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.

Deadly Poison: In addition to its existing effects, when a rogue applies Deadly Poison to a target which has already reached the maximum number of applications, this will also trigger the poison which the rogue is using on his or her other weapon.

Improved Poisons: Bonus chance to trigger Deadly Poison from this talent increased.

I’m guessing this is aimed at encouraging PVE rogues to not bother ‘exploiting’ poison procs with a weapon swap script – it’s a shame Improved Poisons isn’t really viable for PVP, but hey a bit more burst vs plate sounds more fun than the previous rogue changes promised in 3.3. I was excited to see another ten changes mentioned for the rogue class, but alas they’re just updates to tooltip info.

Meh, have had a bad week in arenas – played a total of two games. Our mage has gone offline for 6months and my 2v2 partner is having some well deserved time-out. Hopefully next week will be better, if not I’ll try and get over my fear/hatred of 5v5s. Otherwise, it’s either TOGC25 or levelling my 5th rogue (Lastrogue, thought I’d give levelling a Subtlety tailor a try, based on this Slice’n'Dice guide).

Firstly, where did the vanish fix go? Guess it’s still WIP, I would have liked to have given it a try on the PTR before it was removed, but oh well. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but since transfering server and starting playing again, I’ve not had vanish fail when it shouldn’t have done.
Rogue changes for the next patch are a bit crap, but hey, at least we’re not being nerfed?

• Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.
• Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.

Game breaking

Secondly, looks like WotF is in for a hit.

Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc.

With nearly half of the top 100 players rolling as undead at the moment (and 67/100 undead rogues), I’m not surprised Blizz are nerfing Will of the Forsaken (considering how quick they were to nerf fear/blind combos after a few days of priest+rogue domination).

Is the change justified though? In 2v2s WotF hurts, but since Blizz is supposed to be balancing arenas for 3v3/5v5, is this just a knee-jerk reaction to a popular race choice? I’d be interested in seeing what percentage of high-rated undead were top100 players before they changed race.

Lastly, there’s this semi-trivial change coming that I hadn’t noticed at first;

• Top-level helm and shoulder faction-related enchants are now available as Bind-on-Account items that do not require any faction to use once purchased (they still require the appropriate faction level to purchase).

It’s come too late for me, but this is pretty cool for anyone levelling up an alt to PVP with – no more mindless rep grinding with pointless factions

I’ll be back on track now, will try and get more “Know Your Enemy” notes uploaded as soon as I can.

*Moving house, losing internet, transfering server to Chromaggus, losing internet again, getting roped into some raiding, being very busy at work and having to start up 2v2 and 3v3 with new partners…. it all adds up to a lot of downtime :/