A few new talents have found their way into the tree and a lot of things have moved around.

Assassination

Deadly Momentum After killing an opponent that yields experience or honor, gives you a 50% chance per talent point to refresh Slice and Dice or Recuperate to their original duration.

PVE/levelling talent, possibly of some use in BGs/5v5 but I’d rather skip it.

Blackjack Even after your sap wears off, its effects linger on enemies, reducing their damage done by 25%/50% for 5 seconds.

50% damage reduction for 5seconds after your sap wears off. With a lot of my saps going onto healers/classes that will start CCing as soon as sap wears off, this feels pretty pointless.

Improved Expose Armor Gives a 33%/66%/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability

3pts for free expose armor – even if EA remains a single level ability with a 20% armor reduction, this could well be worth investing points in.

Murderous Intent When you backstab an enemy that is at or below 35% health, you instantly recover 10/20/30 energy

Hmm…. nice for hunters using deterrence, but I don’t see this being better than mutilating with 3pts spent elsewhere, especially when you take the positional requirements of backstab into consideration.

Venomous Wounds Each time your rupture or garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 45% chance to deal X additional Nature damage

Supposedly deadling 1k+ extra damage after lvl82, this doesn’t look too impressive since it won’t scale with gear.

Vendeta Marks an enemy target for death, increasing all damage you deal to the target by 20%, and granting you unerring vision of your target, regardless of concealments such as stealth of invisibility

30 seconds of +20% damage, wow. The ability to ignore stealth? Double wow. HfB on acid, this looks like the ultimate rogue killer, especially since we won’t be able to instantly FoK rogues out of their vanishes anymore.

Unless you want to put points into Blackjack or Remorseless Attacks (meh to both), you’ll need to put at least two points into improving eviscerate. With Improved Expose Armor, I can’t see this being a bad thing.

Combat

Reinforced Leather Increases your armor contribution from cloth/leather by 10/20/30/40/50%

Interesting, but pointless vs magic damage and weak against ArPwhoring warriors/rogues. *
*Ñotorious points out that ArP is becoming a thing of the past in Cata, so with this talent physical damage will be mitigated more noticably than I’d thought (while poison damage will still hurt).

Restless Blades Your damaging finishing moves reduce the cooldown of your Bladeflurry, Killing Spree and Sprint abilities by 0.5secs per combo point.

This is going to make estimating the CD of Killing Spree a bit tricky.

With another two new talents in this tree that improve Recuperate plus the increase in armor, the survivability of combat rogues will be slightly buffed – a viable replacement for preparation? Time will tell.

Subtlety

Energetic Recovery Empowers your Recuperate ability, causing its periodic affect to also give 1 energy

Extra energy for when you’re in trouble. Perhaps the energy gained will be enough to get off a defensive gouge or stun. Could be used offensively with Overkill for some nice burst potential.

Dagger Specialization Increases crit chance with daggers by 1/2/3/4/5%

Freshly moved from the combat tree, this could be a nice boost to Focused Attacks.

Sanguinary Vein Increases your damage dealt to targets with a bleed by 2/4/6%

A passive HfB (I’m betting 10g that Blizz will be using this as the easy way to buff/nerf subtlety damage in future patches).

Serrated Blades Your eviscerate has a 4/8/12% chance per combo point to refresh your Rupture on the target to its initial duration

Combine with Sanguinary Vein for a potentially constant damage buff.

Initial Thoughts

It will be very interesting to see whether the large health pools promised in Cataclysm, combined with Recuperate, will negate the need for a rogue to take Preperation to stay viable. If rogues end up being forced to take x/x/23+ to be able to survive, it looks like additional point allocation will be very flexible.

My money will be on 51+/x/x Assassination specs taking over (Vendetta+either prep or combat pts). A more sturdy rogue is a more attractive/viable rogue, and this will possibly increase their representation. My feeling is that if there are more rogues in arenas/BGs, then Vendetta will become a priceless talent for scoring kills on other rogues. Since a buffed vanish that doesn’t instantly break on dmg/bugs will hopefully become quite a nice survival tool. I’m guessing that being able to cancel that out, and hit 20% harder to boot, will be a VERY strong way of spending talent points.

However, all of this is pure speculation so far on my account, and the trees may change as well. Regardless, it looks like the rogue class in PvP will be in for quite a shake up – a lot more so than TBC>WotLK.

With envenom putting out massive damage in comparison to eviscerate, you may be tempted to rely entirely on envenom as your finishing move. With 100% armor mitigation you should be hitting cloth and plate targets for similar amounts, but a couple of classes have abilities which will reduce this damage. The following guide assumes 3/3pts in Vile Poisons (essential talent).

