You need to apply Deathstalker’s Mark with an ambush from stealth, which unintuitively competes with using Garrotes from stealth.
Assassination can only stealth from out of combat and on a 2 minute cooldown with Vanish.
Vanish is also used as an important combat cooldown due to stealth-empowered Garrotes, so you can’t sit on Vanish to keep it as a backup.
Deathstalker’s Mark doesn’t grant Darkest Night when the target doesn’t die correctly, such as some construct enemies that phase out on death or if the target becomes neutral and flees.
Deathstalker’s Mark doesn’t grant Darkest Night half the time when the target does die correctly, most often when they’re killed by a Darkest Night Envenom.
Darkest Night doesn’t highlight Envenom when active, requiring manual buff tracking to know when it’s time for a max combo finisher.
Some encounters have intermissions where the target becomes unattackable for longer than the Mark’s entire duration forcing it to drop.
If you lose your mark for any reason and don’t have Vanish available, you literally just don’t have most of your Hero Talents for up to 2 minutes.
Even if you DO have vanish available, it’s unwieldy as a Mark refresh in solo content due to risk of the enemy resetting.
I know some hero talents are considered underwhelming in theme and/or balance, but at least you don’t have to worry about potentially losing those talents for minutes at a time in combat.
There needs to be some sort of backup option to reapply mark outside of stealth. Personally I think it’d be fun if Poisoned Knife was an empowered ability to give a somewhat more powerful ranged attack as well as a way to reapply mark on a fully empowered cast. But really I would settle on any more reliable way to maintain Mark.
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This part, while true, is easily avoidable in various ways. I do it all day long.
As for the rest of your comments, preach on brother. Having a hero talent linked to stealth mechanics like that is just bizarre.
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They just need to put Shadow Dance back in the class tree.
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Not to mention that even with Deathmark and Deathstalker’s Mark being single target focused abilities, we have some of the worst ST damage (particularly in keys) - not very fitting of the deathstalker fantasy I would say.
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Yeah… I really don’t like the Deathstalker’s Mark system at all. It actively made playing Assassination less fun. It also forced me to set up a weakaura to track when I needed to full CB Envenom to reapply it because Blizzard failed to add in a class proc visual to cue for it. Having to hit Mutilate when you are like 1 or 2 CB shy of a full Envenom just to proc Deathstalker’s Mark is also really bad feeling.
I feel like Deathstalker and Fatebound both need some hero talent makeovers. Fatebound honestly could be scrapped completely and something else take its place if you ask me - coin flipping feels like a pretty lame gimmick and boy does Fatebound blow for Assassination.
If Blizzard wants to keep the Mark system, perhaps they could make it an activated ability usable from stealth (similar to Hunter’s mark) and then structure the hero talents so they get big single target boosts to their mark - and there could be an aoe talent tweaked to provide extra AoE benefit if there no mark active on top of what it already does (i.e. Clear the Witnesses). Mark should also be permanent until the target dies or the Rogue marks a new target. Basically the idea would be mark for when you want to funnel something dead.
Agreed. I know Shadow Dance has been floated as an option and that could certainly work. They could also add in talent that refreshes Vanish whenever a marked target dies. Or add in a ‘mini vanish’ ability in the tree that temporarily stealths you and marks your target that’s on a shorter cooldown (basically only meant to mark a new target and provide a stealth opener - the stealth would drop after a few seconds) and then have this ability refresh on mark target death.
Definitely plenty of ways to fix it, but Deathstalker really needs some QoL changes.
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Also has the worst set bonuses on ptr for deathstalker. Was going to play my rogue in season 3 but not with those awful shiv bonuses.
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Trickster needs to be thrown into the pile too.
All three hero talent trees need a come to Jesus moment.
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Eh, I think Trickster is fine. I just feel it could lean a little more into Kspree / Secret Technique and Coup de Grace needs a better animation.
Just play Sub. Its been fantastic over here
Seems to do way less damage for me, especially on aoe pulls.
Im hitting 10-13 million dps as sin on big trash pulls. Hardly hitting 5m as sub
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Nothing i can tell you other than keep practicing 
. Sub can perform better than Sin if your tank pulls with your cds. Its just very timing oriented so if you cant predict whats happening next at any given moment youre gonna fall behind. Luckily the down time outside of cds can be used to just look around and make that accurate prediction.
Trickster is in the dumpster in terms of pure raw numbers. And honestly the recent changes on the PTR and set bonus helps close the gap.
But it simply is going to have a hard time competing when final tuning settles IMO. I suspect that additional hot fix patches will occur for Trickster after the patch is live because it is that bad.
So yeah I would definitely lump Trickster in with FB and DS as needing massive overhauls. This is the consequence of ignoring Rogue hero talents in beta. It requires more work when the expansion is 3/4 over.
Trickster sub is one of the highest-bursting specs in the game so it’s definitely not in the dumpster in terms of pure numbers. There are some minor friction points but it by no means requires a full overhaul.
Deathstalker however is pure cheeks and has had the same issues since TWW beta. Marks and Darkest Night cause too many prio conflicts which are only exacerbated by the s3 tier set
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Trickster Subtlety ranks very high in PvP
Trickster Outlaw is the top spec for Rogues in M+ at the moment (although Deathstalker Assassination isn’t too far behind).
Stop typing. You’re always wrong. Literally just a monkey on a keyboard.
Trickster for Outlaw on the PTR is numerically behind.
That is why expect to see more tuning fixes post 11.2 launch.
Do you have a source on that? I am not aware of any posted rankings yet for 11.2 but I don’t doubt simmers are hard at work.
Right now Trickster is the to-go hero spec for Outlaw for AoE, and if the new Killing Spree lands Trickster may prove a solid showing for single target too.
And all Subtlety Rogues go Trickster. Deathstalker isn’t bad for Subtlety per-say but Trickster is just better.
Yeah it is early stages so far where the sims are showing that Trickster needs a little more tuning for 11.2. Also, Kspree is like doing 16/100 of Outlaw’'s damage profile now so there is a lot of changes and tuning ahead.
There are almost three weeks of tuning left on ptr so current numbers don’t really mean anything, especially for cross-spec or cross-class comparison. Preliminary sim spreadsheets should never be taken seriously
Subterfuge should be baseline for Sin, which completely resolves the issue of ambush “competing” with garrote. You get to use both in the opener. Problem solved.
Do that and the only real change needed is a method to allow Sin to restealth, without making them stupid OP in pvp. With the idea @Aliama had in their thread, that would pretty much do it, if it was disabled in pvp.
Two simple changes fix everything. It doesn’t need an essay.
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