Shadowstep is no longer a 30% damage increase, it only buffs ambush, so it is only a dps cooldown when vanish and shadow dance are up, aside from that it's the go-to gap closer of choice for sub rogues...

Edit: I think that shadow dance could be a more interesting and less gcd locked ability if it was more along the lines of proccing a stealth that ends on your next yellow attack, like say 20% chance of proccing off a crit finisher (evisc/envenom, even though we only use evisc as sub) but I think that that much action bar switching might be detrimental to a player with a terrible computer.

Although that might simplify sub way too much. Sub is such a reactionary play style compared to the others you'd think that they'd want some sort of proc in there to add to that factor.

Oh, just checked and it is. Must have missed that change. Definitely a cool move now then.

Personally I thought that was the idea and the general plan with all this specialization jargon. All the specs have a different/unique feel. Personally I like it Subtlety's reactionary playstyle, but other people don't which is pretty much what Blizzard are aiming for.

Actually, you get a whole new bar for Shadow Dance as it stands, so you wouldn't be shitting up your normal Stealth bar with non-Stealth abilities. I know because I've actually tried Subtlety a few times on Beta and been miserable. As a complete aside, it really sucks setting up your SD bar for the first time, since you only have a 6s window every 1m to place abilities on it.

So, the X charges / Y seconds wouldn't really have any bar problems.

Given that we basically need ShD for Ambush in pve, and Ambush/Garrote/Cheap Shot in pvp, a whole action bar just for Shadow Dance isn't necessary at all if we assume the charges model is there. You could just put those abilities on your non-stealth action bars, and they'd light up when you popped Shd, just like Overpower lights up for Arms warriors on Taste procs. No bar-switching malarky required.

Mhm, I agree with you about room on action bars - in fact, I mentioned the same thing in my earlier posts. But I see this as a problem only in pvp, where there's so many situational abilities you want to have "just in case" that squeezing three more in would be very painful. But in pve, you'd just need one, for Ambush, which I guess is doable. And as you said, macros could be of great help there, I've been using several "[nomod] something, [mod] something else" ones exactly to save bar space.

I like the idea, but I think you lose a lot of the flavor taking that approach. Even your brand new rogue knows that ambush is very very strong, but having the talent say "This weak move does a bit more" feels a lot less impressive than "You can now use this awesome move".

Personally, I think the most straightforward way to fix Shadow Dance would be to simply remove Ambush from it.

From a PvP perspective: I admit my PvP knowledge is minimal (so by all means correct me if I'm wrong), but my understanding is that the value of the talent has a lot less to do with your ability to do slightly more damage and a lot more to do with your ability to sap/stun/silence/etc.; hence, while removing Ambush would presumably something of a PvP nerf, it presumably wouldn't be a crippling one.

From a PvE perspective: Right now Shadow Dance is a mediocre DPS cooldown that requires the investiture of 5 other talent points (Imp Ambush and Initiative) to be slightly less mediocre. Without Ambush, it would be... a perfectly reasonable utility cooldown. Using it to squeeze in a Garrote here and there might still be somewhat of a DPS increase, and on the Festerguts and Saurfangs of the world it might well be used in that capacity; but you wouldn't need the 5 supporting talent points for it to be useful, and you could afford to save it for it's utility functions as well. This would give us greater access to the interesting filler in the tree, and cost us only a DPS cooldown that isn't even that good anyway.

I'm sure there are other things that could be done, but I think there's a certain elegance to simply changing it's role and not forcing sub rogues to optimize for Ambush.

Edit: Fixed typo.

The thing is that in pvp, Shadow Dance is still used mainly for its switch-and-burst potential with Ambush. The spec's play relies on that burst very heavily, to the extent that outside of Shadow Dance, its damage is close to negligible, especially on high armour/high resilience targets. If you (god protect!) get CC'd during a Dance, you're pretty much neutralised for another minute until the ability comes off cooldown.

Sure, but PvP is being rebalanced to some extent anyway - I mean, they've said they want to reduce the importance of burst damage in PvP, and they've also said that they want to make rogues less cooldown dependent. So removing a burst cooldown and giving sub rogues better sustained damage output seems like a totally reasonable thing to be contemplating.

And yes, i did mean Shadow Dance - I was just thinking about how this solution is similar to the solution they added for Shadowstep. Fixed.

But then, if we remove the burst factor from Shadow Dance... Subtlety is left with no burst-on-demand abilities (and I mean both in pvp and pve). Not unlike how Assassination behaves on live. Notice that both Assassination and Combat's 31-pointers are exactly that, burst on demand. Not to mention Combat has AR higher in the tree as well.

I think what Blizzard meant was that with larger health pools, burst won't be as critical as it is now, where you either kill your target within the small window opened by a switch/CC chain or you lose. But removing all burst whatsoever is not a good way to go.

I'd rather not see Ambush removed from Shadow Dance or Subtlety's playstyle. It's pretty much what defines the spec, and getting rid of it would require coming up with something usable in similar contexts.

Edit: I still do think, though, that the talent budget we're required to invest in Ambush alone is far too big.

Probably should add this to our List of Issues on page 29. Too many talent points into an ability we use too rarely.

Again, that's why I like the "out-of-stealth-Ambush enabled on random proc" idea.