Rogue nerf and consequences
It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.
Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.
I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is. (Source)
Nerf to Combat rogues
This question keeps coming up despite our making several attempts to answer it, so I'll just sticky it up here. Why did we nerf Combat rogues too?
We thought Combat damage was too high as well, just not as high as Assassination. (Source)
Hunger for Blood Nerf
I suspect a lot of this talk is just grumbling over being nerfed in general, but I'm not quite sure what all the fuss is over Hunger for Blood. From a design perspective, it's really nice to have a knob that is so easy to tweak like that. You don't have to go potentially break other talents. You don't have to change base points or coefficients in ways that affect other specs or even lower level members of the class. In fact the mastery system for Cataclysm works somewhat similarly, giving us the ability to adjust numbers independently without causing a cascade of undesirable effects.
To use a different example, consider Affliction locks. We want to buff their dps as I said, but we want to do it in such a way without giving them a big boost in PvP where they do pretty high damage. We don't want to over buff Destruction or Demonology (because we want Affliction to be a real choice) so we can't easily touch spells that overlap or talents that those other guys might use. If we had an Affliction talent ("Hunger for Green Fire") that let us easily tweak them up or down, then in turn we could make adjustments more easily and with less risk.
(Let's not turn this into an Affliction thread. I just wanted to illustrate the contrast between an easy to adjust and hard to adjust tree.) (Source)