The problem is you can’t just give a spec with that much CC strong damage. Assume you get a trinket with Blind, which should be the case all the time when you use Blind on a healer with trinket. Then Sub, on its own, can do Kidney Sap Sap Sap Cheap Shot Cheap Shot on one target while stunning the kill target a bit. That represents 6+8+4+2+2+1= 23s of CC. That means the Priest has 23s to walk by and add 6s to this for a total of 29s. That means your DPS teammate doesn’t have to CC, even if he can help you, and can instead CC the other DPS and then focus on uninterruptible damage. And atm Sub Rogues have the ability to initiate this CC chain every 30s or so, a Mage can CC the other DPS every time the Rogue initiates that sequence. To that we add the Shadowy Duel, which is a cooldown but can still add 5s to the CC (if you do it on healer your Mage and Priest can finish off the kill target) , and the Smokebomb for 5s as well.
If Sub had the same damage as Assa for instance it would be super broken.
Of course the enemy team will be able to defend and try to disrupt all this but they rarely can prevent both the Sap and the Poly out of Kidney, and the Priest can always cover the interrupt with a fear for a Sap or Poly after if you and the Mage got countered. Ultimately these CC chains will go off. It was much better in WoD and before when Sub had one long big dance every minute, the CC chain would be there, but it wouldn’t happen every stun DR, and the spec had damage, even a bit out of dance, and could carry itself.
your logic is flawed because cc costs globals, energy and usually time and/or mobility. think about how you would practically execute what you’ve written.
you can kidney dance cheap shot and burst with sapping off the kidney (if you get lucky and it works). how do you resap? only 3 ways, going for a re, second dance or vanish. re is 0 damage, vanish is sub sustained so very low damage, dance is some damage but way less than first dance.
how do you quarter sap? if you dance half sap do some damage quarter sap that is sort of a thing if you’ve been whacking them with sustained damage during the entirety of the sap. next problem, how do you half cheap shot, how do you quarter?
what you’ve written is some unrealistic scenario with a cc chain that a sub rogue can theoretically do but doing that while doing damage even if sub did good damage is a complete fantasy.
kidney sap is not reliable on those it theoretically works on because combat is buggy. orcs and relents are entirely immune to it. that’s on top of the many abilities that will keep people in combat during the kidney.
sub has had way more damage in every other expansion, including legion which was largely the same spec. funny you bring up wod. with a re or a vanish in wod i did more burst than i do with symbols dance cold blood now.
try playing sub instead of assa and see how weak it is for yourself.
Bro your damage is not high on the meters but the burst is decent. You cant win the arenas alone you need teammates to finjsh the job. Why is that bad? You want the spotlight on the damage meter? You have to do the dirty work to win. I would like to one shot people too but people would cry for nerfs anw after in the forums
it’s one thing to need the help of teammates and another to just be a glorified stunbot. i’d be happy if my burst could remove 50% of someone’s health bar.
I actually played sub before I ever played assa. Learned the game with sub in older expansions on private, came to retail, tried to keep the sub dream alive but after the first 8.0.1 nerf wave it has been excessively hard, and I don’t enjoy the gameplay that the spec offers right now which is why I played assa and outlaw both. Don’t assume what people know or do when you have no clue, stay on topic and that’s it.
Anyways back on topic, I have seen how it is for myself, keep in mind that if you play the NS ES build you have 3 dances and reload them extremely fast (I know some famous rogue player explained how it worked and why it was strong but I’m not good with famous people’s names so if you’re interested well… Can’t help) which allows you to get that amount of dance cc. Also what I described is pure cc done by only the rogue while in reality one or more of those ccs will be covered by a teammate.
I don’t see how ccs costing globals prevent a cc chain from being executed properly sorry ?? As for the energy watch any high rated sub rogue (well, when they play sub) and you’ll see they sometimes pull that off when the mage doesn’t poly. Perfectly doable.
