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 ability. With the Stealth ability, assassins can better avoid enemies and instantly disengage fights. It also has a low cooldown. 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
Agility seems to be useful but the diminishing returns are great. At the "Base" level you automatically get around 3.6% Crit/Dodge and doesn't take much to increase it to an even 4, but the value required to "advance" to the next tier (4%, 6%, etc.) increases exponentially.

Rough estimate of agility required for each percent

Both Spirit and Intellect scale poorly and don't contribute as much. The diminishing returns from Intelligence is even greater since it only reduces rage cost.

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
• Spirit is almost useless since it really only affect magic dodge

Training (activities > 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
• Don't touch Spirit
  • Becomes less relevant as your Stamina increases
  • Higher Stamina means greater healing from items

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. To conserve rage, only use it if you can’t kill an enemy within 10-15 seconds or 25-30 seconds with Improved Sever.
Unlocked at Level 10 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Bladestorm- Deals massive damage

A very costly ability that deals massive damage. If you value your rage, do not use it. Even for an ability with a 10-second cooldown, Bladestorm costs 50% to over double the rage as stab does. The only time you might use this would be against a difficult boss or at the lowest rank (after level 60). There is an Improved Bladestorm talent which reduces the cooldown by up to 50%. With all that's been said it's not a talent you really need to rush getting.
Unlocked at Level 20 and Rank increases every 20 levels

Distracting Throw- Deals minor damage from a distance

This ability costs the least rage. You can use the lowest rank to pull one enemy at a time or use it with melee and stab. It can be rage inefficient as it barely deals more damage than melee, but way more efficient than Bladestom.
Unlocked at level 4 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 stacks. Always use.
Unlocked at level 30

Stealth- Hide from enemies

The ability that distinguishes itself from the other classes (at least at the beginning). It can hide you from enemies (as long as you don’t get too close), and can disengage you from combat if it succeeds (deactivates when you take dot damage). The aggro in this game only happens when you move so you can recover your health and rage before attacking again (I don’t know if this is a bug or not but it’s probably how the coding works).
Unlocked at Start

Incapacitate- Stun an enemy

This ability is unlocked through the talent tree and stuns your enemies for 2 ticks, which is about 10 seconds. I do not recommend unlocking this ability right away and I will explain why in the talent tree section.

Rotation

1. Use Assassin's Vigour if it expires
2. Begin the attack with Distracting Throw if the enemy is far away
3. Attack with Sever.
   • Keep using it to refresh as long as you can’t defeat the enemy within 10-15 seconds, or longer with Improved Sever.
4. Use Bladestorm if you are willing to waste rage and kill enemies faster.
   • It is not worth using in the middle of a fight as It’s a waste of rage using an already rage inefficient ability
5. Spam Melee, Stab, and Bladestorm (if using lowest rank)
6. Use Incapacitate (not recommended) to stun powerful enemies or to conserve health and rage if you can kill them while stunned.
7. Use Stealth to recover health and mana or to wait for a food/potion cooldown. You must not move after casting this or enemies will attack you

Tl;dr Spam Melee and Stab for damage (maybe Distracting Throw and Bladestorm as well)

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 level up Thick Armor to 5 you can begin to level up Focus 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 side quests near the second half of the game that rewards you with a total of 5 talent points.
  • 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). 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 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.

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 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

Incapacitate is the only ability you have to unlock through the talent tree. It stuns your enemy for two ticks, which is a lot despite two ticks sounding like a little (10 seconds). It has a long cooldown of 60 seconds which might deter you from using it. But you should also be deterred from using it because the other talent, Penetration, is the superior one.

Penetration is a strong talent that allows you to reduce the effect of enemy armor by 20%. You’ll be able to deal more damage and is definitely better than a stun. This talent isn’t the most important though, as I consider Improved Stab to be Assassin's greatest talent.

Talent Order

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

Improved Stab 
Improved Strength to 2
Pain
Penetration  

At Tier 1, prioritize leveling up your right talent tree. Improved Stab increases the damage and rage value of your stab so leveling it up first is a given. Skip improved sever and level up Improved Strength to 2, just enough so you gain access to tier 2 talents. This allows you the flexibility to level up master's training later.
After that, you simply level up Pain to 5 to gain access to tier 3 talent Penetration.
You can attain this as early as level 50, assuming you have 6 extra talent points from quests. You may also, at any point level up Improved Strength to 3 so you can invest in Master's Training. Improved Sever and Improved Bladestorm may also be leveled up after depending on what you need. I'd suggest leveling Improved Sever first since it's generally more useful.

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

Flexibility
Improved Agility to 2
Focus
Incapacitate
Channel Energy
Improved Agility to 3
Thick Armor
Discipline

Flexibility is a no brainer along with Improved Agility to 2, gaining access to tier 2 talents.
Like with the right tree, level up Focus and Incapacitate. The rage cost reduction isn't too important but the 10 second stun is pretty good.
Proceed to level up Channel Energy and Improved Agility to 3. Both talents have better scaling than Thick Armor. The reason why you should level up Discipline last is because of how much agility it requires to raise your physical crit and dodge rate. Therefore you are really in no rush to train agility with points.