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.
- During Shadow Dance use Shadowstrike.
- Outside of Shadow Dance use Backstab.
- During Shadow Dance use finishers with 6 or more combo points.
- 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 chaining them during cds.
- Shadow Dance during Symbols of Death or when you are about to cap on charges.
- Vanish outside of Shadow Dance at low combo points
- 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.
One of the important things to get right as Subtlety is to always make sure to Supercharge your Secret Technique casts (a 9 combo point Secret Technique in fact does hurt). So in your main cooldown window when you do a back to back Shadow Dance (you want 0 downtime between those two Shadow Dance’s) you wanna hold your 2nd Symbols of Death cast until Secret Technique reaches 10 seconds or less cd. That way you are able to Supercharge both of your Secret Technique casts.
Note that this opener assumes that you are playing the Hero talent Trickster which also means that an Eviscerate can turn into a Coup de Grace. If you are wondering why there is Backstab after your Shadow Dance cast its because it is worth it to consume your Premeditation buff for a 7 combo point Backstab for an extra stack of Danse Macabre.
Single Target Opener:
- Start from Stealth
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Flagellation
- Use Rupture
- Use Shadow Dance + Symbols of Death
- Use Backstab
- Use Secret Technique + (Cold Blood ideal use is on the 2nd cast of Secret Technique every major cooldown set) + Shadow Blades
- Use Shadowstrike
- Use Eviscerate
- Use Shadowstrike
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 6 or more combo points, 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 chaining them during cds.
- Use Shadow Dance with low combo points during Symbols of Death or when you are about to cap on charges.
- Use Vanish outside of Shadow Dance at low combo points or hold it as a defensive or to cheese certain mechanics.
- 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 you wanna use Eviscerate on AoE up until 7 targets, due to your hero talents and also i don't recommend playing Shuriken Tornado as Trickster 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
- Shadowstrike
- Eviscerate
- Shuriken Storm
- Spread Ruptures
- Shuriken Storm
- Flagellation
- Rupture
- Shadow Dance + Thistle Tea + Symbols of Death + Shadow Blades
- Shadowstrike
- Secret Technique + (Cold Blood ideal use is on the 2nd cast of Secret Technique every major cooldown set)
- Shuriken Storm
- Black Powder
- Shadowstrike
- Black Powder
- 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.
Subtlety Rogue Cooldown Sequence
To best explain how you use your cooldowns during a fight I had this picture made to showcase how it works.
One thing to note however, is that you are going to have 1 extra Symbols throughout the fight due to you having 3 charges of it, and there isn't really any right or wrong time to use it. What I usually do is sit on it until the end of a fight and then I just dump it all, you just have to make sure that you have 2x Symbols and 2x Dances ready for your Blades/Flag window.
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.
- It's a gain to hold onto a Coup de Grace once you are getting closer to your next Flagellation / Shadow Blades window, 25 seconds or so before.
- 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 until 7 targets are present then you just wanna use Black Powder.
- 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 unless 7 targets or more are present then you just keep using Shuriken Storm this is however very minor and if it's more comfortable you can just default to only doing Shuriken Storm into Black Powder.
- 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 or if 7 or more targets are present.
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 at some point during the fight you are gonna have to send a Symbols of Death on its own together with a Secret Technique
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 which you don't even do anymore inside of your big cooldowns but can still be done in your small dances if you dont meet criteria for sending Secret Technique as Trickster.
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
Cooldown usage going into patch 11.0.5 gets a bit trickier to explain since we now also have a charge system on our Symbols of Death, the easiest way to explain it is that you ideally wanna always have 2 Symbols charges and 2 Dance charges ready for every Flagellation window, while also spending as many as possible during downtime and the best way to ensure this is to pay attention to your Flagellation cooldown and just do a FULL STOP in sending Dances and Symbols when it reaches below 30 seconds.
- Symbols of Death on cooldown.
- Shadow Dance every Symbols of Death.
- Secret Technique every Shadow Dance.
- Flagellation 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.