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KunamitsuUK

03-04-2010, 08:39 PM

Im a 85 Assassin with 5/6 T4 gear mythed (not done new myth quest yet) with 180 AA points and im struggling to get over 10k dps on fights, I average between 5-8.5k. I have played around with the dummies to get my casting order right but I must be doing something wrong all my lvl 70-80 attacks are mastered my 81-85 are expert.Solo my Crit is 79% and double attack is 55%Anyone have any tips or advice on casting order etc or on what I might be doing wrong?I usually play healers but I really wanna get this sorted and play my assassin to the best of his abilityThanks for your time cheers

Revenga

03-05-2010, 02:08 PM

I'm in the same boat, but I only have Fabled, no raid gear, no new masters, and I only have 139 AA at lvl 89. I started playing the game 2 months ago and just hit 80 3 days before the expansion. I'm trying to get more AA's now and fiddle with casting order, but I still hit a consistent 3k dps which sucks. On bosses, I spike higher, as I have more time and get off a pretty good Concealment chain. I usually don't bother with concealment on trash as it dies quick. Should I use Concealment more? I open with debuffs and dots and then just start working through my CAs. I have ACT set to make an audible bell when my auto attacks go off. I try to time 2 CAs between the dings. I know that a big chunk of my issue is gear and aa's and I'm trying my best to work on the AA part. I think there has to be a better order of running my CAs though. I have 3 steps left in Epic Repercussions, but it's hard to get a group to take a low dps Assassin along for the run and I'm in a small guild.

Daggers

03-05-2010, 08:41 PM

There are a few important princiles behind Assassins that help our DPS...First of all, Autoattack is your friend. 2/3 of your DPS is going to come from autoattacks. Time them well. As was pointed out, there are autoattack timer bars you can get via some custom UIs. Another trick might be to download ACT (Advanced Combat Tracker) from Eq2interface.com. it reads logs and parses data, yada yada...you likely know what it is. It also has a nifty ability to put in custom triggers. For instance, you can set a sound to go off everytime your log puts the words 'soandso HITs <target>' and even 'soandso CRITICALLY HITS' <target>' if you want a different sound for your crit hits. Using this method is a good way to "train" yourself to waiting for the autoattack timer to run its course. Spamming combat arts actually hurts your DPS due to the pause and global cooldown you get from their reuse timers.Secondly, Crit Chance and Double Attack are key. Before Sentinel's Fate, Assassins could easily raise their Crit Chance via gear. T2-T4 gear had a lot of it on there. Double Attack always took a bit more to raise. However, with Sentinel's Fate, Crit Chance and Double Attack are easy to come by. Even the legendary gear and treasured drops from mobs and quests have high quantities of both. Keep these both as high as you can without sacrificing your own health or AGI.AGI is another important stat. With SF, this key stat holds a lot of importance for us. Used to be STR would affect melee attacks/damage. Now AGI does that, plus helps your avoidance, and your critical mitigation, and power pool. Best of all, AGI is on all the good scout pieces, in rather heavy doses. It's relatively easy to get your AGI up to 1300+ with just quest/broker gear and a few instance drops.Your AA's will come in time, just try to put more focus in the damage ones. If you're a fan of that nonsensical 'Defensive' stance we have, then put points into that to reduce the negative impacts of it, but I'd honestly say avoid all those silly damage mitigation and defensive stance tweaks in favour of DPS. We aren't meant to take out ^^^ heroics 3-8 levels higher than we are...if you want that, play one of those pointless casters. However, with high enough damage, we CAN take out a LOT of the ^ and ^^ up mobs around those levels. After all, a dead mob does no damage. You can stand there and let them hit you if you want, but I prefer to kill them before they get a chance...From what I read, your autoattack seems to be what's hurting you the most. Play with that a bit and just get the timing down. You'll see a major improvement.--<( Daggers Malone )>--