Also, there is nothing LUCKY about sapping off a Kidney, it’s just normal. People need 6s to drop combat, if you Kidney someone without auto’ing him, without any teammate touching him, without azerite trait proccing on him, without pets or anything else out, and without spells they can cast while in a stun you will get the Sap. It’s simply a matter of knowing when to kidney then Sap. Kidney a priest and he uses pain sup on someone you can’t Sap, Kidney him with mindbender out you can’t Sap, Kidney him when he doesn’t have or doesn’t use pain sup and has no mindbender and you WILL be able to Sap. Just learn the many details that can put every class in combat, sometimes combat might bug out and you can’t Sap someone that you should have been able to Sap but that’s not the majority of times, usually when you can’t Sap there is what we call a reason. Find it out. Don’t take it out on luck. Orcs and rele are an unfortunate addition, one that forces the mage to catch a poly first so you just need to spend your first dance spells preventing interrupts instead of sapping or whatever. Not so hard.
What I’m saying is if you could have the damage to actually nuke someone while keeping that cc chain intact the spec would be too strong. Because even if you don’t do the quarter Sap and don’t do the quarter stun you still have 20s of cc. Without a priests fear. Doable every 20s to 30s depending on dances, but you can do it every 20s for a few set ups before you’re out if charges unless you’re totally bad at managing your spells. Ofc at the END of the cc chain when you need to reapply cc very fast you won’t deal too much damage but your teammates are here for that and you’ll deal your damage on the first part of the chain when ccs last longer. If you’re then given the ability to single handedly deal 60% of someone’s hp on that first cheap shot then both teammates need to do 40% during the whole cc chain…
Yes rogues have historically done more damage, but they didn’t have as easy an access to cc. Legion was close to what bfa is but there was the risk of an orc relentless basically immune to sub as a whole., among other things.
I brought up WoD because the design was better than the crap we have now imo. Damage was there, burst was there, not every dr, cc was there, not every dr. A bit more brainpower was necessary than “stun dr is out and hey I have 2 or 3 charges of a spell allowing me to cc an entire team so I do it sheep or Sap come and we hit repeat every dr” nah that’s dumb and can’t be well balanced with damage numbers only. A minute between set ups allow people to try and rotate through their defensives. I would like rogues to go back to a state where they can deal damage themselves but asking for the current cc capabilities AND damage is too much. Damage gain has to be compensated by a slight cc loss, not much, but not like it is now.
so you haven’t played sub since september or something? how can you know how the spec is to play right now then?
and then you do even less burst than you do normally. the problem we have when we play is not cc. the problem is that people don’t die. you can have the longest cc chain ever but if it doesn’t threaten to kill then it doesn’t matter how long it is.
i’ve experimented with perforate and inevitability stack with gloomblade to try to make something of the cc chains but while it helps it’s just not enough. they run and line my mage and my priest and if i can connect i’m stuck trying to outdps the self-healing. sub fire doesn’t have any relevant slows, but sub frost feels even worse because then you don’t have a fire mage to carry the burst.
it prevents you from doing loads of damage while performing loads of cc. you don’t have the globals, the energy or the dances to do it (well maybe you have the dances if you run ES). often people don’t conveniently stack so you don’t have the mobility either. the more time and resources you spend chaining cc, the less damage you do. there’s a tradeoff there.
also high rated sub rogue streamers don’t really exist, i’ve been trying to find them. i think there’s one single sub rogue streamer left, stungodx. not even nahj is playing it anymore and he’s a pretty diehard sub rogue. i remember in legion when sub was really weak and everyone was playing assa, but he stuck with sub. this season it’s so bad even he’s given up on it. i asked him about it today and he described subtlety as “dead”.
no it’s very inconsistent. combat is buggy and unreliable. both in ways of staying in it too long and leaving it randomly (like with night elves in general).
what do you think i’m asking for? it’s not black and white, it doesn’t have to go from weak to insane.
