So a little about me to save y’all from a long boring read. I have mained rogue so far for two months and I am pretty much the only sublety rogue main I know of. I have tried outlaw and assassination and just hate those specs, they are so boring to play.
So I decided to main sublety, the worst spec for rogues. Why you may ask? I’ve always played the underdog spec and pushed myself to make it work in endgame. So far I have bursted for 80k and have sustained 52k on some fights. I haven’t raided mythic and don’t intend to.
My question, why does everyone hate this spec? My hopes for shadowlands is to finally fix our damage and for the devs to quit screwing over sublety.
With my raid set, my opener with Lust is going towards 250k dps, and a bit over 80k is my sustained damage. You can actually check my WCL, 79k dmg on Mythic Shad and that was my second ever pull of the boss. My guild legit subbed me in last minute on that boss because they were down a few people, I had no idea what I was doing, and I also died right before I could get off my third Vanish+Vendetta+Exsang, yet my sustained damage was still the same as your “burst.” My raid set is only 471 ilvl, just 2 ilvls higher than you.
With my M+ set, I also maintain about 85k overall DPS in +15 keys, and I have 0/3 Echoing Blades. Basically, that means I have 0 aoe, and could be pulling at least 20k more overall DPS with the exact stats + trinkets + essences I have right now.
The funny thing is, I have a set of Sub gears that I mostly use for world content. It’s actually the highest ilvl set of gears I have, with proper corruption and essences and everything, and that set is significantly better than your gears. Yet, whenever I go Sub for dungeon/raid/Visions, I always lose 20k dps and drop down to about your level of damage. So, you’re definitely not playing the spec bad or anything. It’s legit just a crappy wet-noodle spec rn, and that’s why everyone hates it.
Sublety is my favorite rogue spec too, but honestly it’s sustained single target damage is worse than assassination, and it’s AOE is worse than Outlaw. So I just can’t convince myself to play it anymore when it’s objectively worse than the other specs other than maybe burst damage.
Subtlety is honestly my favorite specialty but it heavily rely far too much on Shadow Dance to sustain viable damage. Besides the messy game play and removal of Gouge, I really love their Shadow/Death oriented Lore.
I love rogue too. At 472 ilevel I am sustaining 60k dps which isn’t very good but it gets me through heroic nyalthoa. So I’m pretty happy. I’ve been keeping up with Shadowlands alpha and we are looking pretty good as a spec. Time will tell though.
The spec has zero player engagement at the moment, none of the buttons feel good to press and you can’t fail the rotation. It’s a very linear play style with almost no deviation, even intentionally simple specs like Beast Master have to maintain Barbed Shot or they lose tons of damage.
Most of the players, myself included, loved when Subtlety had 1 Shadow Dance that allowed you to massive damage and if you mistimed it or didn’t get enough Ambush/Eviscerates in it’s window your damage was mediocre. On top of this you had to maintain proper usage of Find Weakness, these two things made for a engaging and rewarding play style.
To top it all off the spec doesn’t scale well at all to where it’s doing nearly 40-50k less DPS on pure single target bosses compared to Assassination, the spec doesn’t even excel in the one thing it use to be known for.
I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit on Alpha, Shadow Dance having a 1 min CD and lasting 8 sec(9 With subterfuge) feels good to press, you can get a lot of damage in during that time frame. Slice and Dice provides more consistent Shadow Technique procs for Combos and 8 energy, adds some management the spec needed while smoothing out energy and combo points.
My only issue is Find Weakness is up nearly the entire time as it’s also applied by Backstab crits, if they would return it to a 70% armor reduction or more instead of 30% that would add a slight skill gap that rewards better players.
Raiding wise it’s also looking very good, Subtlety has a little better mobility with two Shadowsteps like on live but with Shadow Dance being a big DPS CD you have great priority damage for boss timers or adds that need immediate damage.
I don’t believe Subtlety will see much use in M+ at the moment, from playing in Torghast the other specs have more consistent cleave, we’ll just have to wait till Beta when all the features are in.
It used to be the most fun spec in the game. It had insane amount of utility with bleeds, poisons, every kind of CC DR type, and really unique burst. Now they have made its rotation super easy and feeling u impactful. I played it to 2750 in arenas and it feels like a cheap shot bot since the rework in legion.
They are making it more fun to play again in SL but it will still need some improvements imo.
1-Charge Shadow Dance was great because it rewarded good timing/planning. It actually felt like a REAL / IMPACTFUL cd.
Slice & Dice returning is fantastic too.
Take Sub, a spec that was always DEFINED by having multiple finishers that each provided different damage / utility enhancements, its quite unfortunate to see Sub only have TWO finishers in BFA (not including CC finisher aka Kidney). So i’m very happy to see Slice & Dice return as I think it will make big strides in making our rotation/kit feel more complete.