Subtlety Rogue: Midnight Expansion Preview

Unfortunately a lot of the changes for Subtlety do not live up to their stated goals, and in many cases actually do the opposite and make the spec more unintuitive and confusing, when the goal is the opposite. Subtlety was already among the worst specializations in the entire game in this regard, and these changes do little to remedy the issues.

It is important to mention that the below grievances are likely seeing adjustments in future Alpha updates. We are still months out from a possible Midnight expansion release, and hopefully the issues we currently see with Subtlety on the Midnight Alpha will be addressed soon. However, as it stands, we need to call it like we see it.

To start of with, Blizzard have made a few changes that do not clash with their goals, and are good changes for the spec in general. Removing Flagellation is one such change, as it was always paired with Shadow Blades anyway. Find Weakness was also changed from a debuff on the target to a buff on the Rogue instead.

Now lets have a look at the removal of the cooldown reduction based on combo points spent, that is being replaced with a haste-scaling cooldown reduction instead. If you select these talents granting the haste-based CDR, there are a couple of options on how to handle your desynced cooldowns, all of which feel terrible:

• Using your Symbols of Death and Shadow Dance on cooldown and not lining it up with Shadow Bladess static 90 second cooldown.
• Delaying Shadow Blades to line up with your other cooldowns, which don't line up naturally by themselves.
• Never using Shadow Dance outside of your Shadow Blades, completely ignoring the cooldown reduction.

After playing on the Alpha servers, the third option seems like the least bad options, however that also means that the dreaded downtime of the spec outside of Shadow Dance, where we press the least impactful button Backstab, is now 74 seconds long. This also goes against their stated goal of making Subtlety's cooldowns more flexible, as this enforces an even stricter way of handling cooldowns than on live servers.

A lot of the damage amplifications we get from our cooldowns was also removed. For example, Dark Shadow now only increases Shadowstrike damage, not all damage. In practice, this makes Shadow Dance useless on AoE if you're not playing Trickster. Shadowstrike was massively buffed, turning it into the hardest-hitting ability Subtlety has access to, doing quite a lot more damage than even Secret Technique. Currently this means that we may not want to use our finishers at all, and would rather just spam Shadowstrike, despite our Mastery suggesting we are a finisher based specialization.

The new main feature for Midnight are Apex Talents, with Subtlety's being Ancient Arts, which focuses on Shadow Techniques and (hopefully) some new cool clone animations. Up to 4 points can be spent here. Currently, these are arranged in a 1 ➜ 2 ➜ 1 pattern in terms of point investment:

1. Ancient Arts (1 pt)
   When you use a Combo Point Builder that uses your Shadow Techniques stacks, it has a chance to spawn a clone that does a lot of extra shadow damage.
2. Ancient Arts (2 pts)
   This gives us one proc of Shadow Techniquess whenever the clones from the first node happens, or when you press Secret Technique.
3. Ancient Arts (1 pt)
   This is effectively what Shadowcraft does on live right now, except you have to use a combo point generator to activate the effect. It also adds some damage through a clone.

These are not yet implemented on the Alpha, so we do not know what the animation will look like. If there is no cool new clone animation, these Apex talents are mostly just moving functionality from Shadowcraft into the Apex talent space instead. Similarly to Shadowcraft, the tooltips are very hard to parse properly without deep knowledge of the spec and its intricacies. Ultimately it just means that the gameplay loop is pretty straight forward: If you have 5 Shadow Techniques stacks when you press Shadowstrike in Shadow Dance, your next finisher will do more damage and refund at least 5 combo points.

Our Hero Talents are being adjusted in some ways in Midnight as well. Deathstalker's Mark will be harder to move around, as you can no longer use Shadowstrike on a different target to move it. You can only move it with the Eviscerate from Darkest Night. However, you no longer need to have exactly 7 combo points, anything finisher used above 5 will still consume the effect.

Just as in The War Within, the Eviscerate with Darkest Night does not produce any form of AoE damage, and the single-target damage is far from sufficient to make up for this. This could obviously change in a future update, but with current Alpha numbers it is looking like we are completely ignoring the Mark and Darkest Night altogether, even at 5 targets, and instead we just spam Black Powder.

Trickster is largely unchanged. There is however a very important change that was not mentioned in the official notes, and that is that Flawless Form is now capped at 5 stacks and gives 4% extra damage per stack instead of 3. This effectively caps the bonus you can get from it at 20%, instead of the 60-75% we can currently achieve in the War Within. This is a massive change, and while it is still very much a burst centric Hero Talent tree, the main buffs it provides are centered around our finishers, yet most of our damage buffs went into Shadowstrike.