Sub Rogue PVE 3.3.5 (Project)

Good afternoon folks.

Today I've come to propose a fun (and in simulations) some-what viable Sub PVE Rogue build.

The goal in stats is to achieve:
- Dual Wield Hit Cap
- Expertise Cap
- Lots of Haste, to the point your melee swings on MH are under 1.00 on your character sheet.
- Critical Strike Rating (About 40% from stats, the rest will come from the talents.)
- Armor Pen for anything beyond that.

Weapons:
MH 1.8 dagger OH 1.4 dagger

Poisons
- Since we do not have improved poisons, MH Wounding OH Deadly
(Why? Wounding has more than double the proc rate of instant. With our 'speedy sub boy' build here, we're going for # of procs.)

Note: When fighting multiple mobs at once where you can't stack up deadly, swap deadly to wounding, then blade-flurry it down.

Glyphs:
- Hemorrhage, it makes the ability alot more viable to use by granting 40% additional damage to its bonus damage. Sadly, this doesn't reflect on your personal DPS as anyone can take advantage of the Hemorrhage stacks. It's quite visible on Target Dummies though.

- Expose Armor - I use this because sometimes there's no Warrior or other class to provide a similar debuff. I take advantage of this Glyph so I don't have to waste too many combo points on expose armor. Lasts alot longer with fewer points spent.
If you're not worried about this REPLACE IT with Glyph of Eviscerate! (10% crit chance to eviscerates)

- Blade Flurry - Energy is slightly tough for this build at times. (Getting unlucky with Relentless Strikes procs) So, anything to reduce energy costs is a blessing. Less energy used on other things, is more energy left over for backstabs!

Rotation:
(Here is a full optimal rotation, assuming no interruptions.)
Stealth > Shadowstep > Ambush > Backstab > Slice & Dice > Hemo OR if you got +25 energy back from talent, Backstab instead > Eviscerate > Vanish + Premeditation (repeat previous cycle) > Preparation > Vanish > Repeat Previous cycle > While waiting for vanish to come back again, use Blade Flurry to keep the momentum going.

Rotation Notes:

- Throw an Expose Armor in there if no other class available to provide armor reduction debuff.

- If you have an overwhelming amount of combo points (easy to happen with this build thanks to Honor Among Thieves) feel free to throw in a Rupture. Serrated Blades makes Rupture 30% stronger!
(This last statement here, I keep wondering if it's better to do another Eviscerate rather than Rupture. I'm open to feedback on that.)

- When in doubt, press Slice & Dice, Backstab or Eviscerate. Don't freeze up! This spec will run away from you if you let it!

Talents:
https://i.ibb.co/hCMNwnH/sub-rogue.png



Pros / Cons (Simple versions.):

Pros:
1) Nearly infinite combo points provided by Honor Among Thieves and Initiative. Don't forget premeditation! LOTS of eviscerates, slice and dice, and even some leftover for expose armor if needed.
2) Hemo is an amazing replacement for sinister strike. Alot cheaper and can hit for more damage.
3) FAST - this spec can really catch you off guard with how quickly you must act to keep it going. The more momentum you keep, the better the damage! I find it very engaging.
4) Daggers for my sneaky boys! This spec takes full advantage of wielding two daggers. Not much is more satisfying than seeing a constant stream of numbers flying up from them.
5) Mobility - Let's face it, it sucks when the tank suddenly moves a boss out of your reach, or does a sudden turn. Shadowstep not only helps with that, but it also provides a temporary but powerful damage boost to your next attack.
6) Backstab is CHEAP now. Energy cost reduced by 20. Big d**k, little dagger. It's also powerful with Opportunity's 20% damage boost. + 10% more from Sinister Calling.
7) Execution Phase Damage Boost! Other rogues don't get any kind of bonus towards downing a boss to 35%, but you do! Dirty Deeds allows you to enjoy an extra 20% more damage when the boss is low! Hope you got your cooldowns ready! B)
8) Energy Efficient!... kinda.... can you EVER have enough energy? Relentless Strikes!
9) Fighting on your own? Stole aggro for a sec? Ghostly strike! Gives 15% dodge for 7 seconds, gives a combo point, and deals 180% damage with a dagger!

