New WOTLK skill ranks. They are just as underwhelming as the new talents.

* Sinister Strike: rank 11: 150 additional damage.
* Sinister Strike: rank 12: 180 additional damage.
* Backstab rank 11: 150% weapon damage plus 255.
* Hemorrhage rank 5: 110% weapon, increases physical damage dealt on target by 75.
* Mutilate rank 5: 153 additional damage.
* Mutilate rank 6: 181 additional damage.
* Eviscerate rank 11: 1 point 405 to 613 damage, 2 points 706 to 914 damage, 3 points 1007 to 1215 damage, 4 points 1308 to 1516 damage, 5 points 1609 to 1817 damage
* Eviscerate rank 12: 1 point 497 to 751 damage, 2 points 867 to 1121 damage, 3 points 1237 to 1491 damage, 4 points 1607 to 1861 damage, 5 points 1977 to 2231 damage
* Expose Armor rank 7: 560 armor per combo point.
* Rupture rank 8: 1 point 324 damage over 8 secs, 2 points 460 damage over 10 secs, 3 points 618 damage over 12 secs, 4 points 798 damage over 14 secs, 5 points 1000 damage over 16 secs.
* Deadly Throw rank 2: 1 point 223 to 245 damage, 2 points 365 to 387 damage, 3 points 507 to 529 damage, 4 points 649 to 671 damage, 5 points 791 to 813 damage.
* Deadly Throw rank 3: 1 point 350 to 386 damage, 2 points 574 to 610 damage, 3 points 798 to 834 damage, 4 points 1022 to 1058 damage, 5 points 1246 to 1282 damage.
* Garrote rank 9: 1092 damage over 18 sec.
* Garrote rank 10: 1290 damage over 18 sec.
* Ambush rank 8: 275% weapon damage plus 335.

You're ignoring Honor among Thieves which will generate some CP for you.

True, but that also implies you're losing DPS by being in a suboptimal group (healers? casters? yuck!)

The way i read that, its not going to matter what group you're in. Damage or healing spell or ability seems to imply things like bloodthirst and mortal strike as well, just not auto attack/shots.

Why would it imply a sub-optimal group?

Good call. I was halfway through typing the text of the talent out when I saw it read "ability," not just "spell".

The buffs to eviscerate are HUGE compared to what we have now... With the new assassination talents, I can see using rupture and eviserate in a cycle, using cold blood to pick up a crucial crit evis to keep SND up.

Hmmm, just found a screeny of the talents. No mentioning of Flashpowder, where other active talents always do include their requirements. But it's instant, no energy cost, 2 minute CD.
So that means 4 openers, plus, if talented smartly for MoS, a 10% damage buff for 16 seconds every 2 minutes, which means MoS has a 13.3% uptime, which translates into another 1.33% DPS increase. Not much, but what other DPS talents to pick? Add the two effects together, and it looks okayish.

"Honor among Thieves" is another talent that seems to cry for having a nicely full group, so these two definitely look like a sustained DPS buff to improve raidng viability (especially compared to the PvP enhancements Combat got)

"Waylay" is tricky for raiding: Paladins and Warriors won't like their boss slowing their attacks too much, since that also slows down their rage and/or blocks, which means maintaining agro would be slightly harder. (healers won't mind if the damage the tank takes becomes a little less spiky though). I also have a hunch that bosses won't be affected by this talent anyway, it looks kinda like a Paladin's Vindication.

Um, tanks love to have a attack speed reduction on the boss for any non-trivial fight. In fact, one complaint of non-Warrior tanks atm is that TClap can't easily be applied when there's not a Warrior tanking because it's not usable in Beserker Stance.

Some points on stormstrike and different classes

Stormstrike, 2/2 improved: +20% nature damage, 4 charges, 8s cooldown.

Elemental Shaman: Lightning Bolt hits for (~2k non-crit, 40%+ crit chance, 209% crit damage) ~3k including crits, 2s cast time (1.6s-1.8s with haste)
Enhancement Shaman: Earth Shock hits for ~1.2k every 10-12s (with WotLK hit/crit to spells: 25% crit for 1.8k), ~1.350 average hit (inc. crits)

Balance Druids: Use mostly arcane DD spells (and maybe 1 nature DoT), have 1 nature DD spell that can be used to trigger an ability with a 2m CD.

