Been spending a fair amount of time on PTR looking into the Winning Streak! mechanics and with both of subtlety’s Hero trees, any time spent in between Shadow Dance feels very, very bad gameplay-wise. It is not uncommon to sit on Coup de Grace or Darkest Night for 25-30+ seconds (or have Darkest Night time out entirely) because it is not worth the risk to send any Eviscerate/Secret Technique/Black Powder and lose full Winning Streak! stacks. This encourages extremely degenerate gameplay of only casting Rupture or Slice and Dice outside of Dance, and is very unrewarding gameplay for both Hero trees: for Deathstalker you can’t consume Deathstalker’s Marks while Darkest Night is active so its a bunch of unbuffed Ruptures with no Plague damage or buffed Backstabs, and you’re missing out on the extra cooldown reduction from the increased combo points of Coup, plus Supercharged combo points from not sending Symbols without Dance like we sometimes do currently.
With the addition of Death Perception and Supercharger, a suggestion would be to tie the 4pc to Symbols of Death instead of Shadow Dance. It would create a more fluid and considerably less degenerate gameplay loop with the current playstyle of subtlety, as we’re anchoring the use of Symbols/Dance to Secret Technique. Since we aren’t using Dance as often as the other two abilities (could have an entirely different conversation about Dance and CDR/uptime), tying it to Symbols would allow for non-Rupture finishers, and the 2pc/4pc buffs could be tuned to compensate. As it stands, we can maintain 100% uptime once 10 stacks of Winning Streak! are reached which, based on the built-in reset mechanic, does not seem like the intended playstyle of the set.
If the intention is to cycle stacking and resetting the buff, the finisher/shadow damage needs to be tuned to a level where losing it does not crater our damage in cooldowns; subtlety is designed to do a vast majority of its damage within Flagellation/Shadow Blades, and the chance of losing out on 30% finisher damage and 60% shadow damage in those cooldowns is not worth risking and leads to only casting Rupture to take advantage of Deepening Shadows cooldown reduction on Shadow Dance and Sectech’s built-in CDR.
Additionally, the reset chance of Evisc/Sectech/BP is 15% chance per hit of both the physical AND Shadowed Finishers portion, leading to Coup de Grace having six separate chances to reset per cast, and Black Powder has two chances to reset per target hit. This means the set is basically useless in AoE, and there are times where the last hit of Coup can land outside of Dance and you can lose your stacks, which can lead to extremely frustrating gameplay.
Tangentially, there are many of us who would love if our damage events weren’t split as they are currently with spells like Coup, Secret Technique, or Shadowed Finishers because it leads to very odd interactions and a litany of bugs with subtlety talents. Some of those interactions are being looked at and fixed, from recent testing on PTR which is great and something we’ve been very appreciative of, but we still fear that having way too many moving parts leads to complications with both our own kit and how it interacts with the season 2 tier set. We don’t even have the 4pc shadow damage amp functioning on PTR yet so we don’t know how it’s going to work with our talents which is a bit of a concern as well.
I’ve admittedly been quite skeptical of how this tier set would play out, because this spec likes to be in control of our big damage windows as they’re quite literally all we have to look forward to during combat. Having to babysit very large damage increases between 1.5minute cooldown windows does not feel good. I did almost five hours of testing just the 2pc stacking alone and being able to fully stack it in as low as 9 seconds or a whopping 57 seconds with normal gameplay is absolutely wild to me. I get that it fits with the gambling theme of the raid, but when the pendulum swings in potential opener damage are that large it’s hard not to be cynical of its performance.
We can guarantee our second set of cooldowns at the 1.5 minute mark of the fight will be quite strong, but the way to get there feels very degenerate and I sincerely hope some positive changes come to our tier set. I am very thankful for the bugfixes we’ve gotten this PTR cycle, and I really hope the Darkest Night/Deathstalker’s Mark bug is addressed but if our tier set goes live and it feels this bad to play I can’t say I’ll be playing subtlety or rogue in general with any real certainty.
