Assassin
Description
Strong physical attacks cut through your enemies. Evade your foes and strike from the shadows.
The Assassin fights with rage, strikes fast and from hiding, and avoids being hit rather than taking it.
How it plays
Early on, Melee and Stab will be the primary buttons you'll use. Sever will bleed the target and inflict damage over time, which should be reapplied after it wears off. Bladestorm, Distracting throw, and Hamstring, all are damaging abilities you'll eventually use just as often.
- Bladestorm is a costly ability, but will be your most reliable as well. It is your hardest hitting ability AND damages multiples targets as well.
- Although Distracting Throw is a cost inefficient skill (deals damage similar to melee but costs rage), it can allow you to bring a single enemy to you if there are too many enemies around it.
- Hamstring has a long cooldown and similarly low amounts of damage, but has a chance to stun.
To summarize, these 3 abilities can drain your rage quickly and should be used strategically early on to conserve and use rage efficiently.
Assassins' Vigor is effectively a permanent self-buff to damage and should always be up. Stealth is Assassin's "signature" skill that allows you to hide from enemies and later on allow you to deal more damage.
What to train
Strength and Stamina are the two stats you should prioritize, with more emphasis on Strength (70/30 ratio) early on.
- Slowly shift to a 50/50 ratio as while you'll eventually outscale the cost of abilities with a high enough Stamina, you still need a ton of health late game.
Agility and Intellect has its uses with Agility scaling better. But despite being an Assassin, its a trap to invest in agility too much (intellect too obviously).
- The diminishing return are too great to justify prioritizing this more than Strength and Stamina.
Spirit effectively only increases your absorb (magic dodge) and therefore should barely be touched. The hp/rage regeneration falls off too early to be that useful.
Therefore your training energy should never touch stats other than Strength and Stamina.
- Your points still focused on these two stats unless you have some you can afford to spare on Agility and Intellect.
Talents
One tree is more defensive with slight utility while the other tree is full on offense, the latter of course has more priority.
- You can effectively double the duration of bleeds while increasing your critical chance on bleeding targets as well.
- Stab's crit chance itself can be raised fairly high while Bladestorm's duration can be cut in half.
- And against physical attacks, you can increase your chance to dodge, decrease your damage taken, and decrease the chance you get critically hit by them.
- Eventually you can also improve the Stealth ability by reducing your detection range and increasing your critical chance while sheathed.
Stats
What training each stat gives a Assassin. How much grows with the stat; the game's training window shows it for your own character.
| Stat | Gives |
|---|---|
| Stamina | Health Increase Rage Increase |
| Strength | Physical Damage |
| Intellect | Magic Damage Rage Cost Reduction |
| Agility | Physical Crit Chance Dodge Melee Attack |
| Spirit | Magic Crit Chance Healing Absorb Magical Attack Health regeneration every 5 seconds while out of combat. Rage regeneration every 5 seconds. Halfed when in combat. |
Spells
Every spell of the class as its spellbook lists it, with the level it is learned at. New spells and ranks are learned automatically on reaching their level. A number that grows with each rank, such as damage or cost, reads X: the spellbook in the game shows it for each rank and for your own character.
| Spell | Level | Type | Cast time | Cooldown | Range | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Melee |
- | Physical | Instant | 1 second | 1 Space | Basic melee attack dealing X damage. Costs no rage. |
 Stab |
- | Physical | Instant | 2 seconds | 1 Space | Run your weapon through your enemy dealing X damage, while consuming X rage. |
 Sever |
- | Physical | Instant (over time) | 5 seconds | 1 Space | Slice your enemy causing them to bleed for X damage over 10 to 15 seconds, costing X rage. |
 Stealth |
- | Buff | Instant | 2 seconds | 1 Space | Turn nearly invisible hiding yourself from enemies. |
 Assassin's Vigor |
20 | Buff | Instant | 1 second | 1 Space | You are consumed by a burst of energy, increasing your strength by 15% for 5 minutes. |
 Blade Storm |
15 | Physical | Instant | 10-5 seconds | 2 Spaces | You wield your weapons quickly, inflicting great damage on surrounding enemies causing X damage, consuming X rage. Hits up to 10 enemies; past 5, each takes less. |
 Distracting Throw |
4 | Physical | Instant | 3 seconds | 10 Spaces | Hurl your weapon at your enemy from afar causing X damage, consuming X rage. |
 Hamstring |
10 | Physical | Instant | 20 seconds | 1 Space | Hits for X and stuns your opponent for 0 to 5 seconds. Stun breaks when enemy is attacked. Costs X rage. |
Talents
Talents cost 1 Talent Point a piece; a character receives 1 Talent Point every 10 levels. A talent under an arrow requires the one above it learned first. Every point in a talent adds the same again: 2%/4%/6% is what one, two and three points give.
Talents (in-depth)
Tree 2 should be prioritized first to maximize damage. the talents on Tree 1 aren't terrible per say, but they wont benefit you as much early on.
Tier 1
Tree 2
- Improved Stab is the top priority as its your most reliable ability at the start. There is no reason not to increase your critical chance by up to 30%
- Improved Sever is also important, but no equally so even though its required to learn Bloodletting (and increase crit chance on bleeding targets).
- You need to invest 3 points to even unlock the ability to rank up the next talent. 30% critical chance on stab has way more tangible value than a longer bleed at face value
- Improved Strength can be easily skipped as it will take much later before you actually see any benefit from the increased total strength.
Tree 1
- Improved agility falls into the same pitfall and actually suffers even more. definite skip for now
- Thick Armor increases your armor from items, but Flexibility has a chance to completely dodge them. Also Thick Armor has a similar issue as Improved Strength/Agility
- Flexibility wins, but since you need 2 more points to access Tier 2 talents Thick armor is easily the next choice
Tier 2
Tree 2
- Despite needing only 5 points to unlock tier 2 talents, Assassin should maximize the ranks of both Improved Sever and Improved Stab before ranking up Bloodletting first (over Pain).
- The critical chance increase on bleeding enemies completely beats out Pain's general critical chance increase.
- Improved Bladestorm is actually ridiculously good.
- The only issue is the rage cost you will eventually overcome.
- Therefore theres no rush to rank this up yet.
Tree 1
I want to mention that while Assassin has plenty of talents that deal with physical damage, it has no innate defense against magic damage.
- Therefore Focus is easily the most useful tier 2 talent on Tree 1. It'll indirectly increase your damage by reducing the cost of abilities.
- The 12% rage cost decrease also makes for great value when compared to actually investing into intellect
- Personally between Discipline and Channel Energy, the latter feels more enticing. Its sorta hard to determine how much less physical damage you actually take from decreased critical hits taken when compared to a tangible damage decrease.
Tier 3
Tree 2
- Penetration is a straight forward talent that allows you to deal more damage. Nothing wrong with reducing defense.
Tree 1
- Improved Stealth is a solid talent bogged down by the fact you have to invest in a defensive tree over an offensive one. Think of it as a late game goal.