In the current conjuncture, investing points in both SF and Ruthlessness is not worthy for mutilate builds. I don't know whether combat heavy or subtlety heavy builds will ever want to invest in Ruthlessness, which is quite unlikely as well. Sub heavy builds will want to get close quarters combat due to crit chance increase for both fists and daggers (hemo and/or ambush+backstab). Combat swords builds on the other hand might want to get serrated blades in subtlety instead of lethality+ruthlessness. Combat daggers build does not have the talent points to invest in ruthlessness.

Let's consider that you have invested in Ruthlessness instead of seal fate. With this build you will have (0.4*0.2 = 0.08) 8% chance to not gain 25 energy from relentless strikes in each cycle. This disturbance could make you drop hunger for blood or slice and dice if you are low on the energy buffer which is 38-39 energy at max. If you add the sub optimal 4 point finisher, the disturbance will get bigger. Considering your gains, which are 10% increased chance of poison application and maybe 1 point in Turn the tables, the trade-off seems not to be very gainful.

In the end, Ruthlessness seems to be a talent of little use. To be honest, it either needs to be changed to 100% (which requires SF to be changed as well in order for SF to be useful) or it needs to be replaced with another talent. Even in 100% form only mutilate builds and combat swords builds (if not went for serrated blades) will benefit from it.

Edit: To be honest, I believe Ruthlessness was designed to decrease the gain-per-talent-point value of Relentless Strikes by being required by it. As soon as the requirement was removed, Ruthlessness lost its value.

I think you're underselling Ruthlessness. Yes, it's not a great talent, but it's really important in terms of being able to maintain a cycle, particularly with low combo point regen. Yes, Combat Daggers is tight on points... but maintaining a cycle with a 60 energy per CP is pretty hard without it - even with Combat Potency, you only regen about 400 energy per 5-pt SnD, meaning that without Ruthlessness your cycle is just 5s, while with it you can go up to 5s3r. Is that going to be worth the three talent points? Who knows, but it would not surprise me at all if it proves to be worthwhile. And particularly since Combat Daggers builds really want Puncturing Wounds and Lethality anyway, the first 2 points of Ruthlessness are basically free.

Don't get me wrong, it's perhaps a bit weak as a talent - might be better as a 2-pointer - but there are definitely builds that want to take it.

I did some very rough math earlier which may be completely wrong, but if you assume a 30% crit rate and 1.8s daggers in both hands, excluding haste Focused Attacks is 0.3 energy/sec. Compare to Combat Potency with a 1.5s off-hand and a 10% chance to miss, and you get 1.8 energy/sec again excluding haste. Factor in Combat has a haste advantage and a pretty big discrepency there .

Reposting this from another post, but since Assassination is the current topic here are some ideas on how to improve the Assassination tree:

1. Add a 2 point talent to Tier 3 that only benefits SS or Hemo-based specs.
2. Reduce points for Lethality to 1/2/3 for 10/20/30%.
3. Change Improved Poisons to 1/2/3 for 7/14/20%. Increase base chance of all poisons by 5%.
4. Merge Focused Attacks and Find Weakness.
5. Either make Relentless trainable (unlikely), or at least reduce points for Relentless to 1/2/3 for 7/14/20%.

Granted the above was when I was under the assumption that you wanted to take 2/2 Blood Splatter for Assassination, but now it certainly seems like you don't want to take it after all. So in that regard I may have overshot the talent reductions in the early part of the tree.

Assassination certainly is not hurt nowhere near as much as Combat is by the move of Relentless to 5 points in Sub, but it still hurts because it does reduce your talent point options in the other trees.

My basic philosophy on "fluff" talents is that in order to get to 51 talent points in a tree, you should have to spend no more than ~4 talent points on talents which are only tangentially useful to your spec, and be able to get nearly everything that you'd possibly want to get for your spec that's within reach. Currently Assassination has no points to spare, and Combat has way too many points to spare (mainly due to the fact that Lightning Reflexes hasn't been redesigned yet).

In fact, you are right. Currently, the only spec that might "need" ruthlessness (over the other talents) is Combat Daggers and it cannot properly take the talent without sacrificing from Lethality (which cannot be fully talented in this spec anyway).

