We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Subtlety Rogue in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Protection Warrior!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Rogue Tier Set
Why You Should Play Subtlety Rogue in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Subtlety Rogue started out in a tough spot between Assassination and Outlaw at the start of Dragonflight, but after initial tuning became the now dominant Rogue spec in both raiding and mythic dungeon content. This change is mostly a consequence of nerfs to both other Rogue specs and raid design with bosses that work well with the Subtlety toolkit. One of the main benefits to the spec is the low amount of damage loss in talent builds allowing players to adapt to mixed fights with e.g. single target and multi-target phases like Raszageth.
Subtlety is one of the specs which can utilize Onyx Annulet well, this results in a roughly four percent damage increase in pure single target and a slight increase of around two percent with multiple targets. Onyx Annulet stays relevant in Season 2 and helps to compete with other specs in damage output.
The specialization at its core stays fairly unchanged. Subtlety remains a spec with short cooldowns with Shadow Dance as the core cooldown which is used roughly every 25 seconds. Secret Technique acts as a burst finisher that can be further elevated in output with talents like Dark Shadow, Cold Blood or Danse Macabre and is used during Shadow Dance. The damage profile of the spec offers small cooldown windows and given the frequency should always have cooldowns ready when needed for a raid mechanic. The downside to this design is that the amount of damage within one single cooldown window is, compared to classes with longer cooldowns, fairly low. In addition to that the design decision to make damage between cooldowns more relevant, leads to an overall slightly more flat damage profile.
The tier set from Season 2 is not specifically exciting either. The idea behind the tier set is to enhance unwanted talent nodes. While this is partly successful, it does not address the core problem that makes these talent choices bad to begin with.
I will go more into detail in the sections below. For a start, here is a table summarizing why you should (and shouldn’t) play Subtlety Rogue in Dragonflight:
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Subtlety Rogue in Dragonflight Season 2
Subtlety Rogue Utility for Dragonflight
Starting with Utility, while there is no one outstanding thing, there are a lot of small benefits:
The toolkit did not change much over the years, the main addition in Dragoflight was Numbing Poison and it gives a good reason to bring at least one Rogue to your raid team. However, the effect is complicated. Not all encounter mechanics benefit equally from the poison and raid mechanics like environmental damage don’t get the damage reduction. The damage reduction is low enough to allow the switch to Atrophic Poison on encounters it works on.
For mythic+ the amount of stop abilities as well as Shroud of Concealment is very handy. A good Rogue can make up for many mistakes in bigger pulls and contribute very positively to the success rate of the key.
Strong Mobility and Defensives
Cheat Death and Feint in combination opt for a very strong combo and allow rogues to be always within the last standing damage dealers.
This is very important in early progression when gear levels are lower and survivability is a bigger concern.
There are also typically multiple uses for Cloak of Shadows to deal with raid mechanics.
Shadow damage is our friend!
Season two is under the theme of Shadow damage, this is very convenient for Subtlety, because we have multiple talents that empower the damage output of shadow sources. Veiltouched, Deeper Daggers as well as Dark Brew empower shadow damage, crafting options like Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch or Enchant Weapon – Shadowflame Wreathe benefit from this and likely end up as our priority choice. This does not lead to a big power level increase but gives subtlety a slight edge over other classes in terms of benefits from 10.1 additions.
Talents!
A lot of the core talents of the Subtlety tree have the advantage to work in a variety of situations, most talents are not exclusive to single target, cleave or AoE, but improve everything. This allows players to shine in fights with a mix of single targt, cleave and AoE. A very good example is the Season 1 fight Raszageth, where subtlety added a very high value to your raid team throughout all phases. This flexibility is also a very strong point when playing mythic+.
Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible is slightly more single target oriented, but Subtlety, luckily ,is positioned within the upper 3rd in terms of damage output and should, once balancing is more finalized, end up in a strong position.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Subtlety Rogue in Dragonflight Season 2
Borrowed power?
Dragonflight came out with the big promise of “no borrowed power”, this promise could work out to our advantage if kept. Two items from 10.1 are strong enough in power level to exceed items obtainable in Season 2. The two items I talk about are Seal of Diurna’s Chosen and Onyx Annulet. The problem with this is that while this could give us an early damage advantage, it limits how much value we can get from gear progression. Tuning changes could also very well tune the spec around having those two items and could lead to a similar situation compared to Season 3 Shadowlands where the spec was very dominant for the first two or three weeks of the patch and after that, slowly dropped to the lower third of the damage chart.
The good news is that rings are typically lower impact slots which should prevent the highlighted scenario.
The pictures below show a comparison against pure item level equivalents with gear from Season 1. Keep in mind that the comparison is not perfect due to gear and potential talent changes in season 2.
Power level – Seal of Diurna’s Chosen:
Power level – Onyx Annulet:
Bugs are gross!
While the majority of bugs don’t affect you in a negative way, I think it is worth highlighting some of the long-standing bugs of Subtlety.
The bugs were tested on ptr on the target dummy on ptr servers with the build 10.0.7.48999.
