Is it just me or is Unfair Advantage drastically overpowered for farming? You will be able to clear low level instances in record time with a passive retaliate. FoK to gain aggro, then just stand there and let them kill themselves on you.

Does anyone know if there is an internal timer on this?

Blizzard is fine with that at a macro level. Blue has said they want people to have more flexibility to raid with their "friends" or the best players available and not be forced to have say 2 warlocks in raid because you are crippled without the 2 curses.

Yeah they said that. It's just that it takes so much out of the game. Why have classess at all then really. Could just only have 4 groups nowadays: melee, tank, healer, utility. Everyone brings everything, just the name of abilities change.

Ofcourse at this point it's all still just "The sky is falling" crap, but at the moment it sadly seems that Blizzard is heading to that direction.

The density of filler isn't any higher in the new tree than it is in the current one. Right now, we have to take 3 points of straight filler just to get to T2, and 2 more to get to T4, hence 5 points to get up to BF. This is still true in the proposed expansion tree - it's just that the 5 points are currently 11 to 15 or 16 to 20. And if they, as they've suggested, replace Lightning Reflexes with something decent, there's suddenly no filler at all up till about the 30 point level. Which is not to say that there aren't still concerns, of course, but we're not exactly drowning in filler.

For that matter, it's not at all clear to me that having a little filler in each tree is in any way bad. I don't mind taking Improved Sprint, Fleet Footed, and the like at all. My objection is not so much the quantity of filler, but the quality and distribution of it. Right now there's very little filler in Assassination, a moderate amount in combat, and tons of it in Subtlety. It's also sort of clumped annoyingly - when there's a solid block of 5+ points of filler than you need to fill in, it creates a strong incentive to stop there and go to another tree.

The other problem is quality of filler. I think the ideal filler is stuff that, while it doesn't directly add to DPS, is nevertheless circumstantially useful. Does Imp Sprint directly increase my raid DPS? No. But is it a rather useful talent to have for PvE anyway? Yes. Thus, the points aren't really wasted - they're just utility points rather than DPS points. The problem is there that there's an awful lot of points that are basically strictly useless for PvE:

Remorseless Attacks
Improved Eviscerate (probably; it seems likely that either Rupture or Envenom will wind up as top DPS finisher)
Improved Expose Armor (the benefit is pretty minimal, and I suspect we won't be keeping EA up much anyway)
Improved Kidney Shot
Imp Gouge (nice for PvP, but as we're talking PvE here)
Deflection
Riposte
Unfair Advantage (great for farming, useless - in fact, actively bad - in raids)
Master of Disguise
Camouflage
Setup
Initiative
Master of Subtlety
Waylay

And there's a whole bunch more where the utility is marginal at best.

Hence, what I'd like to see is: every tree has around 5 points of filler to get to 51, which are spread throughout the tree, and for which you have options that increase your utility in raid settings if not your DPS directly. This is basically the current situation in Combat - there are 6 points to 41, the first 3 of which don't have a lot of good options, but the later 3 of which can be used to tailor your build to your personal preferences.

my suggestion was to make ruthlessness the tier 1 sub talent, move relentless up to ruthlessness's spot and make it a 3 point talent, leave murder where it was and get less bloat out of bottom end assassination. That would make it fairly accessible aswell.

Going back to this for a second, we also have to remember that these talent trees will go live in the 3.0 patch, and thus we'll have to live with them for a while with only 61 talent points. With that in mind, the current dominant spec (Combat Swords) seems to get a hefty nerfing due to the new RS location and cost.

It's interesting that now we're having to more actively weigh the value of talents. Do I want Serrated Blades badly enough to waste 5 talent points to get it? How valuable is Ruthlessness to me? Do I want to invest the points in Blood Poisoning, knowing that Arms warriors will probably go away? And if I want Lethality, am I really going to have to drop 2 points into Imp Evis? Eww.

This I agree with wholeheartedly, and I believe part of my concern (that I've localized) is in Tier3 Combat. It's awesome that the devs thought to broaden dagger specs (like Mutilate) by putting CQC there, but doing so dramatically limits the talents available to get to the next tier. Previously, people could drop points into Imp Sprint, and all was within acceptable limits. Now, however, non-dagger/fist users are somewhat boned on what to pick from. "Do I really want more parry, or Imp Gouge? I guess Endurance is OK, but..." and that sort of reasoning is awful to have to go through. As you said, it really makes me want to consider switching to another tree :P I'm really, really hoping the revamped LR fixes this hole, and makes it so T3 just isn't even important for non-dagger builds.

It's just my opinnion. I enjoy playing my rogue and I probably will enjoy playing my rogue in Wotlk too. It does, however, affect one when you've been playing your class the certain way and had a certain role in raids since MC to Sunwell, and then it gets changed in the next expansion without a good reason (in my opinion). Maybe Im just dont react to change well.

Enough ranting from me about this subject to. We'll see how things go and change.

Your role is first and for most the same it's always been: massive DPS. I don't see how not being guaranteed the top spot over other equally skilled players changes that. If anything, I think more competition over the top DPS spot makes the game *more* interesting, as being at the top of the meters would mean more than that you chose the "right" class.

The new Imp Evis combined with PotW can produce some very impressive eviscerates. I was hitting 9.3k unbuffed eviscerate crits on the training dummies in Dalaran.

Assuming 3400 AP, 30% crit and 20% armor reduction by a mob, Evis with Imp Evis, Aggression, and PotW is 124 DPE and Rupture (without Serrated Blades) is 110 DPE, unless my math is off. Serrated Blades makes Rupture better again at 143 DPE, but it's pretty impressive that Eviscerate is pulling those sorts of numbers.

Spreadsheet here: http://wow.tachyonsix.com/evis.xlsx

But who knows, since they've hinted that they may let DOTs crit, maybe our Ruptures will benefit from PotW making it the unmitigated king again.

Hm, thinking more about comments on filler....what do you think of moving either Fleet Footed or Quick Recovery to Tier 2 Assassination, would that make them too accessible to other builds? It would solve Mut's lack of good options to get from 13 to 15 points without moving a more DPS oriented talent shallower in the tree, and it moves whichever of those two talents in placed in tier 2 away from conflict with pure DPS talents.

There are actually several things you loose by bring 4 fury over an even mix. According to the law of large numbers you loose DPS because the best rogue you run into is, assuming DPS is balanced so every class is compedative, at least as good as the 4th best fury warrior you find. The law of large numbers also says that with random loot being random it will take longer to equip 4 raiders of the same class and spec than it will to equip 4 raiders of different class/spec combinations assuming there are significant differences in their gearing preferences, which is a safe assumption when comparing warriors to rogues.