What makes combat so good for levelling?

[Kuroyu]

Can someone detail how combat is stronger than assassination, especially while early levelling (pre Lv40).
Objectively as far as i can tell, assassination seems to just have more dps talents while combat is far
more defensive.

Sure they are meant to use swords, but that doesn't stop me from using swords to make the most from my improved sinister strike damage as an assassination rogue. I put two points into combat for -5 cost on Sinister strike, no other early talents seem to be as powerful as what assassination offers until much later in the tree.

[The Shortest Path]

-5 energy to Sinister Strike is very important because of how energy regen works.

5% melee hit and +5 weapon skill are the best talents in the game bar none.

Endurance, Riposte, Improved Sprint all help survivability and soloing in general.

Blade Flurry and Adrenaline Rush are incredibly good for burst or fast clear on multiple mobs.


Assassination doesn't have anything even close to as good for solo leveling. Most of its talents are ones that only really do anything when you have endgame gear or are fighting things that last more than one rotation.

[Cortana]

Can someone detail how combat is stronger than assassination, especially while early levelling (pre Lv40).
Objectively as far as i can tell, assassination seems to just have more dps talents while combat is far
more defensive.

Sure they are meant to use swords, but that doesn't stop me from using swords to make the most from my improved sinister strike damage as an assassination rogue. I put two points into combat for -5 cost on Sinister strike, no other early talents seem to be as powerful as what assassination offers until much later in the tree.

Combat is great for leveling because you can use almost any weapon that drops

[duds]

Any spec is good just dont use daggers to solo for obvious not being behind the mob reasons. But until like level 40+ combat is pretty shitty i found, not enough talents at the top of the tree that give good damage boost although hit is nice.
Just spec in whatever you think will help you to kill mobs faster or be faster leveling (even if its improved stealth to stop ganks) until you are level 40 then go all out combat because you can plow multiple mobs down amazingly fast with AR and BF and aggression is a pure damage boost which is nice.

[Acetabularia]

Assassination isn't bad per se, it just focuses on certain abilities that require a substantial amount of investment into the talent tree before reaching their full potential.
Point in case: Backstab will most likely be your bread and butter if you're planning on deep assassination spec and you kind of need both opportunity (5 points in subtlety) and improved backstab (8 points in combat) as well as lethality (15 points in assassination) to maximize your backstab damage, earliest this would be at lvl 37, which would mean 0 points in master of deception which I would not recommend.
And this still doesn't solve some of the drawbacks of backstab, one being gear dependency backstab benefits hugely from weapon damage and you want a slow, hard hitting dagger in your MH to capitalize on that, something that can be hard to get and keep replacing as you level. And two being energy to combo point ratio. without seal fate which you won't get for another 15 or so levels, you'll be spending 60 energy for one combo point by backstabbing.
But I'm not writing this to try and dissuade you from going dagger spec while lvling. My prefered spec has always been assassination with a mind for PvP and if you keep with the gear curve while lvling it can be a devastating spec. The main reason why I've always frowned upon "leveling specs" is that experimenting and building your own spec has always been part of learning and mastering your class. Unfortunately this has been forgotten in the last decade and instead everyone seems to just spec and gear one particular way because some forum post said it was the best way to spec/gear.