Pnaxx

03-06-2010, 09:26 PM

here is a post from a friend of mine.... Ok, I just wanna say up front. I am not a Swashie, Brigand, Ranger, Troub, Dirge etc. Ya'll know your classes better then I ever will. I'm an Assassin and I love being one. There is nothing I like more then knowing I didn't merely kill something, but I utterly and brutally destroyed it before it even realized it was being attacked. I like me some killin. And that'd be a small problem between me and my agro meter.Anyways, here's a few things I've learned from folks, or readin, or killin, that could probably be applied to all scouts. A lot I have learned from Ladare and a long list of other names, liked or disliked, but all scouts who all can out DPS me at will if they want to.First off Strength is your friend. Str = damage straight up, you hit harder and miss less. STR has a soft cap for damage bonus's at 1000, what that means is that on an average target you will max out addtional damage when you hit 1000 Str, but not to fear if you go over 1000 it helps on raid targets.Agi = had to rethink this, I now know that I have no clue what it really does. Lotta the early stuff said it's the second most important thing after strength. I know it helps avoidance and I seem to do better with it semi high and a lot of good scout gear has agi on it.Int = This is not as important as it used to be with the recent changes in how poisons work but since I am not certain on other scouts abilities I will just let ya know that Int = Spell damage. Spells and Combat Arts are not the same thing. Poison damage is spell damage in effect so Int will boost your DPS it will also boost your DPS if you are a spell using class. Shadow Knights for example use a lot of spells and high INT directly effects DPS in that case.Wis = Resists, this is important for AoE's and such, if you are dead you can't DPS. That being said, don't try to be a tank, but please do try to live through the AoE's. You need to stay on your feet.Sta = Hit Points. If I get hit when I'm in full on offensive mode, I'm gonna die anyway, so who cares? *points up* A few hit points is good, refer to "Wisdom" and please try to live through the AoE's.So...my stats by importance are StrIntAgiWis/StaHere is where I get all conflicted and confused. Speed Speed Speed....except your primary piece of equipment, your weapon, then you want slow.A slow weapon means more time to light off combat arts and when you do hit with it you hit bigger. You though, want to be fast. The faster you are the more combat arts you can light off while your slow weapon reloads. So...You + Speed = YAY!Weapon + Speed = Boooo!Anything you can do to lower your reuse time is good, it gives you more combat arts to use in a long fight. Anything you can do to lower your casting time is good, this also applies to combat arts and the faster they go off the more you can light off, hence, more damage. Anything you can do to lower your recovery time is good. This is that tiny bit of time after you do something before you can do the next something. It's like .5 seconds or some fraction of a second and may not sound like much, but you would be amazed. In a typical raid fight I use someplace around 40 combat arts. That is 20 seconds of DPS. Think about at 5000 DPS that is 100,000 hitpoints of damage.Haste is always good, you get the same big hit from your slow weapon but you get it faster. Yes I know, I just contradicted myself. DPS is sometimes hard to wrap your head around if you like to think like a normal human. A lot of times it's a trade off. Haste directly effects you and is good but my head is gonna explode if I try to explain it because of the whole slow weapon deal. Just trust me...Haste = Yay!Bottom line is this. Get a slow weapon that hits big and has a sweet proc if you can. And anything you can do to reduce casting time, reuse time, refresh time or increase haste is good!CA Damage = BIG YAY! This adds damage to every single combat art you use. Period. It is a direct increase to your DPS, no ifs ands or buts about it. Just do the math. Melee crit and double attack is a point of some debate as to which is more important. The conventional school of thought is Melee crit is everything, but I personally have found that DA is very very close to just as important, so close as a matter of fact that they are basically equal and both critical for DPS. Anything you can do to raise your crit or DA...do it...don't think about it too much unless you take a huge hit in Str or something, Crit and DA trump just about everything but each other so if you can get them take them. Just keep in mind, it's all a balancing act. +1 crit is not better then +100 CA damage, you have to weigh the benefit.One thing you may find helpful is guildchat....Hey everyone What do you think is better Ring A or ring B and see what people say. You can generally get pretty solid advice. Don't be afraid to ask if you aren't sure.What to attacks use and when is a whole different subject I will ramble about later Good question, and I have missed a few things, I'll keep working on this post a bit at a time. I never realized how much there is till I started writin it down.The +DPS mod is important but not as important as the other stats. It only affects your auto attack and is at a rate of 80% per point, or 1 point to DPS = .8% increase or +120 DPS = 100% damage increase on auto attacks effectively doubling it. This is a very good thing but again, while haste for example only affects auto attack, a much lower haste increase makes a much bigger impact on DPS and here is why. If I attack once every 10 seconds at 1000 due to my DPS mod and miss once I don't get another hit in for another 10 seconds.If I only hit for 500 but hit every 5 seconds I still only do 1000 every 10 seconds, no difference until I get that one miss. Now in the same 10 seconds I get 500 damage instead of 0.Over 20 seconds scenario A - Two 1000 point swings 1 miss overall = 1000 dps that is one hit and one miss.scenario b - Four 500 point swings 1 miss overall = 1500 dps that is three hits and one miss.So yes, while the DPS mod will increase your overall damage. Remember, you are a scout, you are small, fast and brutal. Leave the nukes to the folks in the rear. I know I have big hit's, I think we all do, but they come sorta natural by class, you really don't have to worry about that much except to get your Adept III spells and as many Masters as you can but purdy much everyone knows about that bit.I'm trying to remember as much as I can and jam it all into this post, I'm sorry it's going a bit long. But, Spells and Combat Arts. I don't think I should be telling folks how to play thier Chars so I'll just tell you what I do and ya'll can take it for what it's worth. For me, it's all about timing.When the tank says "pulling X" or I see them pulling X, the first thing I do is light off self buffs, the little timed yellow ones. Exactly how I do this varies based on the situation. I have them lined up on a hot bar. In a raid or group where the pulls are comming at a steady rate I light off half of my self buffs on the first pull, half on the second pull, then two at a time after that as they refresh. It doesn't matter which ones, but I start every fight with a couple self buffs, this keeps my DPS consistent for the most part and maximizes the amount of time I am throwing actual damage at the mob vs buffing myself.If it's a named, or anything I need to crank up the damage on, I wait until the tank gets to "2" and light off every self buff I have, and as they refresh I light em off as fast as I can, I don't care about being consistant, it's one fight and I lay everything into it.The second thing I do is a specialty attack, I don't know if other scouts have compounding attacks or not like this but if you do, use that first, generally speaking they do insane damage and you wanna do it as many times as you can. For an assassin it's an attack called Fatal Follow-up. it does roughly 2000 damage, but for every stealth attack in the 10 seconds preceding it, it goes up by 2000 in damage. So I light off concealment that puts me into stealth after every CA, then I light off every stealth attack I have back to back then hit fatal follow-up, I have 7 attacks so the 2000 just turned into 16000. Anyway, if you have a specialty attack use it early and often if you can, whatever it may be.The third thing I do is a couple quick debuffs, if they also do damage then bonus for the kill. I use cripple which decreases the mobs defense and torture which does the same, then lay in with every DOT I have, leave the single hit type CA's for later regardless of how much damage they do. I use the DOT's first then everything else I have after that, my theory is that the DOT's are doing damage while I use my other CA's, if I do it the other way around, all those single hits do nothing while I try to start using my DOT's late in the fight. As I see it, I want the DOT's running constantly...even if I drop I am still doing damage with em, my goal is to never see a pause in my damage output. If you look at an ACT graph, my DPS is not spikey at all, it's more of a hill with the top chopped off. I want it high quickly, then straight across the top till the big thingum drops". That is why I open with quick debuffs only, I get all the debuffs in of course because it helps the raid/group but, my job is damage and damage is what I am gonna do. So in order....Self BuffsSpecialty attackOne or two quick debuffsDOT'sEverything elseNow, as far as "everything else goes" I script them all in order to get the biggest hits in first down to the tiniest thing I have, by that time the ones I started out with should be refreshed starting to refresh and I do it all over again. My priority list for refreshed CA would be the same as above to keep getting as much pain in as I can.I've found that once you get through your opening line of CA, just start lighting things off as they refresh, scripting out 30-50 CA's/Spells is no small feat. In a short fight you may never use the entire plan, but on a X4 raid boss you have plenty of time. Anyways, that's how I do it. I'll prolly think of more later, or iffin anyone else see's something I missed or has a question just lemme know. bsolutely, a lot of this is situational sorta, raid fights are normally pretty long so I use the best debuffs first so they recycle faster and I punch em in as fast as I can when they refresh. I have some though that are nice for a few people, like I have one that significantly decreases poison resistance. That helps a lot but not as much as the one that decreases overall defence so I try to pop that one first. I dunno if that makes sense.

