Subtlety Rogue GuideMidnight Overview
First impression: Midnight Subtlety Rogue
The Midnight Alpha introduced a lot of changes to Subtlety. This article quickly goes over the important changes and highlights the impact. If you are interested in the complete patch notes, you can find them in the Official Development Notes.
Talent Changes: Damage Amplifiers
Many damage-amplifying spells got changed in an attempt to give cooldowns a clear purpose. The list below highlights the impactful changes.
Talents
Change
Symbols of DeathOnly works on Finishing moves now.
Dark ShadowIncreases Shadowstrike damage now.
Danse MacabreNow deals Shadow damage.
FlagellationWas removed.
The result changes the purpose of our cooldowns in the following way:
Symbols of Death - Is now used for either energy or during times with high finisher frequency (e.g. Shadow Blades).
Shadow Dance - Is now mainly used to get access to Shadowstrike.
Vanish - Becomes a damage cooldown again.
Shadow Blades - Remains flexible.
This creates an interesting situation in which the goal of Shadow Dance has the potential to conflict with that of Shadow Blades.
Talent Changes: Hastened Cooldown
Midnight aims to simplify cooldowns by removing Cooldown Reduction and replacing it with hastened cooldowns. A hastened cooldown has its baseline duration reduced based on your character's haste value. The following cooldowns are now hastened:
Talents
Change
Secret TechniqueIs now hastened by default.
Symbols of DeathIs hastened when talented into Swift Death.
Shadow DanceDuration is extended based on your haste when talented into Deepening Shadows.
The Cooldowns of the following spells have been modified for this change:
Shadow Dance - Cooldown is now 30 seconds, baseline duration increased to 8 seconds.
Secret Technique - Cooldown is now 30 seconds.
Removing cooldown reduction is a great change to lower uptime requirements. The old version of the spells required a lot of effort because both Shadow Dance and Secret Technique had their cooldown reduction linked to combo points spent. The change to a static cooldown is welcome, but the hastened cooldown component is not well implemented yet.
The haste scaling introduces new challenges as not all cooldowns are hastened and talents are opt-in, making it hard to know when to talent into them.
Deepening Shadows is the most interesting of the haste talents. It extends Shadow Dance baseline duration based on your character's haste when you use the spell. This gives Subtlety higher benefits from external cooldowns like Bloodlust and Power Infusion, giving additional options for cooldown optimization.
The Shadow Dance duration extension comes with some problems. The most obvious one is the requirement for certain haste values to achieve a sufficient return. Analyzing the current implementation, it seems like we either ignore haste as a stat or get to roughly 20% haste. Having enough haste for extra globals in Shadow Dance is beneficial, but how much haste is needed for benefits might be hard to understand. An additional 0.6 seconds of Shadow Dance can or can not be enough to get an extra cast in. We have this problem already on live due to a bug which causes Coup de Grace to have a 1.2 second global cooldown, this is long enough to sometimes have experienced players lose a cast during Shadow Dance when playing with the season 3 tier set (the four set bonus allows a second cast of Coup de Grace after its use, doubeling the impact of the gcd bug).
Secret Technique and Symbols of Death come with a different set of problems; both cooldowns became noticeably weaker, making additional uses less relevant. The talents and haste interactions in general feel underdeveloped and need additional iteration.
Apex Talents
Subtlety only saw Apex talents in the second alpha update. All Apex talents share the name of Ancient Arts and the same icon. The icon was previously used for Nightblade during Legion and Battle for Azeroth, before it got replaced by Rupture in Shadowlands. The Apex talents are the following:
Talents
Effect
Ancient ArtsAttacks which generate combo points from Shadow Techniques have a chance to summon a shadow clone which repeats the attack at 50% efficiency.
Ancient ArtsShadow clones proc Shadow Techniques.
Ancient ArtsFinishing moves can expend Shadow Techniques combo points. All shadow damage is increased by 10%.
I love the theme. Shadow damage and clones are a very good fit for Subtlety, but the talents by themselves seem a bit boring.
The initial talent increases damage done, always based on a chance, with a slightly higher increase during Shadow Blades where the proc is usually guaranteed due to the high amount of combo points from a refund.
The two-point talent node just gives you additional Shadow Techniques stacks and energy. It very likely interacts with Secret Technique, which is a three-part attack and has two of these three parts labeled as shadow clones.
The final node was just taken out of Shadowcraft. The only difference is the slightly lower stack requirement (5 instead of the maximum of your combo points), a builder requirement to avoid multiple refunds back-to-back, and that it's always active. Having separate talents for these effects might be easier to understand. And the shadow damage bonus is a great passive damage increase.
