Rogue - Assassin Changes

[Loromir]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.
Sev~

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

[Mryal]

Time to post some feedback!

First of all, its sad to see that rogue, wich was once the best melee for self healing now has the worst of all because classes that shouldnt even have self healing (barb?) have gained better methods than popping a scroll.Popping a scroll requires you to waste at LEAST a solid 2 seconds of dps, in pratice it means a lot more due to concentration checks.This should be obvious by now but in order for scroll usage to be at least remotely usefull in high end content the entire concentration system needs to be ABOLISHED from DDO alltogether.

Second, its time to review the DC of assassinate, you guys cant possibly compare it to coup de grace (remember i am a bard player and im saying this), coup de grace is better, not necessarily because of coup de grace itself, the abbility itself is perfectly balanced, what isnt balanced is that bard has acess to a quick no fail CC to use with it (ottos dance), and a virtualy no fail DC CC to use with it (low blow), not mentioning fascinate.

But now, to a more deeper feedback...i dont think turbine realizes what Assassin rogue really is to players.Assassin rogue (was) something that caused people to log on ddo, its a playstyle that was loved and ive met at least two people, paying VIP costumers for years that quit ddo single handedly because they could no longer play their rogues properly.The flavor of stealth and assassinating multiple mobs precisely was something people loved.

Honestly i dont think that assassin rogue or that even rogue feel rogue like in ddo or assassin like.In pratice, what happens is you may or may not be in steatlh, try to assassinate something, then go arround tanking mobs and meleeing them while fully detected and not caring about your placement in battle.I think assassin and rogue in general should get bonuses from backstab, substantial, stealth shouldnt be disabled in combat, instead the rogue should have means to conceal itself enough so that only the mob he is currently fighting detects him from a group (with investment of course), and well, given the current ddo state stealth should no longer reduce your speed in any way, in fact it should boost your speed in shadowdancer, otherwise people will just row back to their barbs and zerg trought with no real care.

[FestusHood]

I think they may need a minor boost to the DC. Not entirely sure what number Assassins need to hit. I calculated that my Sun Elf Assassin will have a 73 Assassinate DC at cap with a Mythic whatever-it's-called, full 5 second stealth, and a +6 tome without doing anything silly like buying potions. The DC could use a couple points added to it, but not much more.

Maybe they could just add in the insightful tactics bonus from know the angles and/or combat mastery items. Those are supposed to be blanket buffs to tactical abilities, rather than adding something arbitrary like stunning or trip modifiers. I'm hoping in future they will allow those to work with monk finishing moves which also suffer from their dc's dropping off in higher level epics.

On a side note, does the insightful tactics bonus from kta stack with combat mastery items? It seems to me they wouldn't stack, but that doesn't mean they actually don't.

[dualscissors]

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

Flavor-wise being agile and quiet goes fine with acrobat/artful dodger theme. But as a matter of functionality, you need speed while stealthing to play an assassin and not be driven crazy by moving at a snail's pace.

What would the restructuring for speed look like? Does it even make sense to have it tiered 3 times instead of an all/nothing thing? Who is going to want stealth and just do +20% speed when stealthing?!

[dunklezhan]

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

Thanks Sev - can you please confirm whether you are aware of a bug whereby the tactic of shooting near an enemy to draw them away does not work? E.g. shooting a wall near a bugbear. Or the floor near a kobold. Or, for that matter, shooting at some scenery or even breaking a barrel near any mob with decent spot/listen that should definitely notice and certainly used to quite reliably?

Its been broken for me for ages on all builds but on my assassin, occasionally trying to peel a mobs away from a pack to assassinate them one by one, it is particularly painful because I haven't particularly built or geared for bluff on that one (which was entirely my choice, I know). I've filed bug reports but I've never seen it acknowledged in known issues or anything like that. if you are aware of it, is it intended to be fixed, or does it come under the heading of 'revamp to stealth' therefore 'not soon'?

Clearly it wouldn't be a particularly high priority, I know that. But it is quite frustrating.

