Assassin

Introduction

This page contains the Assassin Class Guide. You may return to Classes when you are finished reading this page.

Assassin Class Guide

Strong physical attacks that allow you to cut through enemies. Evade your foes and launch sneak attacks with your agileness and stealth.

Assassin is a physical type class that relies on dealing quick damage with moderate cost. As a physical class, Assassins make good use of the melee ability which has no cost. They also have a self-buff that increases strength and a cost/damage heavy attack. With the Stealth ability, assassins can better avoid enemies and increase the crit chance of their first attack. If you do not like the tanky class, Titan, which sacrifices damage (also higher costs) for defense, and do not wish to play the cast heavy magical type classes, Assasin is the class for you.

Stat Breakdown

Strength- Increases Physical damage.
Stamina- Increases Health and Rage.
Agility- Increases Physical Crit and Dodge.
Spirit- Increases Absorb rate (Magic Dodge) and Health and Rage regen outside combat. Rage regen is half as effective in combat
Intellect- Increases Rage cost reduction

Stat Build

Your gear scales best with Strength, Stamina, and Agility

• Early on both your health/rage and damage scaling is garbage.
• Both your health/rage and damage will increase exponentially, scaling by level.
  • Your base health/rage increases every level
  • Your base damage, through an ability's rank, increases every 20 levels or so (melee is every 15 levels) .
• In that case, I recommend prioritizing strength more over stamina.
  • The rage cost of each ability increases drastically
• I would still suggest raising your strength more than stamina, but the rage cost increase between ranks has been reduced by a decent amount.

• Note that the difference in rage cost between rank 1 and 2 is much lower now, its cost having been reduced by about half the original value
• Again the shown values take into account rage cost reduction, so the actual base cost will be different.
• The stamina required (early on) to use the higher ranked abilities is not worth the investment
  • You're better off squeezing as much damage from rank 1 as possible through strength
• You have zero synergy with Stamina
  • Despite Strength (damage) only increasing one thing compared to Stamina (health and rage), Assassin's benefits a lot from it and has more Synergy as well
  • Synergy with Strength includes the Improved Strength talent and the Assassin's Vigor Buff unlocked at level 30
• Once your level reaches the triple digits (bare minimum) your base health/rage increase will gradually start to outscale your rage cost from abilities.
  • By then you should have plenty of strength compounded by various intrinsic buffs
  • Boosting Intellect just a little along with the Focus talent (eventually) helps to offset your upkeep
• Since Stamina boosts both your survivability (health) and resources (rage), you will effectively and eventually not worry about rage cost

That is a lot of rage

• Regardless. that is the point where you should continue to invest more Stamina, but not enough to simply forego Strength.

Agility seems to be useful but the diminishing returns are great. At the "Base" level you automatically get around 3.6% Crit/Dodge and raising it up to an even 4% is easy

• The value required to "advance" to the next tier (4%, 6%, etc.) increases exponentially.
• Therefore its better to increase agility in batches (points only) to move up to the next tier (4%, 6%, etc).
• You also have talents that raise your base crit and one that raises dodge rate, so that helps to off-set an urgent need for agility

Rough estimate of agility required for each percent

Both Spirit and Intellect scale poorly and Spirit doesn't contribute as much.

• Intelligence reduces rage cost but the terrible scaling is compounded on top of diminishing returns like agility.
  • It's still significantly more useful than Spirit, so its good to invest somewhat.
• Spirit's health and rage regen falls off after level 10 or so, around the time you enter the desert.
  • The points invested in spirit are better invested in more Strength and Stamina

Key Points

• Strength and Stamina are equally as important with Strength having a slight advantage early on
• Agility and Intellect are moderately useful with Agility being much better
  • Both should be trained in batches with points to move up to the next tier (4%, 6%, etc)
• Spirit is almost useless since it really only affect magic dodge
  • The health and rage regen fall off early due to your exponential increase of base health and rage
  • Eventually your main source of regeneration will come from consumables

Training (top right > training)

Auto Train

• Set Strength to 65 and Stamina to 35
• Don't invest any training energy into the other stats

Point Allocation

• Train Strength twice as much as Stamina
  • Gradually adjust to 50:50 ratio for both Auto Train and Point allocation
• Train Agility and Intellect to desired tier (e.g. 4%, 5% etc.)
  • Prioritize Agility over Intellect
• Rarely touch Spirit
  • Becomes less relevant as your Stamina increases
  • Higher Stamina means greater healing from consumables