oh come on. why are you exaggerating like this?
yes
you could easily go frequently in wod though. open->30s later dance->30s later vanish->30s later dance->30s later prep vanish. or if you wanna go on dr you open->dance->vanish->prep vanish->dance. and that’s assuming you never got any restealths despite sub rogues back then going for them constantly, so in practice you could fill some of those goes with restealths. don’t forget mages had deep as well.
of course it can. it’s weak now, so you give it more damage until it’s fine. you don’t have to talk in extremes with balance. i’m not asking to 100-0 people in a cheap shot, i’m asking for some damage buffs to bring it up to a reasonable level.
it was definitely not typical to go once a minute in wod.
and forgive me but it’s pretty frustrating to have someone who plays one of the best specs in the game come and talk about how one of the worst specs would become overpowered if it got help. it’s like i’m trying to find some breadcrumbs and you’re sitting on a throne calling me greedy.
but i’m thinking of giving up, i’m fed up with how weak subtlety is. i’ve tried to make it work but it just doesn’t.
yeah it’s not good. it’s sad because it’s my favourite rogue spec. “luckily” it’s also weak in mythic+ and raids so i think the chances of buffs sooner or later are high. just hope it happens fairly soon. perhaps with the release of crucible of storms, if not i guess 8.2…
as a note, had a friend act as a target dummy for a bit and found that nightstalker actually is 12% in pvp, i was under the impression that it was nerfed down to 6%. that makes the NS ES idea shadenox mentioned a great deal more appealing. but i think i’d rather play subterfuge and dark shadow. i tried killing him with the ES build but you just don’t have the energy to utilise it properly without shadow focus or vigor, and if i’m dropping mfd as well then it’s starting to sound too expensive.
i also looked at nightstalker and dark shadow, but with the shorter dance you get one less damage ability during dance so i’m not sure it actually adds damage, plus you lose subterfuge on any restealths or vanishes. really good for kidney goes though it seems.
I tried many stuff too. I think subterfuge is best . I was scared to open on people in war mode lool. The thing i dont like is that bursting seems really off. Why runes gives back energy and damage at same time? I want to use it asap on opener but i lose the energy it provides. Should be 2 abilities separate.
Well I see despite the initial messages we can agree on some stuff.
I actually played it more after September nerfs because I tried to make the old thug work with a friend but let’s say you lose before the arena begins when you see uh or destro in the box because you know you can’t out damage the self heals. Also an unholy has a way to break out of stuns half the set ups with Lichborne and can just stunpet people when he doesn’t have neither trinket not lichborne, and a warlock simply has a bit too much physical damage reduction with the self heals to be killed early. And if the game lasts you lose. And that’s not even taking their teammates into account. One thing I hate about this game is the possibility of facing comps that you can’t beat just because class. Even now in 8.1.5, assa rogues aren’t exactly meta but they have fewer one sided match ups than sub. It was obviously the case in s1 too since assa was too tier. So assa I went, Outlaw a bit too but Outlaw got hurt by the 50% trait nerf. Now outlaw is almost only sustained damage and that doesn’t dent the classes like wlock, uh, ele or rdruid so… Annoying. But still better than the current sub. Also sub has possible moves during dance before that 50% trait nerf with The First Dance, giving insane energy regen and auto hit damage during dance but that has been nerfed too, alongside TFD receiving a pve nerf that applied to pvp as well because it was too good compared to other sub traits… Rip Sub.
