fasten you seatbelts, because it is goint to be a hell of a rant.
ive started playing wow ~middle of 8.2.5 and fell in love with subtelty. at the beginning of 8.3 i wanted to get my hand on lvl 3 of conflict and strife… so i needed to get some pvp ranking points… this lead me to trying out marked for death talent (never did before) so i started practising on pve. shortly after i found out something i considered amazing.
Talents:
- find weakness
- shadow focus
- marked for death
- your choice, i go with cheat
- your choice, i go with prey
- dark shadow
- secret technique
azerite: 3x night vengenance, 1x the first dance, 1x-2x inevitability or whatever feels best at this point; i like to get 3x blood siphon also for mastery and leech, which compensates lack of soothing shadows in my case.
essences: main- blood of the enemy, minor - conflict, lucid dreams, breath of the dying
stats: i found both maxing out mastery/crit and versa/crit to be similarily efficient in spite of dps. im going with mastery atm.
it should be something close to: >30% crit, =<10% haste (10 is a good number here), 70 % mastery (can get much higher if u use blood siphon and gems), ~4 versa.
trinkets: dead-eye spyglass is great, but i’ve had 445 version of razzashi medallion before and its also pretty good. 2nd one can be harlan’s loaded dice (i use it rn), but also putting on-use agility or mastery boosting trinket and shadowdance into one macro can get you pretty nice results (i’d use azerok resonating hearth as 2nd if it’s uptime wasnt as low)
corruptions: honed mind is your best friend by far, other useful thing might be surging vitality. thing is… subtelty being as it is rn i have no means to check wide variety of stat/corruption variation builds. i was unfortunate enough to get no gushing wound to try out, ill try to hunt it down on mothers stall.
rotation revolves all around fitting two night vengenance boosted big-booty fat eviscerates into one shadow dance.
it goes as: (stealth)-> shadowstrike -> nightblade -> shadowdance -> shadowstrike -> evis -> shadowstrike -> nightblade -> marked for death -> evis
(but we are not out of shadowdance yet, so)
backstab -> nightblade -> shadowdance -> strike -> evis -> strike x2 -> evis or secret technique.
except… it looks like this only on some boss fights, because trash dies quickly when you can fit 2x 200-300k into 5 sec 25% dark shadow fueled shadowdance, so in fact you get to mark mobs more frequently (and, in consequence get shadowdance charges back more rapidly you would think).
always remember to squeeze in fully loaded secret technique with blood of the enemy crit buff for that sweet juicy numbers to pop up.
you might think that after the 2nd shadowdance usage there is not much left to do because you are pretty empty (no first dance haste buff hurst, eh?) you are completely right!
thats when things get really slow as you will press buttons only like twice a second. now, in this few blinks of and eye you get to have some me-time. consider your past mistakes, like getting addicted to minmaxing, or abaddoning will to master any other spec in the game, because why be viable? but not for a long time! this amazing 1.5 sec per cp spent cd reduction kicks in! the dopamine/adrenaline levels start rising again and you get one more precious use of shadowdance! soon, marked will be up again, now you need to get only one or two more nightblade- evis rounds to get back to your opening rotation. few fights last much longer than that.
your rotation will be consisting of getting night vengenance buff and sniping out weakest enemies with pumped evis.
there are few amazing things about this build: you are occupied 95% of the time. there are literally moments of having no key to press, you are able to do almost everything with this build- dungeons, world pvp, pvp itself (go with master of shadow tho and focus rather on mastery/versa/haste rather than crit), raids are also in your reach.
cant wait to get myself some treats, like few more of honed mind corruptions, i think when i get 2-3 of lvl 3’s im going to switch to crit/versa build for a bit of steadiness and few moments of 400k+ crits showing up (its addicting af, worse than metaamphetamine… supposedly).
i wish i could try out versa/mastery build with crit as low as possible to pair it with the unbound force… doubt it would work tho.
there are few more issues that could be adressed like the most efficient cp to energy-refill capacity of relentless strikes for a nightblade outside of shadowdance (this one bugs me a lot, it might be really important to improve fluidity as it does 3 things: boosts dps by a bit, helps generate energy and sets shadowdance back up; this may be important not only for marked for death build, but for every dark shadow build)
so what do you guys think? have you played with such a set up? do you have any other tips? or maybe you think all this wide possibility build is way too complicated and it is better to use this stale nightstalker-deeper stratagem-enveloping shadows (and having to, yuck, energy pool) build? what might i have to take into cosideration to improve?
hope everything i wrote down is clear and understandable, im not a native and, well, languages differ, universals differ 