Rogue - Assassin Changes

[CThruTheEgo]

After trying out the changes this week, playing my assassin does not feel much different after the revamp than before it. So I have to ask the question: why did you all bother doing this revamp if nothing substantial was going to change?

My critiques of the revamp:
-I'm still falling behind party members while sneaking. Yes, I am sneaking faster, but if I'm still falling behind the group, then what's the point?
-I'm still squishy and have horrible damage mitigation.
-I still have the same weak self healing.
-DPS is nowhere near high enough to offset the weak defenses and self healing. My dps is still far behind every other revamped build. In fact, the only noticeable difference in my dps comes from blitzing, and that shouldn't be a requirement for good dps.

My suggestions for further changes:
-Remove the sneak speed penalty altogether for assassins. As stated many times by many people, this does not affect the assassin's power or game balance. All this does is increase the assassin's enjoyability factor while in a group.
-Lower the cooldown of shiv to 6 seconds. Tempests get a 6 second bluff clicky. Why wouldn't assassins?
-Change the bluff animation to not have any delay, like shiv currently does. If you change this, then you don't need to lower the cooldown of shiv (although I'd still question why tempests get a shorter cooldown on a bluff proc attack).
-Remove the pause after activating assassin's trick. There's about 1 second after activating assassin's trick where you just stand there not doing anything. I'm not sure why this is still here.
-Measure the foe should fade 1 stack at a time every 6 seconds for reasons already stated earlier in this thread. I get that you want this to be a "surprise" boost after dropping out of sneak mode but, as I predicted, it's easy to keep up by dropping into sneak mode for 1 second out of every 10 seconds. So it is really a consistent buff that is simply tedious to keep up. Changing it to fade 1 stack every 6 seconds removes the tedium and, in all likelihood, would result in the vast majority of players having less than max stacks most of the time.
-Something has to be done with lethality. It is in epics where assassins need the dps boost, so this is the ideal place to do it. After playing with the changes, I have changed my opinion that lethality should proc an assassinate check on a vorpal. Instead, I think lethality should improve sneak attack dps somehow, either by allowing sneak attacks to crit, or having them be affected by 200% melee power. As an aside, you said you were going to provide the details of exactly what lethality currently does. Unless I missed it, we never got those details.

Other questions:
-Does assassin's mark require a poison strike to land (i.e. enemy fails their save), or is it just a successful hit that's needed? In other words, is assassin's mark still applied (so that I gain the benefits of weakening strikes and deadly strikes) when an enemy succeeds their saving throw against the poison strike?

Changes that were done well – thank you:
-Shiv as a bluff clicky. Bluff on demand was long overdue.
-Assassination cooldown reduced to 12 seconds. It's noce to be able to use this more often.
-Measure the foe builds one stack every second. This makes building it much less tedious.

Thanks again for the continued discussion Sev.