Enhancement comes out the gates strong in
Sepulcher for a few obvious reasons, and a few less obvious ones. We had good gains with
Domination Shards, but nothing unique like some of the better
Frost Shard scaling options, and we received a variety of flat buffs to the way the spec operates in both single target and AoE so we were bound to go up relative to
Sanctum. Less obviously though, given it's only week one, guilds are simply much more interested in
getting the boss killed so single target specialists are more desirable. On top of that, optimizing cooldowns and who does what is much less prevelant when things are on low pull counts - something that punishes sustained DPS less, after all you can't mess up your cooldowns if you don't really have any.
Finally, there was a bugfix where Shocks (that is very relevant thanks to the
Folgore del Gelo buff and the subsequent rise of the
Nucleo Congelato Conduit recently) were double dipping on Haste for their GCD reduction, which means we are slightly inflated (in the 3%~ region on single target).
The added talent changes with things like
Fiamme Sferzanti and
Tempesta di Grandine gaining traction alongside some experimenting with
Attuatori della Lava Primordiale to open up our ability to interact with fight styles we previously couldn't is clearly having an impact. Going forward, the set bonus when people get access to it will improve the sustained single target aspect to a good degree (think 10-15%~ on the high end) so expect that to rise, but not as much as the big ticket bonuses. Double legendaries is where the big gains lie, with
Night Fae's Semi della Crescita Sfrenata adding some much needed burst,
Necrolord's Elementi Scheggiati giving some extremely strong funnel and AoE options, and
potentially Venthyr's Condotto Elementale adding some really powerful sustained AoE.
That said, our damage profile is still fairly flat for now until we gain double legendaries for burst windows, and is extremely punished by
when downtime happens and if it aligns with procs because of
Mano Ardente still being dominant paired with the unreliability of
Spiriti Elementali without tier. I still expect (
barring any changes) that Enhancement
is going to perform very well in most encounters in spite of some of its shortcomings, it just may be more volatile with more strict mechanical requirements with the release of Mythic. The only question mark is how rough the tuning of the encounters is because we are one of the specs that relies on double legendaries to unlock, which is still weeks away.
Subtlety Rogue has a very good start into this raid tier. The baseline damage from the spec is strong and the carry over power from
Confine della Notte puts it in a top position on most fights.
The raid design so far offers a lot of bosses that require a high amount of single target like
Skolex and
Halondrus, fights with adds that need to die fast like
Dausegne or fights with options to funnel damage into one target like
Ingegnere Xy'mox or
Anduin Wrynn. All of these fights play excellently into the kit of the spec that can funnel damage very well due to the higher combo point generation of
Tempesta di Shuriken, offers cooldowns frequent enough to deal with add spawns as well as two charges of
Passo nell'Ombra that can be uses to gain uptime or avoid mechanics.
Halondrus in addition is a special case encounter where auto attacks currently can't miss. This means that dual wielding classes get a noticeable boost in output and subtlety specifically gets additional benefits from a higher amount of
Tecniche d'Ombra and
Stiletto Intermittente procs.
The only fight Subtlety Rogue is bad at is
Prototipo della Guerra. A big majority of the fight is two target cleave which is the weakness of the specialization. However, this gets easily set off by the strong performance on other bosses when looking at the overall raid performance graph on Warcraft Logs.
The acquisition of the two set bonus will further enhance the single target output of the spec with high uptimes of
Lame d'Ombra and helps with low target cleave for the same reason. The four piece bonus is even stronger as it causes a positive feedback loop with more combo point generation that leads to a higher amount of two piece bonus triggers and ultimately more four piece procs. The only downside of the tier set is that it heavily relies on proc chances. Which means while it is strong, it will lead to luck being a relevant factor in your final output.
Another interesting thing to look at is double legendaries. While Subtlety gets a fairly substantial boost in output from the tier set, the second legendary has, compared to other specs and classes, a fairly minor in impact.
Frammento d'Anima di Akaari can stand out slightly due to a functional change in the 9.2 patch that made it proc
Vene Perforate, but is due to its design mainly strong in single target heavy fights.
Atto Finale increases the overall damage, but is also not a significant jump in power level.
The spec overall will remain one of the top melee dps choices with further progression into the tier. It is unclear at this point how well it works on the last three bosses, but is in a strong position to stay competitive.
