Assassins: Final Plea to Assess Outdated Abilities

Over the course of the last couple of expansions, changes have been made to mechanics and itemization which have rendered certain assassin AAs and combat arts less versatile than expected. I have compiled a list of these abilities with recommended changes.

I. Predator's Final Trick

During the Sentinel's Fate era when this ability was introduced for predators, players were most fortuitous to achieve 100 - 120 static potency through itemization and spells. The whopping 52% potency allowed predators to output a ludicrous amount of spike damage during its limited 12s duration. With each successive expansion pack since then, however, the amount of available static potency has come to dwarf the primary benefit of this ability -- the damage boost.

Today, players can easily achieve something in the range of 10k - 12k potency, so the benefit of 52 additional potency isn't noticeable. Most assassins choose to cast it once the ethereal onslaught rune proc clears the recast of stealth attacks + fatal followup if IPS / Concealment aren't unavailable at the time.

Recommendation: Modify it to instead be multiplicative with the player's potency (e.g. 12,000 base potency * 1.52 = 18,240 potency for 12 seconds). Also, change the supporting heroic AA (Enhance: Predator's Final Trick) to increase the multiplicative potency of this ability by 2 per rank.

Alternatively, it can instead significantly increase the player's fervor for the duration.

Right now, dragon claws provides a much greater benefit @ a small fraction of the reuse time.

II. Assassinate

While the damage of this ability is adequate, I feel that the base recast of 5 minutes should be reduced to 1 minute. Ethereal Onslaught already clears the reuse of this ability once every 30 seconds, so the impact on a geared player's parse would be minimal. As an assassin, I hate waiting for the proc to trigger before I'm able to start a new chain.

III. Mortal Blade

I feel that the base damage of this ability is too low considering its high base recast time of 3 minutes. Please reduce it from 3 minutes to 1 minute to reduce the player's reliance on ethereal onslaught or boost its damage considerably (it has the same recast as fusion, afterall).

IV. Frontload (EoF AA)

The main benefit of this ability (increased proc rates) has endured the passage of time, but the additional poison damage hits for a tiny, embarrassing amount of damage. It's clearly not benefiting from any player attributes -- please change it.

V. Dexterous Attacks (Heroic AA)

There's nothing inherently wrong with this ability right now, but its usefulness will diminish when / if more combat art double attack is introduced in the future. Please change it to instead increase the base damage of affected abilities by 100% before other modifiers. Besides, I'm sure that most predators would prefer 1 double-sized assassinate / sniper's shot over 2 smaller ones.

VI. In Plain Sight / Concealment

I feel that the duration of these abilities should be increased from 7 to 10 seconds to account for the massive raid-induced lag. When the raid is stacked with summoners, I can barely cast 3 stealth attacks before IPS expires, producing an ineffectual fatal followup.

VII. Assassin's Flurry (Epic Repercussions ability)

For the longest time, assassins had access to one of the most powerful, desirable epic abilities -- boasting an attribute never before seen on a piece of equipment - flurry. However, the reduction of auto-attack effectiveness with the release of Terrors of Thalumbra and the inclusion of a vast amount of flurry on equipment pieces has rendered the most prominent aspect of our epic ability both common and borderline useless -- virtually everyone is able to cap flurry with little effort (not that it matters since auto-attack is now worth only 3-4% of an overall parse).

Also, I'm fairly certain that the +30% stealth attack damage bonus is lost in the vast sea of today's potency since it's additive.

Recommendations: Replace the flurry bonus with fervor and convert the 30% damage bonus into a separate multiplier (reduce the amount to preserve balance if you absolutely must).

Don't expect much from this tread. Class balancing seems finished for this beta, plus there are so many other classes with much more serious concerns than the assassin.

I'd be happy if concealment was made to work like IPS so right side is actually usable. Increase to ten seconds wouldnt be bad either.

Autoattack and poisons are worthless and hardly worth investing any AA/stats into either, well if there were any places worth putting the AA into anyways

Why not? No action will be taken if these issues aren't brought to the attention of the development team. Also, summoners were changed mid-expansion even though they didn't really need an improvement compared to other classes.

Assassins certainly have less severe problems than other classes, but that doesn't mean that those problems should be swept under the carpet and ignored.

Darchon6 said: ↑

“Why not? No action will be taken if these issues aren't brought to the attention of the development team. Also, summoners were changed mid-expansion even though they didn't really need an improvement compared to other classes.

Assassins certainly have less severe problems than other classes, but that doesn't mean that those problems should be swept under the carpet and ignored.”

cause's there like 10 summoners for every 1 assassin. historically we havent complained about much since we were always pretty solid, winning single target parses and still being competitive on AE encounters. Now we lose both, and have a reason to complain and the usual response is "waah, you're not OP like you used to be"

Today, equally / max geared necromancers, conjurers, wizards, warlocks, beastlords, and rangers (sniper pets + reset items = op) are able to beat assassins by a fairly large margin. The only "dps" classes we're able to beat regularly are brigands and swashbucklers. Yes, they're just that bad and could use some improvements.