[brzytki]

Assassin's Trick - please get rid of the lengthy animation or at least cut its duration in half

Nimbleness - i'd rather leave it to work on SA only, maybe add 1 PRR per stack?

Deadly Shadow - we don't really need more reflex saves and DEX, i'd rather have +2 DC here instead

Poison Strikes - making poisons more dependent/benefiting from more enhancements in tree is a good idea, but the posions themselves are really lackluster; also i'm concerned about the enemies with poison immunity cause it's not a small group

Shiv - very good improvement, some form of deception was really needed in the assassin tree

Bleed Them Out - i honestly don't know of anyone who wastes their APs on this

Damage Boost - ok, as others said might be good to include Ranged Power

Critical Mastery - finally, it will free some APs; question though - how will it be connected in the tree to tier4 abilities (Killer and Execute)?

Weakness Poison - could be fun, but again question about poison immunity

Execute - i like the buff, i used to skip it cause of a rather long cooldown and missing APs but i'll have to squeeze it in somehow now

Measure the Foe - a much needed buff, i'm glad you improved it

Deadly Poison - ok, i guess

Light Armor Mastery - i think you should make it 1/3/5 PRR


What i'd like to add or change in other, not mentioned, enhancements and some questions:
1) Killer - I really wish you could make Killer buff expire one stack at a time. There are very few buffs that expire all at once nowadays, the whole point of building up stacks is to not get rid of them easily. I understand leaving Nimbleness stacks disappearing all at once because they are easy to build up, but with Killer you need to at least put some effort to keep them (meaning land a killing blow, which when grouping with cleaving-blitzing or SWF with 50% DS for "free" ANYONE is kinda hard).

2) Toxin Affinity - just get rid of it if you are not going to rework Poison Strikes cause nobody's gonna pick it anyway; either make Poison Strikes stances that trigger once per, say, 5 seconds or change the DC formula to be at least 10 base+rogue lvl+INT mod

3) Lethality - consider upping the damage or the HP limit, in epics 1k hp is and has been for some time a joke

4) I have some questions about the threat reducers cause i've been wondering for a few years now, how exactly do they stack? We have so many sources of them now that one has to wonder how much investment in it is needed. It's been assumed that threat reducers from different sources (enhancements/items/ED) stack - is it still the case? - will Subtlety from Acrobat tree stack with Shiv? Is there a limit to threat reduction (Eladrin once said you guys were thinking of introducing a 50% limit)?

5) Also, about the new poison enhancements, will they be connceted in any way in the tree or will they be "stand-alone" enhancements?

[patang01]

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

I agree, I never understood why it was in the Acrobat tree when it's such an iconic Assassin thing.

[Mryal]

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.


Sev~

Then delay this and work on a different class (druid, arti?) until you can/have time to mess with stealth.Doesnt makes sense to mess up with rogue and not with stealth.

[Annyee]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Ty for the Dev/player interaction. It make a big difference.

If you start a official TWF thread we can post our imputes there and keep this thread on topic.

I would also like to say that given the abysmal state of the spaghetti code it is understandable that reworking the stealth system is going to be a major undertaking. However, if Rouges are ever going to be anything more than a different flavor of Ftr then it needs to happen. With a broken Stealth system no one will build a sneaky Rouge, they will just turn out to be another Ftr class, that sneak attacks, and does traps, that most people ignore anyway (PRR/MRR), and wears lighter armor (maybe heavy armor rocks and so do splash builds), and has lots of dodge, and maybe de-buffs things.... other than all that, yea, a Ftr with less HP. You get the idea.

[bbqzor]

Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

Okay this seems to be targeted at the "assassinate doesnt play nice with new stealth AI" thing... Im not sure the problem is clear. The code probably doesnt need to be redone really, but Assassinate needs to be coded as a zero-agro attack or something. The issue is when you hit a mob with NOTHING else around, because you are the only target you get the heat. Can you make a successful Assassinate generate zero threat or something? That might fool the new AI into not autojumping you when youre alone. Or make it a "zero sound" attack, so the mobs dont auto-hear it and come running. If you can just make the strike actually "stealthy" by making it a zero threat, zero noise attack, that may do it. Try that if you can? If you can log in, feel free to contact me. Like 3-4 mins and the problem can be fully demonstrated/repo/explained etc... dont think youre looking at a system overhaul just a change to assassinate to work inside the new system.

