Well, if you'd want to create a "real world" smoke bomb ability, you'd also have to make those players behind the smoke to be out of line of sight. I mean, the sight doesn't magically get better if you're standing behind the smoke instead of in the middle of it.
I haven't heard anything of that yet, also you have to be careful when comparing reality and WoW. Blizzard will bend reality as much as they want to make it balanced™.

I should probably also point out that even this example isn't a good one as you can use the two pillars to the same effect already. Nobody does this though, why? Most 25man raids have at least 1-2 Death Knights and Death Grip is infinitely faster than waiting for the casters to meander up and pick a location to stand and it's also on a cooldown that's 1/6 of the value of Smoke Bomb.

This argument doesn't really hold much value because you can already do it, and it very rarely happens, although Smoke Bomb might make it slightly more popular. Either way, I think we've discussed this issue so much its time to move on. Tink and Aldriana are correct, I didn't pay enough attention in my speculation. But really, the entire debate is kind of speculation because nobody has actually seen it and we all know how much Blizzard likes to change abilities during beta and even live.

I have to say I'm really quite interested to see how these new changes work. I love the idea of some of them, but others seem very niche.

The FoK change I love. It's always amused me that you could have a "fan of knives" using maces, so I think the implication that they're going to restrict it to thrown weapons is a good one. Also the fact that the weapon used will be the ranged one makes so much more sense and actually makes that slot useful to combat beyond just a stat-boost. Further loving the ability to apply poisons to it as, when I first gained poisons, I was baffled as to why you could only apply it to your melee weapons, so the whole system will now feel much more connected into the style of rogue gameplay and flavour of how they work.

Combat readiness - sounds like it could be very helpful, but I guess more useful in pvp and levelling pve than dungeons/raids. However, combined with the new Recuperate ability, it sounds like it'll take a fair bit of the downtime out of levelling. I've recently levelled a Death Knight and I was stunned at how much quicker it was to level, simply because with blood spec healing you have very little resting downtime except for if you want to reapply a food buff.

Redirect - I can't wait to try this. So many times I've just missed out on getting a combo-point ability running because the target I was attacking inconsiderately dies a millisecond before the energy becomes available. Just a 3-pointer on SnD to burn through a large mob pack a little faster and *bam* your combo points are wasted on a dead mob. I've been following the official forums and there's quite an argument for the combo points to be generated on the rogue rather than a mob, which is an interesting take, although would obsolete this talent. It would certainly be a bit more efficient in a situation where there's a large number of mobs that you want to change to quickly but don't necessarily want to kill them at the exact same time (e.g. the trash before Marrowgar that explodes into bone shards).

Smoke bomb I'm not quite so thrilled with. I think it'll help the pvp-ers have some slightly more interesting fights but it's so situational in pve, maybe actually hindering more than it will help in some cases if it brings some mobs towards you that you want kept at range while at the same time as you're trying to stop an attack. They also seem to say that they only stop directed shots, not AoE, so how useful it will really be, especially in a dungeon situation, remains to be seen.

Weapon specialisation changes - really really looking forward to this. So many times I've been caught between keeping a lower weapon for slightly longer that I'd like to in order to wait for a "compatible" upgrade further along the line or changing spec just to use a different weapon setup. It's really been annoying! Rogues should be the masters of all weapon types and be able to use them effectively in any combination, depending on what they have to hand. This change will really allow some creative combinations.

Also in more general terms, it's going to be interesting to see all the talent changes towards being able to pick more "fun" (in Blizz's words) talents rather than necessary ones that aren't so fun (e.g. the weapon specialisations that they're removing). On top of that, them simplifying the gear stats is good news (for me!) - people like Aldriana may be able to get their head round all the different stats and what they mean, but I seriously struggle. Hopefully everything will be a lot clearer without wondering on the spot if something that appears to be an upgrade is truly an upgrade because of some random stat differences between the items you're comparing - especially if they're of a similar level.

I guess there'll be a number of changes between now and release, and probably further after release when they work out what things work like with proper numbers of people, but all in all, definitely looking forward to seeing the changes.

