Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
When you play with the Deeper Stratagem and Secret Stratagem talents, you will finish at 6 or more combo points, which also applies to all the finishers in the priority lists.
Below I will list spells in a priority order to make it easier to understand the importance of certain parts of the gameplay loop for subtlety.
Single Target
Be in Stealth if possible.
Generator Priority:
- During Shadow Dance use Shadowstrike.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use Backstab.
Finisher Priority:
- During Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points. Prioritising Secret Technique over Coup de Grace over Eviscerate.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points.
Cooldowns:
- Cast Shadow Dance with 6 or more combo points and when Secret Technique is ready to be used.
- Cast Shadow Blades during Shadow Dance.
- Cast Secret Technique during Shadow Dance.
- Cast Vanish outside of Shadow Dance and at low combo points followed by a Shadowstrike.
Multi Target
Be in Stealth if possible.
Generator Priority:
- During Shadow Dance use Shuriken Storm on 3 targets or more use Shadowstrike on 2.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use Backstab only on 1 target, if more than 1 target, use Shuriken Storm.
Finisher Priority:
- During Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points, use Black Powder on 2 targets or more but always prioritise Secret Technique over Coup de Grace over Black Powder.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points with Black Powder on 2 targets or more.
Cooldowns:
- Cast Shadow Dance when you have 6 or more combo points and Secret Technique is ready to be used.
- Cast Shadow Blades during Shadow Dance.
- Cast Secret Technique during Shadow Dance.
- Cast Vanish outside of Shadow Dance and at low combo points followed by a Shuriken Storm.
Openers
Single Target Opener:
- Start from Stealth
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Eviscerate (we do this here before going into cooldowns to apply Slice and Dice)
- Use Shadow Dance + Shadow Blades
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Secret Technique
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Eviscerate
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Eviscerate
- Use Shadowstrike
Just continue with Shadowstrike and Eviscerate until Shadow Dance ends and immediately use another charge.
AoE Opener:
- Stealth
- Shadowstrike
- Eviscerate (skip if you already have Slice and Dice active)
- Shuriken Storm + Shadow Dance + Shadow Blades
- Secret Technique
- Shuriken Storm
- Black Powder
- Continue with the normal priority list
For both Single target and AoE consume Coup de Grace whenever it's available.
General Playstyle
The general flow of Subtlety can be a bit weird at first due to the low cooldown on Shadow Dance and multiple charges of it, so ill try and make it as clear as possible.
Your ultimate goal is to always have 2x Shadow Dance uses on each set of Shadow Blades and during your “downtime” (inbetween your Shadow Blades) you wanna fit in 2 more singular uses of Shadow Dance to make sure you have 2 charges ready for your big burst.
Cooldowns
Subtlety Rogue basically only has 3 cooldowns.
Secret Technique: Simple finishing move that's split into 3 hits, first being a physical hit from the player and the last 2 being from shadow damage from shadow clones. The spell is on a somewhat short cooldown that gets reduced by Haste, and the optimal usage is during Shadow Dance at 6 or more combo points.
Shadow Dance: Your bread and butter cooldown for Subtlety is how the spec does most of its damage. What it does is that it allows you access to your stealth abilities without being inside of stealth, mainly Shadowstrike on a single target for big hitting builder damage. The cooldown has a lot of talents that interact with it, making it a damage modifier steroid.
Optimal use is for Trickster at 6 or more combo points and Secret Technique ready to be used. For Deathstalker, the same rule for Secret Technique applies, but instead of 6 or more combo points you wanna start at low combo points, so you will want to start with a builder into pressing Secret Technique.
Shadow Blades: A 90 sec cooldown that doubles your combo point generation and also makes your attacks do 20% additional as shadow damage. Optimal use is during Shadow Dance.
Defensives
The way I think about using Defensives is “how can I make this fight easier for my healers / raid”.
I spend a lot of time finding things to maybe cheese mechanics with Cloak Of Shadows. This is, however, not always the best use case for these defensives, and I generally recommend using them to help out your healers.
For Cloak Of Shadows in particular, I think it's very important to sit down and figure out where these very high magic damage intakes are so you can help out by just not taking any damage at all. One of the best examples of this was the last debuff clear on Mythic Sarkareth in Phase 1, where you have everyone clear at the same time; using cloak here is a very big help for your team, over cloaking something like a swirly to get more uptime on the boss.
Feint is a little harder to use well, since you can very easily be over using it and losing out on potential damage when feinting too much as it costs a decent amount of energy. Best mechanics to feint are stuff where you know a massive AoE hit is coming or stuff that would otherwise kill you, like the Raszageth P1 bombs before they got nerfed. You had a timer for when these went off, and even if they weren't on you they still did a lot of damage to the raid. Another example is the Hearts mechanic on Echo of Neltharion or his AoE stomp during P1. You get really good value from Feint for stuff like that, where you are forced off from the boss anyway.
Cheat Death is just your fail safe. It allows you to be greedy with health potions and Warlock stones, really lets you min-max, and makes it a lot easier to find the sweet spot for how greedy you can be in a fight. It also helps you figure out what actually kills you (without actually killing you). You can also find mechanics to cheese this. A decent example was during Kurog Grimtotem progress, where I managed to solo two Frost explosions after being able to Cheat Death out of one of them. The same thing is true on Magmorax, where you go to the center with a swirly to die with it on progress you can live that with Cheat Death.
Movement
I won't say too much about this, but I will say that any good Subtlety rogue knows how to get the most out of Sprint and Shadowstep.
- Getting that extra melee or ability off before having to move by stepping a ranged DPS.
- Sprint and gap close with Shadowstep
- Avoid knockbacks with Shadowstep
You also have Vanish and Shadowstrike teleport.