Deadly Poison Doses (DPs)

While an envenom with 5DP does more damage than it does with 1DP, the difference is not horrendous and in most cases it can still output more damage than an eviscerate. The duration of the envenom debuff is based on the number of combo points you used, rather than the number of doses, so a 5CP envenom with 1DP will give you six seconds of +15% deadly poison application. This will help you reach 5/5DP doses faster, at which point your damage will hopefully shoot through the roof.

The following tests were done on a 0-resilience, unbuffed stationary target (ok, 30mins of hitting a training dummy while I watched TV). While the numbers themselves don’t mean too much, it does show the differences between doses/attacks, and why opening with a 1DP envenom can be more beneficial than eviscerating.

Eviscerate
Normal: 2548
Crit: 5377

Eviscerate with 3pts in Improved Eviscerate
Normal: 3058
Crit: 6452

Envenom with 1DP
Normal: 3183
Crit: 6550

Envenom with 5DP
Normal: 4314
Crit: 8904

Envenom with 5 doses of Deadly Poison, minus Nether Protection
Normal: 3020
Crit: 6232

Even with three talent points spent improving the damage, an eviscerate was not hitting harder than a 1DP envenom.

Eviscerate beats Envenom when….

Death Knight

Anti Magic Shell. Not exactly hard to miss – any target under this purple dome will take 75% less damage from your envenoms. Spamming envenoms onto the DK will cap his runic power, so either pool your energy or try another finishing move (bear in mind that a 1.2k eviscerate probably won’t stress his healer too much).

Destruction Warlocks

Despite a lot of forum posts saying the opposite, Nether Protection DOES NOT proc from your envenoms or poison applications. The only time Nether Protection could be an issue is if you have a partner casting nature spells onto the warlock (which could trigger a 30% damage reduction on envenom).

Rogues

With most rogues playing with 3pts in Master Poisoner, your deadly poison needs to be reapplied every six seconds before it drops off. Combine this with their stuns, evasions plus cloak of shadow, and you’ll have problems keeping a stack alive on any decent rogue. While this DPS loss is annoying, what can be even more fatal is not being able to shiv wound/crippling poison (unless you’re playing with deadly on your main hand, which requires a 1.4speed mainhand dagger to be truely viable). Not being able to shiv wound poison onto a rogue with evasion can cancel out the dps advantage of your envenoms. If you can stunlock the rogue then deadly poison/envenoms are useful, but once the rogue leaves the stun it’s worth weapon-swapping to another offhand dagger with wound poison applied.

Appologies for the slackness with updates, the last month has been chaos with barely enough time to play. Things are quietening down now and our new 3v3 seems decent enough (despite having scary amounts of furious gear!).

PVP Hit Mechanics – The Basics

All of your special attacks (mutilate, envenom, rupture etc) have a 95% chance to hit a target when you’re standing behind them. Increasing the amount of hit you have by 32.79 will increase your chance to hit by 1%. You initially need to have 164 hit rating just to make sure that you have no chance of missing your target with special attacks.

Hit Reduction Talents/Racials

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are several talents/debuffs/racials that affect your chance to hit;

• Quickness Passive racial skill of Night Elves, -2%
• Insect Swarm Even though this is a talent in the Balance tree, it’s not unusual to see Resto Druids with this ability, -3%
• Scorpid Sting Hunter ability, -3%
• Arctic Winds Mage talent, not widely used, -1% upto -5%
• Heroic Presence Draenei passive buff, +1%

In a worst-case scenario, you could be trying to hit a Frost Mage with insect swarm and a sting on you (they do stack) – without any hit rating you will have a 16% chance to miss. You could ‘fix’ this by taking 524 hit rating, but this would nerf your damage/survivability in the majority of games.

How Much Hit Rating for Rogues?

Ideally in 3v3 I like to run with between 6% and 7% as this is enough to counter some hit modifiers and also help lessen the impact of some of the more noticeable ones. In 2v2 there’s less chance to bump into a racial/class that will debuff your hit rating, so you may want to stick to 5% and trust your luck.

Where Should +Hit Come From?

You can reach 148 hit from the Season 8 PVP gear and a weapon chain;

• Wrathful Gladiator’s Pendant of Victory 60
• Wrathful Gladiator’s Cloak of Victory 60
• Titanium Weapon Chain 28

One of the following two rings can help increase your hit further;

• Ashen Band of … Vengeance 53 – 59
• Relentless Gladiator’s Band of Victory 50

If you’re really struggling, a Titan-Forged Rune of Accuracy will give a massive 95 hit rating. Also from Wintergrasp are the Furious-quality Titan-Forged Leather Legguards of Triumph.

