On to the more recent discussion:

I hated the Suppression room because it took up so much time to get through. I could deal with maybe an area half of what the Suppression room was or even a tad smaller.

What they could do: Have a rogue pickable door (no keys) that allows the raid to bypass an area (Cutting out 15-30 minutes of trash fighting).

Have a boss that also has a sub-boss caster that does spell dmg and occassionally heals the boss. One rogue would be used to keep mind numb on the caster and another keeps wound poison up on the boss. In addition certain spells would be able to kickable/punchable as well but not all.

Have a boss that is vulnerable to blind poison. When they are blinded, their miss rate increases by 50% for the duration of blind. They wouldn't be CC'd nor would it go away when hit, but it just had a different effect for this one encounter.

Maybe make another sub-boss that was similar to the mana guardians in Karazhan. However in this case they would be immune to melee or spell dmg and the only way you could get them down was by removing their armor. Each sunder would remove x amount of armor. Expose armor would remove even more.

Your Agi -> crit numbers are wrong. It's 40 agi --> 1% crit at level 70, so you'd get just about 4.1% crit from the first 3 items, not 7.47%. Also, I assume by Feral Inspriation you mean Leader of the Pack, which as has been recently covered in this thread is not currently raid-wide in beta, so it's unclear at this time whether rogues will realistically have access to that 5% crit boost.

Sorry if i point out the obvious but ...
1. Shattered Halls
2. Illidari Council

Grr I had a brain fart. I was using crit rating conversion of 22.1 instead of 40. Bad Rupp.

Still puts me at 37.13% crit rating with just those.

Yeah meant LOTP not Feral Inspiration. Must get more coffee...

Wouldn't a talent to reduce glancing percentage be an effective way of increasing smaller group dps without adding an increase in pvp damage or am I taking crazy pills? I'm pretty sure that this has been mentioned before but now that we are seeing some rough talents is this something we should post in the suggestion forums?

With WOTLK coming, it would be a perfect time to just remove glancing blows. They already basically removed crushing, why not take it a step further to remove glancing?

Never understood their reasoning to have this in place anyway.

Glancing is the mechanism that stops you from killing level 50 mobs when you're level 40. Rather than making character power scale fast enough that mobs 5 levels above you are truly unkillable based on raw numbers, they overlaid an artificial disadvantage against mobs that are enough higher level than you that you shouldn't be killing them. The implications for raiding are sort of just a side effect.

That said, the problem with removing glancing blows as a fix for rogues is: it would have the largest effect in raiding, and not really help the 5-man group problem that much as most 5-man instances don't have many opponents that are +3 levels to you. And it wouldn't address the large-group PvP issue either.

Doing to glancing blows what was done to crushing (+4 vs. +3 levels) would be a massive buff to Rogue raid DPS, especially at the 10 man level, where we need it most. Whether it unbalances us in 25 man content is however a question that would need visiting.

I think, in the end, the solution for 5 mans is going to be a greater emphasis on our utility. Making traps and locks a regular occurence in dungeons and a nuisance that Rogues can easily do away with would shoot our 5 man viability through the roof, as well as making a great deal of sense from a lore standpoint, and it could be done without a suppression room style gimmicky "trap area."

For 10 and 25 mans, emphasizing Rogue utility does leave you with little choice other than gimmicks however, and raids that bring you along more begrudgingly than anything - raw damage is really the only good way to fix our problems there I think, whether personal DPS or some means of increasing raidwide dps.

As for large-group PvP, I think many of the new talents are doing quite a good job in helping us out there. I doubt we will have the same issues in PvP in 10 levels that we do now.

I think one thing that would help us out in 5-man content (and to some extent 10 man content) would be some Sap enhancements. We're gaining the ability to sap more different types of stuff in WotLK, but that's not really the problem - or at least, not the entire problem. The real issue is this:

When you sap something, it stays out of the fight for 45 seconds, and then adds. When you sleep, or sheep, or fear, or any other CC something, it stays out of the fight for 45 seconds... then gets CCed again. And again. And again. And you don't actually have to fight it until you're finished with everything else. So if you have 5 opponents and you sheep one, the number of opponents you have to fight at any given time during the encounter goes 4,3,2,1,1. But with a rogue, it goes 4,4,3,2,1 - you kill one, *maybe* two, and then have to fight everything at the same time thereafter. And it's pretty clear that the first of those combat profiles is easier to handle than the second.

So what's the solution? Well, there's a couple things that could be done.

1) The ability to sap more things at the same time. If you could sap two mobs at once, that would make the profile more like 3,4,3,2,1 - with the 4 period hopefully being pretty short - which makes things a little more managable.
2) The ability to refresh sap. Give us an ability with, say, a 30 second cooldown, that lets us extend the duration of an existing sap by 40 seconds. In PvP, this isn't too relevant - Saps usually break in less than 30 seconds anyway. But in PvE, it would let us chain-CC something like most of the other classes, which would significantly increase our viability.
3) Longer-duration sap. Sort of the same idea as 2), just simpler to implement. Make sap last 90 seconds instead of 40, so at least we get to do 4,3,3,2,1 or 4,3,2,2,1.
4) Some combination of 1 and 3. For instance, we can sap as many things as we want, but the duration is split amongst all actively sapped targets. That is, if you sap 1 thing, it stays sapped a really long time - if you sap 2, they break in half the time. You can sap 5 if you really want but they'll only stay out for a few seconds.

