Assassin rogues should use swords?!

Community General Discussion
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Bait title, but hear me out.

From what I can see, dual daggers is only required to cast mutilate. Envenom and other abilities scale better with bigger stat sticks. Weapons can be swapped in combat.

I can’t find anyone talking about this from trying to google various combinations of keywords…

But does this mean there is a potential for weapon swap macros again? swapping weapons in combat triggers GCD, but could it be worth it to boost your burst damage? it seems near every ability other than mutilate can be cast with sword instead of daggers, so while you are garroting, fan of knives spamming, toxic blading, rupturing, and envenoming… should we be pulling out our swords?

Someone with addons, math skills, and time, please test this.

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Doing this would cause your poison buffs to disappear.

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it doesn’t. I’m on my rogue right now swapping my offhand to a sword and back, poison buff stays on. seems poison buff isn’t tied to the weapon slot anymore and is just a normal buff.

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Drop those swords ye bloody girl laughs in Outlaw

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And if you swap your mainhand?

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i hate using sword as a rogue dagger are simply better

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I only have one sword so it was just auto swapping into off hand… but manually dragging into main hand, also doesn’t dispel poison buffs.

Poison does not seem to be a drawback here, if anything it gets buffed too from the bigger stat stick= bigger poison ticks. The only drawback I see is the GCD from doing the swap in combat, so the question is how big a drawback that is. In pvp there could easily be moments to mitigate this drawback too by kiting or cc or something while swapping weapons to burst

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If it works expect Blizzard to nerf it ASAP, cause fun = bad nowadays.

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FURTHER TESTING. I bought a pair each of item level 19 white swords and daggers, no stats on them.

Envenom and rupture don’t scale higher with the weapon damage, so weapon swaps for them only benefit if u got a higher agility sword. but garrote, interestingly, DOES have increased damage when I wield my ilvl 19 swords vs ilvl 19 daggers.

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except… are they? I just did some testing with ilvl 19 white swords vs white daggers, zero stats on them just weapon damage differences… and garrote does more damage using swords. what other abilities are also influenced? and what about if you have a sword with more agility on it than your daggers? could weapon swapping be worth it?

A big help into this would also be if anyone knows how tick damage is calculated nowadays. for example, if using swords with garrote increases its damage, does swapping to daggers without reapplying it then decrease it while it is already on the target? I assume not, once the dot is set it is set. but then what about refreshing garrote? does it keep its highest damage on refreshing the buff? could it be worth opening with a sword garrote then refreshing it with daggers?

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I’m going to try this in game myself, because I know when I switch out to a fishing pole I lose my poison buffs. That being said in order to see increased dps numbers you’re going to have to do more damage with the swords than what you’d lose from having to use a GCD to switch your weapons. My gut feeling is that you’re not.

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I wish. But nope, I’m stuck with only dagger or legion artifact ttransmogs. No sword transmog for me :frowning:

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yup, fishing pole dispels still… but I just bought sets of ilvl 19 weapons from an Orgrimmar vendor, and swapping between those daggers and swords from my main weapons didn’t alter my poison buffs at all.

Also, don’t forget that pooling energy is a thing, sometimes rogues don’t want to be casting abilities anyway. So that extra GCD could happen as ur pooling energy for a burst?

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hoping a decent arena assassin rogue and a raiding assassin rogue sees this, who is familiar enough with rotations etc to weigh in on if the extra GCD could be weaved in with energy pooling or CC, and someone with the resources to test how much extra damage you can actually get with the top tier weapons atm. I’m a 320ilvl rogue with questing items, I can’t really test effectively. ilvl19 vendor items show a 10damage increase in garrote damage with only the weapon swing damage being different, and… its from ilvl19 stuff. I’m assuming ilvl475 daggers and swords will have a much more significant damage increase with garrote just from white weapon damage. and swords/axes/maces/fists with higher damage stats might be worth swapping into for your ruptures and envenoms too for the extra damage.

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The only thing about swords vs daggars that bothers me is try to get two decent daggers at max level in bfa vs one 2h that other classes need, or even a set of 1h swords for outlaw.

The 120 horde rogue I have just recently got a 400 and a 385 dagger so he can play Mut instead of combat.

he has a 410 and a 415 sword for outlaw (combat)

Bliz really doesn’t seem to know how to support proper weapons for classes where different specs need different weapons, and which weapons fit which class.

Mut uses daggers, sometimes a sword and a dagger can work, but currently not so much.

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cool, that doesn’t really have much relevance to this thread at all though. swapping to swords DOES increase damage in assassin, at the cost of a GCD. I want to know if there are situations this damage is worth it, and if high level play where item scarcity isn’t an issue, binding weapon swaps onto abilities might become a thing again like in previous expansions.

like right now for you playing assassin with your 400/385, is it worth it for you to pull out your 410/415 swords to garrote, toxic blade, fan of knives, PVP talent stabbies, rupture and envenom, then swap back to 400/385 for combo generation? All those abilities WILL hit harder with your better swords.

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UR PLAYIN IT WRONG!
-Dev Level Answer

(I’m not a dev)

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