Am I missing something regarding Deadly vs Instant Poison? Same proc rate and same damage on instant proc... it seems like Deadly does the exact same thing as Instant, plus it also applies a DoT. Why would anyone ever use Instant?

After reading I have a few thoughts:

1) A lot of cp builders have reduced energy costs. I fear that we might end up with a spec that caps energy as often as combat does now. Capping energy as frequently as combat does takes away what I feel makes rogues pretty unique - That you don't have to spam next ability asap, but can wait a bit for procs/pooling/optimal situations etc.

2) Rotations seems very simplified? Sub loses some of its passive survivability when recoup is out of the rotation. Revealing strikes is something you refresh when it runs out rather than knowing when to time it. Assassination gets a bit easier in that they can't accidentally "execute backstab" at 35.5%.

3) The last tier in our talent tree makes me a bit sad. 0 CD on redirect would be really nice to have and makes you able to macro redirect into your main attack skill and basically makes your CP global. On the other hand, anticipation makes for some cool things such as saving an eviscerate for trinket procs or if two of your timers you need to keep up are running out within 1 sec of each others you can refresh them one global apart rather than a full 5 cp cycle apart.

It seemed to me like DP would be the raid poison of choice, and IP the PvP poison. The new IP is essentially how WP is now, minus the healing debuff. And with WP being moved to a utility poison, and DP not having as much uptime in a PvP scenario, DP makes sense as the PvE damaging poison.

Redirect is on the gcd, so you couldn't macro it into an ability like that anyways, you'd still have to manually hit a separate button for it.


To the comparison between Elusiveness and Leeching Poison, I think the real distinction is that Leeching Poison represents consistent continuous survivability, while Elusiveness represents "burst" survivability, so they really have different jobs. On a fight like Ultraxion where raid damage is coming almost continuously then leeching poison is an obvious choice. But on a fight with a mechanic like Nefarion's electrocute or Morchok's stomps where the raid damage comes in big predictable chunks then Elusiveness may be more useful, even if it works out to less overall healing prevention it may be better for the sake of reducing the size of damage spikes.

I do agree that Anticipation could use some better competition. Unless we see a lot of fights with the number of target swaps of Madness it would be hard to justify taking Versatility (and if we ever see an encounter where it's worth it for a pve rogue to take shuriken then it's probably not worth it to take a rogue in the first place). I think to get to the level of Anticipation, Versatility would need to turn Redirect into a passive (ie combo points and insight stack on the rogue and transfer to new targets just by targetting them), which would certainly make a lot of rogues happy. But chances are Anticipation would still end up being more optimal just because of all the little optimizations that it lets us do.

I would assume that they're removing energy-reducing glyphs in addition to talents. They've aired the idea of removing Prime Glyphs entirely numerous times already.

Also Subtlety seem to be loosing increased ambush damage from Shadowstep, leaving the spec even further simplified.

I see this more as a way to contribute to the stack at the start of the fight, but not necessarily for maintaining it. The "Weakened Armor" debuff appears to be standardized across each class which makes me think status effects are being combined into a single application regardless of source. Devastate has a 4.5 second CD now which likely makes Prot Warriors the worst choice for building, but they should easily be able to maintain it once it is fully stacked.

Regarding 10% Melee/Ranged Haste, I see this as both good and bad. To be clear I think it is great and definitely an improvement for us however, we appear to almost exclusively be the providers of it. I am only seeing it on Rogues and Survival Hunters. DKs no longer have IIT, Shamans are without Windfury. My concern being, if at any point in the next expansion, Survival become subpar then Rogues have a unique, mandatory buff. Which runs counter to Blizz's goal of "bring the player, not the class".

I also notice this is now our only (de)buff:
8% magic damage only on Curse of Elements (possibly an error as it is now unique to Warlocks)
4% physical vulnerability brought by Warriors, DKs, and Rets
5% crit is almost entirely gone (another possible error - Leader of the Pack references it but nothing else does)

And, of course, everything is still very much WIP with Monk abilities not even announced yet.

Edit: Blue post here Buffs... Where are they? - Forums - World of Warcraft related to buffs/debuffs and a possible DevBlog about it in the, hopefully near, future.

Shroud of Concealment - Extend a cloak that wraps party and raid members within 20 yards in shadows, concealing them from sight. (5 min cooldown)

Might be a bit interesting depending on how long it lasts. Can drastically reduce time needed in raids, also depending on layout, since you have an option of skipping extreme amounts of trash. In the layout of DS it's not that much, but in a MC/BWL/AQ/NAXX/KARA/Grul/TK/SSC/BT etc etc etc.. you can gain like 30min or more in trash clearing time.

I see shadow walk as being similar to prevanishing in BC to get the improved stealth so that you would not get detected by perception/felhunter stealth detection while you're trying to get a sap.

i.e. probably an entirely PvP ability. The only mobs in PvE that are remotely difficult to stealth past are mobs that detect stealth anyway.

My hope is that they add a speed boost to it as well. I'd love to not have to blow sprint to get an opener off.

I'm curious to see how KSp and anticipation will interact. Will the free combo points from KSp be able to convert into anticipation points? This could give some truly impressive possibilities in terms of burst.

From Shiv Changes - Forums - World of Warcraft

The new Shiv will apply concentrated effects of the active utility poison. Those effects are not included in the poison tooltips currently available on the calculator, but here are the current versions:

Crippling Poison – Reduces the target’s speed by 70% for 12 seconds.
Mind-Numbing Poison – Increases the casting time of an enemy's next spellcast within 8 seconds by 100%.
Wound Poison – Reduces the target’s healing received by 50% for 6 seconds.
Leeching Poison – Instantly restores 5% of the Rogue’s health.
Paralytic Poison – Roots the target in place for 4 seconds.

My guess is that Shroud of Concealment is like a raid-wide Vanish, which would allow your group to reset a boss without requiring everyone to wipe. If it works like this, it could be a very cool utility ability that no other class has a parallel to, and it makes sense thematically.