[Annyee]

Then delay this and work on a different class (druid, arti?) until you can/have time to mess with stealth.Doesnt makes sense to mess up with rogue and not with stealth.

The problem is the same problem will everything in DDo. Spaghetti Code. This is the problem that creates most other problems. I don't think the Normal player base understands how bad it is. Borked abilities, class features, ED's, broken feats, some LAG issues, and the bank tab problems all come from Spaghetti Code. If you don't deal with it now then it will have to be dealt with later and its not getting any better with time. Druids, Arti and whatever else also have the same underling problem, abet some classes/game mechanics are worse that others.

Solving an issue like this is not much different than any other systemic problem with any other system.

1. Ignore it.
2. Throw it away and start over
3. Start at the beginning of the DDo database and don't stop until you hit the end fixing code
4. Fix things as they break but no more
5. A war of attrition.

#1-3 are not realistic. Turbine has been practicing #4 for a very long time. We have seen the end result of that. A war of attrition is probably the best way to tame the Spaghetti Code Monster. It will also be one of the hardest however, what other options are there?

Rouges need an update. Rouges are suppose to sneak. Sneaking is broken. Fix it, then move over to the next lair that the Spaghetti Code Monster is hiding in. If it is going to take more resources than you have, cut the extra stuff, like Warlock.

But what do I know.....

[Impaqt]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Add a passive +10% sneak speed boost with each core. Make it not stack with acrobat.

Assassins sneak faster by default......

Acrobats CAN sneak faster if they train.

[Rautis]

One specific suggestion:
Change the assassin's trick to a passive 25% fort bypass. Add to the 12th level assassin core the ability to sneak attack things not sneak attackable, also passive. This avoids questions of animation speed and will make your balancing act much easier in the future.

Interesting suggestion making the fort bypass and sneak attack work as a passive. I'll bring it up with the team.

Sev~

This would actually be a nerf to the ability as it would turn it into self only buff. Party wide -25% fort and sneak attack immunity removal is huge boost that I have used even with the long animation and saving throw(when there is a chance of success). Not only does it do the obvious, it also allows you to assassinate certain creatures that you otherwise couldn't. If you want to buff it more just reduce/remove the animation time. Don't make it some self only thing.


As others have pointed out one of the more important things in assassin pass is to review the assassinate DC formula to be competitive with DCs in Swashbuckler, Warchanter, Vanguard etc.

In general, special attack DCs should be able to have their DCs within 10 points(and that's a huge difference already) or less of each other if invested equally. One idea I've been thinking about is to add an item property that adds to DCs of enhancement based attacks like assassinate or mechanic throwables that don't fall under sunder, trip or stun bonuses. Item should have similar bonus numbers as current stunning, trip and sunder items and probably also come on randomly generated items.

[Mryal]

The problem is the same problem will everything in DDo. Spaghetti Code. This is the problem that creates most other problems. I don't think the Normal player base understands how bad it is. Borked abilities, class features, ED's, broken feats, some LAG issues, and the bank tab problems all come from Spaghetti Code. If you don't deal with it now then it will have to be dealt with later and its not getting any better with time. Druids, Arti and whatever else also have the same underling problem, abet some classes/game mechanics are worse that others.

Solving an issue like this is not much different than any other systemic problem with any other system.

1. Ignore it.
2. Throw it away and start over
3. Start at the beginning of the DDo database and don't stop until you hit the end fixing code
4. Fix things as they break but no more
5. A war of attrition.

#1-3 are not realistic. Turbine has been practicing #4 for a very long time. We have seen the end result of that. A war of attrition is probably the best way to tame the Spaghetti Code Monster. It will also be one of the hardest however, what other options are there?

