Hello everyone,
I am making this post because it has been sort of asked for by the Ravenholdt community and because i want to make one myself because i fear there will be no changes to subtlety (sub from now on) in 9.1. These are still personal opinions and not necessarily supported by the Ravenholdt community.
Some background and why i think i can have sort of an educated opinion about the spec. Since Shadowlands released i have played sub for all content at a decent level: Hall of Fame raiding (played sub on 9/10 fights), Keystone Master and 2.1k+ rating in PVP (all sub).
This post will 99% be about PVE.
TLDR: After the assa buff there is no place for sub in PVE. Rogue as a whole suffers from mediocre damage and 0 raid utility. Sub has no niche anymore, except maybe frequent damage windows. Buffs are needed, either through mastery, flat dmg, talents or new/old baseline passives. âSub is a PVP specâ is not a valid comment, itâs a bad way of looking at the game, besides, assa is already taking over in PVP.
In the first 2-3 months of Shadowlands, rogue was an unwanted class for PVE content (except m+), we had no burst, we had average st and non-existent aoe. But we could more or less choose spec because none actually mattered, so i personally was not too bothered, we did good enough single target.
The problem is more related to other melee classes and specs getting extremely valuable raid utility, death knights getting anti-magic zone was a big slap in the face of any non-DK melee. Because this meant that the already extremely limited melee slots now more or less require a DK, warrior, monk and DH. This is in a meta where most top 100 guilds bring at most 4-5 melee, so you can imagine that itâs very hard to fit a rogue somewhere.
This is further emphasized by the fact that Blizzard developers have actively made sure Feint and Cloak of Shadows does not work on a lot of fights, what i mean by that is that many abilities you would think is AoE, is actually not and not all magic dmg abilities are prevented by cloak. I am not going into conspiracy theories, but this has been a trend ever since Tomb of Sargeras.
So what did Blizzard do to fix the rogue issue?
They massively buffed assassination. 21% pure aura damage buff and âQuality of Lifeâ changes to slice and dice, energy generation, buffing their already strongest legendary and buffing the venthyr covenant ability Flagellation which has strong synergy with the assa toolkit meant that assa is now the best spec on two-target cleave and single target. So far, so good, but did they forget something? Where does this leave sub?
Currently sub is a spec with a very weak niche, in its current form it can only do single target damage at a decent level (still below average), but this is massively overshadowed by assassination.
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Sub has no answer for 2-3 target cleave, you basically just apply rupture and you do single target on one of them, shuriken storm out of dance and thats it. Which leaves sub as by far the worst cleave spec in the game, which would have been fine if it did something else
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Sub has very weak aoe except if its sustained 8 target, but letâs be real, how often do you get to spam aoe on 8 targets for 2-3 minutes
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Sub has very weak burst, it is in fact one of the weakest specs in the game for burst. However it can do this âburstâ every 30 seconds, the problem that arises is that this burst is basically only there to barely keep sub afloat in terms of damage. If you fail these 30 second windows, not only will you lose burst, you will do tank damage because our damage between dance is so so bad
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Sub has a decent damage profile. The 30 second windows does help in some situations, some examples are shields on Kaelâthas on the Sun King fight, Dutiful Attendant damage on Blood Council, pillars on Sludgefist. Itâs not all doom & gloom
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Sub has the option to either AoE or funnel, which is interesting gameplay in itself, it just falls short because neither is substantial. Itâs weak aoe, average funnel and so it feels like youâre just choosing between two bad options
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Sub has very decent single target, it will do very good on fights where kill timers or mechanics donât suit certain cooldown timings. Because yea we have our shadow dance + symbols combo almost all the time. But as mentioned earlier, assa just does this better after the buffs and even outlaw has better sustained single target damage
So what can be done to fix the issues that sub is currently facing in PVE?
Well first off, sub needs to have a clear niche, a raison dâĂȘtre. Why bring a sub rogue over assa? They effectively do the same thing except assa just does it much better in current tuning.
Buffing sub mastery would go a long way, this means that our single target, cleave and AoE damage goes up, since we have a finisher for each situation.
Buffing Dark Shadow to be competitive for single target opens up an option to do big burst for key moments of a fight, also a niche that could be used.
Removing Gloomblade and Alacrity, replacing them with actual options, perhaps even cleave options would be a step in the right direction.
Making Master of Shadows baseline would do a lot for sub since you could pick Secret Techniques for low target cleave without feeling like you completely kill your single target damage. Energy talents have almost never been fun, but always necessary.
Bring back Shuriken Combo in a baby version of its former self. Now this is likely a controversial topic, Shuriken Combo was the defining passive for sub. It was THE niche. And it got completely removed from the game because of a frankly quite bad boss fight in Zul which allowed for you to permanently keep 6+ passive adds alive. Not to mention that any other funnel spec would also do this if it was possible and they still kept their toolkit.
Iâm a big advocate for the reincarnation of Shuriken Combo at a much lower damage modifier (2-3% for each target).
Tune down the amount of time spent in Shadow Dance and make it more meaningful. A reason why our burst in cooldowns canât be much higher at the moment is because of the uptime. Lowering the amount of time you spend in cooldowns and making them bigger (like a melee version of fire mage) could be a new spec defining niche for sub, looking back to Warlords of Draenor.
Make Symbols of Death a one minute cooldown with bigger damage amp.
This would go a long way to buff our burst, of course they would have to compensate the damage you do between cooldowns to accomodate the changes.
Some people might say, âthen just play assa?â, and i canât stand these comments. We (the sub rogue players) were stuck in assa prison for over 2.5 years in BFA, we were looking to finally get an out and play the spec we prefer in Shadowlands, only for Blizzard to buff assa by something crazy like a total of 30% dmg and leave sub in the dirt.
Some people might say, âsub is a pvp specâ, and i actually hate this comment. If assa is better than sub in PVE, more often than not have assa also been played in PVP. Unless youâre one of the best rogues in the world and can coordinate around the sub stun toolkit in a dedicated 3s comp. Blizzard also added a baseline AoE finisher to sub in Shadowlands, is that something you would do if you see the spec as PVP only? Fire mages get to do every single piece of content to a high level, this PVP spec take needs to stop.
This has been longer than intended, it always is. I am going to finish by saying that i donât want sub to be the best spec in the game, i donât want it to be better than assa in all situations, i want it to be competitive. I want to be able to say, âhey i want to play subâ and it not being controversial in a raiding setting. We have spent SO long waiting for this spec to be good, and Blizzard have consistently made sure itâs not for so many years, throw us a bone, itâs basically all we ask for.
Join us in the Ravenholdt discord for rogues if you want to discuss sub or any other spec. Thanks for reading, peace.