In case you missed it over the weekend, Blizzard unveiled a sneak preview of the upcoming rogue revision for their incredibly popular MMO, World of Warcraft.

It's been a while since I played my rogue, but many of these changes look welcome and long overdue.

Planned revisions:

# The following talents have been removed: Improved Deadly Poison, Improved Distract, Throwing Weapon Specialization, Improved Vanish, and Rapid Concealment.

# Improved Instant Poison is now "Improved Poisons" and increases your chance to apply ALL poisons by 2/4/6/8/10%.

# Rapid Concealment has been merged with Camouflage, by combining these talents you not only get a great talent to start off the tree, but obviously it frees up a number of points to be spent elsewhere.

# Murder will now also apply to all finishing moves. The benefit this will provide to output and attack combinations is fairly straightforward.

# Vile Poisons now gives your poisons a chance to resist dispel effects, in addition to increasing poison damage.

# Improved Kidney Shot has been changed, and will instead increase the damage taken by the target while they are affected by Kidney Shot. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Kidney Shot.

# Improved Sprint has been changed, and will instead have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you activate your Sprint ability. This talent no longer reduces the cooldown of Sprint.

# Improved Evasion renamed to Endurance, and will add a Sprint cooldown reduction.

# New talent Weapon Expertise in the Combat tree, increases your weapon skill with all melee weapons. The recovery of damage with an increased weapon skill should be a good boost to overall output.

# Initiative is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75% end chance to add an additional combo point.

# Elusiveness is being reduced to a 3 point talent, but resulting in the same 75 sec cooldown reduction to Evasion, Blind, and Vanish.

# Ghostly Strike now has a reduced Energy cost, the reduction of Energy was enough to make it necessary to also reduce the damage output slightly.

# Improved Garrotes damage reduction will be removed. This is being changed as part of an overall improvement for Garrote.

# Setup is being moved higher up in the tree, becoming a 16 point talent with no prerequisites, helping move the talent in reach of specific builds.

# New talent Heightened Senses in the subtlety tree, increases your Stealth detection, and reduces the chance for you to be hit by spells and ranged attacks.

# Hemorrhage will be moved up in the tree to become a 21 point talent. This should help to place the ability in a more reachable position, and allow for a little more versatility with specific talent builds.

# New talent Deadliness in the Subtlety tree, increases your Attack Power by a percentage.

# Premeditation will have its Energy requirement removed, changed to an instant cast, and range increased. Its cooldown will remain the same. Premeditation will now be pre-reqd by Preperation.

# Vanish will now remove effects that allow the caster to remain aware of the rogues presence, such as Mind Vision and Hunters Mark.

# Garrote, Rupture, and Eviscerate are being increased in damage. More details to come.

# Expose Armor will now reduce armor by a percentage.