Cons:
1) The build doesn't improve poisons, but with Deadly + Wounding, we'll keep up with our high speed daggers and combo points.
2) This build focuses on LOTS of small attacks at lightning speeds. However, we aren't able to capitalize on talents which provide high crit chances. Can't have everything, I suppose.
3) I NEED MOAR ENERGY! It's kinda hard to get energy sometimes. But I have trouble with this no matter what rogue spec I play. We DO however have enough to get our rotation done, so there's that.
4) No gorgeous Mutilate 'nor Killing Spree. But honestly, who needs one fun move, when you can enjoy the entire complex rotation of Sub? Instead, we get Vanish + Ambush multiple times in a fight. It's quite satisfying.
5) Not many of our talents help with our stats except for the 3/5 precision and 5/5 Sinister Calling. The majority of our talents that aren't extra abilities are just combo point generators, or something to help with energy costs, or raw damage increases. This means we have to work a little harder on our gems / enchants / gear.
6) Because of the #5 con just above, this spec is not very "New" friendly. Meaning it needs alot of gear and stats to work well, not to mention the difficulty of mastering the rotation itself.
7) Difficult to test your DPS on dummies, to get a realistic number you need friends next to you getting crits to trigger your Honor Among Thieves.


FAQ:

Q: Why No Shadow Dance?
A: The energy cost for Ambush is much too high for PVE situations. It's a great opening move for erupting from stealth - but is not great for repeated use. You will find it clogs up the rotation - leaving you completely spent when it ends.

Q: You realize Mutilate spec does this but is even better with poisons + envenom right?
A: The goal is not to be "better / best" it is to be viable. Many people stray away from a class because the specs that "work" do not particularly play into their play-style. As for me, I enjoy weaving in and out of vision - making those burst entries into combat, having the mobility that subtlety does with shadowstep and the extra vanishes. And above all, I enjoy being FAST. This spec certainly is enjoyable, complicated, and challenging.

Besides, having cheap backstabs and nearly infinite combo points is really fun. Just needs the right efforts to cash in on them.

Q: How much DPS does this usually do at BIS?
A: Not sure yet, I'm still working on getting that far. However, there is a program called "Rawr" you could emulate this in if you download the WOTLK version of it. Though I do not have this data still, the simulations showed it being within 8% of the same range as a "Cookie-cutter Combat Rogue" (both with BIS gear / talents applied vs a Rotface scenario. No raid buffs applied.) It's not a huge loss, but it's not "Min/Mox'er friendly."



A Final Statement:

Hey there, I hope you enjoyed reading this. Whether you laughed at it or thought it could be a cool project to try out yourself, please appreciate the time and effort taken towards this venture. I am not here to claim Sub's the best, and I am not here for pointless negativity.

What I am here for, is to share a project I've been working on with my rogue. If you'd like to suggest anything that could improve this Sub spec, whether it be a glyph or some point changes or even some tweaks to the rotation, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on that.

So friend, if you enjoy engaging combat with lots of buttons to press, if you want that spec you can really get sucked into and requires alot of concentration, if you enjoy being so lightning fast that a ENH Shaman's jaw would drop at the sight of your melee speeds, this is the spec for you to try.

Currently, my rogue is usually top or second in daily heroics with this build at 5.1k GS. For bosses, atleast. I am excited to get him into raiding soon with my guild to see how he compares and to get him more items to help him out.

Thank you for your time! Play on!

CHANGES / UPDATES

Ended up going for 1/2 in Filthy Tricks and 3/3 Honor Among Thieves

I don't know, having only stats based on daily heroics and stuff is not really convincing yet. Though, I have also been thinking that maybe I should experiment with this spec just to see how it could perform in an actual raid (I don't have much hope for it though). I need some non-ARP gear for it though, so I'd rather make myself full BiS first.

Sub rogue pve is only good for leveling as your ambush is pretty much going to deal 50% or more damage of the mob thus ending it pretty much fast. Other than that, no do no use it in pve.

As I specified earlier in a similar thread, you're wasting your time. The spec won't work because you don't have any proper damage source. Copy-pasting because I'm too lazy to re-write

"That's the main issue, it won't be 2k dps difference. It's gonna such a big difference that you'll regret ever trying it. Arms, for example, is a viable PvE spec and it still gets crushed by it's fury counterpart (talking about a 16k-17k to 21k difference). And as I mentioned earlier, sub is WAY worse than any other gimmick spec out there. You're talking of a dps difference of easily 6-7k between a combat and a sub rogue.

