Synek's guide to the PvE Subtlety Rogue

[Deleted]

you should never be in a position where Rupture could drop because of this

And again, on field is not the same as on paper, things don't always go the way you would like to, and you end up with situations like this pretty often, you CAN'T make everything work perfectly all the time, especially as Sub. Being a Sub player since late Wotlk and for having played it for the whole Cata expansion, I have to say that Sub rotation is a lot of improvisation, as there are a lot of factors that can screw you rotation, if you plan to follow a strict set in stone rotation, then you'll fail at playing Sub. You simply can't anticipate everything that will happen in your Sub rotation, you can't know if in 43.7 sec you'll end up with both SnD/Recup falling off at the same time with enough CP to refresh both, that's impossible.

If you don't play Sub by yourself and train on the rotation and maintaining the whole buffs/debuffs, if you only follow what's written on paper and can't react to unpredictable behaviors, then you'll do bad DPS, and you're better go with Assas/Combat spec, if you want something set in stone and easy to follow.

[Synexlol]

if you only follow what's written on paper and can't react to unpredictable behaviors, then you'll do bad DPS, and you're better go with Assas/Combat spec, if you want something set in stone and easy to follow.

I didn't mean to suggest that it's possible to follow a set-in-stone rotation and not have to improvise, my point was that a situation where both Rupture and SnD would drop if you wait 3 seconds to put up a 5pt Recuperate isn't possible unless you spend 5-6 seconds idling without using your Combo Points, or something similarly silly. I did outline what I would do in that situation too, though.

@Ashvael, I've fixed the things you pointed out, I intend to get around to the Index and BiS list today.

Thanks for the sticky Grindfreak. I'm all for adding a Macro section, but I don't use macros so someone else would need to help me out here. If anyone is interested, please PM me the macros (preferably wrapped in /code if you use italics/bold).

[Brianjosel]

Thanks for the sticky Grindfreak. I'm all for adding a Macro section, but I don't use macros so someone else would need to help me out here. If anyone is interested, please PM me the macros (preferably wrapped in /code if you use italics/bold).

Well, a couple macros that come immediately to mind as useful would be a /cast Premeditation, /cast Ambush macro for starters. Some other ones are general rogue macros, like various Tricks ones (target of target, and focus target). Throwing a pickpocket macro into there, especially for questing, couldn't hurt. I have 2 Shadowdance keybinds, one for the skill by itself, and the other macroed to Berserking. A Shadowdance macro like that, which includes the player's racial, as well as any on use trinkets, might not be a bad idea.

Honestly, even some basic stuff like putting /startattack behind Backstab and Hemorrhage could be mentioned too. Sometimes when you go to target swap, with a lot of stuff on the screen, and at low energy, you will end up sitting there on the new target, waiting to use a special, and thinking you have successfully right clicked the target to start auto attacking, when you actually haven't. Has happened to me a couple of times (this definitely seems to happen to me more on my shaman though). Stuff like this might seem too basic to include, but it is a guide after all, so it couldn't really hurt to have it in there.

I am sure there are some really good macros I am missing.

[Deleted]

Your macros depends a lot on your playstyle and UI, only real useful ones are the following:

#showtooltip Preparation
/cast Sprint
/cast Preparation

To burn sprint if you have to Prep.

#showtooltip Trick of the trade
/cast [help][target=mouseover, exists, help][target=focus, help][target=targettarget, help] Trick of the trade

ToTT macro.

Then you can have a lot of macros that depend on your own playstyle, but as Sub PvE you don't have to use a lot of macros, except "/startattack /cast" and "/cast premed /cast stealth opener"

[steale]

To Always Use Premed When Available

#showtooltip Garrote
/cast Premeditation
/cast Garrote

#showtooltip Cheap Shot
/cast Premeditation
/cast Cheap Shot

#showtooltip Ambush
/cast Shadow Step
/cast Ambush


Various Tricks Macros
#showtooltip Tricks of the Trade
/cast [target=focus] Tricks of the Trade


#showtooltip Tricks of the Trade
/cast [target=PlayerName] Tricks of the Trade


#showtooltip Tricks of the Trade
/cast [target=targettarget] Tricks of the Trade



Prep Macro
#showtooltip Preparation
/cast Sprint
/cast Preparation



For Engineers With Synapse Springs
#showtooltip Shadow Dance
/use 10
/cast Shadow Dance



Shadow Dance and On Use Trinket
#showtooltip Shadow Dance
/use Name of Trinket
/cast Shadow Dance

[Deleted]

This point comes up a lot, actually. I know that this may not be what you're referring to, but many people see the value of Precision lying in the hit it gives you. That's not the case. It's value comes from the itemization that the extra 2% hit gives you when reforging. Assuming you are dumping hit when reforging, you usually end up around the 9% mark at very most. Unless you are still at over 10% hit while reforging fully out of hit.

