I think if the Combat changes lead to the "death" of mixed weapon combat specs, then it is a bad thing, further reducing your options.

I see that Blizzard is adding more Haste to the combat tree, but at the same time they also say they are not satisfied with how Haste works for meele. So, if they plan to change the haste mechanics for meele then these changes will be more interesting.

Assuming that they moved DPS talents down in the tree and cleaned it up, I could see Relentless Strikes being merged into the rogue class as a trained ability. I don't expect this as being something that Blizzard would do though because there isn't -really- anything wrong with it's position right now.

Theres a lot wrong with it's position just now. It was clear when they put it there and increased the number of needed points that it was just wrong, to many people here where complacent with that change considering the state of our dps, making poisons such a big part of rogue dps and then making combat unable to get those poison talents hurt a lot. I never understood this change.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion on how underwhelming Killing Spree actually is. It pretty much ranks as one of the worst 51-point talents in the game. A 51-point talent should be something you want to get, not something you're reluctant to get and even with the 20% damage buff, it still is really bad. A talent that lets you voluntarily lose control of your character and possibly putting you in harms way isn't my idea of good design. At the very least they should take the multiple targeting system off of it, make it single target, and not put you in an uncontrollable "ninja dance". Some people will say well it's cool to use on trash packs... well you're probably better off auto attacking with BF up and spamming FoK on multiple mob trash packs anyway.

I'd like to see something in the way of a Death Wish type talent, even something like a self-castable Hysteria would be cool. Obviously this would have pvp implications but you could have various penalties to go along with it such as, reducing your armor in half, or even zero, doing a hysteria or death wish type effect, making it so you cant use CloS in conjunction with it so you are more easily cc'd. I'm sure a decent solution could be thought up.

I agree with the sentiment of just removing the Improved SS talent, I can't even really believe this has been overlooked all these years. The tree needs to be shifted now that they changed lightning reflexes to 3 points, it throws it off a bit, whereas right now it's extremely well balanced, in my opinion. Also the synergy of crit right now is just too good to ever use anything other than a fist/fist or fist/dagger combo. Between Lethality, Prey on the Weak, and the SS glyph, why would you ever use a sword of the same caliber over a fist? I can't see sword spec ever making a big return unless we have a reverse situation like we have right now with main hand itemization.

Overall, the changes are ok, so far, I'll give blizzard some credit and hopefully they bring rogue DPS up to where it should be.

I disagree that there is a lot wrong with it's current position from it's old one.

The move makes it both more and less accessible. It takes more points, but it takes fewer points to get to it. The net effect was that you moved 4 talent points in other DPS talents into Relentless Strikes. It's new position is almost inarguably better from an access point of view and for the health of the sub tree (in providing a much needed DPS boost to the low Sub) and the overall health of the rogue class.

You complain that combat is unable to get the poison talents because of it. If it was still in it's old position but now cost 5 points, you'd only be dropping 2 points into poison talents, 5 if you took 2/5 in Lethality.

Was the 1 point version more powerful? Yes, unequivocally. That's part of the reason that it was made into a 5 point talent, it was too good for 1 point. It still is a must have, it being changed to 5 points didn't change the power of the talent, just brought it more in line with other talents. It's fine to want a more powerful version, or to not want nerfs, but there really isn't anything wrong with it right now. If you never had it as a 1 point talent, you wouldn't have any argument at all.

I have never liked KS and I don't spec it. While it on paper is worth aprx 2.5% dps, the randomness in being bounced around and then having to reposition one self, more so the danger of being one-shotted by certain bosses (or even whiping the raid on Thaddius), makes it not really useable, but in rare cases would also result in a dps loss. I prefer to invest the talent point in Vile Poison, which is a 1% dps increase, instead. On the other side, for PvP it really can be deadly.

Having said that, to give KS a damage increase of 20% while active, seems to me to be a very bad joke, except for PvP. But I was under the impression, that Blizzard wanted to boost rogue dps in PvE and reduce burst damage in PvP, so why they do this to KS is beyond my imagination. Maybe Ulduar will bring boss fights, where KS may prove to be usable, but until so, it is not a talent I would use.

