Daggers?Swords? What?Follow

Choose Your Weapon!

A very common question these days. Rogues can use a great many weapon types, so it's completely understandable to want to know which you should use when you first start. The answer, however, is not quite so simple. You ultimately must make the decision yourself, but I can help you to do that by explaining what each weapon excels at.

There are four weapon types (excluding ranged) that you can use as a Rogue. One-Handed Swords, One-Handed Maces, Daggers and Fist Weapons. Each type has its strengths, though most Rogues either use Daggers or Swords. Maces are less common, but still more or less mainstream. Fist Weapons are rarely used at all, as good ones are hard to come by.

Daggers

A very popular choice. Daggers excel at doing a lot of damage in a very short period of time. Ambush, Backstab and Mutilate have ridiculously high base damage, along with exceptional crit chance for the first two. Daggers, however, have been plagued by poor Combo Point generation, which made the talent Seal Fate a popular pick. With the addition of Mutilate (the single most energy efficient CP generation), this is no longer such a huge problem for Dagger builds. Daggers also have the highest crit chance of any weapon, as the Dagger talents such as Improved Backstab/Ambush and Dagger Specialization add crit chance, and lots of it. Daggers make for excellent raiding builds, and good PvP builds. Mutilate is a very nice jack-of-all-trades build, and also happens to be superb for raiding.

Swords

Probably the best weapon to use with PvP, as it allows for high instant attack damage without having to be behind your target or stealthed. Particularly slow swords (2.8 or slower) combined with a high attack power (in the 1000 range) can be used with Hemorrhage with great success. Swords are also the strongest grinding build, as you are not reliant on stunning your target to do high damage instant attacks.

Maces

A close second in grinding power if you can find a good one. The Mace Specialization stun effect is extremely useful in all situations. Aside from the Mace Specialization talent, you can treat these exactly as you would a sword. There are some very nice maces out there, but Blizzard really needs to show Maces and Fist Weapons a little more love.

Fist Weapons

Think of Fist Weapons as Swords with the Dagger Specialization talent. Their Damage and Speed is about the same as a Sword (they're a little bit faster on average), but Fist Weapons have the added bonus of having some very, very fast weapons should you desire that in your offhand. An excellent weapon type plauged by poor itemization (that means there aren't many good ones). If you've got a nice set, by all means use and enjoy them, but don't go out there expecting to be fist specced from the start.

Main Hand versus Off Hand

A very common question, and for good reason. The question of what weapon type seems to be the most common, and the answer is very simple. If you're not Mutilate specced, it makes absolutely no difference aside from the Combat talents that effect only one weapon type.

That being said, what you actually do put in your offhand is a bit more involved than that. Your offhand weapon does 50% damage (75% with Dual Wield Specialization maxed out), so getting higher damage weapons will have a much lower effect than doing so on your main hand. This applies to attack power bonuses as well. The off hand weapon is not used for instant attacks either, so that frees up all damage range considerations entirely.

Now, the end all, be all answer. All other relevant stats equal (DPS, base stats, attack power, etc), faster is better for every build except Mutilate. There are two reasons for this.

1. Poisons are a set proc rate, and are not normalized to weapon speed like Enchantments are. This means that if Weapon A is exactly twice as fast as Weapon B, Weapon A will proc your poisons exactly twice as often (on average, though I realize an exact average is an oxymoron).

2. More swings means more spell interrupts. Most classes get talents that reduce this chance, but frequent interrupts can be the difference between life and death in a very close match. Granted, it's not a big difference, but if the stats are identical between weapons, why not take any advantage you can get?