The coming Rogue Changes in 2.0

As listed in the official patch notes and on the World of Raids Forum these are the documented and undocumented changes that will come to the Rogue Class.

• Rogues will no longer aggro targeted mobs that have not been attacked when their "Stealth" cooldown expires.
• "Anesthetic Poison" is now properly available at level 68 at the rogue trainers.
• Stunning an NPC will no longer cause the message "You must be behind your target" when rogues properly try to use abilities behind a target.
• The talent, "Dagger Specialization", will now use the appropriate crit chance.
• Unofficial: Improved Backstab moved to tier 2 Assassination.
• Unofficial: Improved Slice and Dice moved to tier 2 Combat.
• Unofficial: Surprise Attacks changed to "Your finishing moves can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".
• Unofficial: Improved Sap and Elusiveness have swapped tiers.
• Unofficial: Improved Sap now 2 ranks, 50%/100%.
• Unofficial: Preparation changed to "When activated, this ability instantly refreshes the cooldown on your Evasion, Sprint, Vanish, Cold Blood, Adrenaline Rush, and Premeditation abilities." Goodbye double Cloak of Shadows/Blind in arenas.
• Unofficial: Cloak of Shadows is now 1 minute cooldown instead of 2.
• Unofficial: Evasion ranged attack avoidance reduced from 50% to 25%.
• Unofficial: Blind changed to 3 minute cooldown from 5 minutes(is this new? never noticed it before).
• Unofficial: Wound Poison (all ranks) has been changed. Now has a 30% chance to instantly deal damage(increases with poison rank), and reduce healing effects used on target by 10% for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

The latest changes with the reduction of the effect of +weaponskill gave us Mace Rogues already a 20% reduction of DPS in raids. On a short explanation +5 weaponskill reduced the damage reduction from glancing blows and increased the crit chance by 0,04%. Now the crit chance will be 0,1% and no effect on glancing blows. So we will drop 20% in raid damage and get a meager 0,06% increased crit chance.

Especially races like Humans with +weaponskill to swords / maces are affected since it was their only real good racial. Also talents which give +weaponskill are now worthless since they were balanced with their old effects. For us mace rogues that means we get 5% chance to stun mobs (which are immune in instances anyhow) and also 5 Skill = 0,5% crit chance versus monsters that are higher level than us for 5 talent points.

As a quick reminder: Here is the damage reduction table at the WoWWiki.

Now the next change comes. Our decent 41 Point combat talent "Surprise Attacks" has been significantly changed:

Old: "Your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".

New: "Your finishing moves can no longer be dodged, and the damage dealt by your Backstab, Gouge, Shiv, and Sinister Strike abilities is increased by 8%".

If You read this You have to wonder if Blizzard ever played a combat Rogue. Combat Rogues do not really have burst damage and rely on constant damage which means that combat rogues finisher is mostly Slice and Dice and that one cannot be dodged at all. So where is the sugar for us in Surprise Attacks?

As I understand it the 41 point talents make You sacrifice talents from other trees in order to be able to get the crown-talent of Your tree, which should fully fit in there. But surprise attacks is totally off.

Its not like we do not already have the most useless tree of all, but with removal of +weaponskill and an obviously totally misdesigned 41 point talent what does it mean for our future?