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
冰霜震击 buff and the subsequent rise of the
极寒之心 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
鞭笞烈焰 and
冰雹 gaining traction alongside some experimenting with
始源熔岩助动器 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 狂乱生长之种 adding some much needed burst,
Necrolord's 碎裂元素 giving some extremely strong funnel and AoE options, and
potentially Venthyr's 元素导能 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
灼热之手 still being dominant paired with the unreliability of
元素之灵 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
黑夜边缘 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
司垢莱克斯 and
黑伦度斯, fights with adds that need to die fast like
道茜歌妮 or fights with options to funnel damage into one target like
圣物匠赛·墨克斯 or
安度因·乌瑞恩. 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
袖剑风暴, offers cooldowns frequent enough to deal with add spawns as well as two charges of
暗影步 that can be uses to gain uptime or avoid mechanics.
黑伦度斯 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
暗影技巧 and
短剑断奏 procs.
The only fight Subtlety Rogue is bad at is
征战原型体. 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
暗影之刃 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.
阿卡丽的灵魂碎片 can stand out slightly due to a functional change in the 9.2 patch that made it proc
铁拳穿刺, but is due to its design mainly strong in single target heavy fights.
终结预兆 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.