I do agree that you can’t do much of your cc and if your partners are disrupted during your cc then you don’t kill. I remain convinced that a pure damage buff isn’t the real solution. Not across the board at least. Buffing sustained but not touching burst would actually make people not be sitting at 100% with all defensives ready each time sub has a go, that would give kills but wouldn’t let sub just go cheap shot you’re dead on everyone, which happened in the past and was not exactly interesting gameplay. Also, a buff to the slow would help. A 30% slow applied only in melee range is useless as every class (unless you’re fire mage) has better Slows AND usable from a distance. That means sub rogues on their own can’t stick to a not stunned target so a trinket during a go is enough to stop 100% of sub’s damage without even blowing defensives, and sub can’t stick to a target when it needs to. That also means the only semi viable fire sub disc comp, in addition to having the worst dps and the worst healer, has zero slows to make offensive or defensive plays. A slow would help. Also now all good classes have a real ms effect, sub doesn’t, it’s weak and dispellable. After a go one swiftmend and the guy is topped. That doesn’t help, if you don’t kill on your triple stun the kill target heals are enough to stabilize and wait for the healer to go out of cc, then the healer tops the kill target in a couple gcds. Adding a ms would be smarter than adding damage because that leaves the possibility of a reaction to the enemy team after the cc chain while still giving you the possibility to kill. More damage would just mean the guy does on the stun anyways and can’t counterplay. We had that Ms effect in WoD.
Yes, the NS ES build is pretty interesting, you need tfd traits and mfd for it to work though. Since dark shadow is 15% in pvp you only lose 3% burst damage and you get a lot more dances so you can actually deal a bit of damage. The real disadvantage is the lack of subterfuge which can be annoying sometimes if you’re grown used to it. You lose a sec but have three dances so if you blow everything you have 15s instead of 12 so you don’t lose damage alright, plus you reset your dances twice as fast so you actually get a lot of damage since you’re ready to go again sooner.
You could go often in WoD true, but at some point you wouldn’t have the cooldowns to keep going that often so if the enemy team survived your first 4 goes where you blew vanish and prep then you’re in trouble. Also sub had only one shadowstep so unless dumb enemy team stacked you couldn’t cc everyone and that gave them time to react. Mages couldn’t blink while sheeping too. That’s huge.
Pikaboo and Whazz play sub sometimes both in 2s and in 3s. I saw a bm sub disc thug from the move win 2k6 games a week ago if I’m not mistaken. These are not average players but still, they don’t queue into idiots either.
Don’t give up, the spec has been bad for so long, it’s rare that specs remain unviable for an even longer time. If I am correct sub was not really great after the first few legion patches and had to wait 7.2 or 7.2.5 to be excellent again. Maybe 8.2 will be the salvation many people are waiting for to play a spec that doesn’t involve brainlessly training someone pve mode like assa is half the games.
While I didn’t read all of it, nerfing the first dance Azerite trait was THE last coffin in the nail.
Nerfing shuriken storm was also a big aoe hit.
Why are some classes carefully scrutinized ( especially pure dps ones ) like hunter, rogue and warlock while others are completely ignored like demon hunter, death knight and shaman?
I also meant ignored in both and good and bad ways.
we seem to beat destro teams pretty easily post-nerf tbh. seems like the easiest matchup we have out of the common comps. but yes unholy is basically unkillable for our comp. he needs to die in the stuns, which is really hard. we usually just go someone else.
hero cleave (really hard to kill, survive until priest dead or oom), any sort of TSG or ret warrior or such (ok to kill but takes some time, and priest is dead before) and both assa frost rmd (slow root kidney on me to stop me from playing the game while chain ccing my mage until they win) and assa fire rmpala (gas pedal all over us) are really hard.
pretty sure assa rogue is the single most common spec i face out of any class. so far i’ve met 1 other sub rogue and 0 outlaw rogues. according to xunamate i should see 1 sub rogue every 11 assa rogues but i’ve probably seen like 100 assa rogues at this point with 1 sub rogue. i asked my friend who doesn’t play 3s with me and he said he can’t recall seeing a single sub rogue.
yes it’s hard to tell how much of outlaw not seeing play is outlaw being weak and how much is that it’s awful in the meta. building tempo by swapping around a lot does not work when everyone is a tank with loads of self healing. it doesn’t suit sub particularly well either but sub is a spec that goes for structured setups with cross to try to 100-0 somebody with stuns which works a bit better at least because most classes don’t self heal much while stunned and fire mage burst is almost high enough to make up for how trash sub’s damage is.
