Subtlety Rogue Talents Guide

Single Target

Trickster is currently just our go to hero talent for all scenarios, it provides an insane amount of burst and a lot of free cleave damage.

Key Single Target Talents

• Flagellation: Is an old Shadowlands favorite that returns as a mastery buffer instead of haste, reaching a staggering 80% more mastery at 30 stacks. The main value of the talent is in the mastery.
• Danse Macabre: Plays into our big Shadow Dance damage windows by making it even better and also adds an interesting gameplay loop to how we set up our Shadow Dance windows, overall just a great talent.
• Secret Technique: This finisher has great synergy with Danse Macabre as it adds another stack, and because of the delayed clone damage hit, you also gain 6% more damage on the clones if you instantly use another builder after pressing “Sectech”.
• Shadowed Finishers: Basically increases your Eviscerate and Black Powder damage by 30%. This is incredibly good and should always be taken in any build you make for subtlety.
• Shadowcraft: Is our newest capstone which enhances our passive Shadow Techniques while Symbols of Death is active, making it proc 40% more frequently and allows you to consume Shadow Technique stacks with finishers when you have stored enough to fill your combo points.
• Shadow Blades: With its new rework turns into an actual cooldown for Subtlety which causes all of your attacks to deal an extra 20% damage as shadow and makes our builders generate full combo points for 20 seconds.
• Death Perception: A new talent given to us in patch 11.0.5 granting us more charges of Symbols of Death and a nice little damage amp on top.
• Supercharger: Echoing Reprimands new replacement talent, super charging our next finisher after pressing Symbols of Death, main uses for this in our big hitter Secret Technique.

Mythic +

Key Mythic+ Talents

• Flagellation: Is an old Shadowlands favorite that returns as a mastery buffer instead of haste, reaching a staggering 80% more mastery at 30 stacks. The main value of the talent is in the mastery.
• Danse Macabre: Plays into our big Shadow Dance damage windows by making it even better and also adds an interesting gameplay loop to how we set up our Shadow Dance windows, overall just a great talent
• Secret Technique: This finisher has great synergy with Danse Macabre as it adds another stack, and because of the delayed clone damage hit, you also gain 6% more damage on the clones if you instantly use another builder after pressing “Sectech”
• Shadowed Finishers: Basically increases your Eviscerate and Black Powder damage by 30%. This is incredibly good and should always be taken in any build you make for subtlety
• Shadowcraft: Is our newest capstone which enhances our passive Shadow Techniques while Symbols of Death is active, making it proc 40% more frequently and allows you to consume Shadow Technique stacks with finishers when you have stored enough to fill your combo points.
• Shadow Blades: With its new rework turns into an actual cooldown for Subtlety which causes all of your attacks to deal an extra 20% damage as shadow and makes our builders generate full combo points for 20 seconds.
• Replicating Shadows: this talent is very good for cleave and AoE as it spreads Rupture to 1 more nearby target, doubling the value of Rupture casts.
• Death Perception: A new talent given to us in patch 11.0.5 granting us more charges of Symbols of Death and a nice little damage amp on top.
• Supercharger: Echoing Reprimands new replacement talent, super charging our next finisher after pressing Symbols of Death, main uses for this in our big hitter Secret Technique.

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Must have Talents

There are some very obvious ones, like Cheat Death or Evasion.

Atrophic poison: is a must-have if you’re the only rogue in your raid team. It’s a very cheap talent to take and it adds raid utility to a class that lately has been lacking in that department. What it does is that it reduces direct damage from your target by 3% (3.6% with Master Poisoner), this includes spells and mechanics used by a boss, so for raid survivability, it’s quite good (especially early on with bad gear).

Deeper Stratagem: is basically the only DPS node that's a lock in for pretty much all builds because of how strong it is.

Improved Ambush: Basically just makes our Shadowstrike generate 1 additional combo point a very strong and easy talent to pick up.

Situational talents

Talents like Shadowstep, Tricks of the Trade, Shadowrunner, Gouge, Nimble Fingers, Master Poisoner, Blackjack, Improved Sprint, Fleet Footed, Featherfoot, Graceful Guile, Airborne Irritant, Stillshroud and Iron Stomach all have their place in the utility part of the tree and you basically get to pick whatever you want for any given content type you are doing.

Here I'll mostly focus on stuff that has decent gameplay implications / gameplay defining so I'm not including stuff like Secret Stratagem in this list.

We have a few must take talents for pretty much all builds such as.

Death Perception: A new talent given to us in patch 11.0.5 granting us more charges of Symbols of Death and a nice little damage amp on top.

Supercharger: Echoing Reprimands new replacement talent, super charging our next finisher after pressing Symbols of Death, main uses for this in our big hitter Secret Technique.

Flagellation: A 1 min 30 cooldown ability with a massive mastery steroid on combo points spent, the ability itself does not do a lot of damage most of this talent’s value is in the mastery.

Shadowcraft: A fairly new passive capstone to Subtlety which enhances our Symbols of Death to more than double our Shadow Techniques generation and lets us consume them on finishers as well, making for some fun back to back finishers during cooldowns.

Danse Macabre: A pretty interesting capstone which makes every unique ability used during Shadow Dance increase our damage done by 6% which is why we generally use finishers in a certain way like delaying Secret Technique to the 2nd finishers instead of instantly using it.