Hunter Wind Serpent pets: Lightning Breath hits for ~225 (BM, ~180 for Surv) every ~2s (average from some WWS).

Rogue Instant poison: Hits for 170 before talents (+5% Misery debuff, -5% unremovable partial resists), ~245 fully talented, 45% proc chance, makes it proc once every ~2s from a SnD'ed and hasted OH (if you use a <1.5s OH, likely with poisons and crit energy procs).


Scenarios

1 Elemental, 1 Enhance, 2 Rogues with WF MH (not going into the "WF vs. IP or vs. GoA+IP if twisting removed" debate, you can do that better than me).

Only DP OH => 4 SS charges get eaten by 0-1 ES and 3-4 Lightning Bolts. Assume it's a 1:3 split (worse than worst case).
Then we get 20%*(1.3k+3*3K) = 2.060 damage from the nature debuff.

Use IP in OH (and DP automatically from the talent) => 1 charge by ES, 1 by Lightning Bolt, 2 by poisons. We also get 8 poison hits from 2 rogues in 8s.
So, we get 20%*(1.3k+3k+2*245) = 958 damage from the debuff, and 8*245 = 1.960 damage from poisons.

So, your 2 rogues gain 858 damage over 8s (107 RDPS) from this change if you fully spec into poisons.
More than half of your "visible" poison damage is lost to bad use of SS charges.

How does this look in the dreaded "1-rogue-raid" scenario?
Stormstrike is being eaten 1 ES, 1.5 LBs, 1.5 IPs. => 20%*(1.3k+1.5*3k+1.5*245) = 1234 nature bonus, and 4*245 = 980 poison damage.
2214 total raid damage, just barely beating the SS debuff loss. It's 174 more damage over 8s, or 12 DPS, for using Instant Poison as sole rogue.


TLDR
For one rogue, running fully talented IP in the OH is a ~10 RDPS boost.
If 2 rogues run fully talented IP in their OHs, it's a 100 RDPS boost.

This disregards Moonkin druids, who don't use DD nature spells now, and will likely use a 1.5s cast DD nature spell a few times every 2 minutes once the WotLK patch hits (to proc a 2 minute cooldown talent).

It also disregards hunter pets. Wind Serpents are innately weak pets, it is just at extremely high gear levels (high crit) that they become better than their alternatives because they are in an "endless energy" situation, like daggers vs. swords on Vaelastrasz.

It also disregards that some ticks of your DP won't be affected by Stormstrike. The more IP procs you have, the less SS uptime you have, and your DP damage drops.
Edited that in now.

Edit: Improved caculations for fully talented IP are as follows.
1 Rogue No crits: +20 DPS. 20% crit: +33 DPS.
2 Rogues No crits: +99 DPS. 20% crit: +125 DPS.

Adding in the loss of Deadly Poison damage due to reduced Stormstrike uptime:
1 Rogue No crits: +14 DPS. 20% crit: +27 DPS.
2 Rogues No crits: +82 DPS. 20% crit: +107 DPS.


How much will poisons crit affect this?
For muti, currently crit (gems) are ~10% behind hit (gems) which again are 10% behind agi (gems). Even with those spec changes, I don't really see crit climb above agi to make it worth gemming.
That's for you to find out how it'll be.
If you won't gem crit, you'll get ~15% crit, for ~7% more poison damage. If you spam gem crit, find out how much more it is.



Wind Serpent analogy
For TBC mechanics and Lightning Serpent pets, the math has been done.

The conclusion was that with 1 hunter and 1 elemental shaman, sepents needed to be 100 DPS better than the next best pets to break even on SS debuff damage loss, which they generall were not.
But if you use 2 hunters, it usually a gain in raid DPS.

We currently face the same situation: With 1 rogue using fully talented IP, we just barely break even.
It takes 2 rogues to gain a noticable overall benefit, and we lose a large chunk of our SS charges.



Edit: I improved the calculations and made a little diagramme.