Other options involve hitting the PVE content (or buying a Wodin’s Lucky Necklace if you’re rich), and as a last resort you can get another 12 hit by enchanting your boots with Icewalker.

Your Blind Missed?

Missing with your 5pt envenom can be annoying, but what can often be game-breaking is when your blind misses. Blind counts as a ranged attack, so if you’re planning to blind a target, there are a couple of additional modifiers. Retri Paladins can gain a -4% modifier from Divine Purpose and many rogues spec into heightened senses, which also gives the same hit reduction against your blind. That’s not too bad, it’s just one of those things you have to live with. However what some people don’t realise is that evasion works against blind, giving a 25% hit penalty. More likely than not your blind will hit rather than miss, but it can pay to remember the extra miss chance that evasion gives (especially in 2v2 when a double-dps team is bursting down your healer and trying to keep you CC’d).

There are plenty of ways of reaching the hit-cap, you just need to find a balanced way of doing so without hurting your other stats too much. If all else fails, maybe convince your partner to reroll as a Draenei!

* The base damage bonus from Hunger for Blood has been reduced from 10% to 5%.
* The bonus damage rogues gain from attack power for poisons has been decreased. This applies to Instant Poison, Deadly Poison, and Wound Poison.

This is live as we speak, and as far as I can predict, pretty much kills the viability of HfB combos. Poison damage has been reduced by 10%, not a huge nerf and at least they haven’t touched envenom.

Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%. We wanted to increase Assassination rogue damage, and we were succesful, but we overshot the mark. We buffed Hunger for Blood back when Assassination needed a damage boost, so we’re more than happy that this talent won’t account for such a huge dps increase. Because of the nature of hotfixes, it is unlikely the tooltip will change to 10% right away.

On the positive side, it could have been a lot worse. At least 44/2/25 and 42/5/23 builds will remain as strong as they current are, so for the majority of PVPing assassination rogues, this is one PVE fix that won’t floor us.

I was never really sure which talents stacked with others, but luckily the MonkeySpeed addon shows you exactly how fast you’re moving.

I’m guessing Fleet Footed stacks with Camouflage, but not with Sprint, because Camouflage is a penalty reducer rather than a speed boost.

You’ll never be able to get your stealthed sprint speed to match that of a mounted target*, but travelling stealthed at 170% (combined with a distract) really increases your chances of catching them.

In comparison, these are the speeds your targets will be running at;

* The speed modifiers are accumulative. 100 -30% +30% equals 91 not 100.

For a rough idea of PPM with the different weapon speeds, I spent 30mins auto-attacking a training dummy with three different weapons. The test is far from ideal as it doesn’t factor in time you spend kiting, (and I didn’t use Slice’n'Dice or Mutilate) but the results are enough to make me consider swapping my Mutilator for a Murder. The faster the speed the better, as your shivs will cost less energy and Focused Attacks will proc more often from the extra chances you get to crit.

1.4 speed – 12 procs per minute
1.6 speed – 9.2 procs per minute
1.8 speed – 6.8 procs per minute

If running with a 1.4 dagger means not having to shiv at all, it might be worth main-handing deadly and keeping wound on the offhand instead. This would give back the ability to shiv crippling when you’re peeling (or chasing form-switching druids), but unfortunately this is probably something better suited to high-level raiders, as there are no fast mainhand daggers available from PVP. If someone is able to try this out, please let me know how you get on with keeping 5/5 deadly doses applied!

All in all, I’m more than happy with the buffs to Master Poisoner and Envenom – with a full stack of deadly and plenty of combo points you can really burn peoples HP. Who needs ArP when you can put out 7k crits on plate!

Apologies for the wierd post I made earlier today – I was playing around with Spotify and accidentally created a tweet for a random album, which was picked up by WordPress and inserted into this blog……

Master Poisoner – Increases the critical hit chance of all attacks made against any target you have poisoned by 3%, reduces the duration of all Poison effects applied to you by 50%, increases the bonus chance to apply Deadly Poison when Envenom is used by an additional 45%, and gives Envenom a 33/66/100% chance to not consume Deadly Poison.

The ‘massive’ buff that has got me feeling pretty hopeful for HfB in PVP during S7 is the little amendment to the end. 100% chance to not consume deadly poison!

I play as HfB at the moment since it makes a very big difference against plate teams. Not only will this new buff mean more damage from having DP tick (and hopefully let you envenom much more often), all those doses of DP should help your wound poisons avoid being dispelled.

To make this even more attractive, damage from envenom is also being buffed a little as well.

