I think I'll post here again so I won't clutter the forum with useless threads about purely dex-assassination melee problems.
Evasion
So here is an chance to avoid an attack/evasion graph, where z is accuracy.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/spdpzdyws8
We can see that even if character has zero accuracy, he'll still hit targets with 500 evasion with 60% chance.
A character with a decent accuracy of 400 will hit a target with 400 evasion about 78% of the time.
That means that evasion and accuracy are not balanced with one another.
This makes sense since otherwise characters with low perception/accuracy wouldn't be viable unless they're casters. The problem arises from the fact that evasion is the only protection of a dexterity melee character.
Ranged characters have range as their main source of defence, str/con based melee characters have high mitigation from armor and big HP pool, however for a dex-based character his only protection is evasion, and it can't compete with range or heavy armor.
So in order to be semi-viable one should either be either a ranged charater, or go deep into con/str, which places evasion in a position of a complimentary bonus.
From what I see in the game currently, balance wise, it should be outweighted by abilities that benefit from dex/per and can't be used with heavy and/or medium armor, however at their current state those abilities fail to do so, infact, they're not strong enough to be limited to be used with light armor only.
Those abilities are expected to either provide a huge DPS boost to compensate for lack of survivability, or some ways to increase character's longevity in the fight, current dex abilities fail to do so. They're pretty much centered around attack speed, applying pure damage, applying debuffs and crit (talking mainly about assassination abilities here).
Attack speed only increases with pure dex, unlike strength where weapon damage increased both by the stat itself and relative talents, for example. my character with maxed dex has 10% attack speed (and 700 evasion) with several enchants, so attack speed scailing is limited. Strike wounds and assasinate provide relatively weak (in practice) damage, as they deal flat damage that has almost no scailing. Shadow dance only scales with stealth, and in return, stealth doesn't do anything combat-wise apart from scailing SD. Abilities which are guaranteed crits are simply not strong enough to mitigate said problems, investing in crit in general seems a waste of resources at this point.
To put it simple, assassination abilities don't outweight warfare abilities, but they're locked for light armor and light weapons only. And if warfare skills are not much worse dps-wise than assassination ones, why lock yourself into light armor?
Stats
For a decent caster build you need int and con, for decent melee build you need str and con, for a decent dex build, however, you need str (to actually deal damage), con (to live for a while), int (because shadow dance, mark of death, assassinate require tons of mana), and dex itself, which is a bare minimum. There are not enough points for all of this, unless you go unarmed with touches which allows you to dump str and kill two birds with one stone (int).
If light weapons would scale their damage with dex instead of str it would help a ton, but as it is now, there is simply not enough stats for this kind of build.
Misc
Mark of death and strike wounds break stealth when used. I don't know if it's intended to be this way or not, but it makes stealth even less useful.
Strike wounds and shadow dance have animation time that eats up precious combat time and doesn't allow to turn them on and off on demand to, say, fight mana problems and only use them when needed, without rooting yourself for a second while turning them on, and it actually matters alot as well.
Primitive dagger recipe says that this dagger ignores 40% of enemies' armor, but it doesn't work for primitive dagger, or the basic dagger you can get from the bank currently.
Assassination ability branch is almost the least bursty branch of all at the moment, it has no good openers, no good CC, barely any survivability and it works best to make a bag of trash lurking in the shadows kind of character, that or a PvE DPS. The only ability from this branch that actually sees any use is shadow walk.
