Did anyone actually READ what was written?
That was never even brought up.
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Subterfuge being 6 seconds is really a trade off which I think has unintended consequences. Also, bringing back shadow dance isn’t going to solve the problem that Assassination and Outlaw need help as respective specs.
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You guys can make a cancel macro to cancel subterfuge and enter stealth.
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You do know that you don’t have to take the talent right? You especially don’t have to take it twice. You can have a 3 sec Subterfuge if you want.
What is this conversation??
Doesn’t work, sadly. Subterfuge can’t be removed.
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Rip. Yall can go back to complaining ig 
But Shadow Dance was certainly worse right
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I’ve said nothing! 
Although that AR bug definitely is annoying as s though.
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For Outlaw, yes.
For Assassination, also yes (but less so).
For Sub, no.
Luckily, Dance still exists for Sub.
The feedback is largely make Sub Sub, but let the other specs breathe from the Stealth gimmicks.
In the case of OP, they are looking for skill consolidation too (where Backstab transforms to Shadowstrike or Mutilate transforms to Ambush, like how Audacity transforms Sinister Strike into Ambush for Outlaw). Which is again reasonable, if the expectation is that classes are designed without addons in mind, e.g. for buff tracking. That one change alone during Dragonflight for Outlaw was significant improvement for how HO build felt to play.
Because of Danse Macabre, I have some reservation with claiming that Backstab and Shadowstrike are equal though (Sub only). Anyone serious about playing Sub has already set up bars in mind that these two skills are unique.
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Yeah HO builds play smooth as silk on the PTR right now due to the Thistle Tea change ironically.
Backstab and Shadowstrike have to be keybinded separately as they are truly very different situations when needed to be used individually.
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Hard agree. The game should be designed from the no add ons perspective. I have one add-on: Details. Nothing more. You should not have to have add ons to play a spec. And having to have Gloom Blade and Shadowstrike both on your bar during Dance is a design issue.
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I didnt know that meant removing the stealth stuff entirely just to give us a watered down version of it thats overall more problematic.
If it were me i woulda just kept the talent, cause it actually did what a capstone should do, and gotten rid of the bad capstones that have needed tweaking after tweaking just to even be considered for taking.
But what do i know. My line of thinking isnt the slightest bit logical.
I actually have a good solution for this. Scrap all the current abilities and give each spec 2 new ones. One is called builder and the other is called spender. That way we remove any nuance regarding abilities and the situational usage that came with them. Makes rogue much easier to play.
You may not know this but buffs are already tracked by default in the top right corner. For the most part the icons match the spells giving the buffs. If its a proc youre instead trying to track, by default, the game will have an alert appear on your screen mid combat to indicate the proc occured. Some of you may be missing those if you have the Spell Alert Opacity setting un general accessibility set to 0. Turn it up.
The addons argument especially is tiring. Theyre not needed to achieve 95% parses.
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There should be no “situational usage” between Shadowstrike and Gloom Blade. When you can use Shadowstrike it should always be the better choice. Talents should be built around this idea. Nuance can exist elsewhere in the design in more interesting ways.
What you call nuance can very easily be called unnecessary complexity.
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That’s the problem. The capstone was too good, and it practically made the others irrelevant.
Just like how Crack(shot) completely smothers the other capstones for Outlaw because its ridiculously strong in comparison. Even with the Subterfuge tax, Crack(shot) out paces Greenskins/Summarily Dispatched by leagues.
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Crackshot is so OP that they nerfed its damage, removed shadow dance and put in place two charges of vanish and a couple of extra seconds on subterfuge and it is still dominating.
Honestly the Crackshot game play doesn’t need the stealth component because BTE should be primarily an out of stealth tool. Making or forcing BTE into a stealth tool is why on the PTR it resets when entering stealth. But that has reverberating consequences as a result.
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This isn’t always true.
Shadowlands legendary abilities that became talents did not come over to the talent system with overlays. A notorious offender during Dragonflight was Sun King’s Blessing for Fire Mage, that used the Sunfire icon for the stacking buff and a shorter duration Sunfire icon for the actual proc, making it impossible to distinguish without actively mousing over buffs during combat. Trying to do that with off GCD spell rotations is very, very hard, and unrealistic to an otherwise fun element–just bad UX.
Another example was again Audacity. The best method to finding the proc without addons during Dragonflight was watching sct (scrolling combat text) for the Audacity aura or monitoring the Ambush button. This forced Ambush to be taken off the stealth bar to monitor despite (naively) being a stealth attack. HO made Ambush functionally equivalent to SS anyways.
Both of these situations were bad.
Both of these were fixed.
Yet another example is Enhancement Shamans Maelstrom Weapon. When modified to 10 stack, the overlay only provides visual context for 5 stacking. This was never fixed. 
In the case of activating Ambush from Dispatch, it requires you to maintain Ambush on a non-stealth bar too. This runs counter to the naive idea that stealth abilities should live on the stealth bar. The question though is whether Mutilate, its extra hits, and supporting talents are fundamentally different from Ambush. I am in the mind that they are currently different but shouldn’t be, i.e. Dispatch should apply Doomblade/Caustic Splatter. Once Mutilate and Ambush are functionally equal (just a different name to press on proc), merging them to the same glowy button press is obvious.
Again though, with Sub, I don’t think Shadowstrike and Backstab are the same skill. They are unique, have unique conditionals, and if Gloomblade is talented, do unique damage types. Nothing in Sub should be aligned with how Outlaw and Assassination treat Stealth, as a utility not as a core mechanic. (Combo Points are the shared core mechanic.)
LOL
I told you that you were funny and likeable!
In general, when you can use Shadowstrike, it should always be the better choice.
What is significant is the modifications Gloomblade applies to Backstab though, and thats where I don’t think Shadowstrike (the attack that teleports you when Stealthed) is just the same as a harder hitting Gloomblade, despite being similar to a harder hitting Backstab (that teleports you when stealthed).
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If vanish and 2 charge shadow dance are not on the same CD that would be great.
Still degen game play
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I thought a little more about your view on this too. I agree that there is a design issue underscored but that it comes from energy as a resource.
There’s no problem with something like Retribution using Crusader Strike and Blade of Justice to generate Holy Power. Using two unique skills becomes an issue for Rogue though because in lieu of using hasted cooldowns on unique buttons, Rogue is using Energy as the throttle/gate for ability usage. This causes every skill press to compete for resources (Energy, GCD) where hasted cooldown classes compete for resources only from (GCD, Cooldown Availability).
That is, Energy design is like if Crusader Strike and Blade of Justice shared a cooldown, pressing CS activates a 4s CD on both skills but BoJ activates a 7s on both skills. Instead, the cooldowns can reset asynchronously, whereas Energy cannot.
There is a design issue but I don’t think it’s as simple as Backstab and Shadowstrike being decoupled. An open question is whether asynchronous Energy resets (ie, every 10 energy spent increases energy regeneration until a fixed portion of original cost is recovered) feels any better, or if Energy itself is irrelevant and outdated.
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They could attach some sort of effect like this to Sinister Strike, Mutilate, and Backstab and each spec would immediately feel better just due to being able to do more outside of burst windows.
Just to elaborate. I dont think that downtime is bad. But when i need to kidney… or feint… or do literally anything that requires energy but doesnt do damage itself i wanna just drop the fight.
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