glyphs Subtlety Rogue: Mists of Pandaria Rotation Changes, Talents, and Glyphs (Patch 5.0.4)

[Damien 1,514]

This article is no longer being updated. Please check our Subtlety Rogue guide, which is fully compatible with Mists of Pandaria, and is being constantly updated. Thank you.

In preparation for the updates to our guides for Mists of Pandaria Patch 5.0.4, we are releasing articles such as this one, explaining what has changed for a particular class and spec, and what the new rotation is likely to be.

Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress (both from Blizzard's side and from our own) and that this article assumes you are at least somewhat familiar with the Cataclysm version of the Subtlety Rogue rotation and playstyle (such as from reading our guide).

We will first list the most important changes to the Subtlety Rogue Cataclysm abilities, and then we will proceed to explaining the (likely to be) optimal rotation. Keep in mind that we do not document every single change or new ability, only those that impact the rotation.

Finally, we will give you some information about the most useful talents and glyphs you should choose.

Main Changes

Subtlety Rogues will notice two important changes in Mists of Pandaria. Both of them apply to all three Rogue specializations.

The first main change is related to Combo Point management. The three Rogue specialisations have mechanics that cause Combo Point generating abilities to sometimes generate an extra Combo Point. In the case of Subtlety Rogues, Honor Among Thieves will usually generate one Combo Point every two seconds during raid encounters. Also, Rogues get a new DPS cooldown: Shadow Blades, which temporarily causes your Combo Point generating abilities to generate an extra Combo Point. To prevent you from wasting Combo Points, Blizzard introduced a new, nigh-mandatory Tier 6 talent: Anticipation. This talent enables you to have up to 10 Combo Points on a target. When you use a Finishing Move, it will consume up to 5 Combo Points. This means that if you have 8 Combo Points and cast Eviscerate, you will be left with 3 Combo Points.

The second main change will concern AoE damage. Previously, you had literally no way of doing AoE damage, save for Fan of Knives when facing a considerable amount of enemies. In Mists of Pandaria, Fan of Knives now generates a Combo Point on your current target if it strikes it. To spend these Combo Points, you are given a new AoE ability called Crimson Tempest.

New Abilities

As mentioned above, Shadow Blades is a new DPS cooldown that increases Combo Point generation and Crimson Tempest is a new AoE ability that you will use to consume the Combo Points built by Fan of Knives. In addition, you gain the following new abilities:

• Shroud of Concealment is a raid-wide Stealth. It works just like Illidan's concealment aura in the Well of Eternity dungeon.
• Shadow Walk temporarily increases the efficiency of Stealth.
• Master Poisoner is a passive ability that causes targets afflicted by your poisons to take +5% increased spell damage.
• Swiftblade's Cunning is a passive ability that grants your party and raid members +10% melee and ranged attack speed.

Removed Abilities

Sinister Strike is no longer accessible to Subtlety Rogues. Even though this ability was not part of the rotation, we deemed this change worthy of mention. Also, Preparation and Shadowstep are now mutually exclusive (they are both Tier 4 talents). The core mechanics of Subtlety Rogues have either been preserved as they were or slightly changed, as we will see in the next section.

Changed Abilities and Mechanics

As we mentioned in the introduction, Fan of Knives now generates a Combo Point every time it is used. In addition to this, you will notice the following important changes.

• Slice and Dice now has a built-in duration of 36 seconds, which is 9 seconds longer than what you had in Cataclysm when using Glyph of Slice and Dice.
• Rupture now lasts 24 seconds (up from 16), which makes it a lot easier to maintain.
• Hemorrhage is still a bleed but it now longer applies a debuff that causes the target to take increased damage from bleed effects.
• Energetic Recovery now grants you an additional regeneration of 8 Energy every 2 seconds while Slice and Dice is active. Previously, this passive ability was a talent that added an Energy regeneration component to your Recuperate. This means that Recuperate will no longer be part of the rotation.
• Sanguinary Vein now increases the damage of Rupture and causes you to deal 25% more damage to targets afflicted by your Rupture, Garrote, and Crimson Tempest. This means that, more than ever, Rupture is a crucial part of your rotation.