Rouges need an update. Rouges are suppose to sneak. Sneaking is broken. Fix it, then move over to the next lair that the Spaghetti Code Monster is hiding in. If it is going to take more resources than you have, cut the extra stuff, like Warlock.

But what do I know.....

This originated here in brazil:

https://gist.github.com/banaslee/414...-xgh-pt-br-txt

Scroll down for the english translation.

[dualscissors]

Deadly Shadow - we don't really need more reflex saves and DEX, i'd rather have +2 DC here instead

Agreed, my DEX going from 37 to 39 isn't a waste but not a big deal either. This is a place where the capstone can feel truly worth going pure, rather than going after less pertinent boosts. The capstone should give a good boon to assassinate.

Bleed Them Out - i honestly don't know of anyone who wastes their APs on this

Having a clickie that does unnoticeable damage over time in epics is pretty weak sauce. Now sticking a vein or a kidney and slowing/status-ing/extra damage could be something...

Light Armor Mastery - i think you should make it 1/3/5 PRR

Rogues are getting a dodge perk to help with their mediocrity in HPs/PRR/self-healing. Not sure 3 or even 5 PRR is even noticeable being so far behind the survivability curve.

2) Toxin Affinity - just get rid of it if you are not going to rework Poison Strikes cause nobody's gonna pick it anyway; either make Poison Strikes stances that trigger once per, say, 5 seconds or change the DC formula to be at least 10 base+rogue lvl+INT mod

The DCs do make these a waste of space in the epic game.

3) Lethality - consider upping the damage or the HP limit, in epics 1k hp is and has been for some time a joke

Back on the point of assassins and spikey damage, here is a good place for a vorpal to do something that feels mean. Plus it comes as a core at level 18 so no one has to feel it's a gimme to make this a tad stronger for the epic game. It's a vorpal not just a basic crit.

[PhotoRob]

Suggestions

Reason: If I have to invest in hide skill, move silently skill, and crawl around slowly in the dark, that damage bonus needs to be noticeable. Especially if this ability has very little use in a raid tank-and-spank.

(Emphasis mine)

For that matter, why is it that the assassin tree does not have "Faster Movement"? A large portion of the assassin tree requires sneaking to be effective (or even work) while thief/acrobat, which does have faster sneaking, only has one thing based on sneak attack - which as we all know doesn't even actually require sneaking, just no agro.

An assassin should not have a dip into another tree be practically required to make his primary tricks be viable. (This really holds true with any enhancement tree.)

(And just saw the exact same point made two posts further down. Guess I should read more before posting. )

[Qezuzu]

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Faster Sneaking remaining in Acrobat is fine but it should allow up to 100% movement speed in stealth, which would make it sneaking and maintaining Measure the Foe a lot more viable in a party setting, as well as getting a successful Assassinate off. The hitbox and speed for the "attacking while in sneak" animation should also be increased, after an Assassinate there's often some difficulty in getting out of sneak in a timely manner. The speed penalty is a major issue that prevents Assassins (who aren't very experienced) from using the defining feature of Assassin well, and the hitbox is a minor gripe.

Assassinate is the defining feature of Assassin and Execute and Shiv are too strong to be a passive. But as it stands these are the only active abilities worth using, as well as Trick which is situational. Poison is still weak, the actual Poison Strike itself is too weak for a rate of once per 6s, Venomed Blades are already a passive, the damage reduction is something I would only use in Fire Peaks, and +5 damage is simply marginal. Bleed them Out is also still too weak to justify using at a high level because the damage only ticks every 2 seconds (in which time even a freshly eTRed Assassin could have done over 1500 damage or so). Shadow Dagger is a joke at any level beyond 12. It's fine if some of the active abilities aren't completely awesome, there's some in all trees but I would still really like to see Poison being a more major part of Assassin beyond a small amount of additional damage, a debuff and an ability that's not really worth clicking.

This comment isn't directed at you but at people who claim stealth is broken. Beyond being spotted after an Assassinate (which is how it functioned before update 17) and mobs automatically aggroing if they spot a stealthed player in a group (either through seeing through their hide or from tremorsense, this is REALLY noticeable in spider-heavy quests) I don't notice anything odd about the stealth system. If anyone wants I can make a video of a minimum-kill quest completion. I simply don't get spotted if I do it right.