I am overall not disappointed in the talents; they are fine.
Talent Updates
A lot of talents saw updates to follow the new design direction.
The most noticeable change is a massive 150% buff to Shadowstrike combined with a small increase in energy cost. This change shifts a lot of the damage of the spec towards builders, moves Vanish position away from a mostly utility spell towards a damage cooldown, and makes the Subterfuge talent relevant for Subtlety.
The following talents saw a rework:
Talents
Change
FlagellationWas replaced with Potent Powder (increases damage of Black Powder).
Shuriken TornadoNow casts Shuriken Storm a second time 1.2 seconds after the use. Energy costs of Shuriken Storm are increased.
ShadowcraftTriggers from Shadow Dance now and has a higher Shadow Techniques proc rate. The refund mechanism was moved to apex talents.
Perforated VeinsIncreases the damage of Backstab and Shadowstrike now.
The removal of Flagellation was expected, given the overall push to reduce button count. The replacement seems less versatile as it only increases AoE damage output. Updating Perforated Veins is a welcome change; the talent was, for most of its existence, just a tax you had to pay to reach other talents. Giving additional damage to our highest output spell should make it a lot more appealing.
Reworking Shuriken Tornado was the biggest surprise; the new version is boring but easy to understand. It might lead to some unwanted side effects like using Shuriken Storm instead of Backstab even in single target.
Multiple talents had their effects updated:
Talents
Change
Planned ExecutionNow increases critical strike damage bonus.
Warning SignsNow increases attack speed.
FinalityNow increases critical strike damage bonus.
These changes all try to improve the value of haste and critical strike rating.
And finally, some quality of life changes:
Talents
Change
Find WeaknessIs now a buff on you.
Deeper DaggersIs now a passive shadow damage amp.
The change to Find Weakness is a big upgrade; it makes target switching easier and removes the need for small optimizations like tab targeting enemies in low target cleave. The shadow damage effect of Black Powder should become a lot more consistent as a result and lead to easier-to-understand rotational rules.
Rogue Talents
There are a lot of small changes. This only covers the important ones.
Talents
Change
SuperchargerNow triggers from Shadow Dance.
Cold BloodCritical striking with a combo point builder increases the crit chance of your next finishing move.
The general tree stays mostly similar, Cold Blooded Killer changes from an active to a passive ability, reducing button count while staying a strong spell. The change to Supercharger follows a trend to take power away from Symbols of Death. It is unclear to me what purpose it serves, because Symbols of Death is already seen as unnecessary by a lot of players, with more and more players just wanting it to be baked into Shadow Dance.
Hero Talentss
Hero talents saw quality of life improvements and minor updates. The changes are, in general, just good, with some small exceptions. I will highlight the important changes.
Trickster changes:
Talents
Change
Flawless FormIs now capped at 5 stacks.
Capping the stacks of Flawless Form takes out a lot of power from the Hero Talent. This, while the Hero Talent already gets worse as a consequence of the cooldown changes. The Hero Talent will still be strong in cleave and aoe due to Nimble Flurry.
Deathstalker changes:
Talents
Change
New:
Precise KillerIncreases critical strike bonus damage.
Quietus CelerisDeathstalker's Mark has a 30% chance to immediately consume one stack during its application. This reduces cycle time and increases the frequency of Darkest Night triggers.
Mass CasualtyDeals 80% of Deathstalker's Mark's damage to all targets if a stack is consumed by Black Powder.
Changed:
Deathstalkers MarkWas redesigned, and now only applies to a new target when there is no active mark.
Unbreakable DriveReplaces Fatal Intent. The effect was moved to this talent, previously part of Deathstalker's Mark.
Clear the WitnessesBecomes passive and increases damage of Shuriken Storm.
Corrupt the BloodIs now a passive damage increase to Rupture.
The new talents for Deathstalker are fine. The talents are overall simple and mostly passive. Mass Casualty is the most exciting option, but there is currently no way to trigger Darkest Night with Black Powder. The talent could solve some of the problems with AoE, but the impact is hard hard to predict before we see further changes.
Trickster still misses the new talents, which means it is too early to judge relative balance.
The majority of changes are quality of life improvements. The current changes to Deathstalker's Mark could make handling it in multi target situation slightly more annoying but the apex talents hint further changes to it.
