Sub in 5.2

[jtstormrage]

It scales very well with gear due to the passive Agility bonus and the base 20% damage modifier. Also, with the gear in 5.2 it may have great potential as the SND mastery will scale very well with the legendary meta and RPPM trinkets. Blizzard said in a blog pre-5.2 that it was concerned about very high damage from Sub Rogues and Enh Shamans in high end gear.

Has anyone tried Sub in raids?

Would be particularly interested to hear from people with the above items (legendary meta and RPPM trinkets).

[Deleted]

It may not be as good as it had been when they mentioned it in this pre 5.2 blog. There were RPPM changes and Slice and Dice no longer affects it.

I have 535 MH dagger, 535 juju and 528 talisman of bloodlust and no legendary meta gem yet. I only tried sub in 5 mans and on dummy (I know neither is proper raid test), I wasn't particularly impressed.

[Avengerx]

The problem is not with it's damage as it seems to be close to the other specs on a patchwerk fight, the problem is backstab and raid mechanics where you can't use it effectively making sub subpar.

[Kael]

Just to clear up any potential misconception, subtlety only scales better than other specs as gear improves IF its abilities are weighted such that the agility increase is worth more than the base damage percent bonus of assassination or the AP bonus of combat, or if it gains more damage from having higher secondaries than the other two. Neither seems to be the case at this time, and subtlety remains behind on patchwerk DPS, and, of course, suffers from a lack of any real bonus compared to the other two specs other than short-term AoE through CT.

SnD does not affect RPPM any longer, thus Sub does not get more benefit from RPPM items than the other specs from mastery either. Blizzard may have been concerned about Sub and Enhance, but that was before SnD (and I think WF?) stopped increasing RPPM rate. At the moment, enhancement is not breaking the DPS charts even at the top end, to my knowledge, and is receiving a buff (unless those were all tooltip fixes) in 5.3 to make up for it. At the moment, sub just... isn't ahead for PvE.

[Verain]

Correct. The RPPM change totally eliminated any concern they may have had for Sub being all that good.

I believe sub still offers better and more friendly burst windows, and backstab is not a serious cockblock this tier (though it's never totally clean either). I've been rolling mutilate, but I'm pretty sure I could do better as sub on a couple of the fights, if I put the research into it. I've just had such good luck with assassination- and it's generally easier- that I've just been rolling that.

Specifically:

1)- Jin'Rokh seems like sub should be better than we are seeing on him. There should be really high find weakness during his burst phases. I don't know if that delta would be enough to chase mutilate's superior damage in general, though.
2)- Tortos also has sections where sub's more frequent burst could line up, at least in reg.
3)- The bird whatever should absoLUTEly be a sub fight, if you are able to snarf up the powerups and boost that damage.
4)- Primordius seems like he should really help sub with those huge boosts and two minute timers. I dunno, just seems that way.

But, I've literally been A for every fight this tier. We're 11/12 reg right now, with enough play on Lei Shen to know that A will be the way to go on him too. I suspect that I could get a little more mileage out of C on some fights, but I was frankly so disgusted with how terrible blade flurry was (pre range buff) at actually HITTING TARGETS that I specced out of it entirely. I'll try it again soon, as that little stupid cone being fixed should make a difference on the relevant fights. It also looks necessary for some heroics, which hopefully we'll be dinking with soon.

[Coldkil]

Atm (due also to class reroll for guild needs), i'm using sub only for doing dailies, stacking mastery. Pretty fun.

For the rest, Assa is so solid that changing spec and gameplay for a very little damage increase (maybe) is not worth for a lot of people. Anyway there are a lot of sweet spots for sub - you just need to take your time and try.

[Kael]

By fight (Sub vs. Assassination):

Jin'rokh: Sub should be close if your tanks love you and you're excellent at lining up FW with pools.
Horridon: A.
Council: A. Unless you let Sul empower with a ton of sand up. Don't let Sul empower with a ton of sand up.
Tortos: A. Sub if your group goes to town on bats and does so in a short window.
Megaera: A.
Ji'kun: I'm divided. CT would be decent for lower nests, and lining FW into the burst windows is nice, but A does top-notch damage throughout the fight regardless. Needs testing or a directed sim to say what *should* be ahead.
Durumu: A.
Primordius: A. I'm not seeing anything to benefit sub over assassination (basically selective scaling), and the fight doesn't really benefit sub in any way, while it does require rapid target swapping early in the fight and possibly again later.
Dark Animus: A (Single target burn strat... probably A for all strats I've heard of).
Iron Qon: A.
Twin Consorts: A.
Lei Shen: I'm divided here as well; if you're struggling with Lei Shen damage, probably A. If you're struggling with Lightning Balls killing people, Sub for CT.

This all assumes you play both specs very well. If you're not good at Sub, you're not really missing out on damage.

Unless anyone has evidence to the contrary, assassination is scaling at least as well as Sub, so to make that argument work in the future, you'll need to provide some new information. "Scaling" for sub>assass suggests that from T14->T15, sub should be closer than it was last tier. To my knowledge, the gap is larger than before.

[Coldkil]

The "scaling issue" which we had in DS has been "solved" with the recent buffs to coefficients of Assa and Combat, so we shouldn't have any spec being fevored more than another due to boosted ilvls.

It's all about fight mechanics and confidence with the spec - and with sub, we universally don't have much of it because everyone of us has mained always combat/assa because it being easier to play and/or simply better performing.

[Sesshou]

I honestly can't see sub even beating combat, let alone assassination in practice. The only real benefit it has is CT for burst AE. For example sub was mentioned as maybe good on Jin as you can use a CD on each pool, but I can AR/SB on the pull and still AR/SB on every pool which is a stronger CD than just getting a dance in on every pool.

[D3athsting]

Imho as long as backstab has positional requirement sub will never be viable plus sub was the spec that needed more buffs and ended up being the less buffed rogue spec.

[Sesshou]

Imho as long as backstab has positional requirement sub will never be viable plus sub was the spec that needed more buffs and ended up being the less buffed rogue spec.

It is still possible with backstab. Despite the annoyance of positional attacks, sub was largely the best spec in DS with legendaries and the only fight it really fell behind on was gunship (or maybe Zonazz, but we had enough warriors and rogues cleaving the tentacle that I was pulling more just sitting on him as sub). Of course that was when hemo was decent and doing something like ultraxion with the current version of hemo would be garbage.

[D3athsting]

It is still possible with backstab. Despite the annoyance of positional attacks, sub was largely the best spec in DS with legendaries and the only fight it really fell behind on was gunship (or maybe Zonazz, but we had enough warriors and rogues cleaving the tentacle that I was pulling more just sitting on him as sub). Of course that was when hemo was decent and doing something like ultraxion with the current version of hemo would be garbage.

I used hemo/subt with a survival build similar to the one used for hc valiona and did very good on hc morchok topping meters by a large margin (thanks to being able to stay on boss during black blood), other than that i found it good on spine and yor'sajh where my task was to tunnel the boss. Now i find subt to be terrible on everything, very sad...