I agree with you Brotherbear it was a disappointing and somewhat ambiguous answer. I was really hoping that they would address how Smoke Bomb would interact with more important mechanics such as a boss targeting a player.

In regards to the discussion of whether Smoke Bomb will be a double LOS, I think it is worth noting that Blizzard has said some things to the affect that Smoke Bomb is not going to be just a LOS mechanic. They used the analogy of going behind a pillar, but it's worth pointing out that AOE abilities can still do damage to you and a bluepost said:

Target obscured and not Line of Sight. I think it's safe to say that Smoke Bomb (and Hunter's Camouflage) is going to introduce a new facet in how a player can avoid taking damage. And because of this, we can't apply our current knowledge of how LOS works to what Smoke Bomb will end up doing. So we can't assume that double LOS will be the result since this isn't necessarily a LOS mechanic.

What I am most interested in is this:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Cataclysm Class Preview: Rogue

While I'll admit I am pretty put out by the fact that they will not be making a reduced-effectiveness shadowstep trainable, I am hoping they will give us something. Because of the nature of mobility abilities, a PvP mobility buff will very likely hold a very similar buff in terms of PvE. This is hopefully help rogues stay competitive in dps where there is some distance to travel to reach the boss (thinking more Northrend Beast mechanics).

Something rougishly similar to a Warrior's charge would be greatly welcomed.

I doubt we'll get charge per se, but some kind of a gap closer would be helpful in both PvE and PvP. Currently we have a very good way to keep a PvP opponent near us through crippling poison. While crippling is largely ineffective in PvE, it does have it's uses.

The problem comes when we get separated from our target. I'd bet dollars to pesos that the reason CloS is being made 100% was because of changes to poisons. Either their duration or their rate of application is going down which in the case of crippling makes us very vulnerable to kiting. That's all well and good but it puts us in the same position as ret paladins in that once an opponent it ahead of us, we have no way to catch up unless we have CPs on them and we stop and stand to cast Deadly Throw.

Our only choice then is to reset the fight and try to open again, in which case we've given them time to heal as we move at range to drop combat or blow Vanish and try to close the gap in stealth. By the way, Smoke Bomb alone will not let us drop combat as any half-intelligent player with some form of AoE will be able to keep us from dropping combat very easily.

Personally, I'd like to see Sprint re-worked to be more useful and fill this role. Shorter duration and a shorter cooldown; 5 second duration on a 45 second cooldown or something similar.

Change to poisons? Did I miss something, or is this just speculation?

Deadly Throw is instant; you can use it while you move. Of course, that does do nothing for the "have to have CP on them" issue.

Yeah, agreed. Its bad enough going up certain classes (frost mages and survival hunters, mostly) in Arena even with multiple sprints, vanishes, and a cloak. The problem would only be exacerbated in their much vaunted rated BGs where you might find yourself in a 5v5 having to move between multiple spread out ranged kiting classes. Maybe you kill one but whoops you used all your gap closers to just stay on top of him, now you're basically at the mercy of his buddies.

It's speculation but not unfounded. The preview stated that their goal was to shift rogue damage from passive sources to more active sources. The most reasonable way (and one of the easiest outside of lowering the haste on SnD) to lower passive damage would be to lessen poison damage either through application rate or some other factor.

That's... not entirely true. I mean, we do get quite a bit of damage from poisons, but, like, we also just get a lot of damage from white attacks. We get a lot of haste from abilities. We dual wield, and have good talents to support it. Hence, 40-45 percent (or more) of our damage is purely from autoattack even disregarding poisons entirely. Which, I might note, is significantly more than, um, every other class in the game.

It's true that poison damage further amplifies this problem, but even if poisons did *no* damage it would still be a concern. And, moreover, simply having poisons do less damage wouldn't really solve the problem. Rather, what I'd expect to see is poisons becoming a more active source of damage through mechanisms like Envenom, where by poison damage is increased through the active use of abilities.