Poison Changes

Poisons are now spells so you no longer need to buy reagents from vendors. Also, a poison is always applied to both your weapons, so you can no longer have different poisons on your two weapons. Finally, all your poisons now have a set chance to be applied by each strike of your weapon; this means that slower weapons will have a smaller chance of applying poisons than faster weapons.

Poisons are now either Lethal or Non-Lethal. Lethal Poisons are your damaging poisons while Non-Lethal Poisons provide crowd control and utility.

Deadly Poison and Wound Poison are your Lethal Poisons. Instant Poison has been removed from the game, so the slightly redesigned Deadly Poison will be your poison of choice. Wound Poison will only be used when you need the healing reduction that it provides.

Your Non-Lethal Poisons are listed below. Using Shiv when a Non-Lethal Poison is active on a target will apply a concentrated version of the poison effect.

• Crippling Poison reduces your enemy's movement speed.
• Mind-numbing Poison reduces your enemy's casting speed.
• Leeching Poison (Tier 3 talent) heals you for 10% of the damage dealt.
• Paralytic Poison (Tier 5 talent) stuns your enemy.

Rotation

Your rotation does not really change. The fact that Slice and Dice and Rupture have longer durations than previously will make it much easier to keep them up. Also not having to keep Recuperate or Hemorrhage's debuff up will simplify your rotation further.

To build Combo Points, use the priority list below.

• Cast Ambush when you are in Stealth.
• Cast Backstab when you can be behind the target.
• Cast Hemorrhage otherwise.

To spend Combo Points, use the priority list below.

• Apply and refresh Slice and Dice with 5 Combo Points.
• Apply and refresh Rupture with 5 Combo Points.
• Cast Eviscerate with 5 Combo Points.

Cooldowns

From Cataclysm, you retain Shadow Dance, Vanish, and Premeditation, which you should use in the same way as you did before (see our Subtlety Rogue guide). You will have to make a choice between Preparation and Shadowstep as a Tier 5 talent. Whichever you will choose is to be used exactly as it was in Cataclysm.

In addition, you gain Shadow Blades, which increases your Combo Point generation and should be used every time you come out of Stealth, so that you line up this ability with Find Weakness. As Shadow Blades and Vanish both have a 3-minute cooldown, it will be easy to have Shadow Blades up every time you get out of Stealth from Vanish.

Multiple-Target Rotation

Previously, Subtlety Rogues had virtually no AoE capabilities. It does not change much, just that by combining Fan of Knives and Crimson Tempest, you will be able to give up on your single-target DPS when there are 7-8 enemies or more.

Talents

Tier 1 talents improve Stealth, which can be very beneficial to Subtlety Rogues. You have the choice between:

• Nightstalker, which increases your damage by 25% while stealthed;
• Subterfuge, which makes your Stealth break 3 seconds after taking or dealing damage;
• Shadow Focus., which removes the Energy cost of your abilities while you are in Stealth.

We believe that Subterfurge will be the preferred option, as it can enable you to use Ambush up to 3 times when the fight starts or after you use Vanish.

Tier 2 talents provide you with survival and crowd control abilities. Whichever you take should make very little difference on your performance as a raider. You have the choice between Deadly Throw (interrupts and slows movement), Nerve Strike (damage reduction), and Combat Readiness. Deadly Throw will be largely useless in PvE while the other two can be useful in fights where you take direct damage from an add.

Tier 3 talents provide you with powerful survival abilities.

• Cheat Death, which used to be only accessible to Subtlety Rogues, works in a similar way as it did in Cataclysm. We believe that this will be the preferred choice.
• Leeching Poison provides you with a self-healing poison that will be useful in situations such as the Twilight Realm against Valiona and Theralion in Bastion of Twilight.
• Elusiveness grants Feint a 30% damage reduction, which can be very useful if you often need to mitigate the damage you take.

Tier 4 talents provide you with survival and mobility abilities.

