Foreword

This guide was written to highlight specific techniques and general good play that I have picked up from various other posters, my own experience and caffeine induced hallucinations. Much thanks to Prancer’s guide, it helped me a lot, but I felt it wasn’t specific enough in some areas and was perhaps a little outdated, what with the talent restructuring and suchlike. If I used your stuff either consciously or subconsciously or coincidentally, sorry, but in the end the credit is in the advancement of our class as a whole, rather than a “who did what” contest. This guide emphasizes the strength of the rogue's grinding ability. If you don't want to grind or you'd rather quest then go ahead. Grinding is both more reliable and 95% of the time faster than questing as a rogue.

This guide is written from a Horde player’s perspective, if you play alliance then take that into consideration.

Levels 1-12 are simple if you know how, and even with a minimum amount of skill and focus can be blitzed in, relatively speaking, seconds. You should be around level 12 when you finish the quests in your second town (the one with the mounts in, Brill for Undead, for example.)

I highly recommend going to The Barrens at this point if you’re not already there, it’s an amazing place to level. http://www.wow-pro.com/node/660 This guide is incredibly good, running you through all of the quests and basic strategies step by step in a very new player friendly fashion, and is also extremely fast and efficient. This guide ends you at level 20, at which point you can do The Wailing Caverns, aka the Labyrinth of Ultimate Boredom. The quest reward sword and the mace are excellent to dual wield, and your damage output at level 21 or so, which you will be by the time you get hold of them, will be phenomenal for your level. Grinding (which, by the way, is what you’ll be doing a LOT of) will never be as easy as it is right now.

Professions

I, like most rogues, took herbalism and alchemy as my professions. I like to collect herbs, I think they’re kinda cool, you know? Mining ends up being an “oh great, another copper vein” experience for me, wheras herbs are both varied and profitable. I also enjoy the herbs spawning in places they like to grow in, so Wild Steelbloom always requires a trek up a mountain, and Briarthorn is oft found under a tree. The reason most rogues take it is because fadeleaf and swiftthistle are used to create two important rogue items, namely Blinding Powder (3 for 1 fadeleaf) and Thistle Tea (+100 energy instantly) respectively. The ability to collect your own on the go is very useful.

First Aid: You’ll get more than enough cloth to level first aid with tonnes to spare for the AH. However, something a LOT of players don’t do which ALL of them should is get higher level people to make you better bandages. At around level 30 I had 200 first aid, which wasn’t difficult, and at that point you can use Runecloth bandages. With our low stamina build and a rogue’s flimsy hit points, this means the bandage will heal you from your 15% or so health to full in around 5 seconds. Unbelievable, and incredibly useful if someone tries to kill you or adds come along. Kill the mob you’re on and then gouge the intruder, hit the bandage (have Auto Self Cast on) and you’ll be laughing. As so many people farm Runecloth and everyone high has first aid (including all your friends, presumably), you can get them for around 10-15 silver each no problem. They beat the crap out of food, only eat in the event that a DoT effect (damage over time, gentlemen) is on you or you’re recently bandaged. Heavy Runecloth bandages are, of course, twice as expensive to get, and the difference isn’t really worth it, as well as the 225 required skill level being a little bit harder to reach without spending some extra money on silk early on.

Alchemy was my second choice. Early on the buff potions (troll’s blood, ogre strength, armour etc) are very useful and easy to create, and having an endless supply of healing potions really makes a big difference at lower levels. However, I found that as I leveled up more, even with continued herb collection (at one point I had to run around hammerfall collecting herbs so I could gather in STV, because I had been grinding in non herb areas) I fell behind in alchemy to the point where I would just sell the herbs and buy the potions I couldn’t yet make. Herbalism is very profitable once you hit stranglethorn vale, and swiftthistle (usually ~50s each at least) and briarthorn sell for a lot. Swiftthistle is a random spawn in Mageroyal and Briarthorn, so make sure you always pick those up, and I recommend the addon Gatherer to help you hit the spots as you run through areas.

