Subtlety Rogue Midnight Talents Guide

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There are a number of must have Talents in the Rogue Class Tree. 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 Dance, main uses for this is our big hitter Secret Technique.

Rest of the talents you can kind of sum up as “situational” talents where you just pick whatever you need in any given situation really, such as like AoE Blind (Airborne Irritant) if they decide to still make it be an AoE Blind even though the tooltip states otherwise.

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.

Shadowcraft: While Shadow Dance is active your Shadow Techniques triggers 40% more frequently and generates 2 stacks instead of 1.

Going into the Midnight expansion as we start to level up we get to access the expansion feature that is called Apex talents which for sub goes more into its fantasy of hard hitting finishers and more frequent finishers during burst moments, I will quickly go over what they actually do.

Ancient Arts Apex Talent

The Apex Talent for Subtlety Rogue is Ancient Arts; and you want to spec into all 4 points as its insanely strong.

Ancient Arts Rank 1: Abilities that expend Shadow Technique have a 15% chance per stack expended to summon a shadow clone that repeats the attack for 50% of the normal damage as shadow.

Ancient Arts Rank 2: Shadow damage is increased by 5% and your clones have a 50% chance to proc a Shadow Technique stack per rank.

Ancient Arts Rank 3: After pressing one of your builders if 5 or more Shadow Technique stacks are still remaining your next damaging finisher move will consume the 5 stacks to generate full combo points making you do a back to back finisher.

In terms of changing our playstyle, it plays very similar to our old Shadowcraft talent before it got a slight rework, but it's less random and more straight forward as you will now get a buff on you whenever you are about to proc the combo point refund on your finisher.

How we play around the Apex Talent

A few seconds before you Sectech comes off cooldown stop using finishers to store up Shadow Technique stacks.

Both hero talents actually want to play around the proc so I'll go over both ways it's done.

For Trickster you wanna have your NON Secret Technique supercharged finisher (so Eviscerate or Black Powder) be buffed by the apex which sometimes requires you to use a Shadowstrike even at max combo points to proc it, below i will show a quick 3 step mental check list you make during the first few seconds of Shadow Dance.

Dance+Sectech->Strike (check if apex procced if yes)->Evis

Dance+Sectech->Strike (check if apex procced if no, do i have 5 ShT stacks or more if yes)->Strike->Evis

Dance+Sectech->Strike (check if apex procced if no, do i have 5 ShT stack or more if no)->Evis

The third line you ignore the optimization if you cant force the Apex to proc

For Deathstalker it's more or less the same principle but instead of any Supercharged non Secret Technique finisher you wanna Apex buff your Darkest Night Eviscerate instead.

As for when to use these 2 optimizations for Trickster you want to do these at ALL target counts.

For Deathstalker you only do it up to 4 targets and then you drop it.

In terms of which Hero talent is our go to option, in all situation you wanna go with Trickster with how the current balance is, Deathstalker is somewhat okay on full single target or every high target constant AoE but Trickster is just the better all-rounder and the one you should be playing.

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 a stack of Deathstalker's Mark your next Shadowstrike or Backstab does increased damage.

Symbolic Victory / Lingering Darkness: After you press Shadow Dance your next Eviscerate or Black Powder deals 15% more damage (Symbolic Victory) After Shadow Blades expire gain 30% increased shadow damage for 30 seconds (Lingering Darkness).

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.

Precise Killer: Critical Strike damage bonus is increased by 20%.

Quietus Celeris: Deathstalker’s Mark has a 30% chance to immediately consume 1 stack when applied.

Mass Casualty: Deathstalker’s Mark deals 75% of its normal damage to all other enemies within 8 yards when a stack is consumed by Black Powder.

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: Makes our Shadow Blades drop a smokebomb on the ground that allows us to apply “Fazed” 2 extra times on attacks from within the smoke / the buff (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.

Hoodwink: Fazed now increases damage taken by the target by an additional 3%.

Flashing Steel: Unseen Blade now has a 15 second internal cooldown and has a 25% chance to strike twice.

Clever Combatant: Shuriken Storm has a 15% increased crit chance and now triggers Unseen Blade.

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.