I mean, the general shift away from passive damage necessarily means we'll get more active damage, and I rather suspect that won't come through simply having SS and Mut hit harder (as doing so would have potential unfortunate PvP implications). Rather, I suspect we'll see an increased emphasis on finishers in all 3 trees. Mutilate, of course, already has this at some level, where getting proper timing and spacing of Envenoms is an important part of doing optimal DPS. Maintaining SnD has always been important, and maintaining Rupture was quite important in the early parts of Wrath. Now, these mechanics are clearly insufficient as rogue damage is still fairly passive on the whole, but a further move in that direction is sort of the natural way to accomplish their goals.

Moreover, poisons really are sort of a class-defining feature, so I suspect they're not going to make a real effort to de-emphasize them. Hence, altogether, I'd expect us to see us doing similar amounts of poison damage, significantly less raw white damage, and making up the difference with increased finisher damage. We'll see, of course, but I personally wouldn't bet on poisons being nerfed (at least from a damage perspective) in any significant way.

I think the thing to be careful of is not to confuse "increased emphasis on finishers" or "harder gameplay via finishers" with "more finishers". It's not like low rupture is fundamentally "harder" to run evis-only - it's one extra thing to keybind... and that's about it. Similarly, while high-rupture might be a bit harder to run, that's not because it takes more finishers - in practice, you're still running mostly two finishers and only using a third occasionally. Which begs the obvious question: why is high rupture harder to manage than low rupture, despite the fact that it uses the same number of finishers, if not fewer?

Before I answer that question (or at least, give *my* answer to that question), allow me to pose another: what, generally speaking, distinguishes rogues from most other classes in terms of their DPS rotations? How is a rogue's DPS cycle different from that of an enhancement shaman, a ret pally, a warrior, or a DK? Or from every caster under the sun? And the answer (at least for the moment - and yes, it's changing to some extent in Cataclysm), is that rogue abilities are mostly resource limited, whereas almost all other classes are either cooldown-limited or time-limited.

Consider a ret pally: all your relevant DPS abilities have cooldowns on them, hence good DPS is primarily about your ability to keep stuff on cooldown. There's some additional optimization to be performed by using the right ability at the right time, but in practice it matters more that stuff gets used as quickly as possible. A second spent with an ability off cooldown (and you not in GCD) is wasted DPS.

Similarly, consider a DK. There are optimal ability rotations, but almost as important as doing the abilities in the right order is making sure you're doing *something* at all times. Idle GCDs are wasted GCDs.

Now consider a rogue: we spend a fair amount of time off GCD, sitting around waiting to do the next ability... and that's fine. Our goal is not to fill every GCD with an ability; we're limited by energy, not by time. You can SS now, one a second from now, and (usually) there's no inherent DPS loss to waiting. We have a great deal of flexibility in *when* we do stuff that other classes don't. For us, the *what* is usually easy - it's generally pretty clear what we're supposed to be doing, and since all the real decisions are in terms of finisher selection (which only happens every 5-10 seconds) there's plenty of time to think about what you're supposed to doing. Our challenge is not in *what* moves to do, but *when*.

And this, I submit, is the difference between low-rupture and high rupture. Low rupture simply requires using stuff when it's available; high rupture requires careful energy management and ability timing so as to ensure that you always have enough combo points at the times you need them to do the abilities that need to be done. The challenge is not that we have more finishers to keep track of, it's that we need to be smarter about timing their use. Similarly, Mutilate has very little complexity in terms of deciding what moves to use; optimization is all about management of the Envenom buff to get optimal use out of it. Again: what distinguishes good players from bad ones are matters of ability timing, not ability selection.

And this, I suspect, is what Blizzard will want to build off of. I'd be surprised if the focus of changes is simply on having more finishers - rather, I suspect we're going to see it become more important *how* you use the finishers. I anticipate our focus increasingly being on keeping SnD and Rupture and Envenom and other such abilities with durations up as much possible. This both adds challenge to the class and plays to the essential nature of our class without simply complicating things by adding more buttons to push. So, without getting too much into the realm of speculation, I'd argue that (for instance) Rupture is far more likely to receive significant damage buffs than Eviscerate - and not simply because there are fewer PvP implications to doing so.