As of right now, it's not effective to use double deadly and envenom unless it's on trash - even less so if you have a enhancement shaman. For the future, I can't see anyone effectively using envenom in their build (pending exact damage numbers) unless they have the improved poison talents, as instant/deadly poison will raise to a 45% application rate and will stack incredibly fast. Other builds will most likely use a different finisher, say eviscerate.

I'm seeing most people settling on something like a 41/21/5 +4 build, with points in focussed attack, dagger spec, more poison talents and such. The problem with getting all the poison talents that synergise so well is the loss of things like blade flurry that are great dps additions.

First of all, I haven't had to the time to read this thread in its entirety so you'll have to excuse my probable ignorance to any topics previously discussed that I may overlap with. In terms of wrath discussion, if you haven't taken the time to take a peek at Vulajin's analysis of the new talents and abilities I would suggest you do so at the following link, some really great discussion material that could fuel some great topics here:

[Feedback] PVE/DPS - Patch 8634 (07/17/08)

So far I too have decided on settling for a 41/21/5+4 style build, but I'm struggling with the location of the last 4 points, which most likely will be going into assassination because of the great talents in tiers 7 and 8 of the tree. My spec thus far appears to be something like this:

45/21/5

I am inexperienced in terms of mutilate raiding, but I'm tempted to place the 3 points currently in find weakness into infectious poisons x2 for the synergistic effects of the lower tier poison talents and 1 point into blood splatter. I just don't know exactly how much the benefit of a 6% buff to abilities would weigh in compared to 20% increased poison damage (which will apparently be a much greater portion of our damage in wrath) and 10% increase to rupture which obviously will work well with mangle and trauma.

I felt that 3/3 turn the tables was a superior choice to maximizing find weakness because of its probable 100% uptime in a raid setting even though it does not appear to affect finishing moves, however as I previously stated my lack of experience with mutilate creates a problem with my judgment of find weakness uptime and the percentage of total abilities that generally receive its benefit (I would imagine one could simply exercise patience and use finishing moves only near full energy followed up with ability spam to maximize the benefit from the 10 second buff, but that's another strategy discussion).

My question really comes down to the exact worth of find weakness when compared to infectious poisons and blood splatter... my gut instinct is that find weakness is superior, but perhaps a more experienced mutilator/theorycrafter could provide some clarification and elaborate on the topic?

Unless I'm mistaken, mutilate needs the mob to be poisoned. But nowhere does it state that YOU have to poison it. (forgive me, I havn't played mut in ages) But if this is the case, if another rogue has their poisons on, your mutilate shouldn't suffer, right? So unless both rogues envenom at the exact same time, it should be viable as far as the "not effecting the mutilate ability" aspect goes.

The impression I got was that in TBC, envenom dropping the stack of deadly lowered dps because of the time it takes to ramp back up to full. With WotLK if you can fit 5/5 improved poisons, it might change.

Envenom's viability isn't tied to any one particular mechanic - it's how much damage it does that matters. If it hit for 10k damage right now, no one would be arguing that it isn't useful and generally effective.

Further, as mako points out, bosses in raid situations are basically always poisoned by *someone*, so this mechanical change would make very little difference to actual damage done, I suspect. So while it might help for PvP or solo situations to have something like that, in PvE it's going to come down to the exact damage numbers more than anything else.

Okay, first off? Would people please stop posting random speculative builds? Let me give you the global answer right now to all manner of "how good is build X going to be in WotLK" questions: we have no idea. Without knowing the gear, character stats, conversions, buffs, etc. in a *lot* more detail than we currently do, we have no reasonable way of assessing them. Consider this your warning at that point - I'm not going to exhibit much patience with these from now on. If you have quantifiable analysis of the build, that's one thing; but if you're just floating a random idea, you're probably going to get an infraction.

Secondly, with regards to 19/0/52 in particular: well, the deep sub talents are pretty nifty, but you give up a lot of powerful stuff in combination and/or assassination to get it. Is that tradeoff worth it? I don't know, why don't we wait until we know the gear, buffs, etc. in more detail so we can do some estimates?

As much non WotLK junk (3 pages of talking about BC weapons about 2 weeks ago, ect) there has been in this thread and you are yelling at people for discussing WotLK stuff? Granted we dont know exact numbers yet, but that shouldn't stop us from discussion and speculation in preparation for when those items get released.

The second half of your post is what I am looking for, at this time, with this thread. You gave your opinion and thoughts on what we know and a little speculation.

I am kind of bummed lately about what we are seeing for rogues and I think it is reflected here. I have been coming to Elitist Jerks forums for about 3 years now and have always liked that the rogue threads were the longest and most in depth. Lately though, especially with the WotLK threads, many other classes are getting more discussion than rogues are. Granted, we dont know everything we are getting, but we shouldn't let that silence us. Speculation is good because it gets us into a mindset for when the actual data comes out.

Maybe it's because our trees haven't really got anything overly interesting and some of the talents are pretty lackluster right now and we don't get any new PvE ability from 70->80?

There really isn't much to discuss, with what we currently have.

Just an interesting tidbit from beta that I'd think you'll all be interested to know: as of build 8681 (the new one today), energy regenerates once depleted in ticks of 1 energy at a rate of 10 ticks per second.

Well that just made kicking easy, also added some minor dynamic to focused attacks.

Fokus Magic (Focus Magic - New Mage Arcane Tier 3 talent - increases magic damage taken by the target by 150, lasts 1 min or 50 charges. 1000 Mana the new Arkan 11er Talent) looks like a buff to poison damage. We don't know the new ranks but this also scales really well and instant poison looks like the ability gaining the biggest percentage increase by Fokus Magic. I imagine this to give rogues 150 or more additional DPS as it scales with haste and hit and expertise and crit rating.

It sounds like a good change overall, but it'll be harder to store energy for Find Weakness purposes, or after a stun/gouge. Still nothing on the new poisons?