Hey guys,
I love sub for pvp and on bosses I do great, but I struggle on aoe and fights leading up to boss in damage. Any suggestions to increase it ?
Subtlety is an ST spec, not an AoE spec. Your AoE will be dumpster. This is the trade-off for the ST strength. I know that sounds hollow when numerous specs are matching, if not exceeding, our ST and dumping out 300% of our AoE damage. I think it’s time to just admit Subtlety is a PvP spec and the two rogue PvE specs are Outlaw and Assassination.
Either way, I’ve been able to eek out mild AoE damage by using the following priority rotation:
Talent) Take Deeper Strategem talent, Nightstalker and Secret Technique*
QoL) Macro your Symbols to your Dance on a separate keybind from Dance itself
Conduit) Take the 6% extra crit from Symbols conduit
- Open with Shadowstrike into 2pp-3pt Slice and Dice
- Pop your Dance / Symbols macro (on-use trinket too, if you have one)
- Shuriken Storm for 6pts
- Secret Technique
- Shuriken Storm for 6pts
- Black Powder
- Shuriken Storm for 6pts
- Black Powder
- Shuriken Storm for 6pts
- Secret Technique
There are a lot of synergies at work here; Shadow dance increases your damage by 37% (25+12), the Expose Weakness from your dance’d Shuriken storm grants a duplication of Black Powder hits and Deeper Strategem gives you 20% increased finisher damage (5% talented, 15% extra combo point) which all add up to explosive AoE DPS windows. And due to 6pt spenders decreasing the CD on both Secret Technique and Shadow Dance so quickly, we can essentially spam them.
I’ve seen as high as 8k burst AoE DPS with this combination. Generally it’s closer to 4-5k. This isn’t nearly as good as some other specs right now, but it’s not absolutely garbage-tier either.
*Secret Technique is a controversial talent. The 75 energy regeneration over 3sec talent is extremely strong, and allows you to get a 4th Black Powder in your Shadow Dance window whereas Secret Technique does not, obviously. You have to compare the additional damage of a 6pt Secret Technique over a BP vs. a raw BP. I’m finding the Secret Technique IS being beneficial to me on 2-5 pack pulls and is way worse on ST than the 75 energy every Shadow Dance. You can do your own experiments and come to your own conclusions. As our secondaries scale and we get way more Haste, I think the damage of Secret Technique will become more and more valuable than the 75 energy. But right now, we’re a bit energy starved.
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thank you for your input, Im going to grab your advice and go practice a bit!
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My trick for doing good AoE damage in trash pulls is using my Symbols to buff my FoK so it crits all enemies and applies Find Weakness. If the target has Find Weakness debuff then Black powder will do extra damage.
Sometimes I will even dance and tab>Shadowstrike mobs for the Find weakness debuff because, shadowstrike will give find weakness for 12 seconds duration instead of 6 seconds that FoK crit gives.(I’d base that desicion off how many mobs there are) If you need energy or want more damage you can Pop shadow Dance
My main rotation for mobs is something like
Symbols >Fok to 5CP> Black Powder> Maintain Find weakness. repeat. Sometimes I will apply rupture on up to 3 mobs but no more and I’ll keep Slice n Dice up.
The addition of Black powder to the rogue kit is amazing. I find myself pulling big numbers now instead of falling way behind.
As for talents, personally I don’t use secret technique. With the reduction of stat weights and low iL gear I found my energy regen to really be struggling due to low haste so as of now I am running Shadow focus+Vigor. Later on in the expac I will switch back to Nightstalker+Deepstratagem
Hope this helps 
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I agree. But, then I wonder why Black Powder even exists. Why give us a straight up pure AOE rotation if our AOE rotation is going to be subpar. Just seems weird.
I’m still down for replacing crimson tempest with an aoe rupture and making it baseline for sin and sub. It would let those 2 specs focus on single target while doing some form of aoe without looking like garbage on the meters.
I feel like any rogue spec is currently bad for 3-4 targets cleave fight. Warr/DH/DK can AOE into the 4-5k range, and still put out nearly 3k ST.
Sub Rogues can’t bring that type of damage at all unless 4+ mobs and specced into Secret Tech, but missing out on MoS for ours ST dmg. Not sure if it is the current iLVL scaling, or if I should just abandon my rogue and go with a braindead melee like DK or DH to ride out the dmg meter chart.
Thanks for the advice guys, ran some mythics and I can at least keep up with aoe now huge improvement.
I’ve just been doing shuriken storm > black powder spam on packs with secret tech thrown in on cd . I do use the venthyr ability too on large packs which boosts my haste quite a bit so I have noticeably higher energy regen to spam more ss and bp
the aoe can not out damage our single target and they are scared to buff our single target. idk why every flicking xpac theres some new gimmick with eviscerate. they are scared to death to have that hitting like at truck without that one weird trick…I guess that one time in vanilla we where to good
They just need to make Secret Technique a baseline finisher for all specs.
This will help Assassinate and Outlaw the most for higher burst dmg, while replacing ST finisher for sub with something else like a better Black Powder 2.0 finisher.
id personally prefer this. sub feels really good to play in pvp but i absolutely hate it in pve, especially any cleave. outlaw aoe is just so much more satisfying.