By the way what do you guys think of infectious poisons? Say the poisondamage of a rogue will be 20% of his DPS wouldn't increasing that dmg by 20% be better then for example 2 points in close quarters combat? I mean a talent that increases your DPS by 2% a talentpoint is quite decent I think.

Well, if Vulajin's findings in post 1772 are correct (and the formula's don't change), the fact that Infectious Poison does not apply to the poison damage gained from AP makes it almost entirely useless, since the AP scaling accounts for the majority of our poison damage. It's a great talent for PvP, of course, due to the fact that it makes your poisons basically undispelable, but from a PvE damage perspective it's extremely weak. Hopefully, it still has some changes forthcoming.

With the very strong poison damage available in the Assasination tree. Has anyone done numbers on a non-dagger shiv-build with a very fast mainhand for Focused Attacks ?

Kreoss, the issue people have with Combat having too many points to spare, is that there are many non-raid DPS talents in the tree. At last count, if you are running as a Sword-Spec build, and with Lightning Reflexes currently unchanged, we have 9 points to waste in non-DPS talents, 11 points if there is another rogue with Blood Poisoning, or an arms warrior with Blood Frenzy, as neither buff stacks with each other or themselves.

These optional talents you have taken, namely Deflection, Riposte, Improved Sprint, Blade Twisting, and Unfair Advantage, all are soloing/pvp centric abilities, and have no affect on an optimal raid setting. It's a tad odd, where we can take 5/5 in Close Quarters Combat, and not remove anything from an actual DPS talent.

Well, lets posit for the moment that we can find a 1.4 speed OH in the expansion like we can at the moment. With such a weapon and the Shiv glyph, a Shiv costs 29 energy. A shiv also does 75% of your weapon damage, thus gains .75 * 2.4 / 14 = .13 damage per point of AP in physical damage (reduced to, say, .10 by armor), plus .18 times your AP via talented IP damage, for .28 dmg/AP, or about .01 dmg/AP per energy.

SS, on the other hand, gains 1.16x your weapon damage, plus some poison; for a SS build, poison is most likely untalented, hence only has a 20% proc chance and does .15 damage per AP; hence, the poison scaling is about .03 damage/AP. Meanwhile, the physical damage gains 1.16 * 2.4 / 14 = ~.20 damage per AP, or about .16 after armor; thus, SS gains about .19 damage per AP, or about .005 damage/AP per energy, about half of what SS does.

Now, the fact that a SS weapon has a lot higher base damage than a Shiv weapon closes the gap somewhat, but it does appear to scale significantly better than SS given current poison values (which may well get nerfed).

You spent 9 points on talents in Combat that have no benefit to your raid DPS (3/3 Deflection, Riposte, 2/2 Improved Sprint, 1/2 Blade Twisting, 2/2 Unfair Advantage). That's what I mean about Combat having too many "fluff" points to get to 51.

Well, I wasn't speaking of Fist + Swords, but I can't see it being the intended design for SS rogues to spend 10 points on Weapon Specialization talents. And yes, it is an option but why not give an option to people who want to use dual swords as well? In that case, Lightning Reflexes being a DPS boost in some way is a welcome addition. And don't forget they're also trying to make Maces a viable weapon choice as well. I think it's a mistake to resign a tree as being only useful with one specific weapon configuration...if we want more variety in weapon usage then there needs to be variety in talent options to support this.

As for Combat Daggers, while Prey on the Weak's redesign certainly helps it, I have a hard time seeing the appeal of why you'd want to go Combat Daggers instead of just Mutilate. I do think that spec is sort of falling by the wayside though. I enjoyed it back in the day but it just doesn't seem to be there.

EDIT: Also, your link seems like an incomplete spec, but it has 4 filler points. 2/2 Improved Sprint and 2/2 Unfair Advantage.

Well, I'd consider Fleet Footed filler as well. It's a nice talent, it's useful, but at the same time it's not really a DPS gain in a tank and spank scenario. And Quick Recovery, while a very nice talent (your healers will love you), the energy refund is a non-issue once you have your stats to the point where your finishers are guaranteed to land.

As for Deadly Brew, the point of getting it as a PvE rogue is not that it's more guaranteed Deadly Poison uptime. Rather, with 1 point in Deadly Brew, you can put Instant Poison on both of your weapons and have 100% DP uptime. So you get the benefit of having IP on your second weapon while still getting all the Deadly Poison DPS.