Diagramme

Y-Axis is damage over 8 seconds. X-Axis is the amount of Instant Poison procs over 8 seconds.
In the best case scenarios, 1 rogue = 4 procs, 2 rogues = 8 procs, 3 rogues = 12 procs.
Red line is for 245 damage IP, fully talented IP average hits.
Blue line is for 269.5 damage IP, that's fully talented IP average with 20% (spell) crit, a bit on the high side.

You see that 10% more damage from crits does make a noticablee difference.
This also swings the other way - when other classes improve their damage by 10% through scaling, the gain from IP drops noticably.

Improved calculation:
In 8 seconds, we have 0.8 Earth Shocks (10s CD), 5 Lightning Bolts (some haste, and the Lighning Overload talent, which is already included in the 3k average damage) and some amount of poison procs.
4 of them get a damage increase from Stormstrike.


Deadly Poison
Does 180 damage over 12s, 45 per stack and tick, 45*5*1.2*1.2 = 324 per tick talented.
Using this with 4 IP procs per rogue every 8s, we get the numbers edited in above.

That's pretty mediocre, considering that it costs you 7 talent points (5/5 Imp, 2/2 Brew) that are otherwise useless.
It also assumes 4 IP procs per 8 seconds, which requires a 1.3s OH, hit cap, expertise cap, SnD and ~10% haste.

If you drop down to 3 IP procs per 8 seconds (slower OH, not capped, etc.), the numbers drop down to:
1 Rogue No crits: +0.8 DPS. 20% crit: +11 DPS.
2 Rogues No crits: +40 DPS. 20% crit: +60 DPS.

Doesn't it seem like Blizzard are making the Combat tree designed perfectly for leveling? I can't see it being competitive for DPS with the end talents so...useless.

I don't think we can say that any class will or won't be replacing us until we have a chance to see the gear, buffs, enchants, inscriptions, and so forth that are available. We can make some rough assessments on the new talents, but until we start seeing level 80 gear and can start getting actual DPS numbers for all classes, we can't really comment on the overall pattern.

That said: I don't see a major danger to us from feral druids, given that their lack of benefit from WF makes them a less-than-obvious member of the melee group; additionally, their lack of an interrupt means they can never wholly supplant us. Fundamentally, feral druids are sort of the fury warriors of the expansion; back in Naxx days, a fury warrior was a primary DPSer who provided a useful group buff and could help tank for trash. Ferals are a bit more tanking and a little less DPSish, but the same philosophy applies. As such, while I do think there will be a place for one or two in most raids (depending on how the balance between the 4 tanking classes winds up), I think it's also true that they are unlikely to supplant rogues as primary melee DPSers - particularly given how far behind us they are at the moment. The top druid on WWSScoreboard is almost 500 DPS behind my personal best, and I don't even have Warglaives. So that, at least, we don't have to worry about.

Regarding the larger point: yes, I think the new rogue talents are a bit disappointing, and I'm hoping that they improve them before things go live; but I think our best chance for having that happen is intelligent analysis and well-reasoned argument about our shortcomings and how to fix them, rather than simply whining about it.

Ferals are tanks, simple.
They aren't rivals for a DPS slot simply because they fulfill a dual-role, and have to (depending on trash/boss incoming right now) tank or DPS. That's the whole strength of their spec, that they might be very 1-dimensional in both tanking and DPSing, but they can be both and switch freely.

And yes that makes them comparable to Fury Warriors "back then", however the use is different. Fury Warriors are DPSers who were "forced" to tank due ot the nature of the fights. They weren't specialized in tanking however. Ferals are, just as much (or little) as they are specialized into DPSing. And to be a good member of a raid, a Feral will always have to be both.

If cats out-DPS rogues either cats will be nerfed or rogues will be buffed. Give Blizzard some tiny sliver of awareness.

Whoa what's with all the complaints?

I for one am very happy with the new talents, the ideas behind them are great and unique, and imho THATS what counts. Leave the number tweaking to the beta, currently they're most likely just testing things.

