Subtlety Vanish Usage

[ContortedPvP]

So I'm seeing a lot of rogues on shorter fights vanish'ing AFTER the second Shadow Dance has completed (on shorter fights like Zakuun/Iron Reaver) instead of pairing it with Shadow Dance (when vanish and dance are both up).

Was I told wrong, or is this a new development? Simulationcraft shows the same thing, so I'm wondering if the rules/priorities have changed.

Quoted from Rylix on his stream "Vanish can be held for 6 seconds when paired with Shadow Dance, and 12 when paired with Shadow Dance and legendary ring).

Seems pretty inconsistent to what I'm seeing.

Thanks

[Zoulis]

Well w/o counting BL and racials, you'll get 6 ambushes in your dance and 3 in your vanish. The vanish ambushes have a 30% dmg increase.
So when you Dance/Vanish you get 6 ambushes with 30% damage increase, if we count each ambush as 100% damage -> You get 7.8 ambushes worth of damage during a vanish/dance
When you Vanish and Dance seperately you get 6 normal ambushes and then 3 with a 30% damage increase -> You get 9.9 ambushes worth of damage
And this is just Ambush damage, without counting the extra combo points and Find Weakness uptime.

For ring, this changes, because of pooling issues and the amount of Ambushes you'd be able to produce during the ring window, makes it better to use them together.

So if not for the fact that you don't want to waste Vanish or SD CD you'd almost always want to use Dance and Vanish seperately. So on really short fights where there's no 3rd Vanish to be had anyway, there's no problem to hold Vanish for after your Dance has ended.

Atleast this is the napkin math behind my decision of using them seperately at times, bear in mind that there's always the possibility I'm wrong.

[Xaryen]

Your math isn't entirely corrent, because you are forgetting about Master of Subtlety and not accounting for more evis/rupture ticks under effects of 2p + MoS if pairing Dance and Vanish. However point still stands that separating Vanish and SD is slightly better than pairing them up if there aren't any other buffs involved.

But the issue is that the situation OP is concerned with really happens only if the fight duration is between ~1:20-2:00, at which point you would likely want to use your 2nd potion during the 2nd Dance, and since after SD ends you still need 6-8 seconds to pool energy before vanishing, most of your Vanish-Ambushes would probably miss out on the potion.
I'm not gonna try to accurately math this out right now, but my guess is that it's extremely likely that the potion would tip the scales in favour of pairing 2nd Dance and 3rd Vanish(2nd Vanish right after 1st Dance is a given with this fight duration).

Then there's one other option that you can consider, if you know that the fight will be fairly close to 2 min duration you can hold your 3rd Vanish and 2nd Dance and pot while hoping for a Soul Cap proc.

[Deleted]

Didn't stream in quite a while, but I'm sure I always added only do that when you are certain to not waste a usage by delaying.

Also that potion explanation sounds good.

[qlfwow8]

Mostly agreed with Xaryen.

Our fight length on Socrethar the Eternal is about 1:45-1:55, decided by amount of mage. (So sad)
So I use 3rd Vanish at 1:00 and hold 2rd SD for a possible Soul Cap proc until 1:25. Then I will have a 4th Vanish at about 1:40.
Just use 2nd potion when Soul Cap proc.