Subtlety Rogue DPS Spec, Builds, and Talents — 12.0.5

Across Season 1 of Midnight Subtlety has received a few changes that jostled its playstyle and gearing choices around, but now the dust has settled, so here are our current recommendations.

• Single Target - After the May 5 tuning changes Deathstalker is firmly ahead of Trickster in pure Single Target, however as soon as there are more than one enemy, even for a short period of the encounter, it tends to fall behind Trickster
• Aoe -At all keystone levels and any encounter with multiple targets we recommend Trickster as it outperforms Deathstalker by quite a margin while also being simpler to play.

Due to most raid encounters this season having adds and/or several targets Trickster is still going to be the preferred and recommended option, despite it being slightly behind numerically on pure Single Target. Deathstalker also has fairly strict gear preferences, wanting nearly 1100 Haste rating to perform at its best, which is very hard to achieve currently.

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The builds listed above are popular recommendations, covering various different loadouts suited to each style of endgame content. Each Talent Build will have it's own rotation, and can also be manipulated further for specific types of content and to better benefit your group.

Combat Information

Rotations and Mythic+

Want to dive deeper? These guides will teach you how to utilize our Talent Builds in endgame content!

RotationMythic+

These are the new talent added in Midnight, they are located below the specialization talent tree and are immensely powerful. All four of the talents focus on shadowy clones that spawn when you interact with Shadow Techniques in different ways. While the tooltips might look complicated, especially if you are not very familiar with how Shadow Techniques works (you can read an in-depth explanation of how those work on the Rotation page), but in practice Ancient Arts are fairly straightforward.

1. Ancient Arts — Whenever something expends (consumes/uses) your Shadow Techniques stacks, there is a chance that a shadow clone will spawn and deal additional damage based on what spell expended those stacks.
2. Ancient Arts — Passively increases all shadow damage dealt, and also makes it so when a shadow clone spawns from Ancient Arts or Secret Technique you gain a stack of Shadow Techniques.
3. Ancient Arts — If you have 5 or more stacks of Shadow Techniques left after casting a combo point generator you will activate a buff. This buff makes your next combo point finisher also expend your Shadow Techniques stacks, which means you get a full set of combo points back right after using a finisher. This will also trigger a shadow clone from Ancient Arts that will deal damage based on the finisher used.

These Apex Talents allows us to utilize our Shadow Techniques more efficiently during our burst windows and cast finishers like Eviscerate back-to-back without needing to use any combo point generators in between. You also get passively more damage and passively more combo points through the Shadow Techniques stacks generated by Ancient Arts which helps smooth out the rotation.

Starting from level 71 Hero Talents are a set of mutually exclusive trees you can choose between which slightly alter the gameplay and identity of the spec. For Subtlety Rogue the choice is between Trickster and Deathstalker.

Tricksters theme is based around deception. In game this takes the form of talents like So Tricky increasing the duration of Tricks of the Trade to an hour instead of mere seconds, striking with an Unseen Blade at times as well as spawning a huge cloud of smoke through Cloud Cover.

In terms of gameplay the Hero Tree is very much focused around big burst windows with Shadow Blades and Secret Technique, allowing Subtlety Rogue to truly shine in situations that demand big on-demand damage.

Tracking down and focusing on a single target is what Deathstalker is all about. Its central mechanic Deathstalker's Mark is tied to a specific target and allows you to prioritize a lot of your damage straight into that enemy even in AoE scenarios thanks to Singular Focus. Talents like Shadewalker make it very hard for your target to escape you and Bait and Switch is an excellent defensive option for when your enemy decides to fight back.

This hero tree is all about managing Deathstalker's Mark, putting it on the right targets at the right time. Once all the stacks of the mark has been used up the big payoff is Darkest Night, which makes your next Eviscerate do enormous damage.

If you choose to, you can enable "War Mode." Enabling War Mode provides the following benefits:

• PvP talents enabled in the outdoor world.
• 10% increase in World Quest rewards at maximum level.
• 15% more experience gained while leveling.
• Earn Conquest Points, which can reward gear every week.

With the benefits of enabling War Mode for leveling and PvE content, it is recommended to enable the feature to maximize your leveling and rewards at maximum level. However, you will make yourself available for open-world PvP, and the possibility of being "ganked" while leveling or doing World Quests exists.

In this section, we will rank the PvP talents best for leveling and doing solo / small group PvE content. Below is a ranking of both General PvP Talents and Subtlety Rogue-specific PvP talents.

1. Death from Above is just a stronger Eviscerate.
2. Dagger in the Dark — Whenever Stealth is active, you apply a debuff to nearby enemies that causes them to take an additional 5% damage from your next Shadowstrike. Stacks up to 8 times. This is nothing special, but still a slight damage boost.
3. Only two of the Honor Talents increase our DPS while outdoors, so the last choice is up to you on which one you think suits you the best.

Veil of Midnight, Shadowy Duel, Silhouette, Smoke Bomb, Thick as Thieves, Distracting Mirage, Control is King, Dismantle and Maneuverability have limited use in PvE content in terms of increasing your damage in the open-world.

Eleem

Guide Author

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This guide has been written by Eleem, who has been a rogue player, enjoyer and theorycrafter since Legion. He is currently raiding in a top 100 guild and has been known to dabble in Mythic+ from time to time. You can find him in the Ravenholdt Discord as Eleem.