I highly doubt that. I got a feeling Vanish doesn't cause negative threat, it just drops you from combat/the threat list until the boss combat-pulses again. Can't be sure though.

I may have missed it, but the new talents didnt make it in the friday patch, at least i dont see the consolidated dagger/fist spec in my talent screen at the moment. So no testing on mechanics of TotT yet.

Its a pretty unfinished build for sure. We cant make poisons anymore, but we cant buy them either. Dismantle is still 75, several other things.

I'm still very curious about Relentless Strikes. Isn't Relentless Strike the biggest DPS increase per point in the rogues talent trees ? Nature's Grasp is the only one point talent in tier 1 in any talent tree as far as I remember.

It's still very important, yes. But they haven't said what they're doing with it - they might just be moving it down to tier 1 or 2, but my hope is they're just going to make it trainable. We'll have to wait and see.

And just got removed in the last patch. It's trainable now.

I always saw Nature's Grasp and Improved Nature's Grasp as a combined 5-point talent, since iNG was also the only 4-point talent ever (except for back in the day with improved Curse of Exhaustion, which was the same deal basically). I don't see any precedent for making Relentless Strikes a 1-point tier 1/2 talent. Although, they could easily make it a 5-point talent: 4/8/12/16/20% chance per combo point, or 5/10/15/20/25 energy return, or minor redesign to 1/2/3/4/5 energy per combo point.

There is lot of options for blizzard for relentless, for example

1) Trainable, this is probably the best as all spec would be free to spec into most trees.

2) Remove the energy cost of finishing moves. Or reduce it by 25 in all finishing moves, this might be a little OP or too good, as doesnt depend on combo points.

3) Move it tier1 or tier2, this idk, no class i seen has 1 point talent in the first tiers.

4) Include it in another talent,
- On Ruthulness (33% chance per talent point to return 25e 20% chance per combo point)
- On Malice (20% chance per talent point to return 25e 20% chance per combo point)

I'd like to interrupt this thrilling discussion of the WotLK changes to touch on the subject of Expose Armor real quick. Going forward, we are going to assume that you (the rogue) has 2/2 Improved Expose Armor.

Now the EJ rogue think tank states, "if your tank is not a warrior, then it is a net raid DPS gain for one rogue to switch to a cycle incorporating Improved Expose Armor rather than having a DPS warrior apply Sunder Armor."

I'm assuming the following (please correct me if I am wrong)
1) Switching from Rupture to EA will result in a small DPS decrease from the rogue using the EA cycle.
2) The above statement in the think tank is referring to 25-man raid situations where even though the rogue will lose a small amount of personal DPS, the net raid DPS will increase significantly due to the large number of physical DPSers present in the raid.

Now, here are my two thoughts/questions:
1) What about in a 10 man raid situation where you may have...let's say 3 physical DPSers and 2 tanks. Is using EA over Rupture justified in this situation? Or should we stick to rupture since less people will be benefiting from the armor penetration?
2) Let's say your main tank is a paladin and you typically run with a warrior off tank. Now, let's assume we have a boss fight where only 1 tank is required and thus any off tanks you have in your raid will have to DPS up. Since your OT is going to be doing sub par DPS as it is, is it therefore prudent to have the DPSing OT keep a 5 stack of sunders up rather than have the rogue use an EA cycle? That way all physical DPSers get the benefit of Armor Pen (albeit a little less), yet the rogue does not sacrifice any DPS by continuing to use Rupture. Or is this not even feasible due to the warrior receiving less rage?

On the topic of EA:

1) Note that in WotLK, EA is being changed; Imp EA increases duration, rather than armor reduction, and the base reduction for EA has been upped to be identical to that of Sunder. Which, honestly, makes it less than wholly useful, since I'm willing to bet that a DPS Warrior dropping one sunder every 20 seconds to refresh the stack is a smaller DPS loss than a rogue keeping EA up.

2) At the moment, keeping EA up costs about 100 DPS - a bit less if you don't have a Feral on hand for Mangle. So the question is: how much damage does each person gain from switching from Sunder to EA? Well, you gain an extra 475 ArPen for everyone in the raid, which depending on your itemization level and the boss armor value, works out to somewhere between 150 and 200 EP for a rogue, which, in turn, depending on gear level, etc. works out to somewhere between 60 and 100 DPS. So even using the low end of that, if you have 2 rogues in the raid, EA is worth it. Assuming other classes get DPS benefits that are in any way comparable (which I'm pretty sure they do), it is thus likely worthwhile even with only 2 physical DPS classes, and almost certainly worthwhile with 3. So in a typical 10-man scenario, EA is going to be higher raid DPS than Sunders.