Rogue Tree
The general tree stays similar to The War Within. The first and most of the second gates are dynamic and can be switched to personal taste as long as we take the few dps talent options. The dps options are mostly within the third gate. The very right branch of the tree with Subterfuge and Without a Trace becomes relevant due to the buffs to Shadowstrike. Deeper Stratagem and Cold Blooded Killer are likely the go-to talents to select after. The remaining points are likely on the middle path to get Supercharger. The left side seems not too appealing, because of the high energy income we get from Shadow Techniques in combination with the apex talents.
Required
Choose between
My main complaint about the talent tree is the lack of interesting capstone talents; the nerf to damage stacking made existing nodes like Supercharger and Cold Blooded Killer less exciting. And Subterfuge and Without a Trace feel too similar to Shadow Dance. The change is still an improvement over The War Within, during which you Subterfuge and Without a Trace could not be played due to the low impact.
Subtlety Tree
The Subtlety Tree got some talent switches on top of updates to some of the existing talents. I created the picture below to visualize the change.
This changes the power dynamic in the first and second gates. If we look at the first gate, we see the following:
The initial four talent nodes (I highlighted green) Find Weakness, Improved Backstab, Shadow Blades, and Improved Shuriken Storm will always be talented. And we need talent to Fade to Nothing to get access to Secret Technique in the second gate. The remaining talent points can't be used to unlock Silent Storm (highlighted in red) because of the point economy. Doing so would mean you can't reach Shadow Focus or Premeditation, which would remove access to the entire left side of the second gate. At least that's what I thought initially. The rework of Shuriken Tornado opens the possibility to stop using Backstab entirely, by replacing it with Shuriken Storm, which is potentially more efficient energy-wise (two casts of Shuriken Storm for the cost of one). This is more efficient on Deathstalker, Trickster's Unseen Blade requires some amount of Backstabs.
The second gate has two utility nodes now with Shrouded in Darkness and the choice node between Night Terrors/Terrifying Pace. This is problematic because they directly compete with dps talents. All three of these talent choices ended up very niche in use case, but the addition of damage trade-offs will likely make these never played. Gloomblade is also a talent which seems too weak a damage increase to be ever worth talenting in. These three talents are the ones marked red in the image. The talent nodes I highlighted blue are Swift Death and Deepening Shadows. The haste interactions initially seem weak, which makes these talent nodes difficult to recommend, Deepening Shadows might be good enough to use. Using them also means investing heavily in haste, stat points that could be invested in more direct damage increases. Replicating Shadows is one more talent which has the potential to be worse now, many of the damage amplifiers Rupture benefited from got removed. This probably means we will only apply it to our main target in most cases.
Moving to the last gate. This gate now has four bad talents (I highlighted with red). Goremaw's Bite still does not solve a problem the spec has, and as such remains unused. Lingering Shadow was already not that good before Midnight, and the current iteration has lower amounts of Shadow Dance casts. Both talents ended up badly before, so this is expected. However, Danse Macabre was one of our strongest talents before; the damage on it seems tuned low, but it also suffers from the lower amount of Shadow Dance, and also the noticeably higher trade-off from not using Shadowstrike. This means you will typically only get two or three triggers of the damage effect every Shadow Dance. The last talent on the list is Inevitability, Symbols of Death is just a weak cooldown now, extending its duration by a few seconds just seems to be a bad trade-off. To make matters worse, the effect still does not work with Shuriken Storm, which already limits its use with multiple targets.
The takeaway from the talent updates is that the number of talents we consider picking is lower now. While there are multiple talents with low impact, I didn't mention.
Apex talents don't introduce changes to the baseline to improve the situation, even while they are decent. Updates to talents would be welcome to give people more reason to look forward to unlocking capstone talents.
Rotation: Cooldowns
The core concept of Subtleties rotation is cooldown management. Cooldown stacking is what defines it and allows for a satisfying result when played properly. The changes made are intended to make these cooldowns more flexible and give players more control.
The cooldown cycle in The War Within looked like the following:
The old model was fairly flexible; you always grouped your main cooldowns Symbols of Death, Shadow Dance, and Secret Technique together. You line them up with Flagellation and Shadow Blades as much as possible. This leads to the two consecutive uses in the picture above. The dynamic comes from the excess use between major cooldowns, and timing was not very strict.
Applying the same logic to the midnight version leads to the following cooldown sequence:
The first thing we notice is the slightly lower amount of cooldown use, this is a side effect of the cooldown reduction removal. The static cooldown on Secret Technique does not allow it to be used with every Shadow Dance unless we desync it from Shadow Blades. The sequence in general is a bit less dynamic due to the lower amount of Shadow Dance casts. The general cooldown uptime is a bit lower but there is potential to offset it with slightly longer Shadow Dance duration from the haste talent.
