As part of the World of Warcraft Talent System Panel held at BlizzCon 2011, Ghostcrawler introduced details of the Rogue talent trees.
Level 15
I like how the Rogue benefits from this new model.
Lot of the cool stuff that tended to be in Subtlety is now spread out. You should read all of these tooltips.
These are pretty powerful talents all tied into Stealth.
Nightstalker – you move faster while stealthed.
Subterfuge – your stealth doesn’t break for three seconds, which has a lot of ramifications if you’re a Rogue.
And Shadow Focus which is your stealth abilities are free (they cost no energy).
Obviously you can’t take both of those together or you would be broken, and that’s kind of what we really like about the talent system.
Level 30
Level 30 is about control and survivability. The existing Deathly Throw with a nice movement speed debuff on it as well.
The way Nerve Strike works is that if you Kidney Shot or Cheap Shot someone it also debuffs their damage dealt for a period of time.
Obviously, the target must be susceptible to Kidney Shot or Cheap Shot.
And then the existent Combat Readiness where you can kinda build up resistance to someone that’s trying to beat your face in.
Level 45
Level 45 is about staying alive. Cheat Death is up against a new type of poison. We are trying to introduce new types of Rogue poisons.
Leeching Poison – as you beat on someone it will heal you for a little bit of the damage dealt.
And Improved Recuperate, I’m sure Rogues are very familiar with.
Level 60
Level 60. Here’s your Shadow Step as promised, but … you have to choose it or Preparation.
We went ahead and put the Preparation in here, too, so you get all the abilities listed.
Burst of Speed is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a sprint on no cooldown at a cost of energy.
Level 75
Level 75, we have Deadly Brew – whenever you wound, or mind-numb a target you also apply Crippling Poison to the target.
Paralytic Poison will let you paralize someone. You have to hit them a few times before you get enough stacks to paralyze them.
And then Dirty Tricks let’s you Gauge and Blind won’t break from damage coming from Poison and Bleed effects. You can try to debuff a little bit, and then Gauge and Blind them and they’ll take damage.
Level 90
And see what we did here. You can have any ability you want, from any of the bottom talent trees as Rogue.
Shadow Dance is pretty much the existing Shadow Dance. The Killing Spree and Vendetta are fairly different. Let me talk about those.
This new Killing Spree, the way it works is you can press the button multiple times, and every time gives you a teleport. We hope this is a little less disorienting than the current dance all over.
You push it once you blink. You push it another time you’ll go somewhere else, and you can do it as many times as you feel like it within a five-second window.
Vendetta, the real key here is that bottom part of Vengeful Strikes, once you have a Vendetta target, you can use the Vengeful Strikes ability — it has a 30 yard range and generates a combo point.
Pretty nice for Rogues who have trouble with target switching or movement.