I know there has been a few posts that touched on this already, but many have missed core problem of Assassination rogues have right now with the return of SnD in SL.
Some said that Sin as a spec sucks now because we lost borrowed power from BFA, some said that the design of current Sin is fine, we only need number tweaks, etc.
I whole-heartedly disagree. I raided semi-hardcore in early BFA as a Sin rogue in Uldir. At the time there was nothing to borrow power from except for a few useless azerite traits that had nothing to do with the class/spec itself. Sin rogues were by no means a top pick for any raid group, but even so, the balancing and the spec itself was done adequately that I never felt so hopeless that my 95+% parse is only catching the tail of another spec’s 80% like I feel now. After experiencing the SL raid tier and held on after the 5% buff, I feel it’s time for me to make a post to talk about this.
I think the biggest issue with Sin and SnD right now is that normal attacks take too high of a % in our damage composition. The whole point of a DoT class is that you can DoT a mob and move on to let passive damages tick, but now SnD requires you to sit on the mob to deal damage, otherwise you lose ~25% of your dps including auto attack as well as deadly poison procs. We lost what made Sin rogues good and valuable in a raid setting - DoT up, so you can do mechanics with minimal DPS loss. The design team at Blizzard basically took away our entire spec identity just to force the return of SnD. Our poison/bleed damage reduced because they had to be compensated for more white-text melee damage we do, which we never needed and counter-productive to our spec as a whole. This is a fundamental design flaw in the spec itself with the return of SnD.
I personally enjoy added depth to Sin spec with SnD, however it simply does not work in its current state and the effect of SnD has to be changed so our main source of damage returns to being poison/bleeds. Perhaps keep the 10% energy regen, but instead of increasing attack speed, increase our poison/bleed damage with added conditions like within 15 yards etc (I didn’t think this through, just throwing ideas out there).
All in all, I’m not holding my breath for significant changes to Sin rogues until 9.1 or later, but I know many were forced to switch to another class/spec because of Sin’s non-existent viability in any content at all. On a consumer level, as a paying subscriber and frequent WoW token purchaser, I think it is within my reasonable right to expect a working product which is Sin spec for me, but it is not the case atm since no one wants a Sin rogue in M+, no one wants a Sin rogue in Arena just for gimmick one-shots that was hot-fixed already and passive counter due to Kyrian Phial cleanses all your DoTs.
This is a borderline broken product and more need to be talked about regarding this topic.
**P.S.: for your reference, I’m currently ranked #3 in the world on normal CN and #18 on heroic CN.
Logs: h ttps://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/kiljaeden/lycod#difficulty=3
(Delete the space after ‘h’)