really random nerf actually. makes sense to nerf traits that are way ahead of the rest, but doing that to a spec that was already not particularly good in raids and trash in mythic+ with no compensation was weird. now there are 4 survival hunters for every sub rogue in mythic as well as i think 70 assa rogues.
you would need some pretty huge sustained buffs for that to be a thing. i also don’t want to play a sustained pressure spec, if i did i wouldn’t be playing subtlety.
i thought it was. we try to do clean setups, opponents try to disrupt said setups and trade cds to stay alive. we try to run them out of cds and kill them before they kill us. some teams you walk all over because they don’t stop or they overlap cds massively, some teams do a really good job stopping you and rotating cds and it’s hard. this is still what we’re doing, just the damage isn’t there.
some of the most fun matchups of legion were sub rogue mirrors. sub rmps mainly, but also thugs. extremely fast-paced and explosive and the team that played better basically always came out on top.
and cheap shot everyone is really an oversimplification. at some point people grow wise to what you’re doing and if all you do is kidney cheap cheap you will lose because during the globals it takes they will stop the go or pre-use cds or run and line or what have you. it’s a continuous arms race of better setups vs better disruption.
i have enough mobility that i can connect fine, it’s more an issue of crippling poison, frost mage in general and chains of ice cutting your legs off.
sub’s ms is fine. it just doesn’t fit the spec so it doesn’t do anything.
healers doing big healing is fine, just need to have enough damage to match it. and i don’t really think it’s a healer problem anyway, it’s dpsers being too tanky and having too much self-healing.
there is counterplay. if the setup doesn’t have perfect cross then you can disrupt it. and then there’s rotating cds and trinkets to survive and disrupt. if i blind or kidney the healer and my mage and/or priest cover everyone at the right second to deny dispel, stops or pre-used defensives and their team has no trinkets then yes there is nothing they can do but then it was a clean go with them having nothing left, they should die.
i could see the haste being enough if you have like 3x first dance i guess.
arguably the main purpose of dance is stuns so your teammates can connect cc and damage and the opponents can’t run or use defensives. even ignoring the energy concerns, second (and third) dances are significantly less useful than the first because they’re on stun dr, you’ve already used your mfd evis and you’ve already used cold blood. on top of that if you don’t dance immediately symbols and prey are gone as well.
besides, gloomblade does way more damage than shadowstrike on high armor, but shadowstrike gives 2 pts for evis and you get dance haste, but it’s not like oh man i’m popping dance i’m gonna do so much damage now.
restealths were a big thing so i don’t really agree with running out of goes quickly if you went every 30s. besides, our games as sub rmp are basically always short, win or lose. even in this season the longest game i can remember is 2% dampening (besides ones that have gone to a 2v2). actually there was this one spriest hpala that went on for like 7 minutes because we kept running and they kept rotating sac disperse fade.
you could often cc both dps, and even if you couldn’t you had a druid and mage. not being able to shimmer is meh, deep sheep was really easy to land without any help from rogue with blink and blazing speed. didn’t need to stun healer all that much, the other 2 had that under control.
i haven’t seen pika or whaazz play sub in 3s in forever. the thug you talk about was stungodx and jellybeans unless there was another one which i doubt. but yeah, sub fire 2s is the one single thing that subtlety is still good at in this game. trash in raids, trash in m+, trash in 3s, trash in healer dps 2s, but sub fire is good. not cause sub does good damage in that comp, just because it can help set things up well for the mage to 1 shot things.
maybe. but i’m not gonna play any more sub this season i think. it sucks, a lot.
i made a thread on the class development forum. be nice if people could check it out and maybe post their thoughts. probably doesn’t do anything but maybe by some miracle it has some effect.
