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.

Worgens have a racial ability called Darkflight, which allows the worgen to temporarily increase their movement speed by 70%, and can be used every three minutes. Other worgen racials include a passive 1% increase to all damage, reduced duration from the effects of curses and disease…

Goblins get a rocket belt with two abilities on a 3min cooldown – the first ability enables the player to jump up to 20 yards, while the other shoots rockets at an enemy player within 30 yards. Additional passive goblin racials include a permanent 1% increase to attack and casting speed.

As a rogue I’d rather have an extra sprint than a disengage, and reduced duration of curses/diseases sounds like a nice added extra. More on the classes/changes here.