items that have as high an amount of Critical Strike aspossible. All Rogue specs benefit a lot from critical strike, giving youmore burst in your openers as you strike from Stealth, as well as havingspec-specific interactions with Critical Strike.

Haste is also useful for allowing you to generate more resources whileleveling, as you will oftentimes find yourself out of energy and waitingto be able to use your abilities again once you have regenerated a bit ofenergy. For more information on Heirlooms, check out the Heirloom section below.

• 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
• 22 Apr. 2024: Reviewed for Season 4.
• 15 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.5.
• 06 Nov. 2023: Page updated for the Patch 10.2 Rogue rework.
• 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7
• 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
• 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
• 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
• 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
• 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
• 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
• 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.

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