Note, however, that EA is reliant on having a reasonably sustained fight. If you have frequent interruptions that prevent you from just nuking the boss, or are switching targets frequently, Sunders may be better, as they can be stacked up more quickly. Alternately, you can have a warrior stack up sunders for the first 20 seconds or so until the rogue can get EA running - though again, if you're only attacking a target for a minute at a time, even that may not be worth it.

Currently on beta there is a possiblity to bump EA duration to 1min (glyph + impea) so the dps loss by a rogue is less. Though you also have to consider other talent points and glyph choices.
But if the 80lvl instances is any indication to the boss encounters coming in raids, keeping EA will be a nightmare to be honest and not really worth it.

The thing I really dislike with this change is that EA is now exactly the same as SA. The minmaxer in me always liked that our armor reduction is just a little bit 'better' than the warriors one.

About parity between (de)buffs. While I can somewhat agree here, you also have to look at some glyphs given to buffing classes, for example Glyph of BoM or any shaman totem Glyph. Totem of Wrath is also giving 160SP while Focus Magic is 150. And felhunter's buff (forgot its name) is quite inferior at this moment to both AI and DS. I think I can find other instances of small differences between buffs in a group.
So it's not really that 'set in stone' at this moment that every (de)buff in a group will be exactly the same.

Concerning the uptime and warriors. I'm not really arguing about prot warriors here (I'm not really arguing at all).
But your numbers on fury warriors are a little bit off. Every fury warrior gets impHS, so that's already 3 rage advantage on HS over SA. Next, the damage. Currently a warrior with 3k AP (it's not that high) and Muramasa (as thats what I have, numbers with a glaive will be obviously higher) will be getting 987-1156 noncrit heroics. With crit factored in it'll be even higher. You also have to consider that in wrath warriors will be running with 2 handers, so heroics will be much higher damage than they are now. So all in all I think that on a 'static' fight without prot warrior tanking it'll be better to let the rogue debuff EA.

Edited in to not spawn posts:
I've seen some arguing somewhere about how Opportunity and Puncturing Wounds affect 'new' Mutilate.
I've tested it on a dummie in stormwind (the ones in SI:7) using 2 Poniards (7-15 damage range), 2186AP and 41/25/5 build. I made around 10 crit mutialtes from behind and 10 from the front and the difference between them was around 10 damage max. So Opportunity affects mutilate no matter what your position is. I haven't tested PW yet. But considering that a talent that uses words 'from behind' works no matter what the facing is I'm quite sure that PW also works from the front. I guess 'from behind' is jaust a flavor 'rp' text since none of the abilities it affects could not be really used from the front before.

Right, a Heroic Strike hits for over 1000 damage easily - but that's not the question. The question is how much damage you're gaining from converting a regular hit to a Heroic Strike. You'd be getting the white hit and thus both some damage and some rage were you not Heroic Striking; and I'd be quite happy to wager that the damage-per-rage efficiency of Heroic Strike is well under the 60 damage per rage it would need to be to warrant having a rogue cover EA.

Also note that that's an EA-optimized rogue compared to any old Fury Warrior; you lose some DPS by speccing Imp EA and taking the Glyph, while the warrior needs to make no such trade-offs.

Isn't heroic strike just static 176 extra damage + glancing factor + 20% crit damage modifier, for 12 rage (if improved)? That shouldn't pass 200-300 extra damage in average.

Sorry if I totally miss something.

On a one-handed weapon, it also removes the 19% hit penalty. On a realistically-geared DWing warrior that will be less than a 19% improvement, but more than 0. It also has the "hidden" rage cost of not generating rage on that swing.

Wouldn't it be awesome if Exposed Armor was a stack-based debuff like Sunder? If EA gave one sunder per combo point and you could refresh the duration with a 1-point EA, that would put the opportunity costs much more in parity. If the stacks counted for Devestate, there's also some sneaky snap-agro stuff a subtlety rogue could for a warrior by giving him a 5-stack on the pull.
It's an open question how much of an opportunity costs there is supposed to be for different classes supporting different buffs. I think the tradeoff for EA is probably the highest I've seen, but it's sort of comparable to how a warlock, when proving the spellpower or AC debuffs, does so at the cost of personal DPS by the loss of his damaging curse. I'm not going to say the EA cost is unreasonable, because that's a design decision, but it is currently incomparable to anything else, except perhaps Focus Magic, and the DPS costs of a few hybrid max-utility specs (retadins with BoS, blood/frost DKs).

