4.2 and stuff you should know!

Before breaking into the patch notes that directly concern rogues, lets first get some simple things I've noticed from watching other rogues.

• Ability Spam
  If you're constantly spamming mutilate, hemo, backstab, whatever--then your energy will remain at whatever the cost of this ability is, and you'll be doing incredibly predictable damage throughout the match.
  
  To clarify, the solution to this problem is to pool your energy and use it during a burst opportunity with your partner, or when you have 5cp saved up for a kidney shot ->Shadow dance or KS->vendetta/cold blood. Both of those cooldowns are dramatically more powerful with a full energy bar. 
• Damage obsession/tunnel vision
  As touched on in Reckful's recent skill-capped video, too many rogues are obsessed with damage when it's really the second or third priority a rogue should have after control/survivability. It's a very WotLK mindset to begin an arena with the intent to simply outdamage the enemy's healing. Unless you're zerging a healer down in the duration of your immunity cooldowns, this doesn't work anymore. 
• Wasting Kick
  This feels like such a no-brainer, but it's probably the most common thing I see. Stop kicking the first spell you see, every time it's off cooldown. There's too many examples to count, but why kick a frostbolt when your healer is on a pillar and everyone is at full hp? Save it for sheep, or the healer. Don't kick a long cheap heal if you know you're about to land burst, if they can freecast their fast, effective, expensive heal later, then your burst is wasted. 
• Never Gouging
  Gouge is a short CD undispellable 4 second cc, equivalent to a 1/2 DR sap, or a strangulate. I see so many rogues who never use this ability, or use it poorly. Gouge a warrior, shiv off his berserker rage, and now you can fear him.

As for patch notes that involve us there's some very important things going on...

• Cloak of Shadows cooldown is now 2 minutes, up from 90 seconds. In addition, Cloak of Shadows is no longer on the global cooldown.
• Combat Readiness and Cloak of Shadows now share a cooldown.
• Blind duration against enemy NPCs is now 1 minute, while the duration against players remains 8 seconds.
• Stealth now once again begins its cooldown once the rogue leaves Stealth.
• Talent Specializations
• Assassination
• Assassin's Resolve damage bonus has been increased to 20%, up from 15%.
• Vile Poisons now increases poison damage by 12/24/36%, up from 7/14/20%.
• Combat
• Savage Combat now increases attack power by 3/6%, up from 2/4%.
• Vitality now increases attack power by 30%, up from 25%.
• Subtlety
• Elusiveness now reduces the cooldown of Cloak of Shadows by 15/30 seconds, up from 10/20, and now also reduces the cooldown of Combat Readiness by 15/30 seconds.
• Hemorrhage base damage has been increased by 40%.
• Sanguinary Vein damage to bleeding targets has been increased to 8/16%, from 5/10%

-So, talented, cloak/combat readiness is 1:30. That's assuming you're rolling Sub as your main spec of course. They also share cooldowns! The fact that Cloak is off GCD doesn't matter too much as we've never had it off GCD, and have always played around that. 

-Sanguinary Vein being buffed a few percent isn't too much to write home about, but take anything you can get right? 

-Nobody serious plays combat in arenas or competitively in BG's so the buffs are of no concern.

-Poison damage has seen a boost as well as assassin's resolve. This might entice some people to roll Mutilate when the patch hits. Since our survivability is taking a huge hit with the cloak and readiness nerf, we'll be looking to cram more BOOM in before we eat dirt.

This is a big enough change that many of the famous rogues out there have made forum posts to discuss the matter, specifically towards blizzard. Reckful made such a post, and it was promptly taken down. Now Rogue Class Hero: Neilyo has followed suit with his own post. Other rogues have posted threads about this matter on sites such as Arenajunkies and so on. 

I really think the bigger reason to these nerfs is that Blizzard isn't thinking about their Arena loyal customers. These changes in my mind are all calculated towards the Rated BG scene. Which still plays largely like any BG, but without the morons.  However it'll just make a push for a flag defense team to keep on keepin on with a caster defense. As they'll be able to even more quickly mow down any rogues. 

personally I don't know what I'm going to do when the patch hits... I had really fallen into liking Sub because of the same reasons I loved Mutilate back in Burning Crusade. "Positional Requirements" made Mutilate so much more fun than Shadowstep/Hemo back in BC. Everyone was ShS/Hemo and it really took the fun and skill out of it by large. From watching Akrios and Nition of warcraftmovies and roguerogue.com fame (RIP) I really found a spec that was challenging, but still got the job done. When WOTLK came and sub got Shadow Dance, it was something I thought of bouncing to. Cause at least during Dance you had to be behind someone to Ambush spam. 

Later on Sub got a huge boost to Backstab, especially if you used daggers. Mutilate had lost its positional requirement, so this really brought me back to what I loved, the challenge.  But now that Hemo is getting buffed to the point it might take over for Backstab largely, I don't know if I'll even enjoy playing Sub anymore. 

Blizzard is doing a lot of things right now, and many of them seem to be really killing good pvp. People that bottom feed in BG's never skip a beat, they'll complain about these changes, but in the truth of it all, the changes do very little in terms of their gameplay. They'll still play like noobs, and not utilize the class to its potential, so it really leaves the smaller yet more talented crowd with a bad taste in their mouths.

Hopefully Blizzard takes heed to the words of the renowned rogues out there, giving these proposed changes a second look.