Why 10% ? isnt yellow hit 8% and spell hit EP values below even crit?
What am I missing?

[Ashvael]

Why 10% ? isnt yellow hit 8% and spell hit EP values below even crit?
What am I missing?

Not really missing anything. Synex is stating that you'd need 10%+ hit after forging everything out of hit to then drop a point in Precision. Unless you have those 10% after forging all hit away, dropping a point in Precision is usually not worth it.

[Deleted]

Not really missing anything. Synex is stating that you'd need 10%+ hit after forging everything out of hit to then drop a point in Precision. Unless you have those 10% after forging all hit away, dropping a point in Precision is usually not worth it.

Ok, so it´s including the precision talents.
I dropped em a while back to help the healer so that he could focus on tank when we went up on Beth, picked up imp recoup and swapped initiative to Enveloping shadow.
Putting up mitigation with feint up to 66% all in all, and a bit more self heal.
And I have 8% hit atm, reforged away pretty much all I could, some exception where I for example reforged away mastery instead of hit.

[critterkiller]

Hemorrhage is 29 energy (Slaughter from the Shadows reduces cost by 6 at 3 ranks) and SV activates off any bleed, meaning a Warrior or Feral Druid can take care of that for you last time I checked.

But then you would need to have one AND if its a fury warrior i dout they use rend to they? this is for 10mans only, as in 25man you will probably have a bleed up 24/7.

[Brianjosel]

But then you would need to have one AND if its a fury warrior i dout they use rend to they? this is for 10mans only, as in 25man you will probably have a bleed up 24/7.

Fury warriors apply Deep Wounds to their targets. All warrior specs bleed things, although Prot warriors don't always Rend a single target, as it takes quite a few TClap refreshes to make it worthwhile on a single target (to my understanding). Not all Prot warriors are specced into Deep Wounds either. The DPS specs should always have bleeds up though.

Feral DPS and Feral tanks both apply bleeds through Rake and Rip for DPS, and Lacerate for tanking. They will always activate Sanguinary Vein. Some hunter pets bleed things too, and other Assassination and Subtlety rogues do as well. It is a crap shoot for a Combat rogue, although probably not likely on a target swap, even with the bleed debuff up.

[Amuramie]

My Subtlety rogue is my favorite alt, bar-none. If my guild wasn't relying on me to continue main tanking, I think I could very happily swap mains for 4.3. But I still love the fast-paced, challenging, be-a-BA-as-sh*t-ninja things you can do as Sub. What I'm getting at is that I'm always trying to squeeze extra dps or efficiency out of my rogue - I try to min/max in ways I have not done on any other character - and I love the moments where people go, "Holy sh*t, I had no idea Sub could PvE."

That's a long-winded introduction of saying two things: First, <3 you all who are here. Second, There's no consensus as to what our best secondary stats should be. I'm no programmer or math wizz, but I like to think I have good logic skills, so I set about trying to determine that for my own.

To see what I mean about no consensus, look at stat weightings here, here, and here:

elitistjerks.co m/f78/t119013-cataclysm_subtlety_compendium/
shadowcraft.mmo-mumble.co m/
noxxic.co m/rogue/subtlety/reforging-and-stat-priority#stats

Shadowcraft and EJ stat weightings are similar but crit is weighted slightly higher on SC, and SC weighs spell hit and mastery below strength (x.x). Compare to Noxxic, which says to spell hit cap for poison uptime and focus on mastery after that. It does give low weight to expertise, but personal experience says having a dodged Ambush during Shadow Dance, or a dodged Eviscerate right before Rupture needs to be refreshed are extremely frustrating and worth avoiding by expertise capping.

Now, let's look at a break down of Sub damage. It comes from:

White swings
Poisons
Backstab
Ambush
Rupture
Eviscerate

Sometimes you'll Hemo, but it's not relevant to this discussion because you ideally won't ever Hemo more than you have to.

Of those damage sources, Backstab and Ambush are not modified by any of our secondary stats - except crit, but those abilities both have high crit chances from talents. Still, crit does benefit all of our damage sources, so crit can't be a "bad" stat, but it seems non-ideal.

