I’m making a rogue for fun. I’ve never played the class seriously but I’ve always been a Sassination rogue fan (I love Dot specs). I just find the stealth element odd to be used constantly.
A rare? Sure. But on goats in the field. It seems weird. I’m just hoping people can give me their 2 cents on what they find appealing about it.
If you want to rely less on stealth, play outlaw.
I enjoy rogues in the open world because I gank people and mess with them 
I havent found a groove with Outlaw. It feels like a skow Fury warrior to me.
Outlaw heavily relies on stealth to do damage now.
Assassination does best because it can dot up multiple targets in open world.
How do Rogues feel about this? That feels, to me as a non-rogue, like a step backwards.
We’re rogues. We should be using stealth.
You could maybe argue it should be a defensive instead of an offensive cooldown, but it shouldn’t feel like a useless button either.
For open world content, I like Subtlety. The Shadow Dance windows allow for quick busts of crazy damage. I can easily handle 3-4 mobs at a time, restealth and move to the next group.
Regarding stealth as a rotational ability. It doesn’t feel right. It’s something Blizzard shoved in our face with this expansion via the hero talents. The part I dislike the most is having to hold Vanish in case I need to reset the hero talents. For 20 years Vanish has been an iconic tool for Rogues. Now I have to hold on to it just in case I have to refresh a talent.
It just feels wrong. 
I do not mind Vanish being used as an offensive but when an entire spec revolves around it that makes doing world content very hard.
That is why BlizZard needs to give Outlaw Rogues alternative builds that do not rely on Crackshot stealth/vanish windows.
So, things to consider:
Subtlety:
In terms of overworld, Subtlety is a bundle of short cooldowns or cooldowns that get cooldown reduction, and then two bigger cooldowns. Shadow Dance, Symbols of Death, Secret Technique, and technically Cold Blood are a more regular shorter cooldown cadence. Shadow Blades and Flagellation are the bigger cooldowns.
For random goats and singular enemies, you’ll rarely even need cooldowns. Most of the time it’s just Shadowstrike, maybe a Backstab, and an Eviscerate. That usually cleans up anything that isn’t a hardier world mob. If it has a bit more health, Symbols beforehand and maybe a Shadow Dance after the first CP drop from Stealth will clean up mobs nicely.
Assassination:
Honestly probably the more hilarious of the three specs in overworld? You basically can just run around throwing 2-4 dots on things and watch them bleed out with Sudden Demise. The leveling experience on Assassination both in Beta and in actual live release was hilariously easy. It didn’t even feel fair. For elites you’ve got the Kingsbane + Deathmark cycle with Shiv’d Envenoms which pumps hilarious damage into a burst window. Shiv can also be treated as a shorter cooldown to pump big Envenoms into things that don’t justify Deathmark or Kingsbane.
If I didn’t have a preference for Subtlety I’d just always play Assassination right now, tbh.
Outlaw:
Sorta gimmicky? It works really well on mobs that die within the Subterfuge window due to the stealth reliance that Mafic mentioned. You can sorta work in Vanish rotationally, but you need to be ready to hit the mob IMMEDIATELY after vanishing, otherwise you’ve reset your mob. Pretty nice bursty spec, innate CDR makes it feel like it flows pretty well from mob to mob. Less self sustain than Assassination, faster outside of Stealth but a little slower inside of Stealth than Subtlety.
This is what i mean, to me (a non-rogue) Outlaw should be:
As assassin has a job, and Subtlety (im guessing) is more magic that Assassination but outlaw should be a sell-sword. It should use pistols, and blinds, and hunter-like traps, and maybe even something like illusions.
No disagreement. They were partway there before putting Crackshot into reliance on Shadow Dance and Vanish.
They really should push Vanish back to a purely defensive/utility cooldown and tie Crackshot to something else. I also wouldn’t mind Dispatch feeling better to use, because it honestly feels really weird in the rotation as the “not-BtE-but-need-to-use” spender.
Yea, Subtlety fits under the Shadowblade archetype where Assassin is more of a Poisoner archetype. How they landed so close to each other, not entirely sure, but they still feel distinct in playstyle at least.
Yep.
Float like a Butterfly talent needs to be baseline for the spec because it is the identity of the spec. Same with one of the RTB talents that makes RTB RNG less frustrating to deal with.
Honestly, I was kinda hoping they’d build a tank spec along the same theming as Outlaw/Combat at some point. Would love to have a defensive duelist tank spec on Rogue.
I’d almost say I hope they do an opposite version of Gladiator Stance from WoD, but that experiment ended horribly and I have no expectation that Blizzard could make it work.
It’s fine. You can still do most open world stuff as outlaw without having to use vanish burst windows, which is why I say it’s the least reliant. In order to do burst, and for the spec to flow decently well, you have to work in Vanish. BUT! You don’t have to and it feels less bad than assassination and sin if they don’t use stealth. It does feel slow, though.
For anything challenging, you will need to vanish for damage windows.
Because when Blizzard took Rupture and poisons away from Subtlety, folks cried … a lot … like rivers of tears. So, Blizzard gave them back.
I play Assassination and Subtlety. The impact of bleeds and poisons between the two specs is very dramatic. For Assassination, it’s very integral to the rotation. For Sub, it’s like, whatever, do I really need to do this.
True.
I miss Legion Subtlety, at least in regards to it being distinct from Assassination to the degree that it was. Nightblade felt much better than Rupture does on Subtlety.
Sub used to have several mechanics tied to bleeds that really made Sub shine so it isn’t so simple.
Ask anyone that played Sub since vanilla and they would love to have Sub back with bleed mechanics. Put my vote down along with expose armor returning.
In fact Combat had Rupture weaving as a way to squeeze out more DPS for advanced players.
I think the issue with bringing more bleed focus back to Subtlety is that the current design paradigm of the specs would mean this pushes Subtlety to overlap with even more of Assassination.
I think Subtlety has been at its best and most distinct from Assassination when it leans into shadow magic and an executioner playstyle. Legion’s design had a lot of issues (namely the somewhat spammy usage of Shadowstrike), but if the spec were to drop Rupture back out for Nightblade and make a few other small changes to give Subtlety more of its own shadow-magic-rogue-feel, it would help.
Sub lost a lot of its sustain damage because of the shadow damage focus. Shadow damag bypasses armor for all damage.
Sub was at its peak in WoD with Bleed mechanics right before Legion.
In Legion they tried to carry forward the DoT aspect using shadow damage but that did not work because without Hemo, Garrote or Rupture you were limited to only Nightblade. Nightblade was very difficult to maintain and also acted as a slow which is not good for PVE or PVP because you want to control when you apply a slow via active abilities.
Would you say Shadowmeld gives a significant advantage because of this?