Jrel

03-09-2010, 12:24 PM

<cite>Kunamitsu@Splitpaw wrote:</cite><blockquote>Im a 85 Assassin with 5/6 T4 gear mythed (not done new myth quest yet) with 180 AA points and im struggling to get over 10k dps on fights, I average between 5-8.5k. I have played around with the dummies to get my casting order right but I must be doing something wrong all my lvl 70-80 attacks are mastered my 81-85 are expert.Solo my Crit is 79% and double attack is 55%Anyone have any tips or advice on casting order etc or on what I might be doing wrong?</blockquote>You're only 85th level so nothing to worry about. You're getting to up 8.5K so that's pretty good. Depending on who you group with, your parse will vary because their buffs will increase your damage.Now do all of the following at the same time:1. Get your epic. That's a 30% DPS boost on stealth attacks.1. Get your AAs to 200 (hopefully choosing the right ones -- see threads on EQ2 Flames). 1. Get AGI to 1200 at least and keep going till 1400--it increases your damage. STR does nothing now, ignore it. 1. Get Crit Chance to at least 100%, then boost your Crit Bonus and Potency followed by DA. Crit Bonus is an extra percentage of your crit damage. Potency is a multiplier of the base of your abilities and it's awesome. Potency multiples your base damage. My Crit is 103, Crit Bonus 44, Potency 26, DA 42, DPS 91, Haste 42. FYI, I've been told by hardcore raiders to raise Crit Chance to 125--makes sense since a 92 heroic reduced my Crit Chance by 21 % when I was at 86th level.In combat, learn to time your CAs inbetween your 4.0 weapon AutoAttacks. I've got to where I can fire off 7-10 in a row before autoattack, depending on my haste buffs. However, that doesn't mean anything if you're hitting CAs at random. Get your debuffs/bleeds in, this will help weaken the mob. Stealth, use your most damaging CA, stealth, use your next most damaging CA, use Fatal Followup, use whatever hurts the most next (Touch of the Nightshade/Death Blow). Then nail the npc with your hardest hitting CAs downward. Do all of this inbetween Autoattacks. If you're up against multiple opponents, stealth then nail with Stealth Assault, Stealth then nail with Massacre... or just concentrate on one mob. Whatever you see gets you the most damage. My highest melee hit is 101K dmg against Riyadh 89^^^ heroic in the Library, and my highest magic melee hit is 860,000 dmg against 82^^^ heroics in a group in the Hole--wthout an epic.I was much worse than you, but now I can hang (usually outparse) the very well-equipped in instances and in minor raids (WoE); however, against those with mythicals doing 21K+ in a fight and I'm only doing 15-17K, it is still obvious I need my epic. I'm not an expert but the above is working for me.<a href="http://eq2players.station.sony.com/characters/character_profile.vm?characterId=753887108"><img src="http://eq2players.station.sony.com/signature/753887108.png" /></a>

-=Hoss=-

03-09-2010, 02:31 PM

<cite>Daggers@Unrest wrote:</cite><blockquote>There are a few important princiles behind Assassins that help our DPS...First of all, Autoattack is your friend. 2/3 of your DPS is going to come from autoattacks. Time them well. --<( Daggers Malone )>--</blockquote>You do not play an assassin. I'm not even sure you play EQ2. I'm not aware of any class that does 66% of its damage from auto attack. Well, make that no one who plays the class well. Sure if you hit one CA and auto attacked for the rest of every fight it might turn out like that.