Secret Technique: Our most powerful finisher on a 1 min cooldown (reduced by combo points spent), it works in a pretty weird way because it has a delay of 1.3 seconds for all of its damage to come out and makes for a very big single target / AoE nuke.

Relentless Strikes: This talent is basically what makes the spec function at a core level, it’s what gives us energy to press buttons, the spec would be unplayable without it.

Deepening Shadows: A passive that reduces the cooldown of Shadow Dance by 0.5 seconds per combo point, this is what allows us to Shadow Dance once per 30 seconds together with Symbols of Death for the normal cooldown rotation for Subtlety.

Double Dance: Very simple talent that just gives us a 2nd charge of Shadow Dance, which offers us a lot of flexibility in Shadow Dance usage which is very nice.

Going into The War Within, we have these new talent tree’s called Hero Talents which further extends the spec identity, here i'll go over the most important parts of them and how they work.

Deathstalker

Deathstalker’s Mark: Shadowstrikes from Stealth or Shadow Dance applies 3 Deathstalker’s Marks to the target and you consume these marks by using finishers with 5 or more combo points dealing bonus plague damage and increasing your next Backstab or Shadowstrike by 40%, this later ties into the capstone of the tree.

Singular Focus: Quite an interesting talent that leans into the old Subtlety fantasy of “funnel” damage, however as of now its not tuned very high but still quite decent, what it does is it basically turns your AoE into priority damage against the target you have Deathstalker’s Mark on without you having to do anything for it which is very very good for stuff like Mythic+.

Fatal Intent: This had the makings of a very good talent but is however drastically undertuned as of now. The way it works is you accumulate stacks on the target throughout the fight and whenever the target falls below 20% HP the stacks explode for plague damage pretty much the same as an old BFA trinket called Inkpod which makes for a very interesting execute talent for the spec which could have upped the desirability for the spec for raiding.

Symbolic Victory: Is basically just our new (2) set bonus just affecting Eviscerate and Black Powder instead of Secret Technique.

Ethereal Cloak / Bait and Switch: Honestly an amazing choice node that allows you to tailor your defensives to the given fight either extending your Cloak of Shadows by 2 seconds (Ethereal Cloak) or adding a bonus of 20% magic DR to Evasion or a 20% Physical DR to Cloak of Shadows (Bait and Switch), a very nice defensive talent.

Momentum of Despair / Follow the Blood: When you crit with Shuriken Storm you increase both the crit chance and the crit damage on both your Shuriken Storm and Black Powder by 15% and 24% respectively (Momentum of Despair) A passive 25% damage increase to Shuriken Storm and Black Powder when you have afflicted 3 or more targets with Rupture (Follow the Blood).

Darkest Night: Here comes the capstone and where a lot of the single target damage from the tree comes from. The way it works is when you have consumed all 3 of the Deathstalker’s Marks or the target dies, you gain 40 energy and your next Eviscerate cast with max combo points is a guaranteed crit and does 60% increased damage and re-applies 3 Deathstalker’s Marks onto the target. This buff is your absolute highest priority to consume whenever it's available.

Trickster

Unseen Blade: Backstab and Shadowstrike deal some extra damage and applies the debuff “Fazed” to the target which increases your damage done to them by 5% and they are now unable to parry your attacks (thank god) it does have 20 second internal cooldown but other talents in the tree allows us to bypass it.

Flawless Form: A simple buff we get from Unseen Blade procs and Secret Technique that buffs our finishers by 3 % for 12 seconds, you can have multiple buffs of this up at the same time.

Devious Distractions: Secret Technique now also applies “Fazed” to any targets it hits.

Thousand Cuts / Flickerstrike: Slice and Dice grants 10% more attack speed and gives your autos a chance to refresh your Unseen Blade cooldown (Thousand Cuts) Using Feint and mitigating AoE damage or dodging attacks with Evasion refreshes the cooldown of Unseen Blade (Flickerstrike).

Disorienting Strikes: Secret Technique has 10% reduced cooldowns and allows your next 2 Unseen Blade’s to not incur their normal cooldown.

Cloud Cover / No Scruples: Turns Distract into a 1 min 30 cooldown and now drops a smoke bomb at the target location and applying “Fazed” on attacks from within the smoke (Cloud Cover) Finisher’s now have 10% increased crit chance against “Fazed” targets (No Scruples).

Nimble Flurry: Turns Flawless Form buff into a Blade Flurry like talent that allows us to use our harder hitting single target abilities for AoE damage while the buff is active. This talent is honestly amazing for passive cleave damage which is something Subtlety has lacked for a very very long time, so happy to see it getting some help in that area.

Coup de Grace: The capstone for Trickster and probably the most interesting part of both our tree’s. After you have procced Unseen Blade 4 times your next Eviscerate turns into a “Coup de Grace” which does a lot of damage and splits the attack into 3 hits our goal is to always have this proc inside of Shadow Dance which makes for some very interesting gameplay choices of the spec and the reason we wanna hold it for Shadow Dance’s is because of the sheer amount of damage it does. The one drawback of this talent is that it also comes with a 1.2 second full global cooldown lock meaning that you cannot use any other abilities during it, not even defensives.