If you haven’t had a chance to see the WOTLK rogue changes yet, here are some new ones that just came out. (From the Beta Forums)

General

- Quality of life improvements: Removal of various reagents (Thieves’ Tools, Flash Powder) as well as a Poisons skill change. We’re removing the Poisons skill and making the finished poisons available on vendors for purchase. This should free up a fair amount of bag space.
- Envenom: Now also increases your chance to apply poisons by 25% for 2-6 seconds (based on combo points).
- Wounding Poison: No longer stacks. The first application now reduces healing by 50%.
- Anesthetic Poison: Now also removes one Enrage effect from the target.
- Evasion, Sprint, Vanish: Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. (Talents that reduce cooldown take this down to 2 minutes.)
- Cloak of Shadows: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes. (Elusiveness now reduces this cooldown to 1 minute.)
- A new level 75 ability has been designed. This is going to be one of the bigger teases as we’re not quite ready to talk about this one yet. I will say that will add some much needed group utility.
- Fan of Knives: Weapon normalization to equalize effectiveness regardless of weapons carried.

Assassination

- Mutilate: No longer requires you be behind the target.
- Relentless Strikes: Talent is too “required” and will be made more accessible. Vigor will replace its spot in the tree and a new talent will be created to fill Vigor’s spot.
- Find Weakness: Made passive to cut down on the number of triggered effects that either don’t affect gameplay or affect it in a negative way.
- Cut to the Chase: No longer requires a critical Eviscerate or Envenom. The finisher just has to land.
- Hunger for Blood: Now removes any harmful physical effect instead of Bleed or Magic effects. Bleed effects will still be removed (as all are physical) as well as effects like Mortal Strike, Aimed Shot, Expose Armor etc…

Combat

- Riposte: Now generates a combo point.
- Mace Specialization: This will grant armor penetration when using a mace. (The warrior talent will as well.)
- Deflection: Reduced to 3 ranks for 2/4/6% parry. This should soften the prereq for Riposte.
- Fist Weapon Specialization: Merged with Dagger Specialization.
- Dagger Specialization: Renamed Close Quarters Combat, moved to tier 3.
- Dual Wield Specialization: Moved to tier 1. Lightning Reflexes swapped locations with it and still needs a little more “oomph”.
- Unfair Advantage and Stay of Execution: Change to more offensive/utility (read mobility) talents. Too much defense on this tier.
- Killing Spree: Weapon normalization to equalize effectiveness regardless of weapons carried.

Subtlety

- More attractive Tier 1 to draw in all types of builds.
- Fewer dagger specific talents to allow additional build options.
- Wrongfully Accused: Reviewed. This talent doesn’t fit well in this location. May be moved lower and/or redesigned.
- Shadow Dance: A bit awkward at the moment. Due for some polish and some design tweaks.

Plenty to do still as you can see. As I mentioned, this isn’t everything we’ve got our eye on but gives you something to discuss and look for in an upcoming beta patch. Please add to the list anything you think needs special attention.

Thoughts

Huge changes here, mostly good. A few of the bigger ones:

• Cloak of Shadows is now 2 minutes without elusiveness. This gives subtlety a big bonus. Although this looks like a fairly large nerf it comes with a lot of buffs, and two minutes isn’t an excessive cooldown. In the majority of situations 1 cloak is enough for an arena match, especially if you’re saving it.
• Envenom looks like it might actually have some use, especially on a target that you are just starting to build poisons on. Anesthetic poison feels like it might hold some utility in a group environment, or possibly have some use in warrior duels.
• The base cooldown reduction on sprint, evasion, and vanish are fair. While this won’t affect arena much, it will mean that we can play to our full potential more than once every 5 minutes.
• Wound poison no longer being stackable be instantly being equivalent to MS is both a buff and a nerf. If you’ll be playing mutilate with the increasingly strong poison talents, I don’t see you having a big problem keeping it on (especially with deadly brew, giving you the ability to reaply wound with every shiv). With other specs though, a single dispel can remove the all important MS effect. It’s too early to see how this will go but it’s something to keep an eye on.

Assassination - All of the changes seem great to me. Vigor was incredibly weak as a 31 point talent, and cut to the chase now seems worthwhile for any situation (especially with the buff to eviscerate and envenom).

The only thing I really hate about these changes comes in assassination, and that’s the removal of the positional requirement for mutilate. As someone who plays with 250 latency, I can safely safely say that this shouldn’t be a huge issue in using a positional ability like backstab or mutilate (yes, I understand that some people have exceptional latency, but a game should not be designed around this). Not only will the spell out a ton of dodges for mutilates outside of kidney shot, it also takes out some of the skill factor that existed here. Mutilate without positional requirements will feel similar to playing a mortal strike warrior. (hmm…maybe that isn’t so bad)

Hunger for Blood got a nerf and a buff at the same time. Warriors have always been the bane of rogues in arena, but with this ability their snares and all important MS will count for much less. This ability may have actually gotten better.

Combat – It seems as though blizzard is trying to make combat an all around build. Riposte has become a lot more accessible. Dual Wield being moved to the first tier is huge for rogues of any spec. It’s one of the best point for point damage talents available, and I predict it to be the rogue equivalent to Imp. Corruption (generally everyone will take this).

The changes to dagger specialization make it seem as though combat daggers may make a pve comeback. I’m not yet familiar enough with killing spree but from what I’ve heard it still needs some work before it’s finished.

Subtlety – It seems as though blizzard really isn’t finished with this tree yet. Not much new info here other than us learning that it will be further polished. Some changes to lower subtlety seem necessary, but I’m curious as to what will be done with wrongfully accused. Hopefully shadowdance is improved as well as it seems fairly interesting.

It also seems as though blizzard hasn’t forgotten about hemo which is good, as it will allow for more playstyle versatility for the class.

Overall: Some really exciting changes. It looks like our class is moving in the right direction now in WOTLK. Although we’ll wait and see, there seems to be a lot of options in terms of what spec to play for pve and pvp. Daggers are really going to make a comeback and blizzard seems to finally have the right idea for our class. We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds because none of this is really concrete yet.

Life on Blood Furnace

Although getting hacked for hopefully the final time has been a waste of time and energy, it looks like I’ll be able to get my gear back and transfer reversed shortly. In the mean time, I’ve been playing around with some rogues on blood furnace. Although moderately geared and without any titles to show, we got 2091 last night after two evenings of work and both of the rogues I was playing with will be able to get weapons. Although the rating is nothing incredible it shows that you don’t need pve gear (1 of the rogues had merciless weapons) or the best racials (one of the rogues was an Orc) to have some success with double rogue. It’s more about commitment and having the right strategy.