In regards to talents that needs reworking, yes, Improved SS really is out of date, likewise with AR. It is today a very weak talent for Combat rogues, as the energy regen is extremely high. I have always thought, that the coold down of AR should be lowered to 3 minutes, and I hope it will be so, which with glyph of AR would lower it to 2 minutes and then it would become a really strong talent again. I would also like to see the cool down on Blade Furry be removed, so it would become part of a cycle.

Still, the changes are only initials. More will come, maybe some will be reworded. However, I don't see rogues gaining a 15ish percent dps increase to bring us to par with hunters, or a 20ish percent dps increase to bring us up to par with mages and fury warriors.

It might be worth mentioning that, in its current form, Mace spec outperforms (at least from what I've seen) CQC. Just take your current spreadsheet and turn CG and WD into Maces.

Certainly there are bosses on which Killing Spree sits somewhere between "a bit of a risk" and "certain death": Thaddius comes to mind particularly, and I'm always careful to hit it in the first five seconds of the fight before the first charge so that it will be on cooldown when I go to hit my actual cooldowns ten seconds later, just in case I space out. Kel'thuzad, Sapphiron, and Sartharion are also candidates for never using Killing Spree ever, since it's pretty much guaranteed to put you in a cleave or tail swipe or frost blast or something.

On a lot of other bosses, it's extremely powerful. The big one for me is that it takes me out of every other Vortex, thus giving my healers a bit less to worry about and giving me 10 extra seconds of dps against an extremely tight enrage timer. (Yes, I know Malygos10 isn't really that tight a timer, some of our dps sucks, there's nothing I can do about it.) Incidentally, the fact that the Killing Spree location gets hit by Malygos's Arcane Breath is a known bug, but you should still save it to get out of Vortex. It's perfectly safe to hit every cooldown against most other bosses, and any adds that get summoned tend to take a lot of damage from Blade Flurry + Killing Spree. Noth especially suffers from this since there's always the big "aoe everything!" moment every 2:15 after he teleports away that syncs up nicely with the BF/KS cooldown. I also find it works well on Gothik when I need some damage right freaking now and don't have time to do a normal cycle.

As an added bonus, if you get a 5-pt Eviscerate in early, TotT it and follow up with KS for a quick way to give a tank around 20-30k threat for free. A 20% buff to KS just makes it better for all of these situations. And what was I going to put in its place anyway? 1/5 Imp. Poisons? Spare me.

You can use Killing Spree when Sapphiron starts to go into the air, you can use Killing Spree after a Frost Blast has happened because you are now unable to have any further Frost Blast and no one sits in the center of Kel'Ts hitbox so you will not have a Void Zone to get stuck in. On Sarth it's not going to get you cleaved but the breath thing is something you have to pay attention to, it was a nice way of keeping up when Tenebron went wild pre-3.0.8 and it will undoubtably remain a nice means of adding some extra AoE DPS on whelps when you have blown your energy on FoK and need to wait for it to regenerate.

The 60 second variant was really nice for the utility perk (Trash, Vortex, Air Phase) but it still has useful points on most aspects you just have to weigh in the best times to use it still.