Prey on the Weak 5/5 gives you +25 melee crit damage for target with less health% than you.
For a Brutallus fight with 40% crit chance and not counting 5/5 lethality, crits make ((2*40%)/(2*40%+1*60%)) = 57% of your damage, and this talent adds 25% of that, which is around 15% total.

So, if it works as a straight 1.25x multiplier to total crit damage (the new mage/warlock talents have been tested and work that way, although none of the old talents work that way), then it's far from useless.

I don't see how some of you are making out a supporting ability in the Subtlety tree at the moment: Waylay lasts only 8sec and is triggered by an Ambush ciritical strike, which you won't be having many of in a bossfight (where support matters). In case you're fast (and saving energy) you may be ably to play Vanish -> Ambush as an oh-shit-button to save the tank per 30% slowed boss attack speed, but that's it.

And it won't stack with thunderclap just to rub it in .

The assasination tree does look fun though. I'd rather it become the topdps spec as, baring some new ability which has synergy with combat, there is no change in how combat would play.
Atleast theres things to react to as deep assasination.

Shadowdance-ambush-ambush-ambush-ambush
Should manage to get a crit in there

From the look of it, Shadowdance is definitely not a PvP move: you enter stealth, not an improved version of stealth. So getting behind your opponent will be kinda hard when toe-to-toe, though it will be possible of course. It looks more like a method of stringing some openers into a bossfight once every 2 minutes AND getting some more use out of MoS.

Well if one doesn't like combat swords plus survivability filler talents then maybe a mace mainhand / sword offhand spec with Prey on the Weak could work out nicely. Combined with ROD and mace spec this would mean 1,03*1,05*1,25 = 135% white crits triggered by offhand sword attacks.

But anyways I imagine that survivability will be play a bigger role when choosing raid-dps specs. Blizzard tried it with TBC to make rogues desire more survivability with all the cleaves, whirlwinds etc. Perhabs the try something similar to this but in a smarter way. And if survivability becomes a bigger issue, then raid-specs would also be much more viable in PVP, which seems to be a general goal, when looking at the talent trees .

Perhabs this would work out better if survivability would be somehow connected to raid-dps, like Quick Recovery for example.

A nice summary. Every class is complaining that the rogue buffs are too much , they'll be unstoppable in PvP and PvE off the charts, I disagree, ofc the rogue forum thinks they are not enough I disagree also. It will be necessary to tune some of the talents up.

Blizzards aim for the 2 trees was:
Assassination: Be as good as Subtlety for PvP and to be as good as Combat for PvE....Combat will continue to scale well, assassination even with the buffs will require focus to match, but I don't think will be clearly second best choice. On par is what it seems like..but on par for level 80..not for levelling up.

Combat: Be as good as subtelty for PvP and continue to be good for PvE (least work required)

Subtelty: Be as good as either Assassination or Combat for PvE continue to be good at PvP

The thing with subtelty, not much we can do till we see it in action for PvE and see how those abilities play out. Shadow dance sounds lovely but I think it should last longer.

Also I think all are forgetting that we have 1 more rogue trainable ability to see, this might be one that heavily favours Subtelty mechanics, who knows, we shall see.

All in all, I think the rogue changes are one of hte most exciting, but then all the classes are: Just remember in attempting to dissect, don't underwhelm yourself, most things lose their sparkle once ufully understand even though they continue to be good.

I saw someone complaining about Feral druids able to out-dps rogues because of their changes, what a stupid thing to say, Feral dps in cat form is a good deal OFF rogue dps currently, still has issues with scaling according to the druid forums and still no solution to procs like WF etc. Their dps is largely burst which suits a person who's spent half the fight tanking, then transforms to cat to go dps, but their sustained has a very poor increase.

I would not be worried about feral druids, when you think about it, cat form needed to catch up a bit with Enh shaman, but, I estimate feral druid cat dps is about 15% behind rogue dps, if feral druid's get about 10% more dps increase from WotLK than rogues got, that still leaves them about 5% behind.

Having finally gotten a look at the new talents, I'd say that the best thing that's happened for Mutilate and Trispec dps is the addition of talent points to spend, rather than the new talents themselves.

