Which talent spec is best for rogues?

TL;DR – Combat Swords with expose armor works for almost everything (you can keep 2 pts in IEA talent even if not doing IEA). You’d only use combat hemo in much rarer niche situations.

Rogue P2 Talent Specs

Here are the talent choices and swaps you’ll be making going from P1 into P2 raiding.

Murder is back. A lot of rogues opted out of murder for P1 because it wasn’t effective vs. all the undead/demon bosses, but P2 brings us more humanoid bosses and trash mobs.

  • Swap your 2 points in improved eviscerate to murder for P2

Imp eviscerate still isn’t bad, since there are still a few bosses that are immune to murder, but overall I would still prefer murder for phase 2.

TL;DR – If you run 1 rogue per raid, then IEA spec is far and ahead the best raid spec in p2

Improved expose armor will be your go-to spec for P2. From the data and math we’ve seen so far, combat hemo is only useful in very niche and situational scenarios – I would personally never run combat hemo even in a 2 rogue raid.

These are the only times I would consider combat hemo:

  1. You have 2+ rogues AND you want the 2nd rogue to play support spec (your alternative is to just have him go full dps while other rogue does IEA)
  2. Your rogue doing IEA is bad at his class and can’t keep IEA up
  3. The boss mechanics aren’t friendly to IEA (doesn’t apply in P2 – only very few bosses in P2 can’t be learnt to IEA better and you wouldn’t swap to combat hemo mid raid just for 1 boss in an instance)

Combat hemo does perform better on trash BUT the problem is you need roughly 80%+ of the total damage in a raid to be trash damage before combat hemo comes close to the damage gained from IEA on bosses. This is unlikely to ever happen in TBC, unless you run an almost full caster raid.

Note: For pure personal dps performance – full combat with no IEA and no hemo still outperforms other specs by a mile. It’s not even close. Combat hemo IS NOT a personal dps increase over just dpsing.

  • The 2 points into improved expose armor talents barely affects your dps, so just keep them even if you’re not doing expose armor – it can be handy to have for a ‘just in case’ scenario

Note: Swap 5/5 fist to 5/5 mace if using a mace in mainhand

  • This will be your standard talent spec in P2 if using a mace or fist weapon in mainhand with sword offhand
  • I don’t recommend ever using a non-sword in offhand because sword spec procs and latro’s shifting sword beats every ‘non sword’ alternative in P2 (including s2 gladiator dagger offhand)