On all accounts: no.
- A HaT rogue does not require raid stacking, it requires raid sorting, which is still a different mechanism. Raid stacking is the practice of requiring specific classes and specs for the raid to even go, because certain buffs and debuffs are must-haves. Currently, with the exception of a certain place requiring 2 priests, raids require specific roles to be filled, but not classes. While HaT certainly favours being grouped with certain classes (pet-classes), even those are not required. The alternatives without pets aren't completely bad, and even then, it is very safe to assume that at least one or two pet classes are present anyway. But convenient groupmembers are *always* there, from any role you can think of.
- It's harder to tell a bad HaT rogue maybe, yes, but the exact same thing could be said for Combat and even Mutilate. But when half a HaT rogue's groupmembers die, you'll be able to pick up who are the good ones, they will simply handle their drop in CP generation better.
- If Blizz is fine with what it does, then it's upto them to decide whether it's overbudget or not. There is a known equation to evaluate budgetting of items. For talents, there is not. Blizz weighs trees and specs as a whole, depending on the specs possible with them.
- PvP is not an issue, since this is a very obvious PvE orientated talent. It is very easy to make an effective PvE build without either MoD or Cheat Death. If you require those for PvP, then ditching HaT for either one should be no problem. There is no such thing as a PvP tree, if there ever was such a thing.
- Actually, it does not. HaT CP generation knows something called "dry-spells", moments where simply no CP's seem to be generated. This is not a bug or anything, it is simply a moment where none of your groupmembers crit, either because they simply don't, or because they use abilities that can't crit, or because they're repositioning, it can be anything. The skill in HaT lies with knowing what to do during these moments. "Just hemorrhage" is not always the best option available. Similarly, there is no energy regen other than Relentless Strikes available. Using too much energy kills your DPS, especially during these dry-spells, and easily sets you on hold for 3.5 seconds before you can Eviscerate again, which is not really efficient. Even the combomoves you use are a decision to make. There are times you can two button it, 1 for Evisc, and occasionally the second for SnD. There are also times when the CP flow is high enough to insert Ruptures without dropping in CP generation, or when Rupturing is a must because CP generation is constantly very low instead.

In reference to buffing Sub, I don't expect Blizz to do much with HaT, but instead, to improve some on the deeper Sub talents: Slaughter from the Shadows and Shadowdance. Especially Slaughter, since they were considering turning Hemorrhage into a debuff from (for example) Backstab.
The problem with the last 3 tiers of Sub is basically that each promotes a different part of the combopoint system:
HaT promotes the use of finishers, Slaughter promotes the use of Combomoves, Shadowdance promotes the use of openers. Since we can use only one of these moves at a time, these three talents make eachother almost redundant. Slaughter and Shadowdance will combine for dagger rogues, because Slaughter also affects Ambush. But currently, a non-dagger rogue, thus hemorrhage, may pick Slaughter, but will have little use for Shadowdance for example.
Like it or not, HaT is basically using the rogue mechanics in an inverted way: use your finishers, add in the combomoves when applicable. A finisher like EA actually moved up in rank on my keybinds, since the opportunity cost for it went down quite noticably. It seems easier and more efficient for a HaT rogue to keep this buff up than for a warrior to sunder.

As a Combat Rogue I see some of these changes with good eyes.

> Adrenaline Rush cooldown reduced: This in my opinion makes alot of sense PvE-wise (I don't realy PvP anymore nor I care about it). If we look at the current fights and their duration, on most cases except maybe Sartharion +3D, you get to use this abbility once.

> Lightning Reflexes: This also pleases me eventhough theres a downside as some people already pointed out. Being a CG/Hailstorm user, this means, if the current "changes" stay and theres no other changes on the Combat tree to free those filler points again (Which I highly doubt), I will have to get a WD for my OH and therefor making our Mutilate Rogues sad.

> Killing Spree: In all honestly I do enjoy this abbility, eventhough theres always risk involved when you use it because of the possible "Ninja Jumps". The 20% damage buff is welcomed but still makes it a fairly crap 51tp abbility compared to other classes' and speccs.

> Mace specialization changes: Seems like Blizzard wants to bring Maces back to life but they also forgot to add decent maces to the game. Angry Dread being a 156DPS weapon, falling behind CG and Split Greathammer being a 1.6s OH makes them a bit unwanted in my opinion.

> Savage Combat change: I like it because it actually benefits the raid, together with ToT, rogues have "some utillity" despite their shameful dps.

This being said, I'm actually looking forward for the next PTR notes to see what has Blizzard been doing during all this "we will fix stuff" period and also because, this makes me believe that Ulduar might be getting closer!