They explicitly said ages ago that the 10- and 25-man items would be part of the same set, like the different seasons of Gladiator gear. So you can fill out your 4 piece bonus with 2x 10-man pieces and 2x 25-man pieces, or any combination thereof.

There is a 3.0 speed mainhand sword in the game, but that doesn't mean that we should complain because epic swords aren't that slow. In the same way we shouldn't worry that raiding offhands are 1.6 speed, just because we've had faster weapons in the past. As long as our dps is balanced well against other classes, it doesn't matter how fast the weapons are that get us to that dps.

I sincerely hope that they will change their mind, if they do the above it will overvalue 10man and undervalue 25 man Tier set pieces.

Interchangeable setbonuses on T7 10 man and T7 25 man gear would result in people getting the early easier accessable 25 man pieces, then supplementing them with 10 man to get the setbonuses and move on to the next instance. (leaving out content in the process) The net loss of stats would be bearable as 5-7% less stats is not a bad tradeof,f compared to the effort that you need to invest for a full 25man decked in 25man T7 so you can raid T8.

You're afraid that people would skip half an instance only because of a 4-pc set bonus ?
A bit excessive, don't you think ?

For the Weapon speeds, the Arena OH is 1.5 speed, so I am guessing Blizzard will have 1.5-1.4 speed weapons for Rogues somewhere in there.

Not to bring PvP into it, but it just doesn't make any sense for poisons to stay as they are. You're talking about giving rogues a ton of damage from an unmitigated magic source. I'm not really sure that plays well with our being balanced as a physical DPS class.

I don't see any problem with it staying the same. Set bonuses are generally meant as 'free talents' which scale with your level and gear. However awesome they may be, they will be replaced by gear with stats that makes up for them though; I don't see shaman past Kara wearing 10 Storms and I doubt you'll see rogues wearing their bracers/belt/boots past Naxx.

Even if it's value DOUBLED from 70->80 (which I find quite unlikely) it would be worth approximately 300 AP maximum. I'm pretty sure that Naxx-25 gear (and probably Naxx-10 as well) will have big upgrades which will quickly invalidate the set bonus. I mean hell, there are 150 EP upgrades from BT->SW, so most certainly we'll be upgrading two pieces that much by raiding in Naxx.

I certainly hope not. I remember scrounging around while leveling in BC and I couldn't even find a suitable green sword with a fast weapon speed until the mid 60's. I think I was still using a level 50 Hanzo's sword until I got the Scimitar from Tavarok in Mana-Tombs. The problem again persisted itself at 70 when many rogues were farming for Latro's and used it all the way to T6. I hope Blizzard is more careful this time with weapon speeds so that we can min/max a little while leveling and certainly be able to min/max throughout all the raid tiers.

Did anyone notice Hunger for Blood now only returns 15 energy as opposed to the full 30 energy cost of using it?

How would this affect a cycle? I guess not much if there wasn't a physical debuff on you to begin with but if there was you surely would miss the free boost. Would you say that now this talent is more balanced or PvP?

Assassination, Wastewalker, Netherblade and Slayer sets all had vastly superior 2 piece bonuses that I would prefer stacking over the 4 piece bonus of the respective set. Really, only Deathmantle stands out as an example where the 4 piece is much stronger since the 2 piece bonus, at the time, was really only helpful on 2 bosses (and has since been made completely useless).

Someone later pointed out that Blizzard earlier stated their design intention to have both sets share set bonuses like the arena gear. I don't know that this is a bad thing since it's a bit alarmist to presume someone would forego the balance of a raid instance simply b/c they have their 4-piece. Although the aggregate incremental step-up between the n10 and n25 sets looks smallish to me, I'm guessing the non set piece slot items will further underscore the power level difference in tiering enough that you'll want to get as much booty from n25 as you can before your guild steps up to the next 25 man. I'll also bet Blizzard makes some can't-miss item drop in the 10 man so that we can all have our next generation 50-run-with-no-drop nightmare stories. Tradition counts, after all.
:-P

Sort of. Although in spirit it's right to say that it doesn't matter what speed OH they make the standard if they tune correctly for it, it's still right to be concerned about this since the 0.1 spd differential in a combat build's OH makes such a world of difference. When vastly "inferior" items outperform items multiple tiers above them because of 1 stat that Blizzard underestimated, it leads to problems. The Latro's example was simply absurd. If it's Blizzard's intent to drop OH speeds by 0.1 per tier, that's a really big leap in terms of a combat rogue's output alone, putting the other stats on the weapon aside. It seems like it's more in their design philosophy to maintain *relative* positioning and a good way to mess that up is to ignore what history has taught them.

I don't disagree that poisons shouldn't be tuned, because they should. But saying 'unmitigated magic source' may be a bit of an overstatement. Much like saying that an Enhancement Shaman's magic damage is an unmitigated damage source from a melee class. Sure, rogues aren't traditionally thought of as a hybrid class, but Blizzard appears to be making a paradigm shift toward not pigeonholing all classes as much for WotLK.

If we take Holy damage, for instance. It is probably closer to unmitigated. There is simply no resist gear available to increase your chances to resist or partially resist. Sure, Ice Block. Cloak of Shadows, and the ilk give limited mitigation, but only for short amounts of time.

