First, a warning from the moderators (and I know Songster said it, but I want to be very clear about this): if this starts going down the road of the other thread - people complaining about rogue DPS, or overall balance, or overall utility, or whatever, no mercy will be shown. Infractions will be fast and furious. This is your one and only warning.

Now, with that out of the way, lets get down to business.

1) I'm not sure if we can reach any real conclusions about the overall scaling of the class with what we know, partly because scaling is always restricted by what we have access to - until we start seeing Ulduar items, I don't think we can really project what DPS is going to look like by end-Ulduar. However, I do think it's the case that Mutilate has a bit more of an implicit gear threshhold that is higher than Combat; while one can do viable Combat DPS almost no matter how bad your gear is, if you don't have a reasonable amount of expertise, you'll start missing finishers and your cycles will fall apart. If you don't have enough crit, you'll wind up with too many 2-finisher cycles and your cycles will fall apart. If you don't have enough hit and haste, your poisons won't restack fast enough for good Envenoms. And so on. But I'm not sure that's a scaling issue per se - I think it's more of a "you must be this tall" (sorry gnomes) situation. If you're below the line, it doesn't work; if you're near the line, it sort of works; and if you're above the line, it works really well. However, once you're above that line, it's not clear to me that your further scaling is going to be notably good or not; it's also worth noting that there is an implicit diminishing returns on crit as it pertains to SF procs, so there is some reason to believe our scaling will slow down at least slightly. But in terms of scaling versus other classes - I don't think we really know enough to say for certain.

Now, in terms of the specific issue of poisons: first, this is somewhat tied to the second point about weapon speed - were fast weapons not so good anyway, IP wouldn't be so strong; but they are, so it is. Fundamentally, the problem is twofold; first, IP scales with Hit, Haste, and Crit in addition to AP, while DP scales with AP alone. The secondary problem is that with end-Naxx hit/haste/crit rates, IP is *already* scaling faster with AP than DP does. Combine these, and there's really no way around it - DP needs to do more damage, and/or scale better. It seems to me that some tuning of the AP-scaling factor might be in order, but there are probably other ways to make it work.

2) There doesn't seem to be a lot to say here. Either Blizzard needs to rework how Focused Attacks and/or Poisons work, or they need to give us fast daggers.

3) I think there's an additional problem beyond what's noted in that poison application hurts Mutilate rogues a lot more than Combat rogues - with the current IP/DP setup for Mutilate, switching out either poison costs a *lot* of damage - either use lose the Envenom/IP interaction, or you lose the ability to Envenom entirely - either way, it's a lot more damage than the pure poison switch - which is all Combat has to pay. In fact, Combat gets the healing debuff for free, while Mutilate would pay a nontrivial amount of damage to get it. What this means is that if the two specs did comparable damage, Combat would be strictly superior due to the much easier application of debuffs. Hence, it would be good if the poison-style debuffs could somehow be made more accessible to Mutilate rogues.

On the Tricks front - I'm not sure there's a real difference between balancing our DPS with or without Tricks. Tricks only makes about 100 DPS difference, meaning that in practice one will have a hard time telling which way it's balanced without a large-scale statistical analysis of WWS parses. With week-to-week fluxuations being what they are, I suspect no guild would be able to conclusively tell whether you're averaging 50 DPS more or 50 DPS less than a given other individual - and to the extent that they can, it's unclear to me how many guilds would care.

I'd now like to propose a solution that speaks to all 3 of these problems. It's not a total solution to any of them, mind you, but it would help on all 3 fronts. The proposal is this: provide a means, either via glyph or talent, that one can Envenom without dropping Deadly Poison stacks. This accomplishes a couple of things.

First, it makes Envenom somewhat stronger relative to Eviscerate, particularly for Mutilate builds. As such, the issue where IP/Evis catches up with DP/Envenom would at the very least be postponed.

Second, it makes weapon speed less important for whichever weapon is doing Deadly Poison. While Focused Attacks would still favor fast weapons, the need to quickly restack Deadly Poison would be gone; as such, slower weapons would be more viable. At the very least, I'm reasonably confident that Sinister Revenge would pass Webbed Death for the MH.

