All that talk about assassins and slteath in the previous news made me wanna take my gnomish rogue for a ganking spree. Except that someone forgot to extend their World of Warcraft subscription yesterday, leaving me with plenty of time to catch up on the Rogue section buzz from the official WoW forums. And guess what: lucky me! Sticked high atop the list of topics, lay the first solid details about the changes being made to the rogue talent tree - planned for the next major game update, version 1.12.

As far as I known, rogues are the last class to be reviewed by Blizzard, after all other classes had their talent trees and skills revamped in previous patches. So it's easy to see why expectations have been growing high within the community, despite the fact that the devs have no intention to "save the best for last". Blizzard already feels that the rogue class is the most solid class in its implementation, function, and talents, so not all "do-it-from-behinders" will be satisfied by the upcoming changes.

A preliminary list of planned changes is available in this "Rogue Talent Review - First Glimpse" topic, but keep in mind that these changes are not complete or final, and the information within is likely to alter during the testing phases. Below is a brief selection of some of the hottest things to come!

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

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

- 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

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

- 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

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

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

- Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage

No more Hunters Mark after Vanish, eh? I bet some hunters are yelling "NERF ROGUES!!1" right about now...

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)