Nature resistance, on the other hand. can be stacked through gearing and mitigated by GotW, racials, talents, etc. Poisons can and will continue to be resisted by magic immunity effects.

If we're looking at poisons as a DoT, mitigation is even easier. Three out of four healing classes can remove poisons quite easily. Not to mention that resilience will make the recurring effect significantly weaker.

So yes. I think that the general consensus is that poisons need to be balanced. But to treat them any differently than "non-primary damage" for non-rogue classes is simply choosing to not accept that things are going to be different in WotLK.

First of all a couple news from beta:
- Improved Poisons are fixed and nerfed. Giving 3% per rank. Does not apply to Mind-Numbing and Wounding
- Envenom 'buff' nerfed to 15%.
The tooltips on the talent and on Envenom were not updated.
Poison damage values are still the same.
I forgot to turn on combat logging for last naxx run, but I still had around 35% of my damage coming from poisons. So they have lots of work to do.

What really bothers me with current poison situation are the effects weapon speeds have on overall damage. If things stay the same we will see most rogues running with weapons at speeds as low as they can get in both hands. Because poison damage will just be too high. And it already is in the beta.
So while I am going to do anything to attain best dps this situation strikes me as 'wrong'. Not only from an RP (and 'used to') point of view, but also from an itemisation standpoint. Right now a rogue wants sword X and sword Y. If the things are not tuned right then every rogue will wants 2x dagger X. And that is bad.

Increasing poison damage also increases the opportunity cost of running utility poisons.

It does make the decision between DPS and utility more meaningful, so I'm not going to say if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I will admit I'm not looking forward to the fights where I have to tank my DPS because the CoT warlock missed the raid.

Blizz has a habit of tagging the best items with 'main-hand only', 'off-hand only', or 'unique' to prevent that which puts us back to main-hand X and off-hand Y (sword/dagger/etc).

Also, the only other class that may want a fast dagger would be hunters (probably just for the stats). Casters often have to deal with a lot more competition than that.

Deadly brew could be made to take a lot of the sting out of that. I'm sure that CoT/CoR lock would rather put up a DPS curse as well but we all do what it takes to get the boss down.

Actually, Blizzard said they are trying to get away from the Main-hand only and Off-hand only models. A few months back they changed almost all of these items to one-hand. The only exception to this were fists. I believe the reason for this was cosmetic as fist weapon graphics only work for a specific hand, while all other types of weapons have graphics that are symmetrical.

Because the mechanics of it make 2x daggers far superior to 2x anything else? It changes the traditional idea of slow mainhand, fast offhand, instead encouraging fast everything. If Poisons account for 35%, and SS/Mutilate account for 15%, you stop caring about your specials in favor of maxing your Poisons. From a personal perspective, I think there's something wrong with a rogue asking for Curse of Elements over Faerie Fire.

But why do you object to it anyway? Because you're used to slow main/fast off? Does the current restriction to double swords bother you as much as the possible restriction to double daggers?

Personally I would rather be a rogue than a stealthy warrior.

I too would welcome a greater distinction between warriors in leather and rogues in plate. If that means using faster weapons in both hands and lots of damage from poisons, so be it. Fast weapons and 'deadly poisons' strikes me as more rogue-like anyway.

Blizzard already does not have the habit of 'tagging' weapons. They changed it midway through TBC. The only 'unique' items you see mostly are crafted ones (so you cant gear yourself up with just crafted stuff).
The 'bad' part of wanting 2 very fast daggers is that the itemisation team obviously does not know that. Look at naxx. 3 daggers. 2 slow ones from bosses and 1 fast one from trash. If things stay the same noone but hunters will ever care about the boss dropped ones. It will almost be the same situation as today (with daggers). We will just have 1 dagger drop per instance that every mutialte rogue wants. And several other daggers that will be disenchanged.
It can promote the lattro situation even more. Where some blue 1.3 dagger will be better than anything else in raids just because the raid drops are 1.5.
Different speeds for MH/OH is good not because its rpish but because it gives us more options to choose from. And it speeds up gearing (imagine every rogue wanting not 1 but 2 Blade of Infamy).

And it does not have anything to do with double swords or daggers or maces. Im not talking about restrictions to one type of a weapon. I am talking about a 'restriction' to speed of said weapons. If you run the numbers you will see that currently glyphed Shiv is the best cpg dpe wise. I have not run the numbers but I would not be surprised if even combat rogues are better off running double fast something with double instant and spamming Shiv.

That would make sense if deadly brew were early in the ass tree, but it requires 30 points. Doesn't make any sense to do that unless you have the deep ass poison talents.

If anything it restricts choice when different speeds are needed, since itemisation must be split between the two speeds. If all daggers were 1.3-1.5 speed, then a rogue could take whichever two dropped and be good to go, instead of having to sit through a bunch of fast daggers dropping while waiting for a slow one to drop. It's the same principle behind all the armor homogenisation; you can simply put 2 or 3 variations of the same item dropping in different locations, knowing that every time one of them drops it will be of use to somebody. Raiders can gear up faster due to less wasted loot, and there's less lootwhore drama because there's always going to be something similar dropping from one of the next few bosses.