Things I'd still like you to consider, Sev:

One of the reasons I think the stealth-based playstyle has very low adoption is because is because the advanced strategies are not very obvious or intuitive. Keeping your H/MS scores up is obvious, not sneaking right into the face of a mob is obvious, using Invisibility is obvious, but the tools required to make stealth work at a high level are not very obvious and basically require reading a guide. Flaming Sphere is probably the least obvious, who would have thought that a garbage lvl2 wiz/sorc spell was so powerful? Even something as simple as Noisemakers is not intuitive, the fact of their existence is buried in a barter UI in House Cannith. Making noise through projectile collisions or invisible movement, sacrificial summoned monsters, Glitterdust traps, etc. none of these abilties are remotely as obvious as "smash and heal" or "shoot and kite". This is why I suggested that Assassins get Spell Like Abilities; Assassins DO get spells in 3.5e and this would be a way to make the tools of stealth a bit more explicit. Between the obscurities and the speed penalty, it's just not an attractive playstyle to many (I'd really give anything if I could find stealth-only groups even rarely )

If you consider Heal Scrolls a Rogue's means of self-healing then you should improve it, because I'm much better off just using Cocoon and kiting or using Meld Into Darkness/Improved Uncanny Dodge when it's on cooldown. Lowering the cost of Wand/Scroll Mastery and having it include a cast speed bonus would be simple steps in doing this. I'm really not seeing a major increase in survivability here so better self-healing is important.

tl;dr reduce sneak speed penalty, flesh out the poison more, give stealth-focused SLA's and better scroll healing.

And Spell traps? Are you guys aware of their impossibly high DC (equivalent to Disable Device score)? This is code you're probably going to touch in the Mechanic pass so I'd really like to hear what your opinion on this is, it's an important ability for soloing Assassins, and as said the changes to Assassin would have to be pretty dramatic for them to perform in solo/shortman situations as they currently do (without trap CC, great survivability, AoE damage, or exceptionally high single-target damage, I just wouldn't be able to solo difficult content which is something many other classes can do).

[Annyee]

Faster Sneaking remaining in Acrobat is fine but it should allow up to 100% movement speed in stealth, which would make it sneaking and maintaining Measure the Foe a lot more viable in a party setting, as well as getting a successful Assassinate off. The hitbox and speed for the "attacking while in sneak" should also be increased, after an Assassinate there's often some difficulty in getting out of sneak in a timely manner. The speed penalty is a major issue that prevents Assassins (who aren't very experienced) and the hitbox is a minor gripe.

Assassinate is the defining feature of Assassin and Execute and Shiv are too strong to be a passive. But as it stands these are the only active abilities worth using, as well as Trick which is situational. Poison is still weak, the actual Poison Strike itself is too weak for a rate of once per 6s, Venomed Blades are already a passive, the damage reduction is something I would only use in Fire Peaks, and +5 damage is simply marginal. Bleed them Out is also still too weak to justify using at a high level because the damage only ticks every 2 seconds (in which time even a freshly eTRed Assassin could have done over 1500 damage or so). Shadow Dagger is a joke at any level beyond 12. It's fine if some of the active abilities aren't completely awesome, there's some in all trees but I would still really like to see Poison being a more major part of Assassin beyond a small amount of additional damage, a debuff and an ability that's not really worth clicking.

This comment isn't directed at you but at people who claim stealth is broken. Beyond being spotted after an Assassinate (which is how it functioned before update 17) and mobs automatically aggroing if they spot a stealthed player in a group (either through seeing through their hide or from tremorsense, this is REALLY noticeable in spider-heavy quests) I don't notice anything odd about the stealth system. If anyone wants I can make a video of a minimum-kill quest completion. I simply don't get spotted if I do it right.