Yeah, I totally forgot that Heroic is an on next swing ability :/
I guess all my expectations of debuffing expose are ruined then (yeah, I actually was looking forward to it for some reason).
Or we'll just have to wait and see how the 'new' fury warriors with 2handers will function (rage and damage wise).

About the glyph, by the way. There is not much else a mutilate rogue can slot at this time actually. 1 slot goes to SnD. And I'm already not sure what to put in the next one. While Rupture may be a good choice it's not really that usefull judging by my expirience with mutilate in the last 3 weeks I've been running ZA. Sometimes I even would've liked that my Ruptures were shorter then they are. For example, landing a rupture under double mongoose/SoC proc, then doing 'quick' SnD 'cycle' (ruthlessness proc + crit muti) and finding myself unable to use Rupture because 'a more powerfull debuff is already in effect'; witch sometimes messes with a cycle in a bad way for me. And from all the current dps Glyphs this leaves us (for a muti build) with a Garrote one. That we use at most 2 times in a typical boss fight.
So at this moment a mutilate build is strugling to fill more than 1 Glyph slot for raid dps. And we have 2 more. But things may change and we may actually get a Mutilate Glyph or some poisons/Envenom Glyphs.

@Valen: Current wrath rank 10 Heroic is 234 extra and functions just like an ordinary yellow attack (no glancings, 9% miss rate and 20% crit damage from Impale).

I suspect it'll be used more for ramp up and emergencies than as part of regular cycles. A 1cp SnD followed by the largest Envenom you can do before the SnD drops is probably the fastest SnD ramp-up available; similarly, if you get energy-starved, popping a sub-5 point finisher to keep it up seems useful. But unless I quite miss my guess, we're going to be doing mostly 5-pt finishers for the regular cycles.

The beauty of this new Cut to the chase, aside from the extra dps from a finisher every 25-30sec (That should be around ~100dps at 70?), is that it also replaces improved snd and saves 3 talent points there, making it perhaps one of the best talents, point for point, even at this stage.

No it doesn't. 21 seconds is enough to Eviscerate/Envenom, but it's not enough to perform two finishers, so you'd be forced to spam Eviscerate/Envenom repeatedly. If Eviscerate/Envenom become strictly superior to Rupture, then this is fine, but I anticipate Rupture still being worth weaving between Eviscerates/Envenoms.

You don't have to do 5 point finishers. Also the combo point generation of mutilate has gone up by quite a bit, due to higher crit from dagger spec and extra energy.

On top of it, it's not easy to get the rupture talent with 51 points spent, without missing some other good talents, and with the new envenom (25% higher chance of 2 weapons doing instant poison for 6 sec, along with deadly), combined with 11% higher crit rate of finishers compared to now, I wouldn't be surprised if it passes rupture by quite a bit.

There is also a glyph that increases SND up time by 3 sec.

Regardless, I think it's pretty obvious that the goal of cut of the chase is to replace improved snd and it will. Question is under which circumstances and cycles. I don't see anyone missing out on 3% extra hit or crit on tier 2/3 of combat, just to do 5 point rupture finishers. (even if its needed).

Well, I think it's true that CttC will reduce the importance of Imp SnD, but I don't think it's going to be a straight replacement. There will still be circumstances where the extra SnD uptime is valuable. How valuable? Well, that's kind of hard to say, of course; we'll have to see what you'd do with the talent points if you didn't put them in Imp SnD. But I think it's too early to say that CttC saves you the points in Imp SnD - it might, it might not.

If it turns out that it does allow you to skip Imp SnD and do something better instead, that does make the talent a bit more competitive; but it stil seems a bit underwhelming for something so late in the tree. I'd like to see it made 3 points and moved to where Focused Attacks is now, with Focused Attacks moving up to CttC's current spot and gaining 2 more ranks.

The problem with deep assassination at the moment, in my opinion, is the number of good talents. What i really would like to see is find weakness reduced to 3 points so you can get more talents in deep assassination without sacrificing combat or whatever they come up with at first tier of subtlety. Right now, It's hard to decide between find weakness, turn the table and 20% extra poison damage.

Also master poisoner is fairly useless now that hit works for spells. I think Infectious Poisons should be moved there and combined with that talent.

Seal fate is another candidate of 3 points talent. It's weaker than druid one at the moment by far. Blood Spatter doesn't seem to quite fit there at all either. I don't see a point of suddenly having a rupture talent in assassination.

Generally, the offensive talents could be combined and then replaced with some defensive ones for pvp builds.