Subtlety Rogue Talent Changes
The first set of changes landed on the public test realm and introduces the following changes:
Relentless Strikes now generates 4 Energy per combo point spent on finishing moves (was 5 Energy).
Shadowcraft no longer stores 1 additional combo point. Frequency bonus from auto-attacks increased to 75% (was 40%).
Developers’ notes: Energy and Combo Point generation during cooldown windows has often been overflowing. These reductions aim to reduce circumstances of over-capping resources while maintaining potent relative generation in those windows.
Lingering Shadow now also applies to Shuriken Storm.
Shadow Dance’s tooltip has been updated to include its threat reduction effect.
Apex Talent: Ancient Arts now considers the total damage of Secret Technique when creating a shadow clone, instead of only its initial hit.
Fixed an issue that caused Secret Technique damage from secondary hits to be attributed to summoned pets instead of the attacking Rogue.
The very top of the Developers Note states the direction of the patch, which also bleeds into the tier set bonus design. This stated goal is a reduction in damage during cooldowns, which is then shifted elsewhere. The implementation of this is not obvious.
Achieving this goal is done by nerfing resource generation, while also slowing down the apex talent triggers. The change to Shadowcraft looks like a roughly 20% reduction, but is noticeably higher. The stated 20% would be the difference from procs auto attacks generate, but the talent also interacts with shadow clone attacks via the Ancient Arts (Apex 2) apex talent, something multiple attacks can trigger. The total reduction is closer to 40-50%, which is in part so high due to the feedback loop apex talents generate.
The impact of the change is a noticeable slowdown in pacing during cooldowns. We will use Shadowstrike more, and get combo point refunds less frequently. Fitting multiple Darkest Night procs into your major cooldowns will also be harder when playing Deathstalker. It is worth mentioning, the PTR server currently has the changed proc rate on Shadowcraft while still giving the extra combo point. This means the change can't be reliably tested.
The energy reduction from Relentless Strikes is comparably low and should not make a difference. The Secret Technique related change hints at a rework of the shadow clone parts of the attack. This could mean a reduction in effectiveness of Improved Secret Technique, which currently applies two times. We potentially drop the talent as a result. The change in interaction with Ancient Arts (Apex 1) is a welcome change as it opens up optimization potential around Ancient Arts (Apex 3).
Season 2 Tier Set Bonus
With a new season comes a new tier set, and this season aims to introduce more complex and impactful bonuses. Our tier set bonus is the following:
2-Set Bonus: Backstab costs 10 less Energy and deals 100% increased damage. Shuriken Storm costs 5 less Energy and deals 60% increased damage.
4-Set Bonus: Lingering Shadow now also benefits Eviscerate and Black Powder at 100% effectiveness.
The two-set bonus focuses on damage on combo point builders, but is very specific. It intentionally leaves out our strongest combo point builder, Shadowstrike in an attempt to increase damage outside of cooldowns. The energy reduction aims to increase the frequency, and is an interesting choice given the intentional decreased of energy cost of both abilities in the Dragonflight update of the 10.2 patch. The impact of the tier set seems fairly low initially due to the low contribution of Backstab and Shuriken Storm to our damage. An early simulation shows the set bonus around a 2-3% damage increase on single target. Hero talent wise, the change favors Deathstalker as it offers multiple talents increasing the damage and critical strike chance of Shuriken Storm.
The addition of even more damage to Storm and reduction in resource generation has the potential to lead to a shift in talents, away from some of the weaker finisher focused talents like Finality. We can invest these points into talents like Perforated Veins, The Rotten, Shuriken Tornado and potentially Lingering Shadow. Doing so, can lead to an shift where the majority of damage (potentially more than half) comes from our AoE combo point builder in multi target situations.
The four-set bonus is built around Lingering Shadow. A talent we only used in the early seasons of Dragonflight. The talent got a small update to also work on Shuriken Storm to keep it relevant with multiple targets. The initial problem the mentioned talent faces is the power level, which means talenting into it is currently a damage loss, and is not factored into the power budget, but the gameplay impact could be worse. Most of the power of the talent is after our main cooldown ends, which we can use a second time right after. This makes sense during our major cooldown Shadow Blades, but isn't as obvious outside. We typically want to line up Shadow Dance with every instance of Secret Technique. The decision now becomes to either introduce long downtimes to play around the 4-set piece or play like we do now with minor impact outside of our major cooldown window. Adding more targets could complicate the cooldown use further as it could lead to explicit delays in major cooldown use to maximize around builder damage.
However, this is not addressing the elephant in the room: The potential to still use the Season 1 bonus. The Season 1 two-set bonus is worth roughly 7-8% dps, this should be enough to offset some of the item level differences but the Season 1 four-set bonus is likely not strong enough to be considered.
How bad is it?
It is incredibly hard to tell, for two reasons. The first one is implementation, most of the stated changes did not land on PTR so far, so they can't be tested. The second one is the feeling that these changes are incomplete. Many of the changes to other classes or specializations don't try to simply nerf specs, but to redistribute power or fix rotational problems while the Subtlety changes are just straight nerfs. I still appreciate the bugfixes, but they feel like trying to wrap it positively. Some of them are even a bit funny and reading the addition of the threat reduction to the tooltip of Shadow Dance after more than a decade of existence has a comedic value.
Getting the nerfs feels awful, but also has implication on viability. High damage output during cooldowns can help manage adds or raid mechanics like shields or be beneficial on encounters with short damage amplification phases. All of this is present in the raid, while Subtlety seems to take a more noticeable hit than others.
The tier set design misses the mark. It empowers the one spell which is designed to be used the least and forces players to play a talent option which isn't good. All while reducing hero talent diversity and potentially creating problematic AoE rotations.
This is undesired as the design seems to lose sight of the goal. The reason downtime feels bad is not because of Backstab damage, but the slower pacing. Spreading damage out by increasing cooldown frequency or duration is a better strategy, which was used successfully multiple times in the past. An increase of Combo Point generation could help too, as it accelerates finisher use. There are many ways to introduce interesting mechanics that are not Backstab damage.
My hope is that we see compensation buffs to talents or abilities to accommodate for the lower resource generation once the nerfs get implemented, also to keep a reasonable damage profile. Iteration or even a rework of the tier set to better fit Subtlety would be ideal. The current tier set reads like a placeholder and does not lead to meaningful gameplay decisions.