Things I'd still like you to consider, Sev:

One of the reasons I think the stealth-based playstyle has very low adoption is because is because the advanced strategies are not very obvious or intuitive. Keeping your H/MS scores up is obvious, not sneaking right into the face of a mob is obvious, using Invisibility is obvious, but the tools required to make stealth work at a high level are not very obvious and basically require reading a guide. Flaming Sphere is probably the least obvious, who would have thought that a garbage lvl2 wiz/sorc spell was so powerful? Even something as simple as Noisemakers is not intuitive, the fact of their existence is buried in a barter UI in House Cannith. Making noise through projectile collisions or invisible movement, sacrificial summoned monsters, Glitterdust traps, etc. none of these abilties are remotely as obvious as "smash and heal" or "shoot and kite". This is why I suggested that Assassins get Spell Like Abilities; Assassins DO get spells in 3.5e and this would be a way to make the tools of stealth a bit more explicit. Between the obscurities and the speed penalty, it's just not an attractive playstyle to many (I'd really give anything if I could find stealth-only groups even rarely )

If you consider Heal Scrolls a Rogue's means of self-healing then you should improve it, because I'm much better off just using Cocoon and kiting or using Meld Into Darkness/Improved Uncanny Dodge when it's on cooldown. Lowering the cost of Wand/Scroll Mastery and having it include a cast speed bonus would be simple steps in doing this. I'm really not seeing a major increase in survivability here so better self-healing is important.

tl;dr reduce sneak speed penalty, flesh out the poison more, give stealth-focused SLA's and better scroll healing.

And Spell traps? Are you guys aware of their impossibly high DC (equivalent to Disable Device score)? This is code you're probably going to touch in the Mechanic pass so I'd really like to hear what your opinion on this is, it's an important ability for soloing Assassins, and as said the changes to Assassin would have to be pretty dramatic for them to perform in solo/shortman situations as they currently do (without trap CC, great survivability, AoE damage, or exceptionally high single-target damage, I just wouldn't be able to solo difficult content which is something many other classes can do).

Have you ever pulled a lever while sneaking? Or how about creature Ai not dropping agro? All the movement penalties. And yes, getting auto agro after an assassinate is broken. Stealth was ok pre MoTU, not the best but ok. Post u14 its been broken.... very very broken.

[Ranidae]

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat ...

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

Speed

Acrobats are agile.
Assassins are deadly.

I'm ok with speed boost staying in acrobat tree.


Stealth

One change would fix 80% of the stealth issue. Change (break stealth when missed) to (break stealth when hit + damaged).
I'd be reasonably happy with that.

[Qezuzu]

Have you ever pulled a lever while sneaking? Or how about creature Ai not dropping agro? All the movement penalties. And yes, getting auto agro after an assassinate is broken. Stealth was ok pre MoTU, not the best but ok. Post u14 its been broken.... very very broken.

Pulling a lever breaks sneak and always has. Yeah it's kind of dumb but if this wasn't the case, absolutely nothing would prevent even average stealth users from completing quests with zero effort. If it didn't break stealth then nothing except required kills and spiders would prevent me from just waltzing to the final boss.

Mobs do drop aggro, you just need to use invisibility or you need to leave the general area the mob is in.

Movement penalties have, again, always existed and I agree it wouldn't be a bad idea to remove them (with enhancements).

Auto aggro after Assassinate existed before u17, and u14. After Assassinating without drawing aggro was removed (which was u19 I think), the ability to shed aggro by, you know, running away, made it better than it was before. This is something I would consider unbalancing if it were the case, being able to Assassinate whole dungeons with out anything attacking you. A compromise would be to give bonuses to Spot to mobs in the vicinity of an assassinated ally (woah hey Bob dropped dead there's something fishy going on) but not have them instantly aggro, or have a "critical Assassinate" not draw aggro. And double-assassinating is still possible, you just need to Bluff the second target.

Unless something has changed in the last few months (I've been doing nothing but eTRing for awhile), I just don't believe the stealth system needs any major changes. I can do some tests later to confirm what I'm saying (or just find that I'm wrong, which I doubt I am). This video from u22 shows a couple things I'm talking about (shedding aggro mostly).