Hello, Solo-raiders! 👋
Welcome to Hero’s Path, a new series where we take a deeper look at one of the game's specializations and break down what makes them tick. We’ll talk about their skills, mechanics, strengths, weaknesses, builds, and everything in between. Basically, this is the series where we say “Here’s a knife, here’s how you use it, now go have fun!”
There’s also one important thing to keep in mind before we get started: everything we talk about here represents the current state of the specialization. Things can and probably will change as development continues, especially when it comes to numbers and balance (and names, because everybody sucks at naming things).
With that out of the way, let's talk about