Subtlety Rogue Frequently Asked Questions — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.2.5

Use a dagger in off-hand, unless you have a slow weapon that is around 40 item levels higher than your dagger.

On multiple targets, Mastery gains more value while Haste loses some. This is due to a larger portion of our damage coming from finishers on AoE and the accelerated resource gain diminishes the value of Haste.

The First Dance and Inevitability are far ahead of other traits on single-target. Note that, in situations where you are casting Shuriken Storm, these traits do effectively nothing as they only work with Shadowstrike and Backstab. To get a better understanding of Azerite traits, refer to the Simulations page.

For Subtlety, there is no Haste breakpoint/cap. Additionally, because The First Dance grants you Haste when Shadow Dance is active, Haste has its value devalued.

The DPS differences between the races are fairly minimal. The best races for DPS on Horde are Pandaren, Undead and Blood Elf. For Alliance Void Elf, Night Elf and Dwarf are the best.

You can see a ranked list of all the Racials on our Simulations page.

Subtlety is fairly weak, due to the removal of Shuriken Combo in Patch 8.1. Combined with the fact that the spec did not receive any buffs to compensate, it is weaker than both Assassination and Outlaw in Raiding and Mythic+.

Subtlety has better burst and priority damage with multiple targets than Assassination and Outlaw, but in general, slightly lower single-target output.

The answer to this question in any context will always be to simulate it. This is because an upgrade for you may not be an upgrade for someone else. In other words, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer, even when talking about 2 completely identical comparisons from you to another person. Everything in your gear has an effect on everything else.

This applies to gear, azerite pieces, trinkets, and even talents in certain situations.

The only exception to this rule is when a specific fight dictates a certain set of optimal talents, for example. If you are curious about what kind of setup to go for a specific fight, WarcraftLogs.com's rankings and statistics are a good place to see what others are doing.

We have a guide on how to sim yourself here:

For the most part, there is no set "amount" of any stat that you should have. There are also no stat goals or particular distributions of stats that you want to aim for. It is very common for people to overestimate the importance of having the "right" secondaries, when in reality, having a higher quantity of stats will almost always beat having "better" stats. Having 120 of your worst stat is often better than having 100 of your best stat, since the differences in value are not as big as many people think.