Looking at the Assassination tree, Cut to the Chase seems really poor for an investment of 5 talent points. With a 30% critrate it can't be relied upon to refresh SnD, and because of that you won't even necessarily be using Evisc or Envenom in your regular cycle. I don't see any reason why 4-5s/4-5r isn't likely to still be the normal Mutilate cycle. Focused Attacks, assuming the 1 crit per second that Aldriana posted, means that you wouldn't even be generating enough energy for 1 extra Mutilate per minute. 5 extra mutilates in a 5-minute fight, really isn't going to add a lot to your 250,000+ damage already done.

Hunger For Blood looks far too costly to be worthwhile. 90 energy for 15% dps increase, then 3 energy per second for the rest of the fight. That's 3 lost Mutilates per minute, instantly negating any gain made from Cut to the Chase for a 15% dps boost on what's left. It's probably worth it to use it if you've taken it, but it seems to me that the other talents you could take (Blade Flurry and Opportuinity) seem to overwhelm the gain made fromtaking 51 points in the Assassination tree.

The same is true of trispec Hemo builds. You can now take Sword Spec, Weapon Expertise as well as Deadliness, Dirty Deeds and Prep, freeing up a couple of points for either Lethality or some additional utility (extra dodge, Improved Expose, whatever you choose) in a 13/28/30 build. Also, 11/39/21 Hemo/Combat Potency is within 3dps of that one, but has a shorter cycle time (3s/5r instead of 5s/5r) so could be able to keep up its dps more reliably on trash and interrupted fights. In addition it may scale better with Hit and Haste Rating.

The Combat tree seems to be the only one with new talents that make a big difference to your dps. Prey on the Weak and Murder Spree will likely form the foundation of Combat raiding builds. 25% extra crit damage for the majority of the fight and a zero-energy Mutilate flurry every 2 minutes seem rather powerful abilities. Of course, the possibility of going 30/41/0 Seal Fate/Surprise Attacks also exists, but based on the current DPS spreadsheet (so obviously it's not taking into account new ranks of skills) it only does 1 personal dps more than the new trispec Hemo. So for Combat it's looking like 20/51/0.

I've done some brief napkinmaths, adding values to the results I get from the existing sreadsheets, just too get a very rough idea of how the new talents might pan out. Murder Spree adds 5 Mutilate-style abilities every 2 minutes; that's 1/24th of an attack per second with both weapons, adding (assuming it's weapon speed normalised) adding AP/14*2.4 per hit. For my gear this worked out as about 60dps, which was almost 4% of my current dps.

Being conservative, assuming that you're at higher health than the boss for 50% of the fight, you would gain an somewhere in the order of 4-5% dps from Prey on the Week. That's a decent gain from 5 talent points, especially seeing that it's a scaling talent. Yes I know it's not as simple as average crit bonus * crit chance, but it gives a very rough idea of the power of the talent.

I did the same with the Hemo build and the results were that trispec Hemo came out just ahead on overall raid dps (1677 for trispec vs 1668 for Combat Swords). So at first glance, Combat v Hemo seems pretty much identical to the way things are at the moment. The possibility of Hemo scaling using 4/5 Combat Potency, could mean that the current problem of Combat outscaling Hemo might not be as much of a problem in Wrath.

I did the same with Mutilate, plugging in 71 points worth of talent points (41/25/5 but adding in the full poison talents to try to approximate the effect of Deadly Brew, but I understand that the result will still be underestimating dps) with my gear and Vengeful Gladiator's daggers, and its dps came out as 1554. Unless the new poison talents can make up over 100dps, or huge changes are made to the new deep Assassination talents, it seems to me that Muti will still lag behind SS and Hemo builds. Changing the amount of energy returned with Focused Attacks, or changing it to work from all attacks, not just crits might help, or basing it on damage done instead. But the most obvious change, to me, would be to make Cut to the Chase proc off every Eviscerate and Envenom. It would be great keeping SnD up without having to actually use it.

In short

Some nices changes, but no real change. Trispec Hemo gets scaling through access to Combat Potency, Combat Swords is still king of dps and Mutilate still needs a lot of work for it to catch up with the other 2.