As well as giving excellent damage vs plate targets, the new changes to Deadly Poison (and Master Poisoner) also give you a large amount of flexibility with the point allocation. The typical point distributions are 44/2/25 and 44/4/23 though there is a fair amount of flexibility when it comes to the talents you pick, allowing you to balance your talent build around your team, your tactics and your gear.
Assassination
Assassination Talents
Yellow Talents – Essentials (twenty-nine points)
These are the essential talents you can’t afford to skip when making an Envenom build.
Red Talents – six points
To unlock the later tiers, you’ll need to spend six points here. Theoretically you could assign more, but it’s generally regarded that the later talents are more valuable.
Improved Eviscerate – It’s a lot harder to keep Deadly Poison stacked on another rogue (thanks to their Master Poisoner, CloS and being kited) so you’ll probably be falling back on eviscerate to deal finisher damage. If rogue teams are hurting you, taking this talent and carrying a second dagger with wound poison on can help balance things out.
Ruthlessness – For back-to-back envenoms. This is a personal favorite of mine, as with a bit of luck you can envenom, then mutilate, then 4pt envenom again (thanks to the ruthlessness proc followed by a mutilate crit). Also nice for applying 1pt ruptures to rogues, with a 60% of another combo point after the rupture.
Lethality – Your mutilate/gouge will crit for more – not as powerful as it sounds, but a safe choice for three points.
Purple Talents – Four/Five points
Improved Poisons – The faster you can reach five applications of Deadly Poison (and keep them stacked), the faster you can start ripping into your target. I really recommend going for 5/5 in this talent, though several very good rogues are playing with 4/5 (and who am I to argue! 
). A point saved here can be dropped into any of the following green talents.
Green Talents – Four points
Quick Recovery – Pretty essential for most comps other than double-dps in 2v2. Even if you’re rarely being focused, you’ll probably be taking damage from dots/aoe etc and the free energy gained vs rogues/warriors/prots is noticable.
Improved Kidney Shot – With a team that is capable of unloading extreme burst (for example, rogue/ret/priest with an aggresive priest) you’re looking at a lot of extra pressure from this talent. For 2v2 teams (or 3v3 teams with toothless resto-healers) you’ll likely be better off concentrating on increasing your own DPS rather than your partners, as you’re now bringing a lot of damage to the table in comparrison to the traditional 41/5/25 specs.
Deadened Nerves – For times when your survivability is an issue. I would rather increase my resilience than spend talent points, but if you lack the gear (or are getting rolled even with 1000 resilience) this will be a help.
Focused Attacks / Find Weakness – Two points in FW will give more dps than two points in FA in a PVP environment. Taking three points in FA makes it viable, but at the cost of a lost point.
Subtlety / Combat
Subtlety/Combat
Red Talents – Six points
Camouflage – Faster movement and quicker restealthing (useful for sap>cheapshot>restealth tricks).
Serrated Blades – As much as I try, I just can’t become enthusiastic about this talent. A reduction of 640 armor (when a large chunk of our damage bypasses it) is a very low buff. I only use rupture to stop rogues from stealthing so increasing the damage it does seems a trivial buff.
Ghostly Strike – I don’t know of any rogues who use this talent with an assassination spec, but I’ll be experimenting with it after christmas (as soon as I’ve found a spare keybinding!).
Setup – While the free combos can be great (especially for back-to-back envenoms), this can backfire and actually cost you points. Unless you play with mouseover dismantle/focus/blind macros, there’s a chance you will generate a combo on the wrong person, losing the ones you have on your target. You can get around this in the 2v2 bracket by always using focus macros, but in 3v3/5v5 you may need to manually switch target, risking the generation of a combo point on the warrior you were about to disarm.
Initiative – Assuming you’ve already taken Camouflage, Initiative is the best of a mediocre bunch. This is only a reliable bonus when you opening with garrote (as you’re likely to waste the +1 from Kidney Shot when your Mutilate crits), but hey, it’s better than a rupture buff or 2% crit reduction!