Envenom’s scaling has been increased from 7% to 9% of attack power per combo point.

The chance that you are spotted is influenced by your Stealth Level and your opponents’ Detection Level – the only other things that affect it are the direction that your target is facing (never forget, “Rogues do it from behind”) and how much lag you both have.

If your connection is worse than the other rogue’s, you will appear on their screen before they appear on yours. It might be coincidental but I find that if I am sprinting in stealth I tend to get the jump more often, and I seem to get jumped more times when the other rogue is sprinting. I guess sprinting increases the advantage/disadvantage of the lag effect. Perhaps.

Rogue Stealth Level

There are a couple of other items as well, but these are low level and seriously damage your stats.

Stealth Detection

This is also determined by your level (5pts per level) + modifications from the following;

The worst combination of opponents you can get is a human rogue engineer with 2/2 in Heightened Senses, standing next to a Voidwalker with the Consume Shadows buff active. Their stealth detection level increases by 81pts – however, with 3/3 in Master of Deception, if you pre-vanish (vanish whilst in stealth before you get close to your target) you will still have a slight advantage compared to the other rogue. Risky though, it can be a waste of a ~very~ useful cooldown…

While a Mutilate/Prep build can offer a big increase to survivability and mobility through double vanish/evasion/sprint, against plate/healer teams it seems to struggle in terms of damage output. One alternative that we’re playing around with at the moment is a full Assassination build with emphasis on damage output and armor mitigation. This build relies heavily on you being able to take an absolute kicking at the start, so Deadened Nerves, high resilience and a competant healer are, to us, pretty much a necessity. We’re currently trying out 52/5/14, though we’ll be experimenting with using Ruthlessness to make Cut to the Chase easier to benefit from (maybe opening with Garrote, Hunger for Blood, then Slice’n'Dice, and hoping for Ruthlessness to give a free combo-point for a quick envenom/eviscerate).

Advantages

Damage, damage and more damage. With +18% extra damage on all attacks from Hunger for Blood (glyphed), +3% crit and the increased rate of procs from Master Poisoner, plus either a self-refreshing Slice’n'Dice or extra damage/energy regen from other talents, this spec has the ability to hit like a truck.

Disadvantages

Say goodbye to preparation and heightened senses. Unless you are suicidal confident enough to pre-vanish when the gates go up, you will definitely be at an initial disadvantage vs stealth teams. More times than not their rogue WILL find you if you leave it long enough. Without preparation you’re likely to have a rogue breathing down your neck constantly to begin with; a rogue able to dodge most of what you throw at him for 30seconds and who potentially has one more opener than you.

Tactics and Thoughts

Against rogue/X teams, it feels that the most important part is surviving the starting burst. If you can stay alive until after the other rogue’s second evasion/vanish, you’re home dry. Rather than trying to find their rogue, you may want to accept that you’ll be spotted first and just jump their partner instead. A garrote will let you use Hunger for Blood straight away and you should be able to knock some health/mana off the partner before the rogue has the chance to Cheap Shot you. Try and predict how far away the rogue is from their partner – as soon as you pop up waving your daggers around, expect their rogue to head straight for you. If you can time a lucky Fan of Knives… well you’ve just saved your healer a lot of work and cost their rogue a valuable opening move.

Against plate and trees, use Master Poisoner to your advantage. I usually run with deadly poison on my mainhand and wound poison for the offhand (so you can shiv crippling when needed).

Restofariann over on http://arenajunkies.com has a lot to say about this spec (from a resto-druid’s perspective) and his thread on the subject is a very good read (http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=84046).

While mutilate specs are still viable (and sometimes preferred because of the lack of dots you put on your target, Master Poisoner is now the main spec seen in arenas.

Mutilate-prep

Season 6 may have only just begun, but by the looks of it there is one spec dominating the arenas – 41/5/25. It’s early days still, but currently RP is back at the top of 2v2s and RMP is leading the way again 3v3*.

When speccing for mutilate-prep, there is still a large amount of flexibility to be had with point distribution. The choice of filler talents is quite high, so you can really pick a spec to match your team/gear.

41/5/25 seems to deliver decent sustained damage, but if general survival is an issue you may want to put points into Nerves of Steel (possibly even Sleight of Hand if you are are being burst down too fast).

Key talents

Assassination tree

• Puncturing Wounds
• Fleet Footed
• Quick Recovery (if you have a healer ofc)
• Seal Fate
• Deadly Brew
• Mutilate

Combat

• Dual Wield Specialization

Subtlety

• Opportunity
• Dirty Tricks
• Elusiveness
• Heightened Senses
• Preparation
• Dirty Deeds

*source: SK Gaming