The issue isn't caused by SF. I'm not talking about possible ways to trick a wrongly designed tree. The issue is that the tree chokes up as soon as you get into tier 8. Just to give you a statistical comparison: The maximum number of talents in tier 8 of different trees is 7 for all trees but assassination which is 10. Only exceptions are 2 hunter trees with 8 talent points, and those share the tier between dps and utility, not pure dps.

What you see in assassination is a design mistake and probably an oversight on the designer side. The trees are build based on a general guideline that obviously isn't followed here.

What we need to do, is to remind them of this and make them fix it. Such a design mistake doesn't give you "choices" as some of the talents are plain worse than the rest and for sure will never be used. The current design basically tells you: "here, you got X poison syngery talents, but you can only take X-2 of them at the same time".

Another very obvious design mistake in assassination is the rupture talent that feels completly out of position there. But I posted this earlier I think.

I don't really mind the filler talents at all if the DPS outcome in the end is ok. Filler talents like Camouflage or Improved Sprint are a nice idea and the concept to have to choose between utility and utility and DPS and DPS is a good idea, as utility is fun. If you had to choose between Shadowstep or Fleet Footed or Elusiveness but had to spent two points on them to reach a really good DPS talent is nice.

In the end - if the DPS is ok - more utility and fun talents are quite welcome in my opinion. So buffing up the lower tiers and the end tiers but giving fun talents as fillers mid tree is a good idea. Only the numbers have to fit in the end.

Edit:
I missed a change regarding Prey on the Weak.

You missed a change, PoTW affects all crits now.

I'd like to see Blood Splatter move down to where Murder was.

I'd say Relentless Strikes, if it really is going to stay in the Subtlety tree, needs to be reduced to 3 points to achieve the same effect (7/14/20% chance per Combo Point). That would at least give Assassination rogues the chance to put a total of 8 points into Precision and Close Quarters Combat (with only 2/3 Improved SnD really needed).

Personally I also think that Vile and Improved Poisons should be rolled in together for 5 points. At the very least it frees up 3 points in the lower tiers, but if you also moved, say, Infectious Poisons down to that tier as well, then it would also help a bit with the higher tier bloat, while increasing Poison dps.

Assassination Rogues don't need improved SnD. Your new SnD is HoB.

It still needs to last long enough to perform a full cycle - untalented SnD, even with the glyph, does not.

--edit--

Bah, I read that as CttC. Unless special dps so far outstrips white dps that SnD becomes unimportant, even Mutilate rogues will need SnD up 100% of the time.

Well, lets see, HfB last 30secs now. What does this mean?

You enter every fight with 15% extra damage for some 25+ sec( since i count 5sec as wasted time)
You must apply the first S&D manually( This needs verification, since CttC seems to only refresh S&D, not apply it)
After this point, you *NEED* to keep HfB on at all times, it must not drop, cause you waste 60 energy to reapply the full effect.

I suppose that by doing this rotation you have enough time to refresh HfB whenever needed.

HfB( precombat, 3rd application)--> Mutilate 1-2x--> S&D 3-5--> Mutilate 2x--> Envenom 5-5--> HfB-->Mutilate 2x--> Rupture

Still needs calculations if it is doable, I think the glyph of S&D would be must have for this.

EDIT: Valen that's incorrect.... Envenom increases the chance that you will apply poisons by 25% after a 5CP Envenom.

5 sec or 6 sec doesn't make much of a difference. It will be 40-45% up time. Although most of the time you will do 5 cp envenoms anyways because you need to get ruthlessness now to go down the tree.

Remember 25% is fix. The duration is increased by 1 sec per combo point.

Mace spec looks really interesting. The big questions here are if they are planning to keep armor reducing skills (and serrated blades) as static values, while adding the percent based talent and arp rating. And if they are keeping it as such, how will it stack? Mace spec will probably be very strong if it counts it from total armor value, but on the other hand it's probably weak if it takes it off the reduced value.

Is armor penetration still NYI in beta, or could someone perhaps test it out?

Sure, there are other problems. I'm not arguing that SF is the entire problem by itself - it's clearly not. My point is simply this:

1) Assuming the talent trees stay in something vaguely close to their current state (which they probably won't, but nevertheless), skipping SF is going to be standard practice for saving points in the tree.
2) The reason for this is that SF is extraordinarily weak for a 5-point talent at the 30-point level. To be frank: it just plain sucks on a point for point basis.
3) Any fix for the Assassination tree needs to get rid of some points somewhere. Yes, the problem is primarily (though not exclusively) that there's too much stuff at the top; even if these were moved down, there'd still be the problem that you have more talent points in the tree than you can spend there. Thus, even after the moves are performed, some talents need to be compressed into fewer points, moved to another tree, combined, etc.
4) Hence, one approach for so doing would be to make SF into a 1-point talent (which would then be a pretty reasonable 1-point talent), and then move some of the points from the overstuffed top of the tree down. For instance, if you moved CttC where SF is now, made SF a 1-point talent where Overkill is now, moved Turn the Tables down to the 30-point level, and added 2 more ranks to Hunger for Blood and put it where CttC is now - that would improve the situation vastly, would it not? I mean, it's still too many talent points, but at least the excess is more evenly spread throughout the tree.

Another obvious option in terms of shuffling things around would be to put Blood Spatter in mid-to-deep subtlety (around the 35 point level); too far in to dip, but a nifty bonus for an otherwise-sparse tree. A deep-sub rogue would then get both Rupture talents and have a nice Rupture-centric build.