Of the remaining four damage sources, Hit and Haste both increase white swing and poison damage, and mastery boosts Rupture and Eviscerate. I tested three reforging sets: one that was full Mastery, one that was full Haste, and one that reached the Spell Hit cap.

EDIT: I apologize for the poor formatting; not sure how to fix it.
Set Haste Hit/Spell Hit Mastery Crit
1 - Mastery) 8.25% 9.6%/10.57% 15.65 34.25%
2 - Spell Hit) 9.1% 15.13%/17.05% 9.89 35.71%
3 - Haste) 12.87% 9.94%/10.97% 10.18 36.19%

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know that this is a very non-scientific experiment, but it does produce some very reproducible results and leads to a few interesting observations.

The first observation is this: energy gain per second between sets 1 and 3 is only about .5 energy per second - 30 per minute - and not enough for a single extra Backstab per minute.

The second observation is this: between all sets, despite having widely different Haste and Mastery values, swing timers ended up being much the same when Slice and Dice is active: 1.07/.83, 1.1/.86, and 1.06/.82, respectively.

I took those three sets, sat for 15 minutes at a time in front of target dummies, and did nothing but auto-attack. The sets yielded 2.94M, 3.45M, and 3.21M damage, respectively.

Think about that for a moment: "maximizing" (I use the term loosely) passive damage ONLY yielded half a million more damage over fifteen minutes. That's 250k damage over a 7 1/2-minute fight and only 167k over a 5-minute fight.

The conclusion that I reached (I by no means hold this as fact or law - I merely want feedback and to get people to think about it and come to some consensus) is that gearing for passive damage increases is very marginal. In a raid setting with full buffs and maximum gains from HaT, the boost to Eviscerate damage implies gearing for Mastery is the way for a Subtlety rogue to go. Anecdotally, I've observed that running heroic 5-mans without Mastery and with stacking Mastery, my maximum Eviscerates go from around 35k to around 55k. In a raid setting, with full attack power buffs and many free combo points means Eviscerate will be doing incredible damage.

Look at the anecdotal numbers I posted - 20k extra damage per eviscerate. In a 5 minute fight, you would only need to use 9 Eviscerates - one every 33 seconds - to overtake the damage output from maximizing your passive damage.

Another conclusion is that for the casual Subtlety Rogue running heroics, it really doesn't matter what you gear for, but I would personally go for Mastery followed by Haste since you won't ever want to Rupture on trash and won't have any time for passive damage to do anything meaningful.

TL;DR, but you should really read the whole logic train and provide feedback on it: combo point builders can't be buffed, passive damage isn't worth worrying about, so boost your finishers.

[Deleted]

About not rupturing trash, I might be wrong, but with Sanguinary vein giving +16% damage on a target you have bleeds on, a low cp rupture seems worth it.
Obviously a full rupture would be a bit wasted.
Though normally I swap over to combat for trash packs and just cleave away, then swap back.
Got my stuff reforged for Sub, and the same reforge works pretty well on combat afaik.

[Deleted]

About not rupturing trash, I might be wrong, but with Sanguinary vein giving +16% damage on a target you have bleeds on, a low cp rupture seems worth it.
Obviously a full rupture would be a bit wasted.
Though normally I swap over to combat for trash packs and just cleave away, then swap back.
Got my stuff reforged for Sub, and the same reforge works pretty well on combat afaik.

Use Hemo glyph, easy target switching, and good dps gain if you maintain the dot.

[Splosion]

I've been playing my rogue as sub in alt raids recently, and have been really enjoying the spec. This guide has really helped that (as the previous one did aswell).

I have a question though:

out of the 3 timers we have to keep as high uptime as possible (excluding dances/expose weakness), which is the most important? From the discussion on the first page, I figure it's ok to have recup drop as long as you refresh with a 5cp one as soon as you can. What about rupture and SnD? How much of a loss is it to let these drop for any time?

[Deleted]

I've been playing my rogue as sub in alt raids recently, and have been really enjoying the spec. This guide has really helped that (as the previous one did aswell).

I have a question though:

out of the 3 timers we have to keep as high uptime as possible (excluding dances/expose weakness), which is the most important? From the discussion on the first page, I figure it's ok to have recup drop as long as you refresh with a 5cp one as soon as you can. What about rupture and SnD? How much of a loss is it to let these drop for any time?

