Slice and Dice - Increases the rate the target dies by 40%
No matter what anyone tells you, this needs to be your first activation. Your top damage will always be your auto attacks, and this is what fuels those auto attacks and drops our attack speeds to below 1.0 for our off hands. Ideally, you will use tiffany your opening point to activate Slice and Dice, and then work towards the extension of it.
Combat and Honor Among Thieves builds will use a 5 point slice and dice at this point. Deep Assassination builds will work up an Envenom. From that point on, every time your slice and dice is approaching 6-7 seconds, you need to think quickly about your combo points and energy remaining on your target and how to best refresh it. Remember that any level Envenom will refresh it to the 5 point maximum when you have Cut to the Chase, so if you are forced to do a 2-3 point envenom, it's far more efficient to sacrifice that damage and envenom duration to keep your slice and dice active. Cut to the Chase is an amazing talent, but it will NOT start slice and dice, only refresh it. So it's extremely important to never let this fall off, moreso for Assassination than Combat and Honor Among Thieves builds for that reason. However, do not let this fall off for longer than a second for any build unless you are in a phase where you cannot melee the target. If your target flees, jumps, blinks, etc, that's your signal to use your combo points and energy in the meantime to refresh Slice and Dice while on the way to your target, or save it for when you're about to begin meleeing it again. Thanks to our lovely offhand talents, energy levels are affected by our attack speed. So the faster we attack, the more chances for bonus energy we get, and thus more special attacks for combo points. It's a lovely circle, and it all revolves around starting this skill up and keeping it up.
Rupture - Bleed, bleed, bleed!
This is typically your second priority at the start of a fight, and second thing to consider refreshing after slice and dice. This is nice for ignoring armor and resistances on your target, and provides a steady source of additional ticking damage alongside your deadly poison. This is an essential thing to get started on your target when your tank is not a Druid or a Warrior as Assassination. Hunger For Blood requires a bleed on the target, so getting that bleed on the target as quickly as possible for our 18% damage increase (you do have it glyphed, right?) is necessary to earn and keep our place at the top of the damage charts as Assassination. This is also affected by Mangle and Trauma for bonus damage, so if you have any kind of Feral Cat or Armstiffany jewelry Warrior in the group, you'll get great results from keeping this up constantly. You'll get great results from keeping this up anyway, but that 30% bonus is oh so nice! If you have it glyphed for bonus duration so you can focus on other combos rather than refreshing this more often than you have to, bonus points!
Expose Armor - Because not every tank is a Warrior
Quite possibly the most underrated finisher. If there is not a stack of Sunder Armor on the target, you will have to include a 4-5 point Expose from time to time to ensure maximum physical DPS. Everyone will see a solid increase in damage from this, so please disregard your giant yellow numbers for a moment and take one for the team. This has a high priority for Honor Among Thieves builds since you do more physical finishers than the other builds.
Eviscerate - Why can't every target wear cloth? :(
This is our lowest priority finisher. While it can critical,wow gold, and scales decently, the fact that it's affected by armor reduces the overall damage far too much... unless you talent and glyph for it. Eviscerate with the appropriate talents can put out some impressive damage, but a lot of that comes from combat and a rather poor overall talent in the Assassination Tree, where you have more important talents to grab at that tier for overall damage. ,buy wow gold; Since Honor Among Thieves builds generate combo points quickly, you'll see plenty of opportunities to Eviscerate once your other essential DPS finishers are active. Let them have it!
Envenom - To sacrifice a stack for the greater good
If you are an assassination build, you will be using this in place of Eviscerate. It has a lot going for it in ignoring armor, and you will break ,wow gold;cheap wow gold five digits when you critical with this often at higher levels. I can't emphasize how important it is to take Master Poisoner if you are serious about using Envenom however, since Deadly Poison makes up a good chunk of our damage over the course of a fight, getting it back up to 5 stacks as fast as possible is imperative. Remember to use Cold Blood with 5 point versions of this in moments of weakness to produce Envenoms that might rival the mages and warlocks!
