For the sake of other rogues out there who are pretty excited about the return of Hemo, Deadeight has complied his own list of favorite Hemo builds for us to try if we want to use the ability but aren't really sure how it should fit with our other talents.

One of the builds is quite a bit like my rogue's new leveling build (as well as Chris's latest Build Shop rogue build), so I guess that means a number of other players love the new Cheat Death too, and not everyone thinks Shadowstep is a waste. I'm not a high-end raider going for the top damage, or a PvPer going for the ultimate skill combination. I just like zipping about all over the place every 30 seconds while questing or doing normal instances, and I figure whatever I lose in damage in order to get that is more than made up for by the "wheee! teleport!" factor.

So if you're the type of rogue who suddenly feels tempted to cause lots of hemorrhages, this guide could be a handy starting point, or else a nice way to measure up your own personal build against what other people thought would be good.

With todays news that Hemorrhage is being buffed yet again in the latest build of patch 2.3, I'm getting more and more excited to take out my old rogue character and use my favorite ability again. Back in the days before The Burning Crusade I used to enjoy using Hemo to succeed as a rogue in PvP when latency and casual gear would have left me at a bad disadvantage otherwise. Hemo was just strong enough that it gave me a real chance at success sometimes, and all the other buffs to stealth in the Subtlety tree made me feel like a real rogue sneaking around and stunlocking people, rather than a warrior without the heavy armor, or a backstabber who could never seem to get behind anyone or crit often enough to kill things.

Once The Burning Crusade was released, I felt terribly disappointed to learn that there were few if any more very slow main-hand weapons at the new level cap. Today there are still very few with a 2.7 weapon speed, and even fewer with 2.8, which, before the expansion, was really the minimum weapon speed you needed to start making use of Hemo successfully. This is because Hemo is not "nomalized" like other abilities; it does progressively more damage the more time passes between weapon swings. With only one high-level 2.9 speed weapon in the game (and that a legendary), and all 2.8-speeds being either too low-level to be useful or to far out of my reach to attain, I feared my preferred playstyle would be dead and useless by the time my rogue reached 70.

But now I'm not so sure. I still don't know why Blizzard didn't add more slow weapons like they used to have in the old days, but I'm hoping these buffs to Hemo will make up for the loss, both in raids and in PvP. Still, I'm hardly the best rogue theorycrafter out there. Are any of you good mathematicians able to speak authoritatively on whether this change is enough to raise Hemo from the dead?

Update: Our commenter, Rick, shared with us a link to an Elitist Jerks discussion in which they provide some good research about this change to Hemo. Among other things, it seems this new version of Hemo is now normalized, meaning that, like Sinister Strike, it won't matter what weapon speed you have when you use it -- it'll still do the same amount of damage. Many of them are eager to try it out.