SnD is top priority, then comes Conv, then Rupture. And BTW, don't always wait for 5 CP to refresh Conv, or you'd loose quite some ticks, because in the meantime of the waiting for 5 CP, SnD and Rupture might both drop, loosing even more DPS.

[Synexlol]

SnD is top priority, then comes Conv, then Rupture. And BTW, don't always wait for 5 CP to refresh Conv, or you'd loose quite some ticks, because in the meantime of the waiting for 5 CP, SnD and Rupture might both drop, loosing even more DPS.

I think it would depend on how long SnD will drop for. Assuming it will only drop for ~2 seconds at most, I would think that losing a 'buffed' Rupture would be worse. EJ doesn't really specify, but losing 10% Rupture damage, plus pre-pot, plus initial procs would easily mean more damage loss than losing SnD for 2-3 seconds, I would think. Naturally it would also depend on what buffs you have when putting Rupture back up, but I think it's a grey area and I happen to lean towards a buffed Rupture being more important, more out of gut feeling than anything else.

As for Recuperate (I assume that's what 'Conv' is?), as long as you're not neglecting putting it up, waiting for 5 CP is always best. As long as you are keeping Recuperate up as much as possible w/ 5 CP Recuperates, letting it drop for a tick or two is easily better than keeping 100% uptime at the loss of efficiency. Slice and Dice gives a direct damage loss for every second it's down so you keep it up with whatever CPs you have, but Recuperate doesn't work like that.

You'd lose, at most, 2 ticks, totaling 24 energy, and waiting for a 5 CP Recuperate would easily make up that so called 'lost' energy (which is never actually lost in the first place). Also, the idea of Rupture/SnD dropping due to waiting for 5 CP should never happen. If either Rupture or SnD are low while you need to refresh Recuperate, you refresh SnD/Rupture THEN Recuperate. You don't drop a 2CP Recuperate first.

@Amuramie, I admire your work and testing, but you're missing out on one valuable thing; Haste does infact affect everything. More haste equates to more Backstabs, more auto attacks, more poisons, and more finishers via higher CP generation rate. I'll expand a bit more later, but Mastery doesn't scale very well with Subtlety, the high amount of GCDs spent on non-damaging finishers rather than Eviscerate during Find Weakness, Rupture not scaling with Find Weakness at all, and no Poison cap all devalue Mastery. I'm sure there's other factors, but finishers in general aren't very strong for Subtlety in comparison to Backstab, which is our largest damage source by a noticeable amount. Making the most of Find Weakness will quite literally make or break your DPS, and Mastery doesn't help a whole lot in that regard since Backstab is the be all and end all.

[Brianjosel]

Amuramie,

Your post, and results contained within, are fascinating, but I was looking at that Noxxic website you linked. I am fairly certain they just copied an Assassination rogue's gearing strategy over to Subtlety. The stat weight completely goes against what is up on EJ. I know that EJ and Shadowcraft conflict to some degree, but Noxxic is way, way different in stat weights.

I know a full Hemorrhage build values mastery more than the typical Backstab build, and produces damage results in the neighborhood of the Backstab builds, although they do lag to a degree. Outside of a build like that, I don't think I have ever seen mastery recommended.

[Maultilus]

As far as the spec not having any "filler" points I can't argue. However, I've really enjoyed what I read from the dmg-taken meter after switching a few talents around. I dropped the least dps talents, Initiative & Elusiveness, as well as only taking 1/3 Precision due to having nearly %10 hit before reforging. From that I picked up 3/3 Enveloping Shadows and 1/2 Imp.Recup, which allows %90 upkeep on Feint (reducing %80 aoe dmg taken) during aoe heavy mechanics / phases. And of-course the Imp.Recup is just a static -%3 dmg taken. Point being, I didn't have much trouble keeping up the normal rotation & squeezing in a GCD + 20 energy for Feints. Has anyone else experimented with this, would you recommend it ? The changes I made this week were putting in Glyph of Hemo after reading this updated Subt Guide, having the T12 2pc bonus, and tweaking my talents. So it's hard to judge exactly with multiple changes, but dmg / dps seemed to go up while dmg-taken went down substantially.

[steale]

Point being, I didn't have much trouble keeping up the normal rotation & squeezing in a GCD + 20 energy for Feints.

Glyph Feint and it only costs you the GCD.

[Canisis]

I find sub entertaining to play but personally i dont think the spec is worth playing compared to the other two simply because of how fight dependent it really is. Its way less versatile than either of the other two specs