Abilities

Melee- Deals minor damage

Since assassins scale with strength, this ability will be your bread and butter along with stab. This ability costs no rage.
Unlocked at Start and Rank increases every 15 levels

Stab- Deals moderate damage

This ability is your bread and butter along with melee. It costs a small portion of your rage and can be strengthened further with Improved Stab, giving it 30% more crit chance.
Unlocked at Start and Rank increases every 20 levels

Sever- Deals moderate damage over time

This ability costs as much as Stab and should be used at the beginning of combat. This ability will deal damage 2 to 3 times (once every 5 seconds) and is the most cost-efficient ability. Note that it does not deal initial damage and should only be used to reapply the bleed effect. Improved Sever increases its duration by up to 3 ticks. Once you get bloodletting, applying a bleed becomes essential as it increases the crit chance of ALL attacks.
Unlocked at Level 1 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Bladestorm- Deals massive damage to multiple enemies

A costly ability that deals massive aoe damage. This a pretty good ability, even if it only hits one enemy, since its also your strongest ability, its the prime candidate to use under stealth. You can simply use lower ranks of the ability if you want to conserve rage. If you can afford to spam it, then Improved Bladestorm helps to reduce it's cooldown by up to 50%.
Unlocked at Level 20 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Distracting Throw- Deals minor damage from a distance

This is the only ability that can be cast from afar, but is also the weakest ability behind melee. Since it costs rage to use as well its the worst ability assassin has. Regardless you can still use it to grab the attention of single enemies to prevent multiple mobs from attacking you.
Unlocked at level 4 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Hamstring- Deals damage and has a chance to stun. Dealing further damage breaks the stun.

Formerly an ability unlocked from the talent tree, Hamstring does slightly less damage than Stab and much more than Distracting Throw and Melee. I consider this to be a filler and/or sparingly situational ability. It also has a chance to stun rather than it being guaranteed. In term of ratio, it requires more rage to damage than Bladestorm, but it has a fairly long cooldown so it shouldn't take too much rage from you overall. Therefore its still worth using more so than Distracting Throw.
Unlocked at Level 10 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Assassin's Vigour- Temporarily increases strength

A simple ability that temporarily increases your damage output by an equivalent of a Fair Strength Potion (15%) and increase stacks with any Strength Potion. This is one reason why strength has more value early on. Always use.
Unlocked at level 30

Stealth- Hide from enemies and increases crit chance while in Stealth

The ability that distinguishes itself from the other classes. It can hide you from enemies (as long as you don’t get too close), giving you an innate 50% crit chance on your first attack. Do note that once you start combat you cannot activate stealth again so beware.
Unlocked at Start

Rotation

1. Use Assassin's Vigour and refresh it if it expires
   • Use any potion as well, if you want to
2. Activate Stealth to enable your temporary crit chance boost
   • Alternatively use Distracting Throw to lure an enemy to you
   • Priority of attacks to use under stealth
     • Bladestorm
     • Stab >=< Bladestorm (lower rank)
3. Start the fight with your chosen ability
4. Attack with Sever.
   • Keep refreshing if the fight will last longer or to maintain the increased crit chance from the Bloodletting talent.
5. Spam the rest of your abilities
   • Always spam melee and stab.
     • If running out of rage you can just spam melee instead and keep sever up
   • Bladestorm
     • Use any rank if you can afford to spend the rage
   • Hamstring
     • Use on cooldown, unless saving it for the conditional stun
   • Distracting Throw
     • Use if you want the extra damage and can afford to spend the rage.

Talent Tree Overview

I consider the left tree to be the defensive/utility while the right tree is the offensive.

• It takes 5 points in a tier to gain access to the next tier of talents, but only for one side.
  • For example, if you have 5 points invested in the left tree (Flexibility to 3 and Thick Armor to 2) you can begin to level up Focus, Discipline, and Channel energy, but not Improved Bladestorm or Pain.
• If there is an arrow connecting two talents, you must level up the talent above before you can level up the talent below.
  • Penetration can only be leveled up once you have leveled up Pain to 3.
• You can reset anytime. but just note the cost to reset (after the first free reset) increases every time you reset.
• You shouldn't worry about the Talent Tree early on as you only start with one point, gaining more every ten levels.
  • There are side quests later in the game where you can earn extra.
• Eventually you will have enough points to unlock everything.
  • I will list all the talents you can learn and the order you should learn them.

