That’s a debuff utility for more poison users and makes using daggers a little more viable other than deep assassination.

Like Spoon said, rogues are a dps class. You shouldn’t have to spec your dps class to do dps. You should spec your dps class that allows you to dps in the way you find most enjoyable.

If anything I think the major lean is going to be at taking the cookie cutter styles and breaking it up a little like the redundancy of added hit or crit or flat damage or block or health. I’d love to see dagger spec changed to grant armor piercing when using daggers or some special proc like double poison effects or something when using daggers for assassination. Just ideas guys.

There were many other extremely worthless talents that have long since been cut out of the sub tree (and a few that were removed from combat and assassination), but I remember improved distract because it was by far the worst of them all because it actually made the ability it was supposed to enhance worse.

If you really enjoy combat, I have good news for you: rogues have been mashing SS through Vanilla, TBC and WotLK, chances are quite high youll be mashing SS through Cataclysm as well. There is no point to being scared that your DPS will be gimped because of this change – history has proven that generally speaking, rogues always have done pretty damn well for single target DPS, so no worries on that front either.

So, tell me, how is removing bloat talents, and having more choice in the skills you get to use and how you play your toon, a bad thing? Please explain, because it just sounds to me you have no confidence that bliz know wtf they are doing. It sounds like you are simply afraid of change. As I said in my earlier post, change is good, change keeps the game fun. As the game evolves, so should the players gamestyle. If I wanted to play a game that never changed, I’d be playing counterstrke. :p

Passive talents might be boring, but I’d rather have 20 “boring” passive talents than 20 goofy, hair-brained attempts at “interesting” talents. A very small handful of players love the sub tree, and almost all of them are PvP’ers – most of the players who try and talk me down when I badmouth sub either play other classes or are total noobs to the rogue class. There is a reason the vast majority of players won’t touch the sub tree – sub as it is right now is only good for ganking. It doesn’t give you high DPS, it doesn’t make you a terror in a battleground, it doesn’t help at all in raiding. What it does is make you extremely annoying in Arenas. That’s pretty much it.

If you want a bunch of goofy, worthless, “interesting” talents, then specc for sub. I’d rather stick with the boring old combat tree and spam sinister strike and put out DOUBLE the DPS that anyone speccing sub will be able to put out.

As for the discussion at hand, the rogue as a CLASS should be putting out the DPS that you get with assassination and combat. Three different talent trees for a pure class should be just that, 3 different ways to achieve the same goal. Assassination screams high burst front loaded DPS with the goal of being an assassin, 1 hit kill – poisons – snipers – that kind of thing. Sub is the silent killer, the guy coming out of the shadow, the guy being able to manipulate stealth so you can’t tell if he’s a ghost or a living being. Combat to me screams ninja, that’s the blade master, the guy with 1,000 tools of death at his disposal and the dexterity and agility to be all over the place all at once.

All three should be true to the rogue as a pure class and give great DPS output. It would be amazing if combat and assassination gave up their endless passive talents and instead it was rolled up into the core of the class. The fact that at level 80 a combat rogue (and honestly speaking, I’m a combat rogue right now as it’s awesome for leveling) is still using sinister strike feels a little meh in design. It also kinda sucks that you MUST put min. 5 points into assassination always for the 5% crit, and 5 into combat for the hit and 5 again for the offhand damage, and then 5 in sub for Relentless Strikes.

Only partly true. For a time, HaT was the best Raid dps spec in the game, outdamaging Hfb and combat by a fair margin, but it was very dependant on your party setup and having a full set of melee dps raidbuffs. It was also somewhat luckbased, but even so, for a time, it was great raid dps until bliz fixed it, understandably so.

Your reasoning behind “dont fix it, it works fine” is archaic. You think because bliz mix up the talent trees and make the picking of talents more fun, that your DPS will be gimped as a result? Wah, wah, dont fix my passive talents, they bosot my dps a lot, wah! Gimme a break, youll be doing dps fine, they will find other ways to boost everyones dps fine without the need of bloat passive filler talents. L2adapt, its what makes the damn game fun.