Thanks for the input.
I just had someone send me a party invite and whisper on my main (who has not yet respecced 3 points). Neither made Honor Among Thieves stop working. I even tried declining the invite to replicate previous results. Now my friend and I are both confused for two different reasons.
Your hard work and diligence is much appreciated!
SMALL NEWS!
Just out of curiosity, before doing what I said I wouldn’t, which is spending gold on a respec, I made sure to recreate the conditions that made Honor Among Thieves stop working. Afterwards, I respecced three points into it, at a loss of 1% crit rating from Malice (may it rest in peace). I tested and I got no combo points from Honor Among Thieves, even with the three points in it. After logging back in, Honor Among Thieves, of course, worked again.
Then came the raid, which went well, thanks for asking. At no time during the fifteen bosses and oodles of trash mobs in Naxxramas did I end up losing Honor Among Thieves while having three points in it. I did not log out nor in between pulls. I’d say this is an effective work-around for the time being.
However, the difference between two and three points, aside from the obvious issue that Honor Among Thieves stops working with just the two points, felt negligible. Either way I was getting a free combo point about every one to two seconds. If it weren’t for this bug, I would much rather have that point back in Malice where it belongs. So, I plan to continue testing what’s causing this bug, albeit at a less enthusiastic pace since I can no longer say it’s completely broken and I do still have other, more pressing goals.
So, I’ve been hypothesizing why such an issue would occur. It’s bizarre that Honor Among Thieves stops working only when there are less than three points put into it. My first hypothesis was that Honor Among Thieves had to be reverse-engineered from retail, where Honor Among Thieves is binary (you either have it or you don’t). If that’s the case, someone would have needed to recreate an Honor Among Thieves that had a one and two point version, using the retail Honor Among Thieves as the three-point version. Adding the code for the one and two points versions would then likely be where the mistake occurred.
I then had to devise a test for this hypothesis. Thankfully, my curiosity earlier paid off as it had already given me a lead. What I ended up doing was activating my secondary talents, where I had only one point in Honor Among Thieves. Using that, I went through the process of losing Honor Among Thieves. Then, I switched back to my primary talents where I had three points in Honor Among Thieves. Just like before with the respec, the loss of Honor Among Thieves persisted even after later switching to a talent tree that had three points in it.
And, because I’m a very curious individual, I spent more gold to respec my secondary talents to remove Honor Among Thieves entirely (may my thirty gold rest in peace). I went through the motions that dropped Honor Among Thieves in the past, multiple times, and then switched back to test it with the primary spec that had three points. Honor Among Thieves was still working, no matter how many times I tried to lose it from the secondary spec. It seems like Honor Among Thieves will only stop working if you have one or two points in it. This does lend credibility to my hypothesis that someone messed up on reverse-engineering it.
Unfortunately, what we really need to help Blizzard along is to provide them with conditions that can 100% recreate the bug, and I still don’t have that. I’ve pretty consistently been able to get Honor Among Thieves to drop by visiting the local wildlife in Darnassus, though, and making yellow numbers appear above them, about five or more of them, before returning to the training dummy to test. Given that there seems to be a random element involved, I think that’s going to have to be the best I can offer unless something new comes up.
I’ll see if I can recreate from my own rogue!