Pre Patch 3.0 Thoughts

Since before the announcement and release of the WotLK talents, many people speculated about how and if Blizzard was going to make rogues return to the “glory” days. By this I mean of course every rogue returning to a backstab orientated build, because as of right now it is effectively to the point of mashing your hemorrhage bind while staying at 25 energy. Now there is the occasional mutilate rogue, but really they are only effective in a few certain compositions and even then, if you understand how to play mutilate its only requires a little more attention to your abilities.

After the WotLK talent trees were released, everyone was speculating about how a shadow dance daggers build could possibly be successful in arena. With the energy cost on backstab lowered from sixty energy to forty five, backstab became the highest damage per energy ability a rogue had. On top of that the buff to ambush and the talent Waylay, daggers were beginning to come together. With the use of shadow dance coupled with the old shadow dance were able to maintain a 10% increased damage for the duration of shadow dance, along with also being basically immune to cc with four vanishes.

The only other hope for blizzard to restore the rogue class to the “glory” days of daggers was to implement some very unique and useful abilities to mutilate. Well with the creation of hunger for blood, deadly brew, and the change of some poison talents things were looking nice. I didn’t mention infectious poisons because first off that never worked on the PTR build and was removed, and secondly it almost seemed like a bad thing. Considering that would poison was no longer a five stacking poison, you would of needed to use instant poison on your main hand weapon (with the old deadly brew it would proc deadly) in order to provide protection so your wound poison didn’t get dispelled. This would mean that healers could keep a stack of deadly poison ticking on them for protection, which would make them unable to be blinded or polymorphed.

I’ll admit that the first build of hunger for blood (where it removed ALL debuffs and would refund full energy if it devoured a debuff) was over the top. However, when Blizzard changed it to only remove physical debuffs it seemed as if they had it perfect. This change solved mutilate rogues number one problem, which was mobility. With the option to remove hamstring, wing clip, and also bleed affects it almost felt like it was too good to be true. Well, apparently it really was too good to be true.

Now with another change to hunger for blood and to shadow dance, it is almost forcing most rogues to either spec some variant of mutilate without hunger for blood, since it is hardly worth it anymore, or just go shadow dance hemo. Both of these specs are fine, however I personally was hoping for a little change from just mashing hemo while staying at 25 energy. I won’t even go into the relentless change, because that has been drawn out too much already. In the end most of this is speculation and none of this will be even close to what will actually pan out, just like pre-BC people thought 30/0/31 would be the most dominant arena spec.