The stated option is the intuitive approach to cooldown managament, but it might be reasonable to adjust cooldowns for their more specific use cases. The sequence below is a extreme example of how this could look.
The benefit of this sequence is more efficient utialization of each cooldown. The main change is the seperation of Shadow Dance and Shadow Blades to allow both cooldowns to get full benefits. The idea here would be to trade off the damage amplifier of Shadow Blades for additional Shadowstrike casts as well as higher combo point generation. This strategy also points with low downtime.
It is too early to know which sequence will win out, or if we might do something in between both sequences. The latest blue post highlighted bigger changes in the near future too. The takeaway from this section is that cooldowns are now more difficult to understand. Stacking cooldowns was intuitive and the old system emphasized on this. The new system might spread cooldowns out which does not only change our damage profile and uptime but also opens up more exotic uses people will need external help to play optimal.
Design Problems
Backstab is a terrible spell!
Backstab is, by design, terrible; it is a builder that does poorly because it's a filler spell. But this design only works in an environment of regular cooldown use. The current design with 80% or higher downtime is just too extreme. Increasing the cooldown frequency would help balance things out more. Downtime would still feel worse, but this is something required when cooldowns hold most of the power.
This might be catastrophic when paired with Shuriken Tornado. The talent option seems currently strong enough to replace Backstab entirely with Shuriken Storm even on single target.
Haste interactions need to be iterated on.
Cooldowns mostly align naturally with each other now, and all impactful cooldowns are a multiple of 30 seconds. Having cooldown reduction on cooldowns causes desyncs which lead to situation you either hold cooldowns or desync them entirely. Symbols of Death is a good example here. The spell already got nerfed baseline and many talents interacting with it got moved off to diffrent spells. Naturally, you would align the cooldown, but doing so means you would never talent into haste cooldown reduction.
The duration extension of Shadow Dance is done smarter but also punishes you for slow inputs, off gcd Shadow Dance uses or bad input latency. This results in confusion as to how much haste is needed to fit another global which could differ from player to player. Players might start to optimize this by using macros and introducing short delays before the cast of Shadow Dance to get value from the talent.
One of the design goals of Midnight is to make things less reliant on perfect execution and macros, so this talent feels in conflict with this idea.
The update to cooldowns is confusing!
Cooldowns prior to alpha had a very simple purpose: they added up damage amplifiers to create a strong sequence of bursts. Cooldowns now conflict in purpose, and this makes them harder to understand. Shadow Dance main purpose is now to access Shadowstrike, which means you usually want to go in shadow dance with low combo points to ideally get up to a maximum of 6 casts of the spell. Shadow Blades is designed mainly to generate a lot of combo points, but would reduce the amount of Shadowstrike casts during Shadow Dance. And Symbols of Death now only increases finisher damage, so it isn't that relevant during Shadow Dance but more relevant during Shadow Blades. There might be a valid reason to design cooldowns that conflict in interest, but this isn't working well. It gets even more complicated because of other talent options that modify them. It could lead to situations where Shadowcraft or Premeditation are simply not good anymore.
The AoE rotation is an afterthought.
The updates focus a lot on increasing builder damage, especially Shadowstrike. But Shadowstrike is a pure single-target attack. Only one of the two hero talents can take advantage of it with multiple targets due to Nimble Flurry. To make matters worse, we might stop using certain cooldowns or ignore our hero talent mechanism once we reach a certain threshold. One example would be Deathstalker's Mark; it could be worse than Black Powder on as few as 5 targets, one of the new hero talents could solve this.
Talents are still complicated.
Many of the talents people are confused about remain complicated. And the talent updates make things worse. Critical strike damage bonus is harder to understand than straight up damage percentage or critical strike chance and how good is '30% of your mastery' (from the new talent: Potent Powder). But there are more extreme examples.
Danse Macabre - Requires unique spells used, this incentivises you to try to include as many unique spells as possible for the biggest reward. There are now only three spells worth using.
Shadow Techniques - Procs every 3rd or 4th auto attack, with a 50% chance on the 3rd and a 100% on the 4th if it didn't proc on 3rd. It is also confusing because you only learn about it in the spell book.
Shadowcraft - Makes your Shadow Techniques proc every 2nd auto attack. Proc frequency is not easy to parse and should be avoided in tooltips.
