The 3.0.9 changes are a bit baffling.

They want to reduce mutilate burst damage in pvp, yet they leave the two pvp-only burst talents in assassination alone (vigor and overkill). They presumably want to change weapon speed mechanics so that there is meaningful progression in dagger itemization, yet they choose to lower the percentage of overall damage that actually comes from the mutilate ability (and thus the weapon) itself, and on top of that they increase the effect of SND, which has the net effect of making fast weapons even more desirable than they were prior to 3.0.9

Since the changes are so inconsistent with their stated objectives, there are 3 possibilities here:
1) They are incompetent.
2) They are lying about what they want to achieve.
3) The 3.0.9 changes are a temporary stepping-stone to some (yet unannounced) bigger changes coming in 3.1

I think 1) and 2) are highly unlikely.

I think 3 has to be the only possibility although I appreciate the candor of your first two options.

We don't know what itemization nor the remainder of 3.1 class changes will bring to the table.

That being said, your first two options do bring up the point that Wrath has been a great product but not without a ton of inherent growing pains. Continuing to balance the game around PvP while implementing their new hybrid/pure philosophy has been deeply problematic.

So it's wait and see, I guess, and in the meantime, we'll all be scrambling to pick up our really fast weaponry, regardless of its item level.

Just because we do things differently due to our energy mechanic doesn't make it wrong. Good players can beat just about any other player of any other class and spec. Yes, I've seen a good warlock take down a good rogue 1v1. Our burst damage is not any different from any of the other classes that have pretty eye-popping burst.

Unless Blizzard wants to reduce us to 100% of our damage coming from white attack / poisons and remove any offensive abilities from our arsenal, they have to find a way to handle pvp differently. This is why having a "pvp tree" made sense from their prior design. Something as simple as swapping Prep and Premed in the sub tree forces us to really make the decision if we want mobility, defense and survivability or on-demand burst and the ability to stay on our target to deliver our opening payload. Let's be honest, if you REALLY want that rogue off you, you can make it happen. It may mean you trinket earlier than you'd like or blow a cooldown earlier than you'd like, but it makes sense that to counter another player's cooldown orgy, you should be required to do the same.

Actually, by definition they *are* incompetent. If you remove the pejorative connotation and just go with a strict definition of "lacking qualification or ability," the evidence points to the fact that they lack the ability to meet with their stated objectives since they have not yet come close to accomplishing them, despite several drafts / revisions / changes. That doesn't require insulting or demeaning. That conclusion can be drawn from simple observation. Our issues are not easy for them to fix.

Insofar as lying, I think a lie requires intent to deceive. It's pretty silly to even contemplate that, I think we'd all agree. However, there was a slide of Blizzard's own making at a presentation right on the eve of TBC launch that went through their design principle for each class. Their stated purpose for rogues was for them to be the undisputed top damage doer on a single target. That's not verbatim, but a perfectly synonymous rephrasing. They failed that in TBC. They did precisely the opposite in WotLK. They then shifted their stance to a more vague, "everyone should be competitive" stance and evolved into the far more political, "we think rogues might be a little low."

I think they explicitly stated that the changes in the near term were stop-gap measures and I'm hoping for a complete class re-design but that's really an absurd thing to even hope for given we're neck-deep into this expansion.

It is absurd, and it's quite simply too late for that. Forgive me if this is either preaching to the choir or venturing into beaten horse territory, but as every class now has three deep trees filled with talents, some useful and some not, combined with all the myriad possibilities of equipment, balancing around both PvP and PvE simultaneously is truly making Blizzard the Sisyphus of developers.

Nearly every time they tune classes around PvP, it leads to a reduction of burst, which in turn reduces the mechanics of a given PvE build to more and more sustained white damage and less to do for the player. Hunger for Blood and Slice-n-Dice are explicit examples of that.

I think the best we can do is hope that the upcoming content is enjoyable. Have a coke and a smile and ignore the meters, because which class is consistently at the top (skill and equipment being equal) is more and more arbitrary with every change.

One thing I should add that lends credence to the "stop-gap meets incompetence" theory is this latest business with Enhancement Shaman. Their best MH is currently [Torch of Holy Fire], which speaks to the game getting more and more away from the developers. I don't intend to say the apocalypse is coming, I just think the dynamics of the game are growing in complexity to a staggering degree.

I haven't found any discussion of this idea yet (or if it has been discussed I couldn't find it with the search tool) but one possibly interesting way to improve rogues could be to allow rupture to stack. Bleeds are part of a rogue's toolbox, we already have the ability to have two bleeds up at the same time already (Rupture + Garotte), so letting Rupture stack can represent our ability to find new and interesting places to poke holes in our enemies.

Letting rupture stack, say, 3 times would give us in the ballpark of +700 to +800 dps, which pretty much covers the dps lack we have now. It also would have little effect on PVP: anyone who tries to stack rupture in PVP will be forgoing burst finishers to do so, but in some situations that could indeed be useful.

It would be bad to let the 3-stack drop, this gives the requirement for some challenge and skill to maximise this dps increase. And it could go hand in hand with swapping HfB from stacking to a single buff/debuff in 3.1.

Hmm, to go a bit further along this thought train... perhaps make the 3.1 HfB entirely passive, but where it gives the rogue +3% or so (we may not need +5% per like now if we gained dps from extra Ruptures instead) per Rupture/Garotte we have up on a target. So if you can get a 3 stack of Rupture up there's the +9% damage increase from HfB, and if you Vanish and pop a Garotte that could add a 4th HfB bonus to +12% for the duration of Garotte. This idea would let us go away from having to worry about keeping HfB up like now and instead focus on keeping the new Rupture stacking mechanic in play.

I think I'd enjoy playing that rogue I just invented. Too bad it won't ever happen I just hope Blizzard come up with some solution in 3.1 that is still interesting and fun.

Interacting the stacking with the combo points is all sorts of bad news. Currently, as far as I'm aware, all stacking DoTs get the power of their last application. Doing that, you lay on two 1-point ruptures and then drop a 5-stack (and you always need to rupture at 5, not 4+). Breaking that, and going off the original applications you get the same problem we had with Scorpid Poison and Lifebloom, getting 3 trinketed 5-point ruptures and refreshing it with one-point ruptures. The third option is having it stack to 15, one stack per combo point, but this doesn't avoid the fact that you can refresh with 1-point ruptures. The final option is allowing multiple simultaneous ruptures, Ignite-style. This just allows you to Rupture more often but you're still limited by combo points, and there isn't really any stacking going on. You do get massive ticks at some point, but you're still just back-loading damage you were going to do anyways. It just means you trade envenom for rupture more often.

Question regarding some previous discussion of having a Glyph of Envenom, or something similar, that does not remove the deadly stacks from the target.

Would a glyph or some other sort of talent make a straight Envenom cycle outweigh a Rupture/Envenom cycle, due to the extra Instant Poison procs?

On the topic of Master Poisoner's overall weakness and the poor scaling of Deadly Poison, could both of these be resolved by MP making DP procs have a small amount of frontload damage in addition to the normal DOT? In my understanding, one of the weaknesses of DP vs. IP is that procs after you have a 5-stack are greatly diminished in value. Of course, one immediately apparent drawback I can see is that this would continue the trend of favoring 2 fast daggers. I guess my question is would a mechanic like this be better or worse for scaling than simply increasing the AP coefficient?