I noticed blizzard are removing weapon requirements forother classes it seems, notably allowing frost deathknights the ability to duel wield or 2h, same for enhancement shaman.
I was wondering are they still pushing/forcing daggers for assassination or subtlety ?
imo… assa should use only daggers, the fantasy of this spec is made around stabbing with daggers… but i would like to see sub be able to use swords (currently u need fast weapon in your off-hand so you gonna use 1 dagger anyway)
They could keep the weapon requirements as is, but I personally would apreciate a second energy spender for Subtlety or bringing back Hemorrhage as an alternative to Backstab to fill in the missing sword fantasy styled rogue gameplay we used to have.
Warriors allready got single minded fury as an alternative to titans grip, so who knows.
This tread was appearing on the forum at least a couple of times, by my hand too. Glad to see it returning in time 
Many rogues would like to see return of Hemo (as an another CP spender) and/or simply to have a possibility to use again 1h handed weapons besides daggers in main hand of a Sub rogue.
during mop assassination was played so little they considered allowing it to use swords JUST so more people would play it lol (I played it with daggers it was legit and even had people /w me about it because I was doing solid dps)
shadow step subtly swords was always a thing back in TBC, I think it was wrath when they forced all the specs to use daggers even combat was forced to use a dagger offhand because of class fantasy.
I want swords dang it!! at least combat is kind of fun now
I agree to a point. However, the animations just don’t sell that idea. That’s just not how you fight with a dagger. Overall, the attack and ability animations for different weapons tend to not look good. They ignore things like body mechanics and the shape of the weapon.
The way you move a Sword should be dramatically different from an Axe, and different Swords will have big differences to technique depending on the blade. A cutting blade has a very different profile from something designed more for stabbing.
There’s also this huge missed opportunity in the art animation design to showcase the main benefit of Dual Wielding: defensive capabilities! While you attack with one hand, the other is used to protect you. You also try to avoid crossing your hands, or attacking with both hands at once, because that exposes you needlessly, and if you think about the body mechanics involved, you will actually produce a less efficient and powerful strike, as your balance will be way off.
Now, as for the idea of weaponlocking Rogues, you can just as well attack with an Axe, Sword or a Dagger. Then comes the very real issue of Loot. The options for gearing are severely limited, when you can only use 1 type of weapon. I think this is more pressing, than the idea of keeping the fantasy of the Dagger-wielding Assassin. I would actually argue, that without weaponlocking Assassination, the choice a Player makes to deliberately display a specific weapon type is more valuable and important, as it is a meaningful choice you make, instead of it being an arbitrary limitation penalizing you for playing the Spec.
if you seen that one youtube video… guy cuts open is hand from basically nothing more than crossing blades then uncrossing them to strike the air… it is very owch
Tldr: I’d like to see weapon requirements loosened and there is hardly any reason not to do so game mechanics -wise.
Yeah rogue specs should really be able to choose between all 1-handed weapons, even fist weapons. Altough I think that even the other weapon reguirement changes that are coming are virtually cosmetic in nature. In BFA as in Shadowlands the weapon you wield is merely a stat stick regarding combat mechanics. That is because autoattacks are quite a small margin of our dps and most damage comes from abilities and those abilities scale from our attack power aka stats. What I’m saying that rogues could wield staves and it would not have that great impact on gameplay.
Back in the day when abilities were more dependant on attack speed and actual damage of the weapon it was a different story. In classic sinister strike deals weapon damage + X amount of damage, so it is basicly autoattack with a bonus damage. Which means that for the sake of sinister strike it was better to have a slow hard hitting weapon in mainhand, same with hemo. Nowadays sinister strike deals damage mostly based on attack power, so you can hit pretty hard even with a fishing rod. Of course autoattacks were more significant back in the day. So yeah even DK’s get their 2h frost back their obliterate’s won’t do same chunky dmg that they did in WoD because the dmg has been scaled.
With all that said I would really like to see rogues to be able to wield different 1-handed weapons, for example swords on sub rogue, some of their current animations would fit swords and axes pretty well.
some fist weapons are pointy, the assassins from assassins creed use pointy first based weapons to assassinate targets.
And they’re small and easy to hide! Unless you happen to be from a certain orc assassin clan, which have replaced their other hand with a blade…
I miss those mechanics (f.ex. Hemo inflicts 110% of the weapon dmg). How much more RPG you want, when you finally get that weapon, and besides a cool look it really change your impression during a fight. With a bigger weapon in main hand I had an impression Sinister Strike and Hemo hit slower, but harder, you really feel you inflict some serious dmg.
I say it sometimes in this forum, but more simple dosen’t always mean more fun.
EDIT: Thanks to that effect I remember to get a better weapon was something so exciting, you don’t even care if it looks not exactly how you would wish for (and we talking about times without transmog system). And that swag-effect, when everybody know this is the weapon, and you own it 
something else is on swashbuckler maces, first, swords, axes all use the same sword animations and all make the sword SWOOSH sounds… even vanilla over a decade ago had different animations and different sounds for each weapon type.
how has going forwards taken steps backwards ?
Well, Blizz has created a legendary weapons in Legion (no really orange one, so no count for me). They were the only ones u could fight with back then, so Blizz wanted to make us happy creating an unique set of abilities, sounds and animations in pair to new themes of specs (Outlaw and Sub mostly).
If you ask me, a perfect idea, if we could have a choice between old and new animations, sounds and so on (trough the glyph f.ex.), and not be forced to be a pirate or a shadow-fella exclusively when choosing a spec. After Legion, in Outlaw case, again instead of giving to us a few options to choose from, the icons and names of the new abilities was back to the ones from Combat spec, but… the pirate slashing sounds remains. Yeah… True story
but at the point they were removing the swords shouldn’t they have said “well rogues are going to have axes and maces again maybe we should update this” ?
It just gets a bit dull after a while - there are only so many daggers to choose from. The twinblade of Hakkari gives some flavor with some of the artifact weapons resembling swords, but honestly just lift the restrictions for Sub and Sin. Our mogs deserve it
I like wielding swords instead of daggers as sub rogue more, it used to work as ambush dealt more percentage damage if wielding daggers instead to balance the damage and hemorrhage instead of backstab
Considering Blizzard seems hellbent on keeping Gloomblade for SL, they could remove the dagger specific requirements from it and keep Backstab as is.
And if that is a no go, Shadow Techniques should at least be normalized for weapon speed allowing us Sub rogues to offhand Swords without a penalty to our energy gains.
I remember 1 alpha build years ago when you could mutilate with fist weapons
I just want to be able to transmog daggers into fist weapons… There is a fist weapon that would be perfect for the Sub transmog I have planned, but can’t use it… 
Exactly the same reason here.