Subtlety Rogue Talents Guide

Single Target

Our hero talent balancing is kind of awful at the moment so your only real option is to go with Trickster as your choice of hero talents

Key Single Target Talents

• 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.
• 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: While Shadow Dance is active Shadow Techniques triggers 40% more frequently and generates 2 stacks instead of 1.
• 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 double combo points for 20 seconds.
• Death Perception: Makes Find Weakness, Shadow Dance and Shadow Blades increase finisher damage by 5% per point.
• Supercharger: Echoing Reprimands new replacement talent, super charging our next finisher after pressing Shadow Death. The main uses for this in our big hitter Secret Technique.

Mythic+

Key Mythic+ Talents

• 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: While Shadow Dance is active Shadow Techniques trigger 40% more frequently and generates 2 stacks instead of 1.
• 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 double combo points for 20 seconds.
• Death Perception: Makes Find Weakness, Shadow dance and Shadow Blades increase finisher damage by 5% per point.
• Supercharger: Echoing Reprimands new replacement talent, super charging our next finisher after pressing Shadow Dance, 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.

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

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: Makes Find Weakness, Shadow Dance and Shadow Blades increase finisher damage by 5% per point.

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 increases Shadow Dance duration based on haste.

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.

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+.

Unshakeable Drive: After consuming i stack of Deathstalker's Mark your next Shadowstrike or Backstab does increased damage

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 15% 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: If you crit with a Shuriken Storm you get a buff which gives you 10% crit chance and 20% critical strike damage for 8 seconds on Shuriken Storm and Black Powder. / Shuriken Storm and Black Powder deal 10% more damage while Find Weakness is active.

Darkest Night: When the last mark is consumed (or the target dies) you gain 30 energy and the buff Darkest Night causing your next Eviscerate spend with 5 or more combo points to always crit and deal 50% more damage and reapply 3 stacks of Deathstalker’s Mark if no other marks are active.

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 4 % for 12 seconds, you can have multiple buffs of this up at the same time up to a cap of 5.

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 our Auto attacks, Unseen Blade and Coup de Grace to also hit up to 7 more targets for 75% of the normal damage while Flawless Form is active.

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 and instantly gives you 5 stacks of Flawless Form.