Assassin changes

Concealment is terrible for lag. Any boost with CB would be lost to its terrible performance in raids.

Plus, the overall boosts from the former potency temp on the left side prestige is lost (as noted by Bord on Discord). This expansion will see the Assassin further behind than ever before. Assassins will get some help from these Crit Bonus additions, but far more needs to be done if Assassins are ever going to see parity with other T1 DPS.

[Mercychalice]

Agreed. They *need* a base damage increase to almost everything, and bumping up Whirling Blades to be somewhat comparable to Makeshift Arrows and rangers' hawks would be spectacular. For some reason though, assassins have seen very little beneficial to them in the last 6 years, at least. I have to admit that this bothers me a lot, because I love my little sin, and absolutely hate the playstyle of the ranger.

I betrayed from Ranger to Sinn just to test all these urban legend complaints and I found that you guys are sooooOOOOOoo right on all stances. Sinns are about 30% behind rangers on the dps side of things. Also note changes to Concealment with out Touching "In Plain Sight" shows that the developer teams need more time for changes to all classes.

I posted this in the scout thread... but figured i should move it over to the Assassin thread since there is one now...

Nice to see some update notes that included Assassins Thank you.

• Enhance: Honed Reflexes will grant Fervor to the caster, if the caster is over level 100.
• Concealment will grant Crit Bonus to the caster, if the caster is over level 100.
• Deadly Focus will grant Crit Bonus to the caster, if the caster is over level 100.

I like the fact that you are trying to make our temp buffs useful again which is great. Although I have a few suggestions.

First, most assassins no longer use concealment, because we get a better version through AA called "In Plain Sight". Concealment and In Plain Sight use the same timer and can not be used together. Therefore, If you could attach the new crit bonus part of the buff to In Plain Sight that would be great. Even with the crit bonus buff to concealment, no assassin is going to use concealment over In Plain Sight. Concealment tends to break stealth very often which leads to broken Stealth Chains.

Crit Bonus being added to some of our less useful buffs is a nice direction, but i am worried that it could be short lived. As we get better geared, and move closer to the Crit Bonus Cap, these buffs could become near useless again. I have always thought that if potency is not capped either should Crit Bonus... That would help with a lot of the disparity that has happened between Melee classes and Casters. Although I do not see you guys reversing path at this current point. Therefore, the least i can ask for is that these buffs also be given equal Crit Bonus Overcap for the Crit bonus that they give. This way, no matter if you are at the Crit Bonus Cap, you will always get the benefit of the Crit Bonus in the Buff. Personally I think all temp buffs for all classes should work this way when there are Caps to Stats.

I was a bit disappointing that it does not appear that Assassins have been given a straight percent increase to their abillities like many other melee classes.

I would like to end by saying the state of the assassin, and melee T1 DPS is still in need of great overhaul. When it comes to named encounters in both group zones and Raids, you guys have been always comming up with new ways for encounters to be PITAs for melee LOL. There are many fights where the raid force has to stand a a certain distance, run around in circles, joust, and other things that tend to make melee dps useless in an encounter. Meanwhile, the Range Caster DPS just stand still and go Pew Pew and rack up huge DPS parses. That is why melee dps had amazing auto attack dps at the beginning of this game. Because we had to make up for the times that we had to run around in circles or stand back out of range of all of our good abilities. Casters had fallen back a bit in DPS and Spell Double attack conversion from spell haste was increased to help them keep up with the T1 Melee DPS. Then the auto attack dps was ripped out from under the Melee DPS... thous leaving us lacking when it comes to ranged T1 DPS classes.

Without bringing back melee DPS, some drastic changes are needed to bring Melee DPS back up to T1 DPS. It should never be at a point where a guild would be better off leaving the melee DPS back at the guild hall because they are useless in many of the encounters.

One last thing... mana drains have been horrible over the past expansion and appear to continue into this new expansion. I personally would prefer that mana drains had no effect on melee DPS, but i know that is not going to happen LOL. Although most mage classes have ways to regain their Mana. Scout DPS used to have a great way to keep mana up... it was called poisons. Yet over the years, the Mental Breach Line of poisons have become ineffective. They could use a boost to the amount of mana that is recovered each time they proc.

[Mercychalice]

Please, If you are going to add Crit Bonus to Concealment, you should also add it to In Plain Sight, since this is a replacement for Concealment, and no assassin I know will use Concealment over IPS. Thank you.

[Mercychalice]

I know I had to fight damn hard (and I mean HARD) this last year to come in usually around third to fifth on the parse, behind both rangers, the monk, the necro, and the wizard in my guild. I will never give up my sin to become a ranger, no matter how much it seems to be unbalanced. Her playstyle is Home to me, where as playing a ranger (I had a separate ranger for a while) made me fall asleep, like it does when I play a caster class. There was no movement, nothing to keep my brain output flowing, on the ranger. Even on fights where some movement was required, it left me doing the bare minimum before Pinterest or YouTube reclaimed my attention, because those were vastly more interesting than playing a ranger to me. #BuffAssassins