Ranger Specs

You also get them from after smoke bombs though, whereas stunned damage is trash only (and also only with the one talent).  It gives you a few extra boss critical hits.  But as with most specs, everyone agrees on 90% of the points, but the last 5-10 are just kind of put where people feel like.

Sneak attack looks like it works that way in theory crafting. It is, in actuality, a dps loss if you try a smoke bomb combo in a boss rotation and herr is why:

ability costs:

shadow strike 25 vigor
dagger stab 50 vigor
smoke bomb 50 vigor
assassins contract 20 vigor

in order to go back into stealth, you have to stop your shadow strike rotation to let your vigor save up to 50. That takes 1.5 seconds. So you've missed out on a swift strike and all you have done is save up to 50 vigor. So now, you can either zero out your vigor with a larger nuke dagger stab, or you can zero it out to go into.stealth. Lets say u want to go into stealth. You've now missed the opportunity cost of two damage spells and have only done auto attack damage for a few ticks of vigor. Now you are in stealth, but with ZERO vigor again. Stealth turns off even your auto attack damage, so now you are sitting next to the boss with all attacks off, AGAIN waiting for your vigor to tick up. Well, now do u want to use a shadow strike or a dagger stab? To leverage crit damage, you should use your biggest attack because (1.75)x < (1.75)(x+200). So u SHOULD save up for a dagger stab, which is another 50 vigor saved, but this time u do no damage while you wait.

Lets say u want to minimize the time waiting in stealth, and decide to save up to a full bar of vigor so u can stealth for 50 then dagger stab for 50. You at least get to auto attack while you stop using special attacks, but you are still missing two swift strikes or a swift strike and a dagger stab. There is no way, even if everything goes right, that your crit dagger stab can offset the opportunity cost of the attacks your missing to save the vigor to smoke bomb. This same problem happens when a sin needs to blind a boss, as that also costs 50, but at least then you are providing benefit to your tank.

I could probably stop here, but there is also the matter of even if this WAS a dps gain, its a 5 talent point investment for a combo that does something that had a 40% chance of happening anyways, which u can only do 3, maybe 4 times a boss fight if use assassins contract to re-smoke bomb (assassins contract itself costs 20 vigor, so then you are saving 70 vigor to restealth and get your big dagger stab). In contrast, Impale is critical to doing dailies as a under geared rogue, because the elites u need to kill absolutely need to be stunned and hammered down if you don't want to eat after every single mob. Except for the 3% of his time that a new sin might be killing a dungeon boss, he should be stunning with abandon and hammering with dagger stab when he can.

the only assassin I could see maybe using that auto crit talent is a very high geared sin that only farms nacher in ehl and is done doing daily surface quests because on nacher you need to be full.vigor before the burn phase anyways, and crits are at a premium on that fight. Then Maybe I'd pop stealth and save vigor for a auto crit when he kneels. But at that gear level, your can have very close to 50% crit rate, so ur spending 5 talents for something that would have happened 50% of the time anyways. But these posts are not intended for some end game just farming nacher gear level rogue. Its intended for new players who will be killing a ton of surface elites for dailies as they grind their way to souls.

also, before someone suggests leveraging deep stealth to get multiple crits, it doesn't work that way either. I've reset several bosses, usually boss one in spl trying to do this when I was experimenting with a deep stealth build. Your damage turns to zeroes and the boss returns to spawn. I never fessed up to the mysterious boss resets but it was due deep stealth attacks.

its also pointless in pvp because your opener will always be your lowered powered attack because u need 4 seconds of stun. You'd rather have 50% more damage on the monstrous dagger stab follow up (which u get whether u crit or not) than your stun critting. If u don't believe me, go duel a rogue and tell me if u care that their opening stun crit you. sin pvp is about opponent management, debuffs, and stun locking. Impale also buffs your damage when any of your allys have stunned an opponent, meaning you do terrific dagger stab damage against any controlled (dazed, stunned OR frozen) opponent. Its useful to remember that unlike shadow strike dagger stab has zero cool down, so if u have 100 vigor you can double stab a stunned opponent.

alright, I am done on this topic. Tl:dr version:

going back into stealth mid boss fight forces you to miss too many potential attacks because of the
Prohibitive cost of smoke bomb.

Impale is too good for 95% of what a new sin will need to be doing all day and gimps their stunlock burst too much in pvp to advocate that they trade it for a skill that only theoretically good on dungeon bosses.

Wow, unlike dinner with the kids where I actually LOOSE brain cells, I think I just got smarter! Thanks Fahid and Kob! This is one awesome discussion!