muzzy

Any chance we could get an ETA for the update?

A few reasons: 1) Once you have all your talent points to work with, a typical hemo build allows for an incredible amount of control over in 1v1. Once you pick up a number of key talents (Initiative, Dirty Deeds, Imp Gouge, Relentless Strikes) you can keep an opponent stun locked and have a bunch of tools at your disposal if things go haywire (Ghostly Strike, Prep) or you want to dish out a guaranteed blow (Cold Blood Eviscerate). 2) Due to its control, it's fairly viable with pre-raid BiS gear (e.g. Dal'Rends), especially given that harder to find a decent daggers before raiding than it is to find a good sword/mace before raiding. Once you pick up some harder hitting weapons and increase your attack power, you can really start hitting like a truck. I remember playing vanilla retail and having middle of the road raiding gear and being up to cut through my target's health in my opening sequence (CS>Hemo>Gouge>KS). As I mentioned above, you probably need to be rocking decent gear, especially weapons, in order to not feeling like your throwing around a wet paper bag at your enemies. At 60, you won't out-DPS a combat build in a raid ever as hemo, but you trading the consistent DPS for the survivability of a build that invests in subtlety as well as the occasional burst DPS when Cold Blood is up.

re: poisons - that may just be a function of lower hit. You could go for precision after picking up hemo (something like this), but I don't know how viable that will be. You mention above that your mage friend seems to have best of both worlds as frost spec. Rogues don't have a similar sweet spot, so it might be helpful to recalibrate your expectations a bit.

Pwnana is right that you'll lose out on some extremely helpful talents in combat. With that said, I felt just as you did and respec'd to hemo at 31. I did just fine all the way to 60 and found prep + hemo allowed for both survivability and fun in wPvP. At the same time, I didn't feel that I struggled at all questing/grinding/doing dungeons and at times thought that my spec was a real asset. Given that you're leveling with a mage, it might actually be a bonus that you can stun lock mobs while your bud dishes out DPS. I will say, though, that I put a ton of extra effort into getting decent gear (especially weapons with a slow MH speed) which required extra farming beyond what is necessary while leveling. It might've been too gimped of an experience had I not invested in decent gear along the way. At the end of the day, play the spec that's the most fun, even if you know that combat swords is the easiest way to get to 60.

ZF pickpocketing runs for Sturdy Junkboxes might be a good alternative to SM doors.

This error keeps popping up: Is there a simple fix?