Cataclysm Rogue Preview

As you should already know, we were given a preview of Cataclysm talents for a few select classes, one of them being us rogues.

I could try and analyse these to death but since it's only a preview and Blizzard is looking for early feedback on them, I'd rather wait until I can try them out myself when I get into the Beta (Ssshh, it's a strategy *hint blizzard: gief beta inv*)

Anyway, the talent trees are being juggled with a bit, some talents move across the trees, others just move up and down tiers within a tree. Hunger For Blood is gone, as was announced, and we get a new skill that smells of Hunter's Mark (First we get a misdirect and now a hunter's mark, hmmm ...).

There are some talents that beg for attention, though. For example ..


Improved Expose Armor (3 points)
Gives a 33/67/100% chance to refund all combo points used when performing your Expose Armor ability.


Deep in the Assassination tree. With this talent Expose Armor only costs 25 energy to apply. Probably intended for PvP, but who knows.


Venomous Wounds (3 points)
Each time your Rupture or Garrote deals damage to an enemy that is afflicted with your poison, you have a 15/30/45% chance to deal with 616/619/621 additional Nature damage.


Also deep in Assassination tree. No more Ruptureless cycles for Muti rogues, I suppose *sadface*


Vendetta (1 point)
Marks an enemy 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 and Invisibility. Lasts 30 seconds.


The replacement for Hunger for Blood. No cost given at the moment, half the duration of Hunger for Blood. At the moment it's even more powerful than the previous incarnation of Hunger for Blood, so I suspect that 20% to go down.


Reinforced Leather (5 points)
Increases your armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 10/20/30/40/50%.

A strange talent in the middle of the combat tree. No PvE use whatsoever unless we're going to be tanking so I suppose this is to make combat rogues more able to go toe to toe with plate wearers without feeling like a naked clothie.

Other than that, Honor Amongst Thieves is getting reworked, looking a bit like a mix between an improved version of what it is now and Leader of the Pack:


Increases the ranged and melee critical hit chance of all party and raid members by 5%. When any player in your party or raid critically hits with a ranged or melee ability, you have a 33/66/100% chance to gain a combo point on your current target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 4/32/2 seconds.

5 comments:

  1. You forgot Restless Blades. That one is the single most biggest change in the combat tree. Restless blades can potentially decrease your major damage cool downs by 9 seconds each. Imba. :)

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  2. Indeed I did forget about that one !

    An interseting mechanic too, reducing the cooldown of a skill by using another skill - the only skill I can think of that has that now is Vigilance refreshing Taunt.

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  3. I'm expecting it to be very tastey al in all :P For combat rogues all our dps restss in our cool downs lol.

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  4. Frost mages have Cold Snap that refreshes all their Frost spell cooldowns (Water Elemental and Icy Veins mainly, but they also have some shorter-term CDs). And I know there are talents based on refreshing cooldowns - for example, Frost DKs have Rime which will refresh their Howling Blast CD and make their next HB free, and I don't think we're the only ones with a similar talent.

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  5. Yes, there's the cooldown resets like Cold Snap, Preparation or the hunter one (Readiness?).

    Also shame on me for forgetting about DELISHUS Rime. It's so awesome to tank heroics with :)

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