Green Talents – Four points
Heightened Senses – If you’re NightElf/Human, have a decent connection, and feel confident that you can avoid being sapped, skip this talent. Likewise, if your team’s tactics involve keeping you safely hidden until their rogue is forced to help his half-dead teammates, consider spending your last two points elsewhere.
Dual Wield Specialization – A flat damage increase to your auto-attacks and mutilates. The norm at the moment is to spend two points if you take Heightened Senses, or four points otherwise.
Deadliness – When you absolutely, positively got to maximise the damage from envenom, this is the way forward. A flat AP increase will benefit all of your attacks and poison damage, though theorycrafting is indicating that points in Dual Wield Spec will give higher dps. If you’re queueing against nothing but plate teams, I have a feeling that 4% increased AP will be more beneficial than mitigated extra damage from your auto-attacks/mutilates from DWS, but this is purely guess-work and I wouldn’t personally risk it.
Bootnote
As well as wanting to have a play with Ghostly Strike (I’ll skip Heightened Senses and go 3/5 in Dual Wield Specialization), I’m also considering trying 3/3 Find Weakness + 3/5 in Cut to the Chase, at the loss of DWS/HS.
I’m wondering if the 60% chance of refreshing S’n'D combined with lucky Ruthlessness procs will give enough extra haste/Deadly Poison procs to outdps the gains I’d get from +40% offhand damage. At the moment I only really use S’n'D for when we hard-switch targets and I’d like to see the difference 100% S’n'D makes in an arena environment.
excellent and i agree with all but one thing…
serrated blades. i think you might be misunderstanding what it says about armor. it reduces the atrmor your your target, whatever that target may be, by 8, and it increases with your level…
so thats 8 x 80, 640 armor reduction. anyway… yes, 3 points for 640 armor reduction is crap, initiative is way better
Ahh I don’t think I put it very clear hehe, I meant that a huge amount of our damage bypasses armor
I’ll add a bit more to it so it makes more sense, thanks!
For a complete rogue noob could you tell me what a basic envenom rotation is and what poisons i should have on mh and Oh plz.
Many thanks.
I would go initiative for a double dps team or an aggressive 3v3 like rmp,but for a 2v2 with an healer I prefer setup a lot, in particular if you manage to let their melee focus you. You get a huge benefit that way. Initiative,even in the best situation,instead, is just a marginal gain.
I am having a bit of trouble with this build. Even with 5/5 improved poisons with just deadly on offhand and either wound or instant on main hand i still have trouble getting 5 doses of deadly on players even after i have gone through cheap shot and kidney shot. sometimes i might finish my stun without a single dose of deadly on the target.
meaning i cannot use my envenom, meaning.. im sitting there being forced to use eviscerate. but i dont have any points in improved eviscerate and if i didnt have my glyph for it it would be even worse since it only ever crits when i use cold blood.
so… what am i doing wrong? only way i can guarantee 5 doeses of deadly after a stun to pull of a big crit of envenom is to put deadly on both weapons, but now i dont have any crippling on the target, making it alot harder to kite and cc the player.
You can envenom with only a couple of DP doses if needed, it will still hit harder than eviscerate on plate. Plus, once you have envenomed, you’ll get +15% chance of proccing more DP, which should speed things up a little. I’ve not had problems getting at least a couple of DP up on the target during my stun so far – I’m using slowMH-instant and fastOH-deadly.
Try using weapon swap macros. A MH weapon swap macro that will allow you to proc WP and CP then swap it to a dagger in your bag carring DP. this requires an extra dagger in your bag, but it works. Also if you just swap MH and OH, I find DP proc’s a lot more frequently. There’s tons out there on the subject.. for example: http://www.wowwiki.com/Useful_macros_for_rogues
or http://www.arenajunkies.com/macros/rogue/#tar18
Don’t forget the macro section here..it rocks