• Preparation is an improvement over the old ability of the same name that was previously only available to Subtlety Rogues. It resets the cooldown of several survival and defensive abilities. This will most likely be the default choice for every specialisation.
• Shadowstep used to be a Subtlety-only ability. It teleports you behind your target and can be useful on fights where you often have to move away from the boss.
• Burst of Speed is a very powerful movement-speed-increasing ability that has a 4-second duration. While active, It also removes movement-impairing effects and prevents their re-application. It has no cooldown and costs 60 Energy to cast. We believe that this talent will be extremely powerful in PvP and while questing. It might also be punctually useful in raids, but that will depend on encounter mechanics.

Tier 5 talents give various boosts to your poisons (mostly to the Non-Lethal Poisons) and will have almost no implication in PvE. You have the choice between Deadly Brew, Paralytic Poison, and Dirty Tricks.

Tier 6 talents deal with Combo Point management. Anticipation is so appealing that it will be nigh-mandatory for raiding. It basically allows you to store extra Combo Points so they don't go to waste if you happen to generate more than 5. Versatility, which removes the cooldown of Redirect, and Shuriken Toss, which allows you to generate Combo Points on a remote target, might be useful, but that will depend on encounter mechanics.

Glyphs

The only major glyph that has an incidence on your DPS will be Glyph of Vanish because it increases the duration of Vanish.

All the other major glyphs provide either utility, more survival, or more mobility, and your choice of glyph will largely depend on the encounter. Those that will come in handy are:

• Glyph of Feint, which increases the duration of Feint by 2 seconds;
• Glyph of Evasion, which increases the duration of Evasion by 5 seconds;
• Glyph of Debilitation, which gives your Eviscerate ability a 50% chance to reduce the target's movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds;
• Glyph of Sprint, which increases your movement speed during Sprint by 30%.

Regarding minor glyphs, it is worth noting that Glyph of Tricks of the Trade has been changed. While this glyph still removes the Energy cost of Tricks of the Trade, it also causes your Tricks of the Trade ability to no longer increase the damage of your target. Therefore, you will usually not use this glyph, meaning that using Tricks of the Trade on a fellow raid member will have a much higher penalty than before on the Rogue's DPS.

Other than that, we believe that the two following minor glyphs will be used by almost everyone: Glyph of Safe Fall and Glyph of Poisons.

Glyph of Blurred Speed can be useful for dealing with particular encounter mechanics.

Finally, Glyph of Hemorrhage causes the over time damage of Hemorrhage to only be applied on the target if it is already afflicted by a bleed effect. Whether it will ever be useful remains to be seen.

This concludes our Subtlety Rogue preview for Mists of Pandaria. We hope you have enjoyed reading it and that it proved useful to you. As always, we are looking forward to reading your opinions on the matter!

[ChaoticNature 0]

A couple of things to note:

Shadowstep doesn't increases the damage of the next Ambush or Garrote on Beta currently, so using it rotationally is no longer useful. This makes Preparation the default choice for fights where the mobility of Shadowstep isn't needed.

Burst of Speed is also described incorrectly in how it functions: "Increases movement speed by 70% for 4 sec. If you are afflicted by any movement-impairing effects, activating this ability will instead remove any such effects and grant immunity to their re-application for 4 sec." It either increases speed by 70% for 4 seconds OR removes movement impairing effects, not both.

As well, Ambush when used in stealth now requires 60 energy, as the 20 energy cost reduction is active only during Shadow Dance. This means that it's highly unlikely that you'll ever get 3 Ambushes during your opener via Subterfuge. It's also impossible, even with Slice and Dice active, to Ambush three times during Subterfuge WITHOUT Glyph of Vanish. I have to agree that Subterfuge is still the better choice for Sub (it makes Vanish a mini-Dance and it seems Ambush nearly doubles Backstab in damage), but I just wanted to clarify some things about it, namely that you MUST have Glyph of Vanish to get off three Ambushes.

Also, your initial opener should possibly be a Garrote, to quickly get Sanguinary Veins going. Otherwise it's likely you won't have the 25% damage bonus from SV until after applying Slice and Dice and finally applying Rupture (this takes 4-6 seconds based on procs in Malevolent PvP gear on Beta). I don't have any hard math on it at the moment, so I'm not entirely positive, but I'm throwing it out there as a possibility. EDIT: Garrote damage isn't even comparable to Ambush damage, the theory is mostly based on the 25% bonus to the second Ambush and the white/poison hits that connect during the ramp up time.

