RIP Rogues in 3.1?

GC words that Rogues are in a good place, HFB and other rogue mechanics are rather broken, but it's too risky to try and fix us has hit the community rather hard. Here is a consolidated lists of issues still facing the various specs and how to fix them. While these fixes are more focused around improving things for PvE, there is an eye on not making the changes over powered for PvP.

1) Assassination

Instant Poison: Baseline instant is still weaker than baseline wounding, even with a 50% envenom buff up time. Baseline IP needs a boost in base damage, AP scaling is on par with wound. Until the Improved Poison bug is fixed it'll be impossible to fully test Assassination's DPS, and with the patch being scheduel for early April it is starting to feel like the WotLK Beta all over again with rogue unable to fully test unbugged specs before release.

HfB: Pages and Pages and pages have been written about how utterly unfun, uninspider, and needlessly powerful this talent has become. The problems with this talent have been hashed out over and over again, the real issue with the new implimentation is that it is only useful in 25 man raids, and the usefulness deminishes as the group size gets smaller and smaller. It also worses the specs ramp up to peak DPS.

Rotation Ramp Up: Longest longest lead time in game to reach peak DPS, HfB change has made this worse. Spec becomes less and less powerful the more target switching is in place and the single target DPS gain over combat will cause this spec to become a relic.

My Fixes:

• Deadly Brew - Give back IP procing Deadly. Yes this is a massive DPS gain, probably too good for the tier level and talent points as each point is worth about 5% DPS, but it has no effect on PvP play and it's better than 15% DPS for a single talent. Swap it with MP if needed to put it out of reach of non Assassination builds (however this messes with 41/5/25 builds - having to give up DD or HS).
  
• Master Poisoner - 33/66/100% chance not to clear Deadly Poison with Envenom. The increased chance is basically the same thing, the only difference is that having envenom clear the stacks forces the rogue to watch a DP tick timer in order to release Envenom as just the right instant. Timer watching isn't fun or needed in this case.
• Overkill - Rework Talent. This talent is a PvP bane and causes a rogues already high out of stealth burst to be all that much worse. Here is what I would do: Each combo move critical strike buffs the rogue with the ability to Overkill, stacking up to 10 times. When the Overkill ability is used all energy moves cost 10 less energy for 1 second per stack consumed. 60 second Cooldown. This talent provides a much needed on demand cooldown for the assassination rogue. The stacking mechanism prevents it's use during the out of stealth burst.
  
• CttC - Evis/Envenom Refresh SnD to 5 CP max or Initiates SnD at the number of CP uses. This change is needed to reduce the lead in time to reach max DPS.
• HfB - Damage is increased by 3-5% (Glyped to +1%) against targets that are bleeding. Other DPS gains in the tree means that this talent can be greatly toned down and no longer needs to be a button that has to be pushed. The talent could also be: Poison damage is increased by 10-15% (Glyphed +3%) against targets that are bleeding to make it 100% totally unattractive to PvP rogues.
  

2) Combat

In general the combat tree is in the best spot of all the trees. The talent tree does flow, through there is only a single spare talent point to put into flavor talents, and duel weapon specing is no longer possible. Cutting all the weapon specs down to 3 talent points for the same effect and allow for more specing into flavor talents (for people who single weapon spec) would be a nice change, but not required.

Killing Spree - The loss of character control with this ability isn't acceptable. If there is only a single target in range of the ability and the player is already in melee there should be no ninja jumping. This would make the talent safe to use on most bosses.

Mace Spec - If haste is indeed added to this talent it will probably become too good, forcing rogues to use Maces (YUCK!).

Daggers - Combat daggers really isn't a viable spec. This is made worse with the PPM poison change as SS with a 2.5-2.7 speed sword will almost always proc wound, while a 1.7-1.8 speed dagger will not (~30% less chance to proc the poison). To make matters worse back stab is performed less than SS. When you add in poison damage with the PPM system SS has a higher DPE than back stab, and this is even before you take into consideration the number of combo points generated. BS either needs to scale at a strong rate, cost less energy, or award 2 combo points to make up the difference.

No real Fixes are needed here, only some minor Tweaks.

3) Subtlety

This tree is a mess and it is hard to fix without knowing if the Honor Among Thieves talent will stay in it's current form. Personally I'd like to see the talent changed to "Whenever anyone in your party or raid group critically hits with a damage or healing spell or ability your next ability costs 10-20 less energy." This would be much easier to balance around (especially for raiding) as you could assume that the buff is always active in a raid enviorment without the need to stack a perfect group.