-=Hoss=-

03-09-2010, 02:44 PM

To be honest, this post from your friend is so outdated is should not have been re-posted. All its done is muddy the waters. Stats are completely different, there are more modifiers to look at and some have different names. And of course, some things he was just flat wrong about, for instance he didn't seem to have a concept of diminishing returns.<cite>Pnaxx wrote:</cite><blockquote>here is a post from a friend of mine.... A slow weapon means more time to light off combat arts and when you do hit with it you hit bigger. You though, want to be fast. The faster you are the more combat arts you can light off while your slow weapon reloads. So...You + Speed = YAY!Weapon + Speed = Boooo!Anything you can do to lower your reuse time is good, it gives you more combat arts to use in a long fight. Anything you can do to lower your casting time is good, this also applies to combat arts and the faster they go off the more you can light off, hence, more damage. Anything you can do to lower your recovery time is good. This is that tiny bit of time after you do something before you can do the next something. It's like .5 seconds or some fraction of a second and may not sound like much, but you would be amazed. In a typical raid fight I use someplace around 40 combat arts. That is 20 seconds of DPS. Think about at 5000 DPS that is 100,000 hitpoints of damage.Bottom line is this. Get a slow weapon that hits big and has a sweet proc if you can. And anything you can do to reduce casting time, reuse time, refresh time or increase haste is good!get your Adept III spells and as many Masters as you can but purdy much everyone knows about that bit.I'm trying to remember as much as I can and jam it all into this post, I'm sorry it's going a bit long. But, Spells and Combat Arts. I don't think I should be telling folks how to play thier Chars so I'll just tell you what I do and ya'll can take it for what it's worth. For me, it's all about timing.When the tank says "pulling X" or I see them pulling X, the first thing I do is light off self buffs, the little timed yellow ones. Exactly how I do this varies based on the situation. I have them lined up on a hot bar. In a raid or group where the pulls are comming at a steady rate I light off half of my self buffs on the first pull, half on the second pull, then two at a time after that as they refresh. It doesn't matter which ones, but I start every fight with a couple self buffs, this keeps my DPS consistent for the most part and maximizes the amount of time I am throwing actual damage at the mob vs buffing myself.If it's a named, or anything I need to crank up the damage on, I wait until the tank gets to "2" and light off every self buff I have, and as they refresh I light em off as fast as I can, I don't care about being consistant, it's one fight and I lay everything into it.The second thing I do is a specialty attack, I don't know if other scouts have compounding attacks or not like this but if you do, use that first, generally speaking they do insane damage and you wanna do it as many times as you can. For an assassin it's an attack called Fatal Follow-up. it does roughly 2000 damage, but for every stealth attack in the 10 seconds preceding it, it goes up by 2000 in damage. So I light off concealment that puts me into stealth after every CA, then I light off every stealth attack I have back to back then hit fatal follow-up, I have 7 attacks so the 2000 just turned into 16000. Anyway, if you have a specialty attack use it early and often if you can, whatever it may be.The third thing I do is a couple quick debuffs, if they also do damage then bonus for the kill. I use cripple which decreases the mobs defense and torture which does the same, then lay in with every DOT I have, leave the single hit type CA's for later regardless of how much damage they do. I use the DOT's first then everything else I have after that, my theory is that the DOT's are doing damage while I use my other CA's, if I do it the other way around, all those single hits do nothing while I try to start using my DOT's late in the fight. As I see it, I want the DOT's running constantly...even if I drop I am still doing damage with em, my goal is to never see a pause in my damage output. If you look at an ACT graph, my DPS is not spikey at all, it's more of a hill with the top chopped off. I want it high quickly, then straight across the top till the big thingum drops". That is why I open with quick debuffs only, I get all the debuffs in of course because it helps the raid/group but, my job is damage and damage is what I am gonna do. So in order....Self BuffsSpecialty attackOne or two quick debuffsDOT'sEverything elseNow, as far as "everything else goes" I script them all in order to get the biggest hits in first down to the tiniest thing I have, by that time the ones I started out with should be refreshed starting to refresh and I do it all over again. My priority list for refreshed CA would be the same as above to keep getting as much pain in as I can.I've found that once you get through your opening line of CA, just start lighting things off as they refresh, scripting out 30-50 CA's/Spells is no small feat. In a short fight you may never use the entire plan, but on a X4 raid boss you have plenty of time. Anyways, that's how I do it. I'll prolly think of more later, or iffin anyone else see's something I missed or has a question just lemme know. bsolutely, a lot of this is situational sorta, raid fights are normally pretty long so I use the best debuffs first so they recycle faster and I punch em in as fast as I can when they refresh. I have some though that are nice for a few people, like I have one that significantly decreases poison resistance. That helps a lot but not as much as the one that decreases overall defence so I try to pop that one first. I dunno if that makes sense.</blockquote>I deleted the stuff that should not have been posted. One exception to what he said though, he is stupid to be using his conceal chain before dots and debuffs. I laugh when I think of who the intended audience must have been.

On3iron

03-09-2010, 04:44 PM

<cite>Daggers@Unrest wrote:</cite><blockquote>2/3 of your DPS is going to come from autoattacks.</blockquote>This made me lol. Try 30% instead. If you autoattack is doing that much, your casting order really stinks.

Lethe5683

03-15-2010, 05:13 AM

<cite>Pnaxx wrote:</cite><blockquote>here is a post from a friend of mine....</blockquote>That post is outdated.