>1.) poison darts. Just how useful are they?

I've never found them very useful. Sleep darts are useful while ranking, since they confer a sort of slowing effect. You can also use them on cabal outers if you really need to kill it as quickly as possible. I'm semi-sure that the outer doesn't say anything on cb when you dart him. You can also use them on someone you've strangled. Though...I've never found the "strangle and dust/darts" to be a very effective tactic.

Anyway...I'd practice darts, but I wouldn't spend a lot of time spamming them or anything. There is a semi-useful edge you can get, though, that I think is tied to poison darts skill. Useful if you fight invokers at least.

>When stalking your victim, if you pop
>into view for just a moment as you drink water, etc... does it
>mess up your stalking?

There's a lot of guesswork out there. According to some recent nepenthe posts, it sounds like there's no penalty for momentarily stepping out as long as the target doesn't see you.

>How many stalks should you try for before
>attempting the assassination?

Depends somewhat on your assassinate skill. It seems like assassins with perfected assassinate get into the "reasonable success rate" territory after 3-4 stalks. For assassins whose assassinate isn't perfected or close to perfected...which is most assassins....I'd say try for at least six. I don't have any "hard data" to back up that number.

>How long does stalking success last in
>absence of your victim (i.e. no longer in the same area)?

It lasts for a while. Though, I've never been sure if you slowly "lose" stalks, or if they all disappear "at once". Just thinking about how I would code stalking, I'm leaning towards the former.