Rogue 1.12 Preview

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Drysc starts it off here (this post reached 10 pages within about 5 minutes). Snippits:

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The following talents have been removed: Improved Deadly Poison, Improved Distract, Throwing Weapon Specialization, Improved Vanish, and Rapid Concealment.

All either gone for good or combined with something else

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Improved Instant Poison is now "Improved Poisons" and increases your chance to apply ALL poisons by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Will also help with Wound, Mind Numbing, and Crippling besides what we could just talent before. The crippling can be a big help in PvP as it is our main anti-kite.

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Rapid Concealment has been merged with Camouflage, by combining these talents you not only get a great talent to start off the tree, but obviously it frees up a number of points to be spent elsewhere.

Ironically this doesn't make me want Camouflage anymore currently (I'm 3 MoD, 2 Camo right now). I still want them equally, the addition of Rapid Concealment is simply not a help because I'm almost always in combat longer than it takes for the stealth cooldown anyway.

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Murder will now also apply to all finishing moves. The benefit this will provide to output and attack combinations is fairly straightforward.

Nice bonus, but still useless once you get enough +hit elsewise (my openers and finishers don't miss, only my melee attacks do).

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Vile Poisons now gives your poisons a chance to resist dispel effects, in addition to increasing poison damage.

This combined with Improved Poisons can be very powerful PvP wise.

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Improved Kidney Shot has been changed, and will instead increase the damage taken by the target while they are affected by Kidney Shot. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Kidney Shot.

Interesting change. Will have to see numbers for how useful it is. At the least, it's not a counter-productive talent anymore.

Imp KS used to reduce cooldown below 15 seconds, meaning if you actually used it you were subjecting yourself to diminishing returns.

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Improved Sprint has been changed, and will instead have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you activate your Sprint ability. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Sprint.

While I can see the value of it, there's no way I'm taking it still.

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Improved Evasion renamed to Endurance, and will add a Sprint cooldown reduction.

Another PvP-only talent.

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New talent Weapon Expertise in the Combat tree, increases your weapon skill with all melee weapons. The recovery of damage with an increased weapon skill should be a good boost to overall output.

This here is the gem. This is the single most important change, PvE wise. For sword/mace rogues, it means they can keep up to Humans in DPS. For dagger rogues, it means we can finally get rid of Aged Core Leather Gloves and Mugger's Belt without seeing a drop in DPS.

The big question is where in the tree? Combat tree is already loaded with talents, if they stick this down in the only hole they created (Imp Throwing Weapon), they've managed to destroy the delicate balance between Daggers and Swords, as reasonable dagger builds can't go this far into Combat.

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Initiative is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75% end chance to add an additional combo point.

PvP again.

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Elusiveness is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75 sec cooldown reduction to Evasion, Blind, and Vanish.

With all these changes to cooldown-based talents I'm wondering what a cooldown based PvP build would be like in 1.12 ...

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Ghostly Strike now has a reduced Energy cost, the reduction of Energy was enough to make it necessary to also reduce the damage output slightly.

Another PvP idea.

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Improved Garrotes damage reduction will be removed. This is being changed as part of an overall improvement for Garrote.

Will have to see the overall change, but it's good that this talent will no longer sacrifice DPS for a minimal overall damage increase.

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Setup is being moved higher up in the tree, becoming a 16 point talent with no prerequisites, helping move the talent in reach of specific builds.

Still a leveling/soloing only talent, in my eyes. Just easier to get now.

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New talent Heightened Senses in the subtlety tree, increases your Stealth detection, and reduces the chance for you to be hit by spells and ranged attacks.

Ouch ... the one talent every rogue will want but won't be able to reach?

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Hemorrhage will be moved up in the tree to become a 21 point talent. This should help to place the ability in a more reachable position, and allow for a little more versatility with specific talent builds.

Will need to see the new trees. Hemo isn't worth it now because it sacrifices the chance to get way too many damage talents along the way. Is 5 less a big enough change?

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New talent Deadliness in the Subtlety tree, increases your Attack Power by a percentage.

Ah, here's the Subtlety bandaid ala Hunter's Survival Lighting Reflexes. Try to make an entire tree better because of one sick talent. Again, will have to see the trees to check out builds ...

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Premeditation will have its Energy requirement removed, changed to an instant cast, and range increased. Its cooldown will remain the same. Premeditation will now be pre-reqd by Preperation.

Wonder if any reasonable rogue build will use it yet ...

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Vanish will now remove effects that allow the caster to remain aware of the rogues presence, such as Mind Vision and Hunters Mark.

Huh, imagine that. A counter-counter, finally.

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Garrote, Rupture, and Eviscerate are being increased in damage. More details to come.

Hopefully none of them are static anymore.

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Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.

... but will it stack with Sunder Armor? This could be a huge PvP change. A great buff versus protection warriors in particular. It's still meaningless in PvE if we can't use it with Sunder Armor.

Overall, tons of PvP based changes, especially of the cooldown variety. Cold Blood / Preparation looks to be outdated for PvP now. I'm worried about the PvE aspect, though. Unless that +weapon skill talent is reachable, the best overall build (Combat Daggers) got exactly zero improvements, the second best (Combat Swords) balanced Humans with everyone else, and all the others still won't reach the levels of these two. In which case we're just back to the "DPS + utility" argument again.

Particularly sobering is no change to Lethality. Before every rogue looked at it and said "NEED". Scaling is pushing it out the door though. Recent mathcraft has put it at about a .9% total damage increase per talent point if you're using Backstab. That's below the standard 1% per talent overall, and way below 2% per talent specialized (think Mage Fire/Frost) guidlines Blizzard has typically followed.

Is Initiative really the only talent that has a reduced talent point cost, now?

I'm really hoping the unannounced changes finish this off. PvP is good now, maybe too good, but that wasn't what I wanted changed. There's still holes.

Edit: I give up. Quote refuses to work, but Code does. It's staying as code.