Subtlety Rogue Problems
Subtlety Rogue, or more general Rogue is currently in a unlucky situation. All 3 specs rank within the lowest dps in the mythic statistic while doing okay in heroic.
Subtlety is even one of the top performers in heroic raids and as such, is expected to perform well. So what exactly is the reason for these differences?
The first and biggest factor is fight length and design. Heroic fight timers are already at a very low 2-4 minutes and as such start to benefit specs with burst damage a lot. Subtlety has with its current design and the soon-to-be-removed
Poussière ombreuse revigorante talent the option to create one of the strongest burst damage setups in the game. The major cooldowns when playing with this talent option are around 90 seconds but can be even lower if you burn both
Disparition charges like you would on a fight with a two-minute kill timer. Compressing your cooldowns is an interesting gameplay mechanic but also one with some big flaws in design. The obvious one is tuning. Reference points for tuning seem to be Warcraftlogs statistics, where kill timers are already too short to give meaningful data for Mythic. Mythic Raids on the other hand don't have enough data by now to help with tuning. For reference, the Warcraftlogs statistic we look at in this article only includes the first 4 bosses -
Ulgrax le Dévoreur,
L'horreur liée par le sang,
Sikran and
Rasha'nan. Out of this pool, we have one pure single-target fight and three mixed fights with varying amounts of targets.
The fight timers change to 5-8 minutes in mythic, which leads to a big diminish in impact from
Poussière ombreuse revigorante. The problem is the talent is driven by a
Disparition.
Disparition reduces the major cooldowns to 90 seconds. But
Disparition has a 120-second cooldown. If the problem is not obvious from the numbers, you get your cooldowns back before you get the spell you need to cause the cooldown reduction. We fix this problem by using two charges of
Disparition from the
Plus une trace talent. The solution however only temporarily fixes the problem and we start running into the cooldown problem at around 5 minutes again. The problem here is that performance even in five-minute fights is not outstanding, in part also due to other problems.
Forced downtime. Subtleties cooldown reduction of
Danse de l’ombre is very tightly tuned. This isn't new and was known in Dragonfligth already but was fixed with the tier set. To quickly explain the problem.
Symboles de mort is your lowest cooldown, and design since Legion always allowed us to align one instance of
Danse de l’ombre with it. The cooldown reduction was always high enough to produce extra charges, which added nuances to the gameplay when deciding how to line them up efficiently. But this cooldown reduction is now so tight, that you barely make one charge of
Danse de l’ombre back during the 30 seconds. Having two charges of
Danse de l’ombre delays the point and only makes it relevant for very long fights. But forced downtime accelerates this problem. Subtlety needs to auto-attack the target (because of
Techniques des Ombres) to get additional resources, and actively needs to use builder/finisher to get the cooldown reduction (via
Ombres croissantes). The problem here is how tight things are tuned. A short downtime can throw your cooldown timings off and can mean you don't have them ready when your major cooldowns come up. This can be marginally corrected with multiple targets, but was bad enough for players in the world's first race to switch to other rogue specs on specific fights.
And then there are Hero talents. We currently have to decide between Trickster and Deathstalker. But both require bug fixes and attention. Deathstalker is currently only good on pure single target but got just hit with a roughly 3% nerf before the mythic raid release. This was seemingly unintentional due to a bugfix for
Nuit noire aimed at Assassiantion. It ended up as a Subtlety nerf on single target fights, where Deathstalker is the overall stronger option. This gives Trickster the option to shine, which offers outstanding burst damage and passive cleave with
Rafale agile. Overall both hero talents still have bugs lowering the damage output which haven't been addressed by now.
For the future. The next fight that gets added to the statistic is
Toressaim Ovi'nax. The fight currently seems extremely hard to play as melee and is not a good fight for Subtlety. The one fight Subtlety is good at is
Silken Court. The damage-amplifying phases line up well with our current 90-second cooldown cycles and allow us to utilize our burst windows well. At least for the next 3 weeks before the talent option allowing this is removed.
Summary
To quickly summarize. Subtlety is currently tuned low, has bugs lowering output, and suffers from problems created by talent design. The encounter design of this tier exposes these weaknesses and I hope gives the development team finally a reason to allocate resources for a redesign. There are changes announced in 11.0.5 which could be a good start but might be not enough to fix underlying problems.
The War Within is a great expansion but a bit disappointing as a Subtlety Rogue player. Subtlety is now the least-played spec in Mythic+ for the 3rd season in a row and one of the lowest played in Raid with a lot of uncertainty for future iterations. It currently looks like we changed from a 90-second burst window to a 60-second one with 11.0.5 which sounds very Warlords of Draenor like. So it's an exciting time for fans of this very classic rogue design with high burst and long downtime phases. I just hope the changes get soon implemented on the public test realm to allow for testing and potential bug fixes and give people more reason to start playing Rogue.