Ancient Arts - While I think all 3 talents are confusing, this one stands out. The combo point refund mechanism was taken from Shadowcraft, but now requires you to use a combo point builder to work. To give the development team credit, there are now visual effects for the proc, which might make it easier to see when refunds happen.
The First Dance - The function is not that complicated but you now need to track a buff to know when you are out of combat as well as have a very good idea about the power level of your spells to know when its worth to talent in. Just to understand the problem space, multiple high-end key pushers avoided the talent like a plague when it was introduced, which included players with higher expertise. I don't understand how the average player should decide if this talent is worth it, especially now that the benefit of Shadow Dance is not as obvious anymore.
I probably forgot to include something in the list.
The damage profile.
Subtlety did fight for years to get a burst heavy damage profile; Midnight seemingly wants to heavily reduce burst altogether and increase cooldown uptime. This is even worse in multi-target rotations, where most of the power is Black Powder, and cooldowns don't increase the damage of it noticeably. The ideal solution would be to have shorter cooldowns with high impact at an adequate rate, a concept which we haven't seen in years.
While it is still very early in the alpha cycle, the latest changes aim to increase single cooldown duration by increasing the baseline duration of Shadow Dance and adding additional duration via haste interaction.
Having long cooldowns is very punishing because players can rarely utilize them fully due to encounter design. To be a bit more specific, most fights in the current retail tier already make it hard to utilize every cooldown in your opener; the midnight iteration might increase the uptime requirement by 10-20%.
There is no clear direction.
The alpha iteration feels like a lot of concepts thrown together. The removal/rework of damage amps splits a lot of purpose across Talents and reveals a lot of not finalized ideas. Is Subtlety supposed to not stack cooldowns now and are cooldowns supposed to be weaker in general? Is Symbols of Death redundant now, after heavy nerfs and talent reworks moving power away from it?. It is currently very hard to know what we end up with and what subtlety is supposed to be. The goals stated in the Developer's notes seems to be not fulfilled, and it is very hard to predict just how much change can be expected. The current version is just incomplete, but this was at least acknowledged in the latest bluepost.
Summary
Midnight changed a lot of little things and broke certain parts of Subtlety. I will try to quickly summarize the important points below.
Apex Talents: Have a good theme but seem gameplay wise mediocre. They are at least fairly unintrusive. It feels a bit disappointing to just promote a specialisation tree talent to apex instead of adding something new.
Haste Interactions: Need work, having haste extend Shadow Dance is an upgrade from the initial hastened cooldown, but can make fitting extra globals fairly tricky; latency and player reaction time will play a role in evaluating whether or not the talent is worth playing. Talenting into making Symbols of Death a hastened cooldown is unlikely due to how weak the spell is on its own.
Cooldown Changes: Make them harder to understand, we don't know if you stack cooldowns or separate them, both can, depending on tuning and further changes, be relevant. This comes on top of the trend to increase cooldown duration. The result is potentially more punishing and less intuitive gameplay.
Talent Tree: Gets slightly worse pathing/choice.
Hero Talents: Got some minor qol updates, but still have parts missing.
Shadowstrike buff: The spell is now a big part of our overall damage, while finishers become less impactful.
Overall, there is currently no clear benefit from the change; it seems incomplete. The goals set by the design team themselves are simply not met.
The gameplay became slightly better with the last update, but it is still worse than the retail iteration. Haste interactions need some rethinking, and cooldowns might need another pass to get more obvious benefits. There is not only a reduction in talent choice but also in rotational depth. All while keeping a lot of the unintuitive parts. My hope is for further updates to fix many of the stated problems and give Subtlety a more defined direction.
Conclusion: Should You Play It?
I advise anyone to try it out if they get access to alpha/beta, but only to build their own opinion. People who want to main the spec or switch to rogue should probably wait for a more functional iteration closer to the release of Midnight. Many things are incomplete currently, which leads to shananigans like the potential of using Shuriken Storm on single target. Our main cooldowns now have conflicting interests. Talent options seem to be more limited, and some talents are in need of buffs/nerfs or changes. The rotation is very simple now, sometimes boring. Blizzard surprisingly managed to keep most of the complexity in talents that people found difficult to understand.
I would be lying if I said I am happy with the current state of Subtlety on alpha. But it isn't the first time the spec is in this position. This is a reminder of Dragonflight alpha, Subtlety suffered from many of the same issues in slightly different form. My hope is to see updates addressing most of the problems and giving the spec direction.
