Since the Legion rework there has been a massive loss of identity for the Rogue class, focusing more on gimmicks and themes. Straying away from what it truly means to be a rogue for “spec” fantasy. In this post I will be talking about the traditional fantasy of both the class as a whole and Subtlety, and why the old design feels better than the current. I will also be mentioning the current flaws of the spec and class as a whole, and how this new talent tree and redesign is better than what we currently have.
Before the Legion class overhaul we were rogues, not poison masters, not pirates, not spellblades, just a rogue. A class that placed heavy emphasis on terrifying openers from stealth, “stunning your target to death,” the ability to create 2v1 situations with blind sap and other forms of cross cc, and finally the ability to score kills without over reliance of cds or stealth. Each global mattered and could be felt, every backstab hit hard no perforated veins or the rotten needed. Rupture and Slice Dice adding synergy to the class via passives like energetic stabbing and sanguine veins, turning those spells into more than just a boring attack speed buff or dot. A good rogue knowing the appropriate times to stay in a fight, or when to run; something that didn’t just stick for sub but for the class as a whole.
I’d argue that the legion rework shook the rogue class the hardest, causing us to see a huge philosophical change in our class design. Assa shifting from mutilate, weapon poison and envenom damage to all around rot damage, something more akin to a warlock or feral druid. COMBAT shifting from cooldown management with killing spree into a rng fiesta. Sub shifting from a focus on Find Weakness, positionals, and finishers; into a major focus on mass cooldown stacking, and resetting your dances with finishers.
This new version of sub has proven difficult to balance due to Shadow Dance being up every stun DR. Leading Subtlety to feel gimmicky and overpowered at its best, and depressing at its worst (towel boy for your mage). Rather than fixing these problems blizzard has actually gone further down the road with these gimmicks in our class tree. Nobody likes the rotten+gloomblade, shadowdust, echoing, deeper, Danse Macbre, or Secret tech. All of these play styles proved extremely unhealthy for the state of pvp, justifying each of their nerfs in not only Shadowlands, but Dragonflight. Due to all of these crazy damage mods our base damage has been dramatically reduced to nothing. If you don’t believe me, going out in the world and attack a mob with just base backstabs and evis, feels horrible. Causing sub rogue to adopt 1 extremely crucial playstyle, stun and run. Playing off of DRs and CDs only, then flopping around like a fish until DRs are back up; preferably in stealth, because we are almost always the kill target in any pvp setting. I’ve gotten 2700+ 3x off this awful playstyle and I will be the first to say it’s not only boring for the rogue playing, but everyone you play against.
For example, you can see this in rogue mage vs rogue mage mirror. In this mirror the winner is decided heavily on whichever team has the better mage. It pretty much just boils down to the mages 1v1ing in the middle of the map, then punishing the rogue who opens first. The rest is history, the first rogue who opens gets forced to trinket, blinded and sapped until drs falls off, then dead. No room for outplay, just need to hope your mage is better 4head.
Another issue with current Subtlety is that there is an over reliance of cooldown stacking. To fo a successful go not only do you need Shadow Dance, but you need Symbols of Death, Coldblood, Thistle Tea, Badge, Shadow Blades, Danse Macabre, Flagellation, Echoing Reprimand, sepsis, and last but not least Secret Tech.
A perfect example of this was in Shadowlands season 1, the Venthyr spell Flagellation got GIGA buffed and was insane when stacked with the master assassin legendary. For the entire expac sub rogues could shadowy duel and 2 shot anyone that didn’t have a trinket, leading to a stupidly scripted playstyle. Your target doesn’t have trinket, but you held onto everything; gg. One issue with this build was that you had to place all of your eggs into one basket. If you didn’t score a kill you’d be almost useless for two minutes, becoming a literal stun bot until Flag and Vanish came back up.
This example is important because it shows how unimportant our core kit is, dance and symbols are no longer enough to score kills. You need your vanish flags, your coldblood techs, your echoings on top of dance and symbols to be a viable threat in pvp.
My final point for Subtlety is the falling moon of Majora’s Mask, the cc and crit nerfs in 10.1… No longer can we sap or blind cap a base, no longer can we sap off blind. This along with crit being nerfed, other cc nerfs, and baseline precog will make rogues USELESS. Why bring us over a ww monk, feral druid, arms warrior, or even ret pally? Something needs to change, rogue needs to revert from post legion to the master piece it was.
Together, Eridian and I have easily put 40-60 hours into developing a class tree and spec tree for Subtlety. We have ideas for the other 2 specs, so depending on how this goes we will push those out. Our redesigned subtlety rogue draws heavy influence from not only wotlk-wod versions of the spec, but from vanilla wow too. Moving Shadow Dance back to a static 60 (or 45 if talented) second cd that lasts 8 seconds and that has no damage modifiers attached to it. Shadow Dance has always been known for dusting people with ambush and finisher spamming, but at the end of the day we got damage through the application of FW, pressing dance wasn’t just a 15-30% dmg buff.
All the damage that was attached to dance and other cds was moved into Find weakness and the bread and butter of our class. Adding more meat to bare bone spells like Slice and Dice and Rupture by adding Energetic Stabbing and Sang Veins. We also buffed baseline backstab and ambush by a lot, but at the cost of higher energy costs and positioning requirements. We even added positional buffs to Evis and Rupture. If being locked behind your target isn’t your thing we incorporated hemo back into sub rogue, we made a talent for it that buffs the spell and allows sub rogue to wield swords. A call back to old school classic and tbc sub rogue.
Our goal for this rework is to recapture the old school feeling of sub rogue, but with a modern twist. Getting rid of the button bloat that is not only annoying to play, but makes our core baseline spells a lot weaker. The more cds, buttons, and burst we have the less our core abilities actually matter. When fully talented, Ambush, Backstab, and Evis should SLAM when armor pen is up.
But that’s all my copium fueled mind has to say, I want to thank anyone that actually did read this. For anyone that wants a TLDR just check out the tree we made and let that speak to you, what we want is obvious. Please leave feedback and suggestions, at the end of the day we all just want to have fun on this class.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1090490136212553739/1092660570609684481/Artboard_1.png