Also note that some of these could be made into talents, to add increased 5-man viability to some specs.

This, of course, primarily addresses 5-mans, but would have some level of impact on 10 and possibly even 25 man fights as well. The only concern is what this would do to Arena, which I'm less clear on, being primarily a PvE rogue, myself.

Although not as extensive as what you're suggesting....even being able to Sap mobs which are in combat would be a decent start as an improvement, as that would give you the option of vanish/sap every few pulls if additional CC time is needed. It would also eliminate "tank pulls just before the rogue get Sap off" issues that can happen occasionally (though I'm less concerned about that side of things, as that's mostly a matter of proper awareness and communication between rogue and tank).

The 'easy' version of Refreshable Sap in combat would of course be to have Blind refresh a currently active sap to it's full duration - though that might bring us back to the days of 7 points in Sub being mandatory for early 5-mans for the extra range talent.

I personally do not think that SAP changes are going to make rogues that much better. SAP definitely lags behind other CC's but in most cases it is good enough.

But while we are talking about bringing our CC's up to par. I do not see any reason for blind to have such a short duration anymore. A 30 second blind was too good in old wow where every CC lasted full duration in PVP. Now that everything is reduced to 10 seconds in PVP, is it still necessary? Blind is a much better CC mechanic for 5 mans than SAP is, if only it had a decent duration and a shorter cooldown.

The problem with a shorter cooldown on Blind is that it would overpower it in PvP. It's an absolutely undispellable CC with a fairly long duration and very few shared diminishing returns.

A longer duration on PvE targets would be entirely welcome however, and, now that PvP CC's are capped at 10 seconds, have little to no balance impact.

I think you are underselling sap. Yes, it can't be re-applied. Equally, it can't decide to wander off into a nearby group of mobs and agro them (sheep, fear) and it is not resistible (sheep, seduce, trap, fear). If it could be re-applied or had a huge duration, it would be need to get some other downside or become OP. I don't fancy going back to the days when sap could be resisted or break early. The fact it always does what it says on the tin, combined with a wide variety of valid targets, makes it very strong.

I do like the idea of a longer PvE duration for blind though.

Sap certainly has it's strengths, yes. On the other hand, you can't pull a mob back 50 yards to get it out of the way of a patrol and then sap it like you can with sheep or fear. And you can't sap if something detects stealth. While it's certainly true that there are circumstances where you can sap where you can't use the other tools, it's also true that there are circumstances where you can't sap but you can use the other tools.

I'm mostly judging from my experience with heroics in the early days of the expansion. My guild was going after them aggressively to get the various raid attunements, and there were certain instances - Shattered Halls comes to mind - that it was just hard to do as rogues. You needed a lot of CC, and that really just meant mages. In time we learned how to do it with hunter kiting and some other approaches that made it more managable, but we never got to the point where we could do it with only rogues for CC (or at least, not until we no longer cared about the instances in question). Fundamentally: in a lot of 5 mans, particularly heroics, when you're doing them in the early days without the benefits of raid gear, the ability to CC stuff is vitally important, and rogue CC just doesn't keep up with the CC of some other classes in practice. If rogues could fill that primary CC role as well as mages do, that would be a distinct boost to our 5-man viability.

Honor Among Thieves is buffed to 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point when anybody in your group crits a damage or healing spell or ability.

OMG! Did they also add a hidden cooldown to it or something? Since in a raid this could well result in roughly doubling CP generation, which in turn means doubling finisher damage, which is currently about 10% of our DPS, so that's 3 talent points for a 10% DPS increase?
Well, I'm just making quick estimates, the CP generation might be a bit higher even in a crit-happy group, and supposedly, finisher damage is going to be a bigger part of rogue damage as well. On the other hand, I'm neglecting the remaining energy cost of certain finishers after Relentless Strikes, so all that will probably roughly even out.

....It is in the Subtlety tree.

The estimates on Honor Among Thieves higher up on this page assume a 100% proc rate. It's a lot of combo points - it's still not a ton of damage. And the placement deep in subtlety is a problem.

As for the new metagems - well, we have a new TSD and a new RED. Depending on what the proc rate and such of TSD, it might be able to take over (as the new RED isn't a whole lot better than the existing one), but it's pretty clearly going to be one of those two.

There's also a 21 crit rating and 3% crit dmg meta. Given current stat weightings, thats obviously inferior to the 21 agi 3% crit dmg, but if those weights change, or if it has easier to accommodate socketing requirements, it may be worth keeping in mind

Just for completeness, curtesey of mmo-champion

Just out of curiosity, how are we scaling, or how do you guys think we will scale, in relation to warriors as far as the new abilities we are getting?

Titan's grip, with the dps range on the 2h'ed weapons just seems like it will be insane with just a 20% attack speed reduction (haste scaling will be huge with an even slower weapon).

Just not sure what you all thought about this looking at the talents we are going to be getting in comparison to the spread between 1h and 2h weapon damage ranges.