Unfortunately, anything but deep subtlety leaves me lacking a very key and core talent for what I do, namely Sinister Calling. Any spec I have basically needs 40 subtlety atleast to work, that’s really how it is. And come 3.0 (and later, Wrath) I’ll also need at least 20 points in combat for Lightning Reflexes, as they’re moving it down the tree.

Mind you, I do love some of the things in the combat tree (Blade Flurry is nice, Unfair Advantage would be potentially quite sickly for me too and soforth) but in general, I don’t have the points spare to get them. Unless Combat or Assassination somehow end up able to match the offensive and defensive boost that 15% extra agility provides, I don’t see how I’d be able to go anything but subtlety. There’s really not much that compares to that much gain in sheer avoidance that I know, even with diminishing returns.

This is a PVE-only, raid-centric look but it’s still really good analysis on the effectiveness of the different talents on DPS.
They’ve pretty much concluded that 51/5/5 (mutiliate) or 5/51/5 (sinister strike) are the two best leveling builds. They’re roughly equal from DPS.

They REALLY like the CttC effect to extend SND indefinitely. They REALLY like the synergy between the Assasination poison talents and the new poison application buff in Envenom. (Envenom is the new jazz).

Also the change to windfury totem (doesn’t overwrite poison, does add a haste buff)
plus the new AP scaling to damage poisons means that poisons have gotten a HUGE buff.

So, take a good hard look at assassination & combat. There’s good stuff in there.

And yeah, I was actually informed by the person I generally bug for all things Game Mechanical that the change was more a nerf than anything. My own immediate thoughts were more along the lines of “Oh, so chance of it triggering Setup then, pity. Oh well, guaranteed is good I suppose.” until pointed out otherwise.

Still never had the points for the talent, so I’m excused in my ignorance, or somesuch
No matter what they do with it it likely won’t affect me, though making it better without making it too good would likely be nice. We’ll see what they do with it.

And I’m not sure how much that link is of help bbr – its main purpose seems to be to sell a DVD full of various textures and doesn’t really explain how bump maps should be made (as I just do an emboss filter). And so far I’m just extracting art resources from World of Warcraft and tweaking them anyhow to maintain graphical consistency – you’d most likely really notice if something from another source got mixed in due to it looking painfully different.

However, in this specific case, the main use of the talent before was avoiding aoe crowd control like Psychic Scream, Frost Nova, Howl of Terror, etc etc. With the change to a flat damage reduction it’s totally worthless for that purpose.

I’m not sure the talent was overpowered in its former state – just too random, maybe. I wonder if there’s a better way to “fix” it?

(Came via the link from Valenna, hi!)