While I had a blast with huge shadowstep CB eviscerates, I knew ultimately, for our class to be at the top of the food chain, we need revolutionary abilities, not evolutionary ones.  The bulk of eviscerate's damage increase comes from the doubling of its base damage, while it will never be as useless as it is now in TBC, it still pales against 2 second cooldown overpowers and the new mage ice barrier that absorbs a whopping 3000 damage!

While deep subtlety dagger was the spec everyone laughed at in TBC, I can assure you things changed dramatically here in WOTLK.  When Blizzard wanted shadowstep to be the definitive rogue PVP spec, we obeyed.  And with their pro-dagger campaign here in WOTLK, I believe eventually the scalability advantage of backstab/mutilate (and the fact that both 51 assassination and 51 subtlety pretty much requires you to be dagger) over hemo will make them the definitive PVP specs.  Shadow dance will probably be the spec of choice for solo play and offensive arena comps, while mutilate with the new poison talents will shine for balanced and defensive comps.


Shadow dance is offense + defense:

Yes, it makes me feel like a ninja.

It is exactly like four vanishes in a row with a 3 second pause between each one, and shares the exact same properties.  It breaks snares (sprint + shadow dance makes a rogue very, very hard to peel), it puts you in improved stealth, and it can not be used while stunned/sheeped/feared.  It does break on damage, but I am happy to report Blizzard seemed to have fixed the vanish code by giving us roughly a 0.5 second invulnerability window off vanishes.  Even with two bleed effects I landed a full shadowstep stunlock on a feral druid, not sure if it was dumb luck.

It does seem like shadow dance is bugged at the moment, that it also consumes your regular vanish cooldown (using the vanish does not consume shadow dance cooldown, thankfully).  Also, while you can not vanish through druid fairy fire, you can shadow dance through it.  Not sure if it is intended (god I hope so).  Unfortunately, hunter flare still renders shadow dance useless, if you are standing on top of a flare it is virtually impossible to use your openers, you can still shadow dance + shadow step through flare to land an opener just like you can with vanish.

45 energy ambush/backstab changes *everything*

At 60 energy vs 35 energy, 41 subtlety's backstab with +30% crit talent, did only 5% higher damage per energy than hemo against 400 resilience characters, and that is without the very damaging debuff hemo brings to the table.  Was 5% higher damage per energy worth the positioning requirement, the loss of hemo debuff and 70% better combo point generation hemo brings, not to mention all the extra talent points you had to spend on backstab?  Absolutely not.

A whopping 33% increase in damage per energy and combo point per energy made all the difference in the world.  With 45 energy backstabs, suddenly backstab is doing 40% higher damage per energy than hemo (even 8% higher than mutilate!), and hemo's combo point per energy advantage is reduced to 28%.  When the extra damage dagger dishes out is actually worth the trouble, people will play dagger, it is just that simple.

Ambush is strong when you actually get to land it

At 45 energy, ambush is 120% higher damage per energy than hemo, and the good old ambush->backstab is back.  At level 77 against a frost mage in full S3/S4 gear, once he goes below 35%, I am getting 3000 backstabs and 6000 ambushs.  That is the kind of damage you need to penetrate a 3000 health ice barrier every 24 seconds. 

I dueled Radikal who played a very nasty anti-rogue spec with water elemental, blazing speed and blaster wave (the blaster wave now has a knock back effect, extremely annoying to deal with), even against an opponent with many outs against stunlocks, once he is snared, shadow dance into shadowstep ambush is guaranteed, and I usually land at least one other ambush during the shadow dance if he doesn't ice block immediately.  If either ambush crits, it is usually enough damage to win.

Infinite Possibilities With Stunlocks

Against opponents that are vulnerable to stunlocks (like almost everyone else), oh my.   A shadow dance rogue against most classes goes like this, you try to make them cough up the PVP trinket, then land a massive custom combo. 

The standard shadow dance stunlock:

Shadow Dance -> CS -> Ambush -> KS -> Ambush -> Ambush

It is my bread and butter shadow dance combo.  Even with -30% stun duration talents, the opponent is usually locked down from start to finish and eats three ambushes.  I have enough energy to follow up with a backstab almost right after.  The fun begins when you start to mix things up.

Against heavy armor:

Premeditate -> garrote -> rupture -> Shadow Dance -> CS -> Ambush -> KS -> Ambush -> Ambush

It is just disgusting damage, not a true stunlock but against classes with weak CC's, two very nasty bleeds on top of three ambushes and quite a few white attacks is a world of damage.

Dismantle

Amazing, amazing ability, can be used both offensively and defensively.  Weapon chain will probably be very popular from this point on.  Dismantle a warrior just when a stunlock is about to end to get 10 seconds worth of free DPS time. 

Offensively, it is even better.  Improved expose armor (4200 armor in WOTLK) + dismantle on a restoration shaman and follow it up with a shadow dance stunlock. 

This ability is our trump card.  Coupled with rogue's already strong stunlocks and defensive cooldowns, we can mix it up in so many ways and this ability really favors dagger users who can deliver a big burst after removing enemy's shield.

Too Much Damage, Not Enough Survivability

I think this really applies to every class at the moment.  It almost feels like level 60 PVP again.  Damage is totally out of control, while survivability can't possibly keep up.  And looking at level 80 loot, with 140 DPS weapons and rings like this, I don't think quick recovery's 20% healing is enough to save a mutilate rogue from burst damage.

Shadow dance is not only an amazing offensive abilitiy, it also makes you very hard to kill/peel during its duration.  When you shadow dance it usually takes 1 second before you come out again, and the enemy has about 0.5 seconds to target you and start a sheep/fear that will be shadow dance immuned.  Such a powerful defensive cooldown on top of prep, cheat death and wrongfully accused is going to make us very hard to kill.

I also predict Blizzard makes drastic changes to resilience (possibly a flat reduction in PLAYER damage on top of what it does today)?  Stamina is not scaling anywhere near the way it did in TBC.  Damage gone up so much for every class.  Now is the perfect time to make resilience the ultimate PVP stat.