During your first round of changes you have killed the only thing assa was good at, Single target burst, making it overall weaker in S2.
If your target is to increase steady state damage, you must go further than doing blind buffs to random talents.
- First of all, increase the damage on mutilate by 280%. Our primary cp generator is doing almost same damage as crimson tempest while costing 50 energy, which is a joke and also makes Doomblade underperforming weak talent.
- Ïncrease the damage of Deadly Poison dot by atleast 150%. Not only its bad to spend 3 talent points for increasing Deadly’s damage, even then it does almost nothing, since DP dot is doing nearly equal damage as our auto attack.
- increase the baseline damage of garrote, transfer the damage from Improved garrote talent into baseline to remove the last stealth requirement for assassination.
- Increase the damage bonus for Lethal dose talent to 5%. Since Deathmark no longer duplicate bleeds and poisons, Lethal dose has fallen behind and now it is a underpeforming 2 points talent.
- Change the Scent of Blood talent. Either change it to one point talent node or change the way it increases its damage. Right now, giving 2 points into this talent gives you absolutely no benefit. Instead change the first point into 4% agility to maximum of 12% and second point into 8% agility to maximum of 24%. This will make the 2nd talent point actually valuable.
- Make the Deadly Poison baseline and move the Dragon Tempered blade to the first talent point. Assassination should be master of poisons as its in the description of the spec. Yet we still have to choose between 2 or 4 poisons build. Why not make it simple and just put the DTB as the first choice of the talent tree ? Right now, forcing players to take Deadly Poison already wastes 1 talent point for PvP players, the same thing goes for AMP poison in the current patch. If your intend is to make Deadly poison mandatory for every content, which the new tier set bonus looks like, you should first make changes in the talent tree and finally make the Deadly Poison and DTB baseline.
In place of DTB capstone you can make a new talent that will further improve our weapon poisons, or boosts envenom damage. - Remove necessary 2 point nodes from the tree and add more talents. Having too much 2 point nodes seems like a lazy work on our talent tree. Talents like Zoldyck, Rapid injection, Fatal concoction or Scent for Blood could easily be 1 point node.
- Remove Thistle Tea. I don’t want to repeat myself why this talent shouldnt exist, so I just say, replace it with https://www.wowhead.com/spell=58423/relentless-strikes, which was always assa’s mandatory talent in order to keep its combat flow stable and not inconsistent as it is now since Legion.
- After removing Thistle Tea, rework rank 1 Implacable into something like your every 3rd Envenom will become empowered, costs 15 more energy, deals 50% more damage and always critically strikes.
- Rework Ambush to be actually usable ability. Make Ambush an execute ability, usable at 35% of target’s HP, costing 30 energy. Also bake Blindside talent baseline into Ambush, since after nerfs this talent is very much dead and no longer worth picking.
- Change 4pc set bonus - replace the auto attack damage increase with energy returns per melee hit. Make Wound poison to stack 1 additional time (max 6).
- Buff Venomous Wounds back to 7
- Last but not least, buff Leeching poison to 15% leech. Right now, the self-sustain of rogue in solo content is not enough to survive mobs that are doing half of your HP with a simple melee hits. Making Leeching poison stronger will atleast increase the survivability to some extend.