Patch 5.2 Rogue Changes: Datamined Information (Not Official) -- Updated 1/9

(IMPORTANT NOTE: I stopped updating this post in early January. It just seemed silly, considering how comprehensive my full breakdown of Patch 5.2 changes had become and how much overlap evolved between what had been datamined and what was official. I’ll keep this post here for posterity, but please be sure to read the post I linked above for a complete rundown, and follow my category of datamining-related posts for updates on specific changes that have been newly spotted by MMO-Champion and Wowhead but aren’t yet — and that may never be — officially in Patch 5.2.)

The data-chugging engines over at Wowhead and MMO-Champion caught a whiff of that irresistible scent today: a new patch build slated for deployment on the PTR server.

This just happened late on Dec. 21. The Patch 5.2 PTR is not supposed to actually become available for testing until January, and we likely won’t see any official patch notes until then. That means that all of the normal HUGE RED BLINKY WARNINGS (OK, OK, I won’t make it blink) apply: Datamining is not an exact science. None of the information is coming from Blizzard. It is prone to making mistakes, leaving out important changes that put *other* changes in context, mistaking tooltip corrections or bug fixes for game changes, and any number of other faults.

But they’re also a lot of fun to read and obsess over.

Below is my summary of all the datamined changes for rogues that we’ve seen to date. I’ve done my best to organize them in a logical way and explain some of the weirder wording within MMO-Champion/Wowhead’s lists. I’ll also add additional info in italics where the datamining currently *does not* match the official patch notes.

• Level-90 Talents:
  • Versatility appears to have been removed completely, and replaced with a new level-90 talent option called Marked for Death. MfD instantly puts five combo points on your current target. It has a 30-yard range and a 60-second cooldown that resets if your target dies.
  • Shuriken Toss appears to be getting a pretty substantial buff. Remember that in Patch 5.1, it was buffed to deal double damage if you were more than 10 yards from your target. On top of that, in 5.2, if you’re more than 10 yards away, using Shuriken Toss will effectively grant you a 10-second buff that allows your autoattacks to hit the target. You still need to be within Shuriken Toss’s 30-yard range for the autoattacks to hit.
  • Anticipation appears unchanged.
• Level-75 Talents:
  • All appear unchanged.
• Level-60 Talents:
  • Preparation appears to no longer be a level-60 talent; it will instead become an ability all rogues learn at level 68. The spell itself appears completely unchanged: It still resets the cooldown on Cloak of Shadows, Dismantle, Evasion, Sprint and Vanish. All of those abilities appear to have the same exact cooldown lengths they had before. In PvP, this is looking like a pretty significant buff. In PvE it’s also potentially a small buff, but it may make the use of Prep + Vanish on cooldown (in conjunction with the level-15 talent Shadow Focus) feel required for a raiding rogue.
  • Replacing Preparation in the level-60 talent tier will be a new ability called Cloak and Dagger. It allows you to cast your stealth openers (Ambush, Cheap Shot, Garrote) from up to 30 yards away, and teleport to just behind your target in the process. (A note for the sake of posterity: In the first PTR build, instead of Cloak and Dagger, the talent here was called Hit and Run: It allowed you to designate a spot on the ground up to 30 yards away and teleport to it, leaving a shadow at your previous location; after 10 seconds [or when you cancel the effect, whichever happens first], assuming you didn’t run more than 100 yards away, you returned to your original spot. Here are a few videos from wavefunctionp [Aeriwen] of the ability in action on the PTR. As Ghostcrawler explains here, the ability was never meant to see the light of day.)
  • Burst of Speed will be… either buffed, nerfed or just rebalanced — I don’t know PvP, so I can’t tell. It will cost 30 energy instead of 50, and increases movement speed *and* breaks “movement-slowing” effects, where on live right now it increases movement speed *or* breaks “movement-impairing” effects (note the language change there; this suggests the ability will not break roots). Meanwhile, the four-second immunity to movement-impairing effects it used to grant when it broke an existing effect appears as though it’ll be removed.
• Level-45 Talents:
  • All appear unchanged.
• Level-30 Talents:
  • Deadly Throw appears to be getting a buff. It will need only 3+ combo points (instead of a full five) in order to interrupt a spellcast and prevent spells from within that school from being cast. In addition, the tooltip no longer says that the spell-school lockout lasts for 6 seconds, it now says it lasts “for a period of time,” which… no idea what that means. Maybe they’ll fill that in with a new number later, or maybe it’ll vary depending on how many combo points you have, or… ya got me. (UPDATE 12/22: The official patch notes do indeed say the spell-school lockout will last 4/5/6 seconds depending on whether you have 3/4/5 combo points on your target.)
  • Nerve Strike appears to be getting a buff. In addition to reducing your target’s damage after a Cheap Shot or Kidney Shot wears off, it will also reduce the amount of healing your target does by 25%.
• Level-15 Talents:
  • Shadow Focus appears to be getting a slight nerf. Instead of making your abilities energy-free while stealthed, it reduces the energy cost by 75%. This feels to me like it might be cleaning up (or avoiding) some sort of exploit, but I’m not sure. It should have little effect overall.
• Changes to All Three Specs:
  • As noted above, it looks like Preparation will become a baseline ability for all specs, and will be learned at level 68.
  • Detect Traps appears to be getting a cooldown (1.5 seconds). Shrug. (UPDATE 12/22: This is not currently listed in the official patch notes.)
• Assassination Changes:
  • I don’t see any.
• Combat Changes:
  • Blade Flurry appears to be getting a huge cleave nerf, but will be stronger against 3 to 5 targets. Instead of “copying” 100% of the damage from your attacks onto a nearby target, it will copy only 25% of the damage from those attacks. However, those attacks will hit up to *four* nearby enemies, up from one. This is Blizz trying to make Combat feel less “required” on two-target raid fights, but still have good enough AoE damage that it’ll at least somewhat compete with the other rogue specs. Will it succeed at doing this without making Combat feel completely pointless? Guess we’ll find out in testing. :) 
    
  • Vitality appears to be getting a buff. It will boost attack power by 30%, up from 25%. (The energy-regen-boosting part of the ability is unchanged.) This should offset a little bit of the Blade Flurry nerf above, but more importantly, it’ll bump up Combat’s single-target damage. This may make it competitive with Assassination for the next raid tier.
• Subtlety Changes:
  • Sanguinary Vein appears to be getting a buff. When you have a bleed on your target (i.e., Crimson Tempest, Garrote or Rupture), your damage will increase by 20%, up from 16%.
• Other Changes:
  • Our Tier 15 (new raid gear) set bonuses appear to be:
    • Two piece: Increases the duration of your finishing moves as if you had used an additional combo point, up to a maximum of 6 combo points.
    • Four piece: Shadow Blades also reduces the cost of all your abilities by 40%.

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First PTR build (16408, mined 12/21/2012): MMO-Champ; Wowhead

PTR build 16446 (mined 1/9/2013): MMO-Champ

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