So I’m rolling a Sub Rogue because I want both an Ally and Horde main and Sub looks the coolest to me. I can’t seem to perform well though. I’ve heard it’s harder to learn than the other specs so I’m wondering if I go Sin and learn the basics of rogue will it help me? Or should I keep smashing my face against sub where I’m seeing little progress?
Subtlety is likely to change significantly in 9.0. Some reasons why:
- A lot of people who loved the spec before Legion hate the way it plays in Legion and BFA
- Both Ion Hazzikostas (lead game designer) and Brian Holinka (lead combat designer) have hinted recently that big class reworks and change in class design philosophy is coming in 9.0.
- Blizzard has a history of intentionally undertuning specs that are due for a rework, because they don’t want people to get attached to the version that they are going to abandon.
- Subtlety is currently undertuned
You don’t have to make the same inferences from those pieces of evidence but I think it’s fairly clear what is going to happen. We will know a lot more at Blizzcon in 5 weeks. For now, I recommend investing your time in something different.
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Subtlety is great for world content, quests and the like. Its burst damage mows down non-elite mobs like nobodies business. It just does not perform up to snuff in dungeons and raids, especially compared to its sister spec, assassination which has almost the same stat priority and weapons and is far easier to play.
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“Let’s take a spec which has a 10 year history of being the arena tryhard spec and make it so the only thing it’s good for is ‘world content, quests and the like.’”
–Blizzard’s Legion and BFA class design team
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Your goal is to have Shadow Dance active as often as possible. During Shadow Dance, you need to have enough energy to do Shadowstrike x2, Eviscerate, Shadowstrike x2. You want to renew Nightblade shortly before doing Shadow Dance. The damage you do outside Shadow Dance is largely irrelevant – it’s mainly for setting up combo points for Nightblade in preparation for Shadow Dance
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I should add, once for have The First Dance, the Shadow Dance rotation changes to: Shadowstrike x1, Eviscerate, Shadowstrike x2, Eviscerate.
The usual “don’t cap resources” applies to all rogue specs
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Yeah subtlety really back-loads most of your damage onto those Symbols of Death/Shadow Danced 6 CP eviscerates. The rest of the spec is played around those hay makers. But, like I said, assassination does more damage and is easier to play, spreading its damage out over several abilities, especially dots, and really spiking things up when vendetta is activated.
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Do yourself a huge favor and don’t play Sub right now. It does less damage than Assassination for more effort. You only feel decent in Shadow Dance; outside of Dance it feels outright bad.
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Not only is there no damage outside of Dance, we don’t even have buttons to press because they all got pruned.
And the buttons that we used to press while Dancing got pruned too.
It’s less exciting when Dancing, less exciting when Dance is down, and just feels all around like garbage.
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i like sin way more than sub personally and always have…i personally hate sub…
give sin a shot i’d say…it just feels like an assasin role
Sub is only fun in pvp. Against dumb people.
Or questing.
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Whereas I fall in the opposite category, despite my attempts to transition to Sin.
My vote is 2-handers for Sub 
Subtlety is more of a pvp spec… It’s almost unmatched in 1v1 potential only outright losing to dk/fire mage/ monk. Really good in 2s and specific comps in threes. Subtlety is not easy to pick up and learn but it’s also not useless and wins the mirror out right against assassination rogue. If you want to play something thats easy, doesnt require thought, and plays like like a dk just go assassination for pvp.
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The entire purpose of the redesign of Subtlety in Legion and BFA was:
-
Juice up the class fantasy to make it more appealing to dummies
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Make the rotation work better in PvE raids and dungeons
If Subtlety were truly more of a PvP spec, which was very true until Legion, they wouldn’t have ruined it with these mechanical changes which are entirely driven by PvE design concerns
Celestalon’s words on the Legion beta forums: “our goal is to make Subtlety appeal to a much wider audience.” Oh yeah, how’d that work out?
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Play Sub if you want to make people feel bad for losing against you. Play Sub if you want to be gimped against mongoloids playing Sin because it’s braindead. Play Sub if you want to do negative damage 95% of the time and get huge Eviscerates the other 5% of the time.
Basically, just play Sin - there is no real reason to play Sub, other than using it as an excuse to why you lost due to raw damage output. Go watch Pikaboo do 2s with random rogues, and you’ll see bad players regularly match or out-damage him when they play Sin and he’s Sub. The better player should always do exponentially more damage, even with a sub-par spec, but that’s how bad Sub is.
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Sub was never about topping meters but rather doing damage at important moments, and tuning is the least of its many, many problems
Sub was never about topping meters? HFC would like a word with you lol.
Only in Wrath and S9 Cata was it solely about control. Beyond that, Sub did amazing damage in 3s and still had control. It wasn’t high sustain, but the burst windows made up for that on the meters.
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HFC? You realize we are talking about PvP right?
Yes, Sub had great burst. Thus my comment “doing lots of damage at important moments”. It’s not true at at all that Sub was only a control spec in WotLK or Cata – Sub was ever solely a control spec – as Dance burst was formidable even in the seasons you mentioned.
But it has never been about topping the meters, rather about doing damage when it counts the most, and that’s a good thing.
A lot of people would like to play Sub in PVE, as well, which is directly affected when it’s bad in PVP. Most seasons where Sub was handily viable in PVP, it was also competitive in PVE. Funny how those correlations occur.
Sub was great in PvP in every arena season in history until the Legion rework.
Even in WoD s1 when Combat was fotm Subtlety was still a very good spec, it was just easier for most players to get results with Combat. But Sub was always R1 viable.
Subtlety PvE was not a consistent presence through all the years as Subtlety PvP was.