This is my guide for the raiding rogue, or those aspiring to be one. It covers everything you'd need to know about specs, gearing, and the dps itself. Hope you find this useful. Feel free to suggest things to add or ask questions. Enjoy.

My sources will be from various people and posts at Elitist Jerks, WoWWiki, and WoW Forums. Pretty much in that order of importance.

Definitions

SnD - Slice and Dice

Cycle - The order in which you use up your combo points. Often, notation will look like 1s/5r or 5s/5r basically Xs/Yr. What that denotes is to use finisher "s" after X amount of combo points, then finisher "r" after Y amount of combo points, then repeat. In our cases, "s" will be Slice and Dice, "r" will be Rupture, "e" will be Eviserate. Also, an additional notation sometimes is "Xs/Yr cut". What "cut" means is to start the cycle again immediately refreshing SnD even if there is a lot of time left on it. Those type of cycles tend to tell you that your energy will start to cap before SnD wears off and it's not worth using other finishers, so it's better to just refresh SnD beforehand.

Energy Capping - Energy comes at 20 sec per tick (normally) regardless of what you do and caps at 100 (normally). When energy is capped out at 100, additional energy ticks do nothing and are thus wasted.

7 Commandments of Rogue DPS

First off, here's a great set of rules Aldriana at EJ posted for rogues. If nothing else, follow these to maximize your dps.

1. Don't die.
2. Don't do anything that risks wiping the raid.
3. Maximize your time on target.
4. Don't let your energy cap out.
5. Don't let SnD drop.
6. Use one of the spreadsheets to figure out your best cycle; this will usually be the highest rupture uptime cycle that doesn't violate rule 4 or 5.
7. Use your cooldowns.

Rogue Spreadsheets

There are currently 2 public spreadsheets out there.

Aldriana's Rogue Gear Spreadsheet and Rogue DPS Spreadsheet (currently maintained by Dontmindme)

They allow you to plug in gear to make comparisions on how they effect your dps and also give you the tightest optimal cycle in a sustained fight. That is to say, you still have to use your own judgement based on the actual fight (i.e. interruptions).

Quick and Dirty FAQ (read relavant pages for details)

1. How much hit should I get?

- There is no magic number for hit to stack to. AP, crit, haste, armor pen all provide dps to a degree. Wear the best gear you have available. Check spreadsheets.

2. What should I spec?

- If you want to min-max to the absolute for pve raiding, combat swords. In the meantime, just spec around the best weapons you currently have access to. Otherwise, you'll have to see how much slack your raid leader gives you in regards to min-maxing.

3. Should I use rupture/eviscerate/envenom?

- Rupture. Almost always rupture. Especially with Mangle available.

4. Should I spec hemo?

- Depends. At low gear levels, it can be on par with combat specs. Even in 25 mans it can provide a nice boost to all physical dps. However, towards T6 level gear, Sinister Strike builds scale far better and you may not gain back the personal dps loss through raid dps. Either way, never have more than 1 hemo rogue in a raid.

5. WF or GoA?

- Windfury. For dagger rogues, GoA + IP is about equal to WF more or less.

6. Executioner or Mongoose?

Mongoose. Rogues used to think Executioner was better at the T6 level of gear, but this was a mistake in it's spreadsheet calculations. Now the answer is "Mongoose is almost always better".