When it comes to talents, there's no way to go around losing some really important talents. Imagine that with your current talents you're losing 50% offhand damage from Dual Wield Specialization, 5% hit from Precision, 15% backstab damage from Aggresion (which should be your main cp generating ability), 50% less duration on SnD (and unlike assassination, you don't have any way of refreshing it except re-using the spell). You also don't have any energy regaining talents (Focused Attacks or Combat Potency) so it's gonna be really slow and painful building up combo points especially with the high energy cost of backstab, even with 5 points into Slaughter from the Shadows. Don't see the point going 3/3 into evisc and 2/2 into blood spatter when more than half of the fight you're gonna be energy starving and fighting to keep that tiny SnD up.

You don't have anything in your favor with Subtlety. Combat has high burst cooldowns, big white hits and plenty of attack improving talents. Most of the talents in the spec improve your crit damage/ability damage/energy regeneration etc in a way or the other. Assassination has sustained dps that relies on weapon speed and poison application, 1 cp generating ability, 1 finisher and than you just have to keep everything going (imagine it being like a set of cogwheels, where you power one at the start and than they just keep on spinning). Subtlety has nothing. You just have some really bad 15k backstabs with no real followup, no improvement on anything except that 1 particular spell. No white hits, no poisons, no finishers, no cooldowns, no energy regeneration...nothing."

Ignore the first part as your spec is a bit different, but everything else applies to you as well. Except for a high energy cost backstab that barely does any damage with no energy regain to sustain it, a finisher once every 5 seconds (since HAT has 1 second cooldown on each combo point) you don't have anything. No white hits, no poisons, no damage improving talents, no energy regain, nothing. Your boss fights will be reduced to you doing 3 backstabs for a total of maybe 50k damage, waiting an eternity to pool up energy again, keeping snd up and dumping a few eviscerates here and there (not even improved eviscerate, so they're gonna gonna barely hit for 15k). During this time you're gonna be attacking the boss without any points in improved poisons and vile poisons (1.5k dps drop just from these 5 points if you sim it), no lethality/blade twisting/surprise attacks (30%/10%/10% increase for your backstab, only ability you're gonna be spamming), no improved evisc as mentioned earlier, 20% overall damage drop from the lack of PotW, no energy regain from Combat Potency/Vitality/Focused Attacks, wasted stats by having to gem 10 extra expertise, no white damage since you're gonna be using a dagger as your main hand and many more disadvantages.

Think about realistic pro's and con's when experimenting with some weird spec, look at which talents actually make your class pull numbers. If you miss 80% of those talents that means the build won't ever work.

the reason why sub damage in pve is poor is because rogue damage in general is passive.
autoattacks and poisons are the name of the damage, and the skills are made up for improve that passive damage.
SnD for himself increase white damage, poison damage, proc chance...
cooldowns like blade furry and adrenaline rush are passive damage multipliers.

sub doesn't improve anything of that. Sub doesn't offer ANY aoe imnprovement.
Even in the long run, sub damage is 35-40% autoattacks, 15-20% from poisons and the rest into eviscerate/ambush, rupture and backstab.

So while sub rotation isn't so bad in terms of fun compared to the other specs, the passive damage is still the principal source of dps and the sub tree doesn't offer much in that department.

that was addresed in cata due to energy regain by recuperate (or SnD in MoP) and sanguinary vein, taking a "feral" aprroach of buffs maintenance for the spec but how you can see, improving the passive damage.

Hi i'm a Brazilian Player, i have a sub rogue pve, but i use this build: https://wotlkdb.com/?talent#fZ0gV0xc...bAzVckt:MfpmcV
i think is the best build for sub pve, i dont use hemorage (no really good buff for the raid, and no good to use. i prefer backstab only), and shadow dance is very important because u need to do 3 ambush and 3 evicerate = a lot of damage like killing Spree of combat. Rupture and SLD ever on i recommend.
max dps that i have done on a dbs is 18699k on sub spec pve.
u can see my armmory there if u wanna copy. (my char name is Bloodress)
i done a livestream doing that dps on warmane if u wanna see check out the link above(on 37:10, DBS):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYyS...ature=youtu.be