While this is not a complete list, it highlights an issue of attention. While some of the listed bugs might bring a smile to your face others can impact your gameplay experience in a negative way. The specific one that I want to highlight is Secret Technique with Acrobatic Strikes. Secret Technique is a three-part attack. The first part is triggered instantly while the second and third part is delayed. These two delayed attacks don’t benefit from the extra range and won’t trigger at all if you stand at max range when using Secret Technique. This is important because 10.0.5 made Acrobatic Strikes easy to reach and the second and third parts of the attack account for 9% of the overall damage output of the spec in 10.0.7.
I personally hope this is something that is fixed up to the point of release and the mention of Nightstalker in the blue post indicates that the dev team works on it.
A more detailed list of bugs can be found on the Bug Tracker, but the majority has low impact.
Talents, Again?
While it is great that we have talents that work well in multiple situations, there are many talents that are not appealing.
The entire left side of the tree is fairly weak and the tier set likely only manages to make Swift Death, Planned Execution and Inevitability appealing (yellow in the picture below) .Swift Death out of the three is mainly used to save points and Inevitability becomes irrelevant quickly with multiple targets. The only reason to go down further on the left side (orange) is The Rotten which gets additional triggers from the two-set bonus (Rogue Subtlety 10.1 Class Set 2pc). However, this is very expensive because Perforated Veins is fairly weak and Invigorating Shadowdust requires additional cooldown talents (e.g. Flagellation) to be strong. There are also five talent nodes that have a zero percent pick rate (red) across all content types (pvp, raid, mythi+). Issues like these also exist for the general tree but this is a topic for another time.
Subtlety Talents:
Is the Tier set good?
The two-piece bonus is fairly potent, it gives additional uptime to Symbols of Death which is a 10% damage amp, gives additional energy, and extends the duration of running Rupture debuffs when activating Shadow Dance. However, it is easy to forget that Symbols of Death has a baseline uptime of 33%, the 2p extends this to around 55 – 60%. The four-piece is only active during Symbols of Death and only increases the critical strike damage of Eviscerate and Black Powder by 25%. This number sounds high, but only appears strong and is possibly in the one-two percent dps range, maybe slightly higher for aoe. Symbols of Death uptime can be increased by switching to currently weaker talents, but this leads to lower baseline damage the tier set needs to compensate for. The two-piece bonus also has a high potential of failure. Symbols of Death currently pandemic refreshes, this means only 3 seconds of a running Symbols of Death buff will be carried over to the new duration. The reduction of the two-piece bonus duration is also only a tooltip change as of writing this article, Shadow Dance still triggers a full duration of Symbols of Death.
Overall the new tier set feels like a downgrade from season one. While I like the idea of trying to make unused talents stronger it does not manage to address underlying issues with talent choices. On the more positive side, it could open up the path to playing a talent combination with Flagellation and The Rotten which would alter gameplay slightly more.
Is the gameplay good?
The core gameplay loop with Shadow Dance and Secret Technique is satisfying and this element of the spec remains intact. The button count stays reasonable and the talent tree allows enough customization to adapt quickly to changing environments. There are certain shortcomings. The spec is still fairly punishing due to the high focus on cdr and short cooldown windows. Missing out on globals in Shadow Dance or having downtime from the boss can quickly result in damage loss. Cooldowns could feel more impactful, damage outside of cooldowns remains fairly high and some cooldowns like Symbols of Death and Shadow Blades feel empty given that they are just “on cooldown” with low amounts of positive feedback in terms of output. Symbols of Death will become more planned in 10.1 because of the overwrite, but will be almost exclusively used between cooldown windows. This doesn’t make using it more exciting.
Is Rogue Good? Should i play it?
Balancing is an ongoing progress, and it is very hard to make a statement based on early simulations and raid testing.
The announced buffs have a low impact and only add a minor damage boost of around 2% dps. The mentioned bugfix account for an additional 1.5% damage and would lead to an overall more noticeable change. The bugfix is not on ptr as of writing this article.
Rogue in general performed mediocrely in raid testing but data size is very low. Balancing on live servers does not look super exciting, Subtlety is on the more single-target-oriented fights within the top ten, and raid design in 10.1 seems fairly single-target-heavy. But it is fairly certain that we see more balance adjustments before the raid comes live.
Conclusion
Subtlety Rogue is currently not part of the overperformers in 10.1 and the tier set is mediocre. The spec has some benefits from switching embellishments/enchants in 10.1 that could bridge the gap a bit. It remains a strong option in mythic+ but it is hard to predict the final position in the raid. The tier set at least has the potential to change talents, but likely will only end up in small shifts of 2-3 talent nodes.
The spec remains fun to play and I would encourage everyone to try it out.
About the Author
This guide is currently updated and maintained by Fuu. A Rogue Theorycrafter since Legion with the main focus on Subtlety. I am also part of the Rogue Discord as a moderator and you will usually find me discussing rotation, strategies or talking about theories to improve the simulation.
If you want to chat about rogue feel free to contact me on discord under #fuu7750.
For more information on playing Subtlety Rogue, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Subtlety Rogue Guide
