Subtlety Rogue: Midnight Expansion Preview

The cooldown cadence has been drastically streamlined and simplified relative to the TWW version of Subtlety. Flagellation has been removed, Symbols of Death has been removed. Shadow Dance and Secret Technique no longer have their cooldowns reduced by spending combo points but instead have static consistent cooldowns.

Shadow Blades also saw a big change, it no longer fills your combo points to full every builder but now doubles the combo points instead. While this is technically a nerf to the ability itself, it opens up for talents like Shadowcraft and Ancient Arts to shine and have an impact during our biggest burst window, instead of being completely overpowered by Shadow Blades.

There has also been quite a shift thematically focusing more on shadowy clones, akin to those spawned by Secret Technique, as reimagined talents like Shuriken Tornado and Replicating Shadows massively increase the frequency at which they appear and the visuals of the clones have been updated slightly.

Now Shadow Dance is typically used whenever Secret Technique is ready, as it has a slightly longer cooldown than Shadow Dance itself. The core concept from The War Within of getting 2 Shadow Dances in during Shadow Blades remains but with the short static cooldown there is only a very small delay required for them to line up well, making the cooldown-management aspect of the spec significantly easier and straightforward relative to the previous iteration.

As time outside of Shadow Dance has been cut by quite a lot we have also seen the removal of Rupture, which was mostly used as a bridge and filler in between the actual fun gameplay moments of the specialization itself. This, coupled with the removal of Flagellation means that there is no ramp-up time or setup before cooldowns, they can be used immediately, emphasizing the burst aspect of Subtlety even more.

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.

Ancient Arts mostly just moves functionality from The War Within version of Shadowcraft into the Apex talent space instead. Similarly to Shadowcraft, the tooltips are often confusing at first glance, however in practice the gameplay loop is pretty simple: If you have 5 Shadow Techniques stacks after you have pressed Shadowstrike, your next finisher will do more damage and refund at least 5 combo points.

It is worth noting that in Midnight the combo point builders are no longer doing pitiful damage, so effects like Ancient Arts that increase their damage are relevant. The Shadow Techniques stacks received from Ancient Arts does interact with all of the Apex talents as well as Shuriken Tornado and Weaponmaster.

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 clones 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.

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 as of now its still very annoying to be forced to use a single-target only ability even in massive AoE situations.

Trickster has not received 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.

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.