And while I really don't see Mastery mentioned anywhere, Executioner now scales at 3% per point of mastery up from 2.5%, meaning it starts at a base of 24% and scales more swiftly than it did previously. Maybe not something that falls within the realm of this guide specifically, but definitely something useful for transitioning Sub rogues to know.

Lastly, Honor Among Thieves now only procs in combat (I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, as it's a SIGNIFCANT change for how the spec opens). This means that Subtlety rogues can no longer stack combo points prior to an encounter with the use of crit heals. Crits on one training dummy do currently proc combo points on one you're not in combat with, however, so it may be possible to stack points on the boss during a trash pack.

Just some things to keep in mind for the final guide.

Edited August 28, 2012 by ChaoticNature

[Damien 1,514]

A couple of things to note:

Shadowstep doesn't increases the damage of the next Ambush or Garrote on Beta currently, so using it rotationally is no longer useful. This makes Preparation the default choice for fights where the mobility of Shadowstep isn't needed.

I am currently working on updating the Rogue guides and I find your post to be most welcome. There have been so many subtle changes to Subtlety (no pun intended) that I keep discovering things I missed. So far, in the updated version of the Subtlety guide, I do advise to use Preparation.

Burst of Speed is also described incorrectly in how it functions: "Increases movement speed by 70% for 4 sec. If you are afflicted by any movement-impairing effects, activating this ability will instead remove any such effects and grant immunity to their re-application for 4 sec." It either increases speed by 70% for 4 seconds OR removes movement impairing effects, not both.

Either I did not read properly back then or the tooltip changed. In any case, I had described the talent properly in my current draft of the new Subtlety guide

As well, Ambush when used in stealth now requires 60 energy, as the 20 energy cost reduction is active only during Shadow Dance. This means that it's highly unlikely that you'll ever get 3 Ambushes during your opener via Subterfuge. It's also impossible, even with Slice and Dice active, to Ambush three times during Subterfuge WITHOUT Glyph of Vanish. I have to agree that Subterfuge is still the better choice for Sub (it makes Vanish a mini-Dance and it seems Ambush nearly doubles Backstab in damage), but I just wanted to clarify some things about it, namely that you MUST have Glyph of Vanish to get off three Ambushes.

That's right. I'll advise to get 2 Ambushes after breaking out of stealth.

Also, your initial opener should possibly be a Garrote, to quickly get Sanguinary Veins going. Otherwise it's likely you won't have the 25% damage bonus from SV until after applying Slice and Dice and finally applying Rupture (this takes 4-6 seconds based on procs in Malevolent PvP gear on Beta). I don't have any hard math on it at the moment, so I'm not entirely positive, but I'm throwing it out there as a possibility. EDIT: Garrote damage isn't even comparable to Ambush damage, the theory is mostly based on the 25% bonus to the second Ambush and the white/poison hits that connect during the ramp up time.

I think I'll go for Ambush x2, especially now that the Sanguinary Veins bonus is 20%.

And while I really don't see Mastery mentioned anywhere, Executioner now scales at 3% per point of mastery up from 2.5%, meaning it starts at a base of 24% and scales more swiftly than it did previously. Maybe not something that falls within the realm of this guide specifically, but definitely something useful for transitioning Sub rogues to know.

I'll mention the Mastery in the stat section of the guide, as it does not really influence the way you play a Subtlety Rogue.

Lastly, Honor Among Thieves now only procs in combat (I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, as it's a SIGNIFCANT change for how the spec opens). This means that Subtlety rogues can no longer stack combo points prior to an encounter with the use of crit heals. Crits on one training dummy do currently proc combo points on one you're not in combat with, however, so it may be possible to stack points on the boss during a trash pack.

Just some things to keep in mind for the final guide.

With that in mind, I think I will give an opener that looks like that Premeditation + Ambush + Slice and Dice + Ambush + Backstab until 5CP + Rupture.

Thank you very for this detailed feedback, I'm certain that it will help me improve the Subtlety guide