Returning player and former rogue lover. Subtlety has never felt more cumbersome to me than it is now in War Within.
I wish I could speak more eloquently on this but I’ll give it a shot. I have a hard time with sustaining damage with subtlety in pve and pvp. Without popping cooldowns dmg output is ridiculously low, your daggers might as well be limp noodles. Symbols of death and Death Perception help a little bit, when they are off cooldown, thankfully it’s a low cooldown. But if shadow dance, ghostblades, etc. are on cooldown, it’s still just low-moderate damage when you have symbols of death available. To keep par with other classes output we rely on our long cooldown abilities, and they are too long imo.
When it comes to pvp, forget it. The cooldowns are way too long for arenas, and I find myself having to hide in bgs when they are on cooldown bc I’m pretty much only an interrupt monkey/easy target at that point. Also with arenas, too many cooldowns to pop while managing shadowstepping and interrupting all at once. Can we get pvp talents to make dodge or spell dmg reduction passive or procced in some way so we at least don’t also have to juggle three different long cooldown dmg reduction abilities with the 8 other dmg and interrupt cooldowns we have to manage?
Sub isn’t known for having a lot of energy to work with. But I do agree that Sub used to have the best economy of energy usage due to high CP generation and being able to concentrate builders and finishers into damage windows.
Without Hemo to serve as an energy saver for CP generation or even expose armor the spec relies on Backstab to do it all. Similar problem with Outlaw and Sinister strike which is why Ambush builds for Outlaw are more popular now. This is because Ambush is just a more efficient combo point generator than Sinister Strike.
Backstab was plagued by this for year and still is to an extent really.
There’s your problem. Sub doesn’t do sustained damage. It’s all about maximizing Shadow Dance windows. Blizzard gives it a “token” amount of damage outside of that just so you don’t feel totally useless.
The Sub talent tree is still ahead of the other two specs because you can talent into having stronger combo point generators which means you do not rely on shadow dance/stealth and finisher as much.
Me again. Back to say “Energy is an outdated resource system.”
In order to modernize Energy, regeneration needs to be asynchronous timing. That is, the first time you use 40 energy, that 40 energy begins to reset over the next window (eg, base 10 energy per second, so 4 seconds). If you press another button and spend another 40 energy, you immediately begin regenerating another 10 energy per second again over the next 4 seconds.
In this example, after 2 presses, you are gaining 20 energy per second until the first energy spend is fully recovered. Then energy gain drops to 10 until the second press is fully recovered.
This basically makes Energy a “GCD pool” where it refills and balances around the timing of your GCD. Starvation is basically gone.
The reason for this is 3 separate hasted cooldowns will reset independently. You press one, its timer is counting. You press another, its timer starts. It does not count against the first timer. This emergent problem comes along because hasted combat priorities are By Design gapless when performed correctly.
But for current energy model, you regen a nearly constant value of energy regardless of the execution priority or timing. The energy spent on the “next ability” doesn’t start cooling down until the energy spent on the “last ability” has been fully recovered. (Granted, energy is then subject to the slew of stims and talents to actually make energy manageable, but on principle, the analysis holds.)
Another thing Blizzard could do instead, is reduce the cost of the builders. Mutilate, Backstab/Gloomblade, Sinister Strike are weaker than wet noodles for what they cost.
At least Mutilate gives you 2 combo points. Maybe if Gloomblade awarded 2 cp, it wouldn’t feel so bad.
Gloomblade is supposed to be a non positional backstab aka Hemo and it fails at that because the damage isn’t high enough and the energy cost is too high.
Sinister Strike energy cost was hiked up because the change to how Adrenaline Rush works so avoid capping energy when AR is up (only reason really). In reality the energy cost of Sinister Strike needs to be dropped down again. Because right now Ambush is better at dumping energy, generating combo points and doing more damage lol.
Mutilate should go back to hitting hard again like a mack truck or be able talent that way as a player choice.
there are plenty of energy procs. if you learn the secrets to proc rates, you do not have energy issues.
there is a reason sub relies on secret technique. it is literally the foundation for many “tricks” or “benefits”
there are secret techniques to proc rates. you can “alter” these if you figure out the secrets.
managing your symbols of death isnt that difficult since you get mutiple uses.
no. im not teaching you how to alter your proc rates. figure it out yourself. it takes me a LOOOONG time to become energy starved. i can mash keys like crazy before it strikes.
altering proc rates has been a thing for 20 years. it is taught to you all through out the game, if you didnt pay attention or listen… thats on you. NPCS do not call them “procs”… figure out NPC call procs, and you figure out the answer.
it takes work, effort and knowledge to achieve this. it doesnt just happen. you have to actually build your toon. thats the advantage of playing a toon for many expansions.
You aren’t teaching anyone because you go into thread after thread insinuating that you know how to do all of these untold secrets, when in reality you’re a gray parsing rogue who doesn’t know how to play and has just been around forever.
No offense, but I don’t think you’re in a position to claim to have some secret knowledge.
I’d rather you not teach anybody anything. You pretend to have some great hidden knowledge that you evidently don’t have, and it doesn’t take much looking into your character’s history to see that.
Hi,