There are also some minor wording changes to Remorseless Attacks (who cares), and they removed the finisher component from Quick Recovery (again, not too relevant for PvE, as no one was taking it anyway. The major Assassination change is the swap from +all crit to +spell damage, which should make it easier to get raid spots in 10mans, as we now provide one of the major caster buffs. It is worth noting that it's only 8% instead of the current 13, but as Earth and Moon has been similarly reduced, I imagine that's just that they're weakening the buff (though Ebon Plaguebringer still says 13).

In terms of Combat... the interesting thing to note is that there's a lot fewer DPS talents than there used to be - I count 8 points of non-DPS filler required to make it to the bottom of the tree - however, you have to put 54 points in it to get everything, due to having 7 talent points at the 45 point level, which gives us more flexibility in utility talents, which is nice. It is worth noting, on a related note, that there is simply less DPS to be gained from the tree - basically, all the talent points there are stuff we already have, but we're losing, for instance, Blade Twisting and our weapon specializations, and only gaining 5% SS damage in return. But that's by itself neither good nor bad, given that the trees will presumably wind up balanced (via masteries or whatever) to do comparable damage in the end anyway. So it's neither good nor bad by itself, but is worth making note of.

The major change here is of course Restless Blades - lets take a minute to assess this. In a 3:45 Festergut kill this week, I spent something on the order of 110 combo points, which works out to something like one every 2 seconds (on average). Hence, if every 2 seconds I shorten my cooldowns by 1.5 seconds, my cooldowns effectively come up in 60% of the time they currently do - KSp (glyphed) would be back up in around 45 seconds, Blade Flurry in a little over 70 seconds, and AR in about 110 seconds. Hacking my combat sheet to give a ballpark estimate on the sustained DPS increase this would give, the answer comes out to around 700 DPS - that is, somewhere over 200 DPS per point. This is in the neighborhood of other "strong" talents like Combat Potency, poison talents, etc., and thus seems like a fairly reasonable option. In particular, with an extra 5 talent points, it's a stronger place to put them than Relentless Strikes, so we'd likely be looking at a 22/54 or 23/53 build assuming nothing else changes.

Of course, other stuff will change, so worrying too much about the details is probably not productive; but it is good to know that it's at least in the right ballpark of power such that we'll think seriously about taking it.

Oh, oops. Misread it. So it's slightly less good than I estimated - but as the vast majority of that benefit is from KSp anyway, it doesn't matter as much as you might think. I still show it over 150 DPS per point, hence still pretty solid.

Nobody has mentioned yet that Combat can now get Fleet Footed. That's the biggest reason I smiled while looking over it.

Actually and unless I'm missing something, you can't if you want all the talents in the combat tree that directly increases damage along with the poison talents. With a basic talent layout that includes Endurance and Restless Blades, you shouldn't run into too many movement issues in PVE though.

I realise everything is still subject to changes for quite a while, but currently I just don't see all that much changing for us. All the major knobs in combat still do exactly the same. Even with a +50% damage bonus to combo point builders from mastery a huge part of our damage will still come from passive sources. OK, it's possible the reworked ranks of Sinister Strike could change it, but enough to make a major diffence to our rotation? I doubt it. Unless Recuperate gets some sort of energy regen component (or whatever - juggling a finisher or ability like the 2t10 bonus that directly increases yellow damage would atleast move some of our focus away from passive damage and thus be mildly interresting), I just don't see our rotation changing all that much. Sure, we'll be pressing Killing Spree and Blade Flurry twice as often - but that seems to be it. Such a change would've made a noticable difference on every end boss of this expansion, but it seems as though the singletarget dps rotation will feel exactly the same.

Edit: I guess they changed the wording on Remorseless Attacks in order to allow it to be used in conjunction with Redirect+Eviscerate or perhaps even Killing Spree. Also, it could prove to be a decent instance talent along with Fan of Knives.

I'm no wizard with spreadsheets and data tables, but I'm particularly interested in how Restless Blades will interact with the T10 4pc set bonus. It seems like it would make it much, much more lucrative. Should be very cool to play around with if they give us the talent changes late in Wrath like they usually do.

Isn't the wording of Restless blades that is reduces those cooldowns every time you use a damaging finishing move? Thus it's not every 2 seconds that you're reducing the cooldown, it's every time you rupture or evis putting it more on the line of every 10-12sec you're reducing them by 1.5sec assuming you're using an evis based build or every 16-20 sec if you're using high rupture. If I'm correct in assuming that with the loss of ArPen we'll be going back to high rupture cycles then you're looking at only reducing KSp by 4.5-7.5sec (depending on glyphed rupture or not) from it's glyphed 75sec cooldown.

Hemorrhage now applies the "Mangle" effect (+30% bleed damage).

I noticed they haven't yet replaced/changed Malice. That is a talent that is sure to change, to be consistent with their new talent philosophy. Likewise for Murder, and probably the "all damage done by 5%" of Slaughter from the Shadows.

They mentioned in their last Cata Q&A that they were getting rid of the weapon specializations that were +ArP or +Crit, but were likely to keep extra attacks like Hack n Slash (and make it work for all weapons). I'm surprised to see it gone as well. Although if they're trying to reduce our passive damage, I can see this making sense.

I don't think this is right.
Previously (Blizcon) it was announced that all those passive bonus talents would be stripped out.
But as we can all see those talents are mostly still there in every tree of every class.
So it's pretty obvious this is still very "alpha".

We will be forced to take utility talents.
We will get that passive bonus back via the mastery path (not implemented in these alpha trees).

At this point its mostly interesting from a "what changed" aspect not a "what is still the same".

I think it is very likely that further additions and tweaks are coming, the current state is likely just Blizzard trying out some of the changes they already more or less agreed on during the brainstorming phase or however you want to call it. A lot of talents are completely unchanged, and for some classes entire trees. There is also the "easier leveling" and "cut out the boring talents" bit that does not appear to be currently implemented at all so we will see a lot of further changes down the line.

It's still quite fun to finally get some more information on Cataclysm and it certainly does a bit to alleviate the boredom of WoW live for me.

Has anyone leaked the effect that haste has on energy regen?

The value of Restless Blades may depend a lot on this.

Getting away from the talents for a bit, some new enchants were also revealed, making for some speculation in regards to how much haste and mastery will factor into our builds, as well as some welcome enchants that make expertise, hit and run speed a little easier to factor around gems and gear stats. A few expected upgrades to existing enchants as well.

A few examples:

Enchant Weapon - Landslide - Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase attack power by 120 for 10 sec when striking in melee.

Enchant Weapon - Hurricane - Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase haste rating by 350 for 15 sec when casting spells or striking in melee.

Enchant Boots - Assassin's Step - Permanently enchant boots to increase movement speed slightly and Agility by 25.

Enchant Boots - Lavawalker - Permanently enchant boots to increase movement speed slightly and mastery rating by 35.

Enchant Boots - Mastery - Permanently enchant boots to increase mastery rating by 50.

Enchant Bracer - Greater Speed - Permanently enchant bracers to increase haste strike rating by 65.