I use mod macros to streamline my abilities. This method has drastically reduced my carpal tunnel. By aligning my stealth macros with my regular bar, my macros allow me to change my playstyle very little and it causes less stress on my hands due to not needing to change bars all the time.
but in the prepatch, something happened: macros’ stopped responding to subterfuge delays. At first, I didn’t worry about it too much, I switched to outlaw, which doesn’t seem to suffer this issue. Outlaw still works to this day:
/use [nomod,stealth] Ambush; [nomod] Sinister Strike
This mod used to work across all specs, given that sinister strike is the default spam ability that changes when specs are changed, but last patch, for 2 of the specs, this mod no longer considered subterfuge to be stealth. I tried changing Sinister Strike to Mutilate/Backstab, and Ambush to Shadowstrike, still having the issue. It also won’t register garrote in the macro.
Rupture also won’t cast in stealth, a different, but perhaps connected issue.
My outlaw spec is working fine, jamming this macro causes me to ambush until subterfuge runs out, but the other two specs do not, they immediately default away from ambush to their respective non-stealth spam-strike abilities.
This has demolished my ability to play these specs effectively in PVP. This change has been so catastrophic to my playstyle that I can’t play anything other than outlaw, as outlaw is the only one that honors subterfuge as a stealth ability.
At first, I suspected this has something to do with changes to stealth under the hood, about sinister strike being the original ability and subterfuge not recognizing mutilate/backstab as abilities under its purview. But given that Garrotte also won’t trigger, what I’m guessing is that [stealth] modifier just doesn’t count unless you’re -actually- in stealth, whether or not Subterfuge is still up. And yet, it hasn’t changed for Outlaw. This seems widely inconsistent.
So what gives? Is anyone else having this issue? Is it just me? This changed prepatch, and this change has been VERY destructive to my playstyle, If I can’t go back to assassination in the next few weeks, I’m kinda thinking I’ll be done with wow for a while.