This is a great change for Subtlety: it revives a dead talent, gives a very barebones spec an extra button, and helps Sub’s bad priority target damage in M+.
The main issues with Goremaw’s Bite currently are its very low damage in single target, and that it heavily clashes with the design of Secret Technique.
Secret Technique encourages us to use Dance every ~20s to consume Supercharger (and Ancient Arts in 12.1) to deal very high damage. Without Dance, Secret doesn’t do much more damage than a regular Eviscerate. Goremaw’s opposes this existing design because it encourages us to always use Dance back-to-back, to fill the entire 14s duration of Goremaw’s and benefit from Lingering Shadow.
In effect, we have to choose between using Secret outside of Dance, making it an unimpactful button that feels bad to press, or desyncing Goremaw’s from our other CDs outside of Shadow Blades, making it an unimpactful button that feels bad to press.
Honestly this talent just doesn’t feel good or impactful with the new version of Danse Macabre, so I don’t particularly care about this change.
These changes are an overall improvement to Sub’s current resource generation. I am not sure why this has been the primary focus for Sub in the development of 12.1, since the totality of these changes makes almost no impact to the actual gameplay for Sub, it amounts to overcapping resources less (not impactful), and casting more Backstab outside of Dance (not impactful).
Overall good changes this week. I would like to see a buff and iteration to the new Goremaw’s Bite, but I think the main issues with Subtlety have still not been addressed.