Tier 1

In the first tier you have Improved Strength and Improved Agility which increases your stat by up to 5%. This bonus is multiplicative meaning it is factored in after the stat is calculated. For example, If you have a total strength value of 100 (after factoring in base stats and gear), then Improved Strength can increase it up to 105 (5% bonus). Both give marginal increases to your stats. but since you'll be leveling up the right tree more, I'd recommend strength over agility.

Next you have offensive talents called Improved Sever which increases the duration of Sever by up to 3 ticks and Improved Stab which increases crit rate with Stab by up to 30%. To clarify, each tick equals 5 seconds or one hit of damage. The talent can basically double the duration of your Sever. Both are equally as good since maxing improved Sever allows you to level up Bloodletting, which increases the crit rate of ALL abilities by up to 30% as long as a bleed is applied.

Finally we are left with the defensive talents Thick Armor which increase armor by up to 15% and Flexibility which increases physical dodge rate up to 12%. Flexibiity is by far the superior talent as dodge rate (agility) will scale better than armor. The armor difference does not seem to matter as much either so dodging is infinitely better than taking less damage, especially for an Assassin.

Tier 2

Discipline decreases the crit chance of physical attacks against you by up to 30% while Channel energy decreases physical damage taken by up to 12%. It's hard to quantify the decreased damage you'll take with Discipline. Regardless I consider both to be low priority talents.

On the right tree you have the new talent Improved Bladestorm which can decrease the cooldown of Bladestorm by up to 5 seconds. In other words it can cut the cooldown of Bladestorm in half. Now that it's an aoe ability, and with the change to how stealth works, its a decent skill granted you have the rage to spam it.

Again you need to max Improved Sever in order to access Bloodletting. Like Improved Stab its a must use. With these two talents alone your Stab will have an innate 60% crit chance, while the rest of your abilities get 30%. Since stealth gives a base 50% crit chance on your first attack, your first Stab will always crit if used under stealth.

Finally you have Focus and Pain. Focus lowers the rage cost of your abilities by up to 12% while pain increases your crit chance by up to 6%. I’d prioritize Pain over Focus as both it and Penetration increase your overall damage output. Pain also strengthens your Stab even more, giving Stab (with Improved Stab) an innate 66% chance to crit. You must max either talent (Focus or Pain) to be able to unlock the final talent.

Tier 3

Compared to the previous tier 3 talent, Improved Stealth is much better. It reduces enemy detection range by 50% and increases crit chance by 50% while in stealth. This raises your total crit chance to 100%, guaranteeing that any ability will crit. The reason why I recommend Penetration over Improved Stealth is because Pain's increased crit chance is better than Focus' rage cost reduction. You already have an innate chance to crit as well. No reason to rush leveling this talent up.

Penetration is a strong talent that allows you to reduce the effect of enemy armor by 25%. You’ll be able to deal more damage and is better than the other tier 3 talent overall.

Talent Order

This is, therefore, the order in which you should level your talents

Improved Stab 
Improved Sever
Bloodletting
Pain
Penetration  
Improved Bladestorm(?)
Improved Strength(?)

Simply follow this order and max each ability. Massive crit rates + armor penetration, what more can we ask for? It takes 13 points to level all of this up which can be attained as early as level 70 if you include the 6 talent points from quests. Its up to you whether to invest into the less important Improved Strength or Bladestorm after, or move on to the left tree.

Once you are ready to level up your defensive talents, I recommend this order

Flexibility
Improved Agility to 2
Focus
Channel Energy or Discipline to 2
Improved Stealth
(right tree) Improved Bladestorm(?)
(right tree) Improved Strength(?)
Channel Energy = Discipline
Improved Agility
Thick Armor

Prioritize getting tier 3 talent Improved Stealth first, since thats the only left tree talent with an offensive property. putting 2 points into Improved Agility is just enough to access the tier 2 talents.
I will err on the safe side and say Channel Energy and Discipline are equally as good. You can choose either or to put 2 points into, and then max both after getting Improved Stealth. Finally max Improved Agility and then Thick Armor