I wanted to try Subtlety on farmed bosses, and especially on Windlord Mal'jarak to see how it performs. I've managed a #32 WoL 10N (poor gear, poor guild) with 158,141 dps.

What I was doing in P1:

• keep 5 CP Slice and Dice up
• keep Crimson Tempest up on all targets
• keep Find Weakness up as often as possible on boss
• use 5 CP Eviscerate on boss when CT is ticking

That try wasn't the best one (I managed 170k dps when going full CT during P1), so I'm wondering what you guys are doing. I realize most of you probably haven't played Sub on this fight, but given it's farmed there is no waste trying different specs now.

(It felt great not needing to tab-target and keep multiple Ruptures up. I hate that kind of "cleave".)

Btw, In 25man environments the terror of the mists trinket(509) becomes far superior than the dark moon card due to skull banner and crit scaling.

If the proc aligns with the 6 second duration, which is possible on the pull

Grats, my rotation is pretty much the same, although I keep rupture and hemo as well on main target and I slack some FoKs, ranked with 137k.

To me sub is way more interesting than the other two specs. Yeah there are a lot of things to keep an eye for and not to mention always being behind the target.

I did both 10 and 25man with sub and probably the most retarded fight is ToES Sha, those panda archers were designed only to completely ignore our spec. Horrible,horrible trying to backstab a target that is in permament whirlind cause the group is collecting orbs.

Rupture still does significantly more damage than Eviscerate, though not sure what the amount of targets you need for CT to be strictly better than Rupture.

I have been playing sub for some bosses for fun, however, it lacks in many departments.

Target switches are bad. While Shadowdance is nice because of its 1 min CD, you have to guarantee 18s uptime on the Target in question in order to profit from Find Weakness. Having to refresh bleed effects lowers the damage you gain from the CD.
With this in mind you sometimes have to postpone the CD for a few seconds.
You have to always be behind the boss - which makes dancing on Will of the Emperor hard and poses problems when you want to use ambush a last time just before SD expires when some bosses turn round in order to cast a spell on a fellow raider.

Even when you overcome these obstackles, dps is still lacking compared to the other specs. There is now way the damage increase to Sanguinary Vein will put the spec on par with the others in terms of damage output under perfect conditions which is sad to me, since I think this spec is fun and more challenging to play.

Edit: I have 495 Gear without sha weapon

I'd be curious to see your parses for sub and assassination on various fights.

I'd like to echo the statement above. Removing the positional requirement from Ambush would really go a long way to helping this spec, due to the higher availability of SD compared to other rogue spec cooldowns. I also believe they would do well to make this spec work as well with either daggers or slower weapons, since Mut is already daggers only and combat is already non-daggers only. A rework to Hemo in order to bring it's damage with slower weapons closer to BS might work.

As a side note, I have been also experimenting with Shuriken Toss as a CP builder. The difficulty in testing Sub on target dummies is the fact that playing solo, HaT doesn't work the same way as in a raid. However, I can consistently improve my DPS (by approx. 10%) over a 5-minute test using ST to build combo points instead of backstab (outside of keeping up Hemo bleeds and Ambush usage during appropriate moments). This is with blue 471 daggers.

When performing the same test with 483 fists with the same approach damage is consistently lower by at least 5% than using the lower iLvl daggers. Again, DPS numbers when building CP with ST yields higher DPS numbers than when building CP with Hemo when using these fists. In both cases, DPS numbers still do not approach those seen with daggers.

Is it possible that ST messes with swing timers, thus affecting slower hitting weapons more? I would have expected the swing damage from higher iLvL items to overtake, when removing the yellow weapon swings from the equation.

I am anyway surprised that significantly worse weapons perform so much better when taking the key difference (backstab) out of the equation. This is with the T14 2-piece set.

Rozetta; Shuriken toss' ability portion scales with AP for its damage. Weapon damage does not matter there. However, Weapon damage (and speed) matters for the autoattack portion (asuming >10 yards away from target). Upgrading weapons and only weapons means Ambush etc hits harder, while Shuriken Ability damage remains approximately the same. The loss you see is probably from reduced weapon swings (because of slower weapons) and thus less poison and HAT procs. Optimally you want 2x daggers when using Shuriken Toss, as that maximizes procs from autoattacks (and Ambush and Hemo too), while you still do the same damage with Shuriken as you would with any other weapon type.

It would be fun to see a "ranged rogue" appear, though; utilizing both Shuriken Toss and Deadly Throw, standing at 30 yards. Go melee for cooldowns and refreshing rupture. It might be a good alternative on typical "run away from me now!" type fights.

If you want to look at some ST Sub logs, i can provide that for HC Raids mainly: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

My Gear: Copperbolt @ Azshara - Community - World of Warcraft

Thinking more about my testing on training dummies, I think I've nailed the reason why ST pulls ahead. HAT only procs on crits from abilities (from the tooltip), so I am guessing it's not proccing on white swings or poison (correct me if I'm wrong on this). Since ST is very low cost, I can execute more abilities over time, and since in those testing situations, only my crits are giving HAT procs, building CP with ST simply gives more HAT procs.

I have been trying ST over Anticipation in LFR. It does have it's uses and it surprising to note how often I am in a position to use it due to fight mechanics. I'd certainly recommend giving it a try just to notice how much you might/might not use it.

In a raid situation, HAT is a guaranteed CP per 2 seconds, since everything including heals will proc it. Energy regen is significantly higher than being unbuffed. This allows for easy use of BS as a CP builder to execute a relatively smooth rotation. Using ST over BS in a raid situation allows for very easy refreshing of Rupture and SnD, and basically swings the damage distribution over to ST and Eviscerate being in the top 5 damage abilities. Obviously under Shadow Blades and Bloodlust, you can't use ST due to capping out on energy. Otherwise, it seems to do similar damage as using BS. Raiding as sub, you will be forced into sub-optimal situations where you might lose both SnD and Rupture due to fight mechanics (fights like Lei Shi). In these situations, re-applying those with ST is very fast. In this way, ST allows for much faster target switches as well. It's great for things like picking up adds on Will (with Deadly Poision, although that is not going to apply in 5.2) as well as position changes, any time you need to run in and out of a fight, get rooted or pushed back, or are simply unable to be in melee range due to fire on the ground. It also doesn't have the positional requirement that BS does.

Since using ST over BS leads to more Eviscerates over time, it's possible that Mastery's benefit might be stronger than Haste's, but that would obviously require simming to work out.