No hard feelings. Active Premed was a better design all around.
For one, it's more satisfying to press Premed and SnD while sprinting towards your enemy in Stealth, vs. it just happening automatically because you pressed Ambush
It's also more interesting to play with because the player gets the choice of how those 2cp get used and where and when exactly they occur in the rotation.
The thing is, if concern about button count is the only thing stopping them from brining back active premed as opposed to the awful passive design.... then why does Symbols of Death still exist? That is a truly superfluous button that doesn't justify a separate keypress at all (and I hate the class fantasy of it too).
Subtlety Rogue was an amazing, incredible, unique, and fun spec prior to Legion and BfA
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I think what they are trying to do with Symbols of Death was going for old school Cold Blood in the upcoming expansion. But old school Cold Blood was a much longer CD. If they intend to keep Symbols of Death a short CD I am not sure how they will balance.
Akaari's Soul Fragment legendary nerfed by 50%.
Yet, it fails to solve the issues in design. The legendary was strong as hell because you have an insane amount of uptime of SD, which is wrong by default. Nerfing it to half its power may fix the damage/numbers but doesn't make the spec better.
Apparently with this Sub has fallen quite a bunch of ranks (for whatever they count for - hint: not really much) and right now Outlaw is in a better place than before.
Also, not only Sub related but generally: soulbinds with their scaling are going to matter much more in the long run, while covenant skills will be less relevant also due to balancing passes going through. So don't choose your covenant only based on the skill.
Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.
My view is that SD should return to a single powerful cool down. I feel the same way with AR in that both should be DPS cool downs that feel fun to use and not just part of a standard rotation. Rogues don't really have the yellow damage to have their main cool downs just help with the standard rotation.
I mean, I like the name? It has a certain gravity to it, if anything else.
I concur with some of the proposals in that SnD could be akin to Roll the Bones in that it could be a strong short cd, but I like the upkeeping, feels nostalgic enough.
Active Premed in the current state of the class has the same issue I sometimes see in MfD: the lack of Sunder Armor kind of pigeonholes the extra CPs in a limited number of things. You can maybe plan to have a short Rupture as you're pooling for some burst, but I don't know, it's the same issue for a lot of classes: a lot of bones have been bared for things to be brought back into the game willy nilly. And it's a bloody shame.
Its designed to be one, but then all the complementary stuff make so upotime goes through the roof. To me it just looks like someone is working on one side, someone else on the other and they don't talk.
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Holy hell, i forgot about that finisher (wasn't Expose Armor btw?). That would have been nice to get back, instead of SnD, especially for sub and its concept of exploting the weak points of your target. I cannot really explain why this sounds to me so much better than SnD; maybe it's because something i apply to the target and not something i have to keep up on myself?
@shoegazing since you're basically the most interested guy into the spec, how do you see EA instead of SnD for sub? While both are very much iconic and SnD probably much more than EA.
Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.
That may be true but at this point it has happened frequently enough to say they have put Sub and Outlaw in the sustain category bucket. I say this because Sub having multiple dances forming the backbone of the rotation and then Outlaw being about sustain and cleave while burst cool downs Kspree and Dreadblades are both talents.
For whatever reason they don't want Sub to be about single target burst from a single CD like shadow dance used to be. However, shadowblades still exists so there indeed may be two teams that need to communicate with each other on design intent with Sub.
Yeah, Expose, not Sunder. Sub was very much about management and upkeep, you'd go for some meaningful burst after setting up stuff, so my stance on the matter is why not both SnD AND Expose?
You'd need to rework the current Find Weakness though: in Cata it made Expose Armor obsolete by becoming a 70% (100% PvE) armor ignore when opening, and now it simply wouldn't work with the abundance of non physical damage the spec deals.
Old FW was a buff when performing a finisher, like 15% when fully talented, Assa tree. Having Sub being a master of finishers would be fine in my mind.
There are sites like THIS that continously provide charts about if a dps is "viable" or not, but they're at best guesses and don't count for anything. As we perfectly know every content/fight is different, and i don't even mention PvP which is a completely different beast.
They're not 100% useless, but it's not the end-of-all.
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Yeah, makes sense to not have it given FW. My bad. Yet it sounds better than SnD at least for me. It's a very thin line though.
Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.
Depending on the streamer, some are pretty good imho. Usually the ones that don't do much of a tier list and instead go through "pros and cons" of each class. One fundamental concept is that the performance depends on how good a player is first of all. If you're playing a spec badly, you're not gonna see good results (but imbalance is always there, some specs are way more forgiving than others).
Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.
No, I played all 3 specs at one point or another in Mythic/Heroic (When it was top dawg) content. I think that the Shadowlands iteration of Subtlety is the best it's ever been, and the most excited I've been to play my rogue in years.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Legion Sub, but we all knew that it was gimmicky and not long for this world. This is a much more polished version of the spec, and for the first time in almost a decade I find it to be a better "designed" spec than Assassination is. SnD just doesn't feel great to press as Sin. It feels like it drops right into an empty space with Sub. Like it belongs there. Rupture feels great with it too. The rotation doesn't need an in-depth guide to figure out, you can just play around with it and get the basics of it by how it works. That's a good class design.
Good luck figuring out how to be 80% optimal on something like a Frost Mage in BFA. Or a Fire Mage, for that matter. Not intuitive. This is intuitive.
It's the same old argument basically: there are changes needed, for sure. But not the ones pushed, which albeit not the ones the userbase would like, surely move things forward for classes and specs.
However for the proposed changes of said classes and specs there would be the need of a rework akin to what Shadowpriests got. And those require work.
...and I sometimes fear the dev team left in charge of WoW doesn't have in them to do such a momentous task more than once or twice, without flunking the rest. And I don't want to sound bitter, but I do remember when I looked forward to expansion changes and sometimes patches too.
“Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life” “Logic will get you from A to Z; Imagination will get you everywhere.”