Free WoW Guide: Rogue - choice of weapons

The first and most important thing to consider when selecting your weapon is that Ambush and Backstab are only available if you have a dagger in the main hand. If you don’t have a dagger in the main hand, those skills become unusable.

Daggers, for some reason, seem to have a higher chance to hit than swords. That being said, it’s easy to see that daggers are the best choice for consistent damage since they attack more often. Swords and maces attack at a slower rate and hit less often, making damage more sporadic. So why do people opt away from daggers then?

Sinister Strike is why. This skill has its own timer, so weapon speed means nothing while weapon damage means everything. For example, let’s say you have a dagger that hits for 40 damage every 1.5 secs and a sword that hits for 80 damage every 3 secs. They both have the same DPS so in a perfect world, just counting auto-attack damage, they should be the same. Factor in Sinister Strike (at max, it does 68+ weapon damage) and you’re looking at 108 damage with the dagger and 148 damage with the sword. Nearly a 50% difference in damage and that’s just considering base damage, not the bonus you get from attack power, enchantments and critical hits. All of this is completely independent of weapon speed.

Backstab and Ambush are the reasons you would use Daggers. Ambush can only be used once a fight and once you’re 60 and do the high level content, you’ll find you’re using Ambush about once every 5 minutes. You cannot use Backstab when fighting alone as you need to be behind your target. In a PvP battle, you will rarely get a chance to use either of these skills. The simplest reason however is that in the majority of the combat situations, you will be using Sinister Strike a lot more than Ambush or Backstab and you should focus on making that skill do as much damage as possible.

All that being said in favor of swords/maces, it’s important to remember than daggers are faster and give access to Ambush/Backstab. That means that daggers, in general, will apply poison twice as often as swords will (based solely on auto-attack), which increases your DPS by at least 10%. Backstab is also an amazing tool in groups as it rarely does enough to get aggro (when the creature turns to attack you instead of another group mate) yet still gives a ton of damage. Matter of fact, if you were to take the DoT Buildyou would be best served with dual daggers simply for the increased chance of applying poisons.

Another factor to consider is that swords and maces are a lot more common than daggers. You will still find daggers but more so in instances and quests. I highly suggest you try both fighting styles out to see which you like more. Just know that damage-wise against "normal" creatures, swords are the most powerful.

Finally, most daggers in the high end have some sort of DoT attack attached to them. This is bad because it takes a debuff slot and negates nearly all use of stun tactics.