Assassin Guide

Basics

An Assassin's Place
The assassin is a hit-and-run expert. Capable of moving in, dealing a substantial amount of damage, then retreating to safety, assassins provide a means to deliver spike damage by those who utilize them correctly. Armed with fast hitting daggers, medium grade armor, and high energy regeneration, the assassin can hit quick and hard.
Note that most players in PvE find assassins as more of a liability than something useful, as they can easily die often if not properly utilizing their shadow disciplines correctly, as well as adding additional Death Penalty. This often places huge pressure on the party's healers, and many groups will not accept Assassins. However, certain assassin tanking builds do exist and work effectively on small mobs, for example, a combination of Critical Eye and Way of Perfection as well as a maxed critical strikes attribute can make them even more effective tanks than warriors.

Being an Assassin
Primarily being a melee combatant, a large number of players play the Assassin like a Warrior. However, with less armor, no absorption, and without a shield, they usually do not fare as well as their melee bretheren. As a result, many PvE groups actively ignore assassin primaries all together or restrict the number of them in the group. Do not perpetuate this generalization and know how and when to pull out. Repeat the mantra: "I am not a tank."
Furthermore, playing the Assassin profession requires you to keep several things in mind:

Longer chains aren't always better
The Assassin's strength is in its high-damaging and condition-causing dagger chains. Be aware that the chain can be easily broken; an interrupted or blocked attack will often stop your spike altogether. As such, keep the chain short, as the longer it is, the more opportunities to break it. Try to fire off the entire chain as quickly as possible as delays (such as waiting for Energy) merely allows the target to put up defenses.

Know what and when to strike
The Assassin must know exactly what to attack, and when to do it. Target lower armor foes, such as supportive spellcasters, first. These are often vital to the enemy team and taking them out fast will deprive the enemy of healing, protection, damage or other support. Also, don't be afraid to wait for the perfect attack opportunity. For example, attacking a Priest of Sorrows after it has used Mark of Protection ensures the target can't use the enchantment on itself.

Manage your energy effectively
Energy is tight for an Assassin, as a full attack chain will leave you dry. Bring energy management skills if you need to. Examples include the Lotus line of skills, Critical Eye, Critical Strike, or even a higher Critical Strikes attribute. Again, running out of energy mid-chain slows your spike, allowing your target to defend itself.

Know when to run
An Assassin must know when to retreat. Most Assassin attacks aren't designed with reliable damage-per-second, so an Assassin with a recharging chain is an easy target. Effective Assassins should bring a couple of defensive skills to retreat to safety, then attack again at the right time. Consider using strong self-heals or retreat shadow steps for this purpose.

Risk evaluation
The Assassin is a profession that is extremely sensitive to sudden changes in the battlefield. An unexpected enemy maneuver might require you to delay your attack, retreat to safety or even abandon a chain entirely mid-spike. Stay aware of what skills the enemy is using, and be wary of foes attempting to take advantage of your chain's cooldown. As such, it is extremely important to keep a keen sense of situational awareness, a skill that can be developed with practice.

Don't try to absorb damage
It's not a good idea to make a tanking build for the Assassin for general play, as most defensive skills are either Enchantments or Stances. These are very easily negated by foes, leaving you open to attack. However, some exceptions exist, but they are relatively specialized and depend on small enemy groups that generally have little variety.

Attribute Summary

Critical Strikes:
Increasing points into this will raise the inherent chance to land a Critical hit with a weapon attack. The increase is a mere 1% whereas the increase gained by increasing an associated weapon skill is closer to 1.4%, meaning that if your goal is to gain maximum potential for critical hits, it is better to raise your weapon skill before raising Critical Strikes. However, whenever an assassin lands a critical hit, they gain anywhere from 0-3 energy, based on the number of ranks in this attribute. See Critical hit for more information on critical hits improve damage.

Dagger Mastery:
Most of the dagger chain attacks are found here. The chance for a Double strike, where you strike an opponent twice regardless if the attacks actually hit, is also increased by raising this attribute. For every rank you put in this, you increase the chance of this happening by 2%. Double strikes automatically occur whenever you use a Dual Attack.

Deadly Arts:
This attribute primarily includes many non-dagger related offensive skills and debuffing hexes. Most skills in this attribute line are particularly useful for countering defenses raised by the enemy, such as kiting or blocking.

Shadow Arts:
This attribute contains more defensive and self-healing skills, but it also contains a few offensive skills. Many skills covered in Shadow Arts are designed to either increase your survivability, or to augment your ability to complete your chain.

Equipment

Armor & Runes

Assassin armor provides a number of unique bonuses.
- Nightstalker's Armor provides an armor boost while attacking.
- Infiltrator's, Saboteur's and Vanguard's Armor provides protection against specific types of physical damage.
- Shrouded Armor provides extra Energy, which is useful for those costly chains.
- Valkyrie's Armor provides extra health, reducing your fragility.

It is helpful to have runes on your armor but usually its best to stay away from Superior and Major runes. These runes reduce your maximum Health, making you more fragile than you need to. Counter this loss with Vigor and Vitae runes if used.

Weapons
The assassin's usual weapon is the daggers. Requiring both hands and having low base damage, their primary advantage is speed. With dual strikes and double strikes in addition to a fast attack speed, any buff that adds damage to each hit will find quite an improvement when paired with daggers. Vampiric and Zealous weapon mods can easily compensate for the pip of degeneration as long as the assassin keeps landing blows. However, requiring both hands, there is no room for a defensive shield or energy granting offhand item.
Many assassins will also choose a non-dagger weapon with a high variance in damage. The goal is to raise the chance of critical strikes, thereby using the highest damage the weapon can produce more frequently.

Plan of Attack

The attack chain
Effective Assassins always remember their sequence of attacks:
1. Lead Attacks, then
2. Off-Hand Attacks, finally
3. Dual Attacks

With only a few exceptions (such as Palm Strike, Black Spider Strike and Falling Spider), many attack skills will specify that they MUST follow one of these attacks. Remember that when a skill's conditions are met, its icon will light up. If a skill is used without its prerequisites, it will fail or miss, costing you valuable time and Energy.

Skills to use

Spamming
Some skills that are useful for PvE play involve increasing the damage-per-second the Assassin can output. As such, these skills tend to have low recharge times and low energy costs, as well as decent bonus damage or Condition-inducing ability. Examples include the Jagged Strike-Wild Strike-Death Blossom combo for PvE play.

Spiking
However, the true power of the Assassin is in spiking, netting solo kills in seconds. Skills employed in a spiking build tend to have longer recharge times and higher energy costs, but the damage output easily make up for this. Due to the many ways of disrupting a spike, an Assassin must be ready to account for those tactics. Many skills employed by a spiking Assassins include (but are not limited to):
- Offensive shadow stepping
- Snares to slow down running targets
- IAS (Increased Attack Speed)
- A method of counteracting Blocking, if necessary
- Assorted skills or attacks that, optimally, inflict:
* Deep Wound
* Bleeding and/or Poison
* Large amounts of armor-ignoring damage
- Reliable self-heals when operating solo
- Methods of regaining energy quickly to complete a spike if necessary

Many effective Assassin builds tend to skip lead attacks, as they delay your ability to use powerful Dual Attacks. Incidentally, one of the spiking Assassin's most valuable assets is the element of surprise - the sooner you can get in, attack your target and get out, the better.


General tactics

PvE
The Assassin can't take damage very well. As such, don't charge right into the fray - leave that job for your team's Warriors. Once foes have begun attacking the tanks, you should get in, fire off your chain, and retreat when necessary, or use a spammable chain that can be repeated on a large number of foes. Use your heavily armored friends to body block foes, allowing you to retreat to safety. Alternatively, use a shadow step such as Return or Death's Retreat to get away fast, as well as placing you closer to your Monks.

PvP
In Player-versus-Player combat, the Assassin tends to place much more emphasis on spiking. Thus, the strategy here is to lurk around the battlefield and target relatively defenseless foes, such as an overextended Monk, enemy NPC's, support spellcasters and so on. Assassins should thus be capable of acheiving solo kills in as little time as possible.

Shadow Stepping

The shadow step is the Assassin's method of teleportation. This is one of the most important tools available, as it allows you to get next to a foe almost instantaneously and thus letting you use your deadly chain. In addition, it also allows you to retreat instantaneously, placing you immediately out of harm's way (for the moment). Additionally:
- Some skills, such as Aura of Displacement, offer both an offensive shadow step and a method of returning to safety.
- Others, such as Shadow of Haste, don't teleport you to an opponent, but can be canceled in emergency situations to whisk you away from danger.
- There are some shadow steps that are random, like Viper's Defense and Heart of Shadow. Be wary when using these are they could place you too close to a waiting foe.
- Finally, some skills like Augury of Death have no immediate effect but will shadow step you to your target at opportune times, allowing you to finish them off.