Personally I haven’t really touched alchemy at all since I started to fall back, but there are two alternatives: 1) Buy a load of herbs and keep up to date, or 2) Don’t get it. Normally I would recommend enchanting, as when you quest a lot you get to disenchant loads of BoP greens and make some money off it, and when you get a junk green drop (bad stats for the respective type, etc) you can disenchant it. Enchanting materials don’t have an auction deposit, so if the auction fails you don’t lose any money, and they also sell quickly on most servers. However, if you have any friends with enchanting you can send them your “junk” greens, and as we won’t be questing much/at all there’ll be very few BoP greens as a result :P

Skinning is an option. When grinding beasts you can end up with sick amounts of leather off a level's grind, but I find that the few seconds skinning each creature does detract greatly from your grind speed.

Mining is another one. I know you can’t track both herbs and ores at the same time, but with Gatherer and flicking between occasionally you can end up getting enough to make it worth the time investment. However, your bags will get clogged up.

Off herbs and green/blue drops alone I managed to make enough for my mount and constant upgrading of blue and green gear off the AH from level 20-40, with a fair bit spare (around 60g) at the end of it, with minimal auction time. Auctioneer is useful for reducing time spent checking item prices, and if you want to try to bid on low cost things then go for it, but some people dislike using it for that and others just plain can’t be bothered (/me).

Speaking of bags, buy full 12 or 14 slot bags as soon as you can. If this character is an alt then you’ll be able to pick them up very soon, and otherwise you’ll be able to when the money kicks in.

Talent builds

(What? Something about the rogue? SURELY NOT ALREADY I’VE ONLY BEEN READING FOR ‘looks at watch’ AN HOUR WTF.) This is a tricky one, but with rogues you can’t really go wrong as long as you get a few, core talents. I’ll explain what I went with and why, I’m sure everyone will have their variations but just hear me out and decide. (Note: This is chronological)

Improved sinister strike – 2/2
This is your bread and butter skill, and the big difference is that when it costs 40 energy, you get 3 off in rapid succession. 100 energy + 1 tick (2 seconds) = 120, = 3 sinister strikes. At early levels enemies generally go down before you hit the fourth or sometimes third one, depending on what level creeps you’re grinding, so this is vital for maximising your dps.

Remorseless Attacks – 2/2
As at low levels the mobs die so darn quickly, 40% more crit with your first sinister strike is pretty huge, and you’ll really feel the difference. I also found that with this skill I feel a bit more pressured to get onto the next mob, so I concentrate a little more, and hey, who doesn’t like crits here? If you don’t wanna crit a lot, don’t roll a rogue, roll a priest ;]

Malice – 5/5
More crits, big dps increase. Every rogue gets this at some point, I like it early.

I was a little split at this point, as either I could go for relentless strikes or precision. Personally I went for precision, as things were going damned fast anyway and I like hitting consistently, but I can see why you’d go more assassination first.

Lightning Reflexes – 3/5
Yes, I know improved gouge owns. However, when grinding you should never use gouge apart from in emergencies, as the big energy cost, the fact you generally want to wait and the needless chance to get behind someone really slow you down. Damage mitigation, on the other hand, will help you reduce your downtime. If you want to PvP some then feel free to ignore this.

Precision – 5/5
This skill owns. When dual wielding your screen is full of miss miss miss miss, and while Sinister Strike doesn’t blaze all its energy if you miss, Eviscerate does, and all the white damage from your main hand and off hand will be increased a lot with this talent. More offhand hits = more poison too. I'd like to know if this worked on Eviscerate and Sap and all that jazz for sure...

Improved Eviscerate – 3/3
More eviscerate damage. You can also opt to get Murder 2/2 and 1 in this, it’s your choice. A lot of the time you don’t need eviscerate early on, and there are the dry couple of levels before you improve it where it just plain sucks. Ruthlessness is NOT a useful talent for grinding 20-40, steer clear of it. You should be using at max one finishing move per fight.

Relentless Strikes – 1/1
This talent owns you. As this build is great for grinding green humanoids, especially ones in cloth, you destroy the enemy incredibly quickly with a few sinister strikes (with the probable crit) and probably a 3 point eviscerate, shift click or quick loot -> next.