Sub as a bleed tree...(warning kinda long post)

[Novarian]

So I was doing some thinking about how poor Subtlety is right now in PvE and got to thinking. Assassination is the poison tree while Combat is the direct damage/out of stealth tree so why not make Subtlety into a kind of bleed tree similar to a feral cat druid. I am by no means saying that these two specs should play exactly the same, more along the lines of how shadow priests and affliction warlocks are where they are similar but there are noticeable differences in the classes (like resource management, obviously pet, cooldowns and how the spells interact with each other).There is a shorter version at the bottom for those of you who don’t want to read it all.

In order to do this a new ability would need to be added in the talent tree somewhere, my first choice would be where Ghostly Strike is and then making Ghostly a baseline ability. The idea I had was an attack along the lines of “Puncture - You pierce your target causing x bleed damage and an additional y damage to bleed over 9 seconds. Generates one combo point.” The purpose of this spell would be to increase the damage of subtlety while you can still use other abilities and help add in another source of bleed damage for sub.

Also the cooldown of Shadow Dance would need to be increased...maybe to 2 or 3 min but the duration would also be increased by a reasonable amount of time. This would help free up some of the global cooldowns and make it so that it isn't as hectic or cluttered.

The damage of backstab should be increased via talents to make it as a filler for when rupture/puncture are ticking. Also having it become the main source of combo point generation. Hemorrhage should be increased as well making it usable for those parts of the fight where you can’t get behind the target for whatever reason so that you can still use abilities. Would kind of be like the rogue version of mangle. Along these lines the debuff of hemorrhage should be changed in some way so that there are not any charges but instead just a constant debuff so hemorrhage doesn’t need to be spammed to maintain the increased damage.

Honor Among Thieves should be changed to possibly something along the lines of, When you critically strike with your off hand auto attacks you have a 33/66/100% to gain a combo point on your target. The reason behind this change is the current honor among thieves seems to rely too much on other people. No other spec in the game (that I can currently think of) has their rotation changed so much when more people join the raid. The more people that join the raid the more critical strikes happening meaning the more CPs generated and the less generating abilities you use. Some people may like this but it doesn't seem very rogue-ish to have to rely on others to do your damage.

Of course the current planned final mastery bonus would need to be changed from Harder-Hitting Finishers to perhaps Increased Bleed Damage to compensate for the changes but since these aren't in game yet I figured this would be easiest.

Ideal Rotation - So the rotation I figure would come out of this is to keep Rupture and Puncture on the target while keeping SnD up on the rogue and using Backstab or Hemorrhage as fillers then Eviscerate when you have the combo points and can keep SnD/Rupture up. Using ShS whenever to increase the damage done of some abilities and using ShD as your burst damage cooldown.

For PvP - I think this would still keep the feel of Subtlety in pvp since you can still burst with ShD, but would also help with fighting higher armor classes using bleeds and what not.

Short Version - I think Sub should be changed to more of a bleed damage tree to help level the damage out with assassination and combat.

[sicness]

Sub is a control utility tree and is why it sacrifices overall damage for it. It's purely designed for pvp and I personally think it's great the way it is rather than it needing more damage. You give up your own damage for more control and utility for your team.

[F4ulty]

You totally just described a feral druid

[Djanco]

Shadow Dance originally had a long ass cooldown with like a 12 second duration or something like that then they changed it to the way it is now. GG

Honor Among Thieves is fine the way it is.

Also, if you had a chance to see the alpha talent tree you would have seen that hemorrhage's new tooltip said the debuff would increase bleed damage by 30% for 15 seconds.

[Annoying]

Some people may like this but it doesn't seem very rogue-ish to have to rely on others to do your damage.

Rogues have always been a class that's extremely dependent upon others anyway. Without a vast array of raid buffs/debuffs, rogues scale terribly as it is, so having sub's primary CP generation be based on others isn't a terrible thing.

[Thesphinx]

I personally enjoy the idea of an entire talent spec based off of combo point generation. However I think the current setup with HaT and all of those openers is a bad idea. This is how I would design it:

HaT would be designed to generate combo points based on a 3 per 5 second basis while in combat (or approximately 1 every 1.67 seconds), while Hemo's debuff will be immensely more powerful but can only be consumed once every 2 seconds, and Backstab refreshes rupture by 3 seconds up to a maximum of 5 times, similar to Glyph of Backstab, only more intense.

Since Rupture is a combo finisher, it's perfectly all right if the mastery benefit remains the same.

As for energy regeneration, sub rogues should also be given an additional talent that makes their bleeds regenerate energy per tick. Because haste will make Rupture tick more often in Cataclysm, this will be perfect for scaling.