Finally, it allows Mutilate rogues to keep 100% uptime on Master Poisoner, making them as viable a source of this buff as a ret paladin or elemental shaman, as opposed to the current situation where uptime is rather less than that.

I'm not saying it's a solution totally without problems... but I do think it would help at least somewhat.

When I compare our class now, to the past, and in relation to other classes evolution through the expansions, I see a few glaring issues, that often have been dealt with, but still plague rogues.

Poisons. In the past, temporary weapon buffs, like poisons, sharpening/weight stones, even oils, were all non significant buffs. In the original naxx 40, a warrior gained comparable dps using sharpening stones as we did using poisons. Now, there arent many weapon enchants, and things like poisons have been buffed significantly. However, they havent learned from the past, and magnified the desparity caused by weapon speeds. In fact, with making our poison contribute an overall higher percentage to our damage than before, its magnified. It really feels like its a normalization candidate, and this should have been obvious since beta, when Vul and others were arguing for it, with blizzard lending a deaf ear.

Execute. In WoW retail, warriors had execute. Its what pulled them ahead of other classes on fights like patchwerk. The longer you stay in execute range, the higher overall damage warriors did. In fact, warrior dps while going up at the end of naxx, was a lower overall percentage of the boss's hp as we started killing patch faster and faster, due to not sitting at execute range as long. Along come tbc, then wrath, and now multiple classes have an execute like attack/modifier/skill. Warlocks have their drain soul spell do 400% dmg on targets below 20%, as well as another execute like buff. Mages have their burndown, paladins have their hammer, etc etc etc. Rogues have been given 2 talents with an execute like modifier. Dirty deeds in sub, and Prey on the Week in combat. Prey on the week is a tier 10 talent, modifying only critical strike damage, and Sub is not accessible to a raid build other than a sub build, which is either a sub par hat build, or an exploited high dps hat build group. Not that we need another pvp useable finisher type move, just pve raid oriented.

Utility. This isnt a rant or whine in any way, the amount of utility we bring now, especially compared to pre wrath, is incredible, however, the price is pretty high. Blizzard gives us an equivelant armor reduction to sunder, and makes us spend 5 combo points to maintain it. Warriors let it roll, and sunder once before it fades to refresh the debuff, while we have to redo the debuff. If your assasination, that means paying attention to hfb, snd, rupture, and expose timers, as well as pay attention to energy vs dp stacks on the target, to maximize dmg. A warlock skips curse of agony to curse of tongues, and can do it in the middle of a fight. A rogue forgoes a dmg poison for mind numbing for a whole fight at a time. Some of our utility just is too costly to effectively use.
In fact, that brings up rupture refreshing as well. We cant overwrite a lower duration higher damage rupture with a higher duration lower damage rupture. Meaning that 5 point rupture with 4 seconds left put on with 6000 ap due to your berserking buff cant be overwritten by a 16 second 5500 ap rupture.

In regards to the DP or envenom glyph, I have been a proponent for this for a while, but I would also like to see a couple more assasination oriented glyphs.

While I like the idea of charge-less Envenoms, it might have PvP implications. I don't really know if people would use it but just throwing it out there. I think if anything, Blizz might just create an increased DP application glyph whether passive or to the increased proc from using Envenom itself. It probably wouldn't fix the discrepancy between weapon speeds though. The glyph could also just have the effect of reducing the charge cost by one so that one DP stack always remains on the target.

I agree that it'd be nice to have better Bloodlust synergy, even if it's just a CD to blow.

On the subject of utilities, I agree with most of the issues. I also wish ToT had a larger range for a wider variety of targets. Although this limitation may be intentional. I don't have a second rogue to feed and usually end up feeding a lock.

Unless I am missing something completely obvious, double instant+evis is already better and is better even at low gear levels if your weapons are sufficiently fast(double librarians or webbed death). The roguecraft spreadsheet agrees with this as well if you change the mutilate damage calculation to assume a poison on the target for the 50% bonus mutilate damage instead of checking your weapons for wound/deadly(which would be a pretty safe assumption to make in a 25man situation since you most likely have at least a hunter in the raid).

If poisons were changed to a "this effect cannot occur more than once every xx seconds" and damage was adjusted accordingly, that would open up a lot more weapon options for rogues. Same treatment would be necessary for combat potency and focused attacks as well.