Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
When you play with the Deeper Stratagem and Secret Stratagem talents, you will finish at 6 or more combo points (5 while in Shadow Dance), which also applies to all the finishers in the priority lists. However, it does not apply if you are playing Resounding Clarity and have charged combo points active.
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.
- During Shadow Dance use Shadowstrike.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use Backstab.
- During Shadow Dance use finishers with 5 or more combo points, Secret Technique with 3 or more Danse Macabre stacks, otherwise use Eviscerate.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points, keeping up Rupture, otherwise dump combo points with Eviscerate.
Cooldowns
- Line up Shadow Blades with Flagellation.
- Use Symbols of Death on cooldown or with less than 3 seconds remaining when specced into Invigorating Shadowdust to chain them.
- Shadow Dance during Symbols of Death or when you are about to cap on charges.
- Vanish inside of Shadow Dance on low Combo Points after your Secret Technique cast, when Shadow Dance, Symbols of Death, Shadow Blades, Flagellation and Secret Technique are on cooldown if specced into Invigorating Shadowdust.
- Thistle Tea during Shadow Dance for the Mastery it provides.
- Flagellation at 6+ combo points quickly followed up by Shadow Blades and your Shadow Dance rotation.
Single Target Opener
Note that with the single target opener when playing the talent Shadowcraft you need to pay attention to your Shadow Technique stacks since you will get some combo point refunds especially after your Secret Technique.
Note that this opener assumes that you are playing the Hero talent Trickster with the talent Subterfuge which also means that an Eviscerate can turn into a Coup de Grace, if you aren't specced into it, replace point 4 with Sepsis if playing that or just Backstab instead of the Shadowstrikes until you reach 6+ combo points for Flagellation. If you aren't playing Trickster but Deathstalker instead we go back to the old rules of always using Secret Technique as your 2nd finisher inside of Shadow Dance.
- Start from Stealth
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Slice and Dice
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Flagellation
- Use Rupture
- Use Shadow Dance + Symbols of Death + Shadow Blades
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Secret Technique + Cold Blood
- Use Vanish
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Eviscerate
- After this point you react to your Shadowcraft combo point refunds so weave Shadowstrikes or Eviscerates depending on your combo points.
Multi Target
Be in Stealth if possible.
Generator priority
- During Shadow Dance + Shadow Blades use Shadowstrike for a stack of Danse macabre or if 3 targets or less.
- During Shadow Dance use Shuriken Storm on 4 targets or more.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use Backstab only on 1 target, if more than 1 target use Shuriken Storm
- During Shadow Dance use finishers with 5 or more combo points, Secret Technique with 3 or more stacks of Danse macabre, otherwise use Black Powder / Eviscerate if prior targeting or if 3 targets or less.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points, keeping up Rupture otherwise dump combo points with Black Powder / Eviscerate if prior targeting or if 3 targets or less.
Cooldowns
- Use Shadow Blades always line it up with Flagellation.
- Use Symbols of Death on cooldown or with less than 3 seconds remaining, when specced into Invigorating Shadowdust.
- Use Shadow Dance with low combo points during Symbols of Death or when you are about to cap on charges.
- Use Vanish inside of Shadow Dance on low Combo Points after your Secret Technique cast, when Shadow Dance, Symbols of Death, Shadow Blades, Flagellation and Secret Technique are on cooldown if specced into Invigorating Shadowdust.
- Use Thistle Tea for the mastery during Shadow Dance.
- Use Flagellation at 6+ combo points quickly followed up by Shadow Blades and your Shadow Dance rotation.
- Use Shuriken Tornado on cooldown or delay it slightly if you know a big pack is coming or Shadow Dance is ready very shortly.
Standard Mythic+ AoE Opener and gameplay
Note if you are playing the Hero talent Trickster I don't recommend playing Shuriken Tornado since it gets very awkward for a very tiny reward a very high target counts, so just follow the basic rules of building and spending.
- Stealth
- Shuriken Storm
- Slice and Dice
- Shuriken Storm
- Flagellation
- Rupture
- Shuriken Tornado
- Shadow Dance + Thistle Tea + Symbols of Death + Shadow Blades
- Black Powder
- Secret Technique + Cold Blood
- Black Powder
- Shadowstrike
- Black Powder
- Shuriken Storm
- Continue with the normal priority list
When playing Shuriken Tornado, use this before entering Shadow Dance with Symbols of Death up. In a lot of cases when playing m+ you are gonna be chain pulling, or it takes 5-15 seconds for the tank to gather up mobs you can use this time to put up ruptures on as many targets as possible, if this is the case then you start from the Flagellation mark with full Combo Points.
After leaving Shadow Dance, keep maintaining Ruptures on targets that will stay alive for 12+ seconds, and otherwise just rotate Shuriken Storms into Black Powders.
Hero Talent Rotation Changes
Trickster
Here is where things get a bit more complicated, as these rules will override a lot of what I have told you above, not so much the cooldown usage but more so rotational things.
This goes for both AoE and Single target, this is just general rotational changes for the Hero Talent.
First of the stacking buff you get from Unseen Blades is called Escalating Blades this gets important as we go.
- If you are not in Shadow Dance but you have 4 stacks of Escalating Blades you wanna use Black Powder instead of Eviscerate until your next Shadow Dance cast to preserve the Coup de Grace finisher, we do this because of the pure amount of damage it does.
- Only consume Coup de Grace if you have the “Fazed” debuff up on the target.
- If you go into Shadow Dance and you do not have 4 stacks of Escalating Blades or “Fazed” up you wanna use Secret Technique as the first finisher inside of Shadow Dance instead of 2nd.
- In AoE you wanna use Eviscerate over Black Powder if you have Flawless Form up.
- In AoE if you do NOT have Flawless Form up and you aren't inside of a Shadow Dance you wanna use Backstab to get it up.
- In AoE during Shadow Dance you wanna use Shadowstrike over Shuriken Storm.
- In AoE only use Black Powder if you don't have Flawless Form up.
- Invigorating Shadowdust builds specifically wants to use 3x Shadow Dances during Flagellation windows instead of the normal two, so you wanna use Vanish right after your Secret Technique cast this way you should be able to fit a Secret Technique in each Shadow Dance (this might be tight if you are testing it on dummies without the new Skyfury buff).
Deathstalker
Luckily this one is a lot more simple.
- When Darkest Night is up your highest priority is to build to max combo points and consume the buff with Eviscerate.
- When Darkest Night is up do not use any other finisher than Eviscerate (even on AoE).
- Use Shuriken Storm on single target when Clear the Witnesses buff is up (outside of Shadow Dance / Symbols of Death windows).
Symbols of Death without Shadow Dance
In The War Within on single target we currently do not generate enough cooldown reduction to sustain the amount of Shadow Dances we wanna cast during our burst windows + also having one for each Symbols of Death cast, so we have the term “Naked Symbols”.
Which means the first Symbols of Death after your burst window with Flagellation + Shadow Blades (not counting the two casts used due to Invigorating Shadowdust) is gonna be a “naked” Symbols of Death so you wanna press it without a Shadow Dance. I’ll provide a picture to help understand it.
Trickster Shadowdust
Trickster Darkbrew
Trickster and Deathstalker play the exact same cooldown wise when playing the talent Dark Brew.
Deathstalker Shadowdust
The cooldown Sequence for Deathstalker is a lot more simple when playing Invigorating Shadowdust. You always wanna pair 1x Shadow Dance with every Symbols of Death you cast.
General Playstyle
Danse Macabre
Many people have asked if we “play around Danse Macabre”, and the answer would be “maybe?”. We do a few things to play around the damage buff gains.
- Shadowstrike on AoE for a Danse Macabre stack or during Shadow Blades.
- Using an Eviscerate before using Secret Technique, this is mainly done for the extra 6% damage stack from the Eviscerate
Apart from these quite small things, we do not play around Danse Macabre stacks, they happen naturally and you don’t have to worry about it.
Pandemic timers
Subtlety has two abilities affected by the pandemic timer (30% of the duration), Rupture and Slice and Dice. Most modern Weakaura packages come with a check for pandemic on these abilities, but if you do not have that, these are the timers:
- Rupture 8,4 seconds left (9,6 with 7 cp).
- Slice and Dice 12,4 seconds left (14,4 with 7 cp).
Cooldown Usage
The cooldown usage actually becomes a good bit easier going into The War Within even if you are using the talent Invigorating Shadowdust. I'll quickly go over it.
With Invigorating Shadowdust talented you turn from a 2 minute spec into a 1 min 30 spec so you always wanna delay your Flagellation until your Shadow Blades is ready again so it basically plays the same as without Invigorating Shadowdust just 30 seconds earlier, that's it for the major cooldowns when it comes to all of the small ones we have, the best way to think of it is like this.
- Symbols of Death on cooldown.
- Shadow Dance every Symbols of Death.
- Secret Technique every Shadow Dance (2nd finisher).
- Flagellation / Sepsis always with Shadow Blades.
- Second Shadow Dance charge during Flagellation / Shadow Blades.
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.
- Vanish (2 charges in Dragonflight) and Shadowstrike teleport.
Defensives
The way I think about using Defensives is “how can I make this fight easier for my healers / raid”.
So 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 is the last debuff clear on Mythic Sarkareth in P1 where you have everyone clear at the same time basically, 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 i think 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 since 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 nerfed them, 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, or the Hearts mechanic on Echo of Neltharion or his AoE stomp during P1, stuff like that where you are forced off from the boss anyway gives you really good value from Feint.
Cheat Death is just your fail safe, it allows you to be greedy with health potions and Warlock stones, it really allows you to minmax and makes it a lot easier to find the sweet spot for how greedy you can be in a fight and help you figure out what actually kills you (without actually killing you). You can also find mechanics to cheese with this a decent example was during Kurog Grimtotem progress i managed to solo two Frost explosions due to being able to Cheat Death one of them, same thing on Magmorax where you go the center with a swirly to die with it on progress you can live that with Cheat Death.