Assassin rant

As someone who plays and league starts exclusively assassin (in hardcore) for the last few years, I am very disappointed with the rework. I was waiting for a rework for years and this is what we got...

First of all, many people saying assassin is fine say "if you put 100 mirrors into it, its good". That applies to every ascendancy... In fact, occultist is just as good if not better for oneshotting bosses.

Why are slams so good as a league starter? Because they have high base damage on a budget and work very well with HP and endurance stacking tanky classes. In short, it is reliable and predictable. You can turn off your brain. If you see yourself losing hp, you logout.

Why is assassin not allowed to be good starter? Assassins situation in the passive tree is so awkward. You don't have built-in synergy with neither life nor ES stacking. You have to travel super far to get to block/fortify. Getting a reliable source of endurance charges is rather impossible and forces you into enduring cry. Yeah, an assassin screaming at their victims sounds spot on.

"Assassin" in any rpg is the stabby guy that dual wields fast tiny pointy weapons. That is the power fantasy of assassins. The ascendancy barely touches that thematic at all besides some crit and poison stuff, which funny enough is better done by pathfinder in most if not all cases. Some ideas:

-Make block easy to cap when dual wielding. It is really CRINGE that shields are the superior option for both offense and defense in 99.9% of cases over dual wielding.
-Making elusive more balanced around the middle ground instead of it being so all-or-nothing and awkward to use. At least make it expire in the same amount of time no matter the % increased elusive effect. When stacking elusive effect there is nothing more annoying than being on that lower 50-0% end of elusive effect.
-Why not bake in some damage reduction somewhere? Something along the lines of enemies deal 1% reduced damage per poison on them capped at X.
-Make perfect agony actually good? Again, it is just too hard to make it work.

Afraid of trickster stealing it shit with FF? This whole "but that would make trickster so op" is so annoying. They can do whatever they want to stop trickster from abusing assassin nodes as game devs. There is no reason to make assassin/sabo suffer just because trickster is too strong. Instead of getting some out of the box defensives, we get a node which allows for gimmicky self poison/bleed/ignite stuff and elusive on crit... on the ascendancy which is already likely using nightblade.

The "more crit when enemy is low or not low" nodes are rubbish. Reminds me of D4 "more damage when X" which everyone made fun of. The fact that we have to path through them to get to opportunistic is a huge nerf. If you use daggers you are already overcapping crit without any effort if you go for crit multi passives. Dont get me started if you want to use ambush as a core exertion skill. All that extra chance to crit is wasted, and a 100% crit multi isnt that much for 2 ascendancy points, you can get culling strike on crits for 1 freaking passive point in dagger mastery ffs.

Deathmarked would have been a good fixer for accuracy issues but again, it is gated by a terrible node. 2 ascendancy points for +1 power charge and some power charge generation when generating power charges is extremely easy already for assassin and again, wasting chance to crit that overcaps.

Conditional damage/defense is generally bad, especially defense. It is unreliable. If I get oneshot in a frame I cannot logout. If I want to maximize elusive, I have to constantly pay attention to it. So basically high risk, low reward.

As of now, ggg's vision of assassin seems to be the ascendancy which is just an enabler to crit with stuff that has no synergy with crit, poison with stuff that has no synergy with poison, and get elusive with stuff that has no synergy with elusive. If assassin isn't the dagger hit based attacks user, who is it then? Might as well delete phys damage dagger bases at this point.

Thanks for listening to my Ted talk.

This is why I didn't bother seriously playing a melee assassin in mercenaries league until I could get the impossible escape jewel near the "blood magic" keystone, which gives you huge block nodes. That jewel a few months after league start was 50 div (svalin was 100 div) because everyone wanted it, which for a "casual" like me was not chump change.

I then took my new block cap and pathed myself to pick up iron reflexes, because it's only a matter of time when (not if) if you die with evasion gear on.

If I bother playing a shadow or ranger build this league that wears a shield, I will make the same choice. Low or no block builds are generally unplayable for me in POE1 in the vast majority of situations, unless it is something super safe like minions or wand totems.

Hit-based melee attack assasins are largely unchanged from the 3.2.7 "rework". The same advantages and disadvantages are still there. The recoup on physical damage intake is irrelevant because you can't recoup when you are dead, which happens often on red life builds.

Yeah... Was hoping Sin would get something good this league, but nope... This was just mud being thrown at a wall and see if it sticks.

Well, it's not sticking on my end.

40% recoup, but it's phys only, and like mnieradko said, Sin is so squishy that I barely see any recoup, because I'm already dead.

Elusive is, was and remains a PITA, there's a reason why Withering Step was used, so we could FINALLY have some consistency with it. Sure Mistwalker got buffed, but the lack of consistency makes it terrible. Oshabi's Bloodline 50% chance for Elusive to be removed, is another conditional that simply was not welcome. Why is this behind RNG?

The change to Ambush and Assassinate is interesting, finally one can take advantage of the first 50% mob life, instead of the previous Full Life condition.

GGG needs to take a look at not just the ascendancy again, but also Sin's crit/poison synergies.

Update after playing the new rework.

Shadowed blood feels strong and is great to pseudocap chaos res but the gameplay is still nowhere near what I would expect an assassin class to be. The new opportunistic less damage taken also makes me feel very tanky. Still, I dislike having to path through the crit nodes for it as it forces me to add some crit stuff to my build when I might not want to do that.

I have realized just how bad nightblade and mistwalker are by not using them compared to previous leagues. Having on demand elusive+phasing with withering step feels a 100 times better. It is so sad that you have to kneecap yourself if you want to scale elusive.

As someone who exclusively plays assassin from start of League to end of league, I 10000000000000000000% agree that this rework was incredibly disappointing.

It feels worse than the previous version of the ascendency because of just the generic damage/crit multi scaling for Poisson and power charges being removed

4 nodes being locked behind 4 points for no reason one of which is entirely a dead node

Assasination style being tied to conditionals you can't control feels horrendous it could have literally just been more 100% crit chance + 100% more crit multi while on full life or while on low life and it would have felt infinitely better to click

Shadowed blood, while the unaffected by damaging ailments is nice, the 40% phys recoup makes no sense I'm already weak to big phys hits with no phys reduction in the area of my ascendency how is this helpful

Mistical infusion could be nice but rune daggers don't get power charges so you don't get any benefit of stacking power charges with it if you want the 9% base crit like you could have in 3.26

Poison and crit have zero synergy outside of perfect agony and death adder which already feel under whelming because of how restritive they are

Having the oshabi bloodline get a way to refresh elusive in the same update just feels like a insult

I just don't understand most of the decisions made there's no way someone playtested tested a 4 voidstone attempt and went this feels good

I know the devs can do better I've seen them do it multiple times but I just can't understand why every single time it's assassins turn to get some love they just drop the ball

Edit: I realized this sounded a little aggressive to be clear I have no hate towards the devs. This is just frustrations that have built up over almost a decade.

The changes really arent great. It went from being one of the worst ascendancy to being one of the worst haha.

the bloodlines are pretty lame as well

i would like people - numerous mind you - that heralded these changes as 'they are great, you just cannot see it' to step out and share their experiences

imo - this is one of the worst reworks so far. Assassin has nothing unique. it is all crit this, conditional that + all damage can poison

tried my best to theorycraft build for this league - wanted to do poison/ignite bow (thus putting some distance between me and dangerous things). but the numbers just werent there. or rather - for the same budget and effort EA Glad/Champion (sic!) was outright better in every aspect

Glad has its lucky block (and few duds), Guardian has my personal best node (100% life regen every 4 seconds) that you can make your entire character around (and also, few duds), Sabo has mini-Nimis, cooldown reduction and blind. Assassin has a cool mugshot photo where he kinda looks like pneumatic dagger

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sidtherat#1310 wrote:

i would like people - numerous mind you - that heralded these changes as 'they are great, you just cannot see it' to step out and share their experiences

Played assassin as my league starter and my gameplay experience was just great tbh. Kinda an expected outcome with the overall good ascendancy changes.

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this is one of the worst reworks so far

The first sabo rework was way worse tbh, and they kinda salvaged it with the second rework.
New chieftain is also pretty bad, not in terms of power, but if we compare it to the old one. There have been lots of worse changes across other classes.

The entire right and bottom left side of the tree are so bad early on. I would love if GGG put some work in actually making the tree good for archetypal gems for the starting classes. Put in some early syngergies for viper strike, double strike, flame arrow, and other stuff because the way the tree is now, you either do poisonous concoction or suffer for 50 levels as every skill gem doesn't do enough damage and costs a hell ton of mana more than it needs too.

I am struggling to see the assassin's unique niche. I think only 1 or 2 nodes are things that I want to get that can't be found on a jewel, and even then the numbers just aren't there.

Like assassin feels like it doesn't really do anything of note. The only good thing it does is +1 power charge, and... then for getting that you get 40% recup, buggy elusive, and like a bunch of crit multi if you are melee, base spell crit if you aren't.

If I had to hazard a guess it is the worst poison ascendancy in the game, because pathfinder, occultist, and champion exist.

For example, the damaging ailment immunity is great, but a lot of things that feel like ailments aren't. I think this only applies to bleeding, ignite, and poison. it should have things like corrupted blood and rare monster modifiers like mana siphon. Also a lot of bosses leave burning ground on the ground or burning oil, so you might think great, I don't need to worry as much about regen and then instantly die to like something that looks and acts like ignite or poison but isn't.

Or the node that says all damage poisons. It needs something more. Something like enemy action speed is slowed by X while poisoned by you, or enemies within your light radius are poisoned every X seconds.

Or like what if assassin just had a node that said melee skills have +10 to gem level and + 50% quality or something. Every Time I look at this I have to ask why isn't elusive tied to the recoup node? other classes get free melding or free fortify, minion lifesteal, or flask charges that sustain flasks. but assassin has to spend 4 points to get some of the worst defensive combos in the game.

I feel like forbidden flesh and flame existing made it so none of these nodes can every be good because trickster and saboteur are just better in every way.

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sidtherat#1310 wrote:

i would like people - numerous mind you - that heralded these changes as 'they are great, you just cannot see it' to step out and share their experiences

Didnt herald any changes but from my (SSFHC) Poison Assassin is good. Im also playing one now. (But I probably kind of messed up the build in going for Divine Flesh & Incandescent Heart as it costs too much. Dont think I would do that again. Too weak vs phys.)

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sidtherat#1310 wrote:

imo - this is one of the worst reworks so far. Assassin has nothing unique. it is all crit this, conditional that + all damage can poison

tried my best to theorycraft build for this league - wanted to do poison/ignite bow (thus putting some distance between me and dangerous things). but the numbers just werent there. or rather - for the same budget and effort EA Glad/Champion (sic!) was outright better in every aspect

Glad has its lucky block (and few duds), Guardian has my personal best node (100% life regen every 4 seconds) that you can make your entire character around (and also, few duds), Sabo has mini-Nimis, cooldown reduction and blind. Assassin has a cool mugshot photo where he kinda looks like pneumatic dagger

Poison Artillery Ballista should be good. Would have been my #1 choice for Assassin if I wouldnt have wanted to try new thing (Fusillade).