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 off with, Blizzard has made a few changes that do not clash with their goals, and are in fact 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 on a few abilities. Shadow Dance initially had the haste-scaling as well but that has since been removed and now it has a static 30 second cooldown. However, the haste-scaling still remains for Secret Technique as well as on Symbols of Death through Swift Death, which gives us 3 different options of how to handle our cooldown not lining up:

• Using your Symbols of Death and Secret Technique on cooldown and not lining it up with Shadow Dance or Shadow Blades later on.
• Delaying Shadow Dance and Shadow Blades to line up with your other cooldowns, which don't line up naturally by themselves.
• Completely ignoring the haste reduction Secret Technique and not selecting Swift Death.

After playing on the Alpha servers, the third option seems like the least bad alternative.

Many of the damage amplifications we get from our cooldowns were 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, almost turning it into the hardest-hitting ability Subtlety has access to, doing similar damage to 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 spawns a clone similar to Secret Technique. 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 deals 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 happen, or when you press Secret Technique. It also increases Shadow damage done by 10%.
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 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.

The Ancient Arts clones that spawn and imitate your attack work fine when the attack is either of your builders, Eviscerate or Black Powder, however if you use the clone to instead amplify a Secret Technique it does not do much damage at all as the close that are appearing naturally from Secret Technique do not get accounted for when the 50% of the damage calculation is happening. This means that you would almost certainly want to make sure you do not end up casting it while the Apex talent is active, which effectively means not buffing our strongest combo point finisher with a big finisher buff, which feels odd. Rupture is another strange one, the clone applies an additional dot, but since this dot has the same duration as the original Rupture. The gameplay implication of this is that having the clone Rupture active at all times is going be mandatory, essentially making it so Ancient Arts must be up before you cast Rupture.

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, any 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 has not received that many substantial changes. 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.

There is also a new talent in the Trickster tree that makes Shuriken Storm also apply Fazed, which is a great addition that makes the AoE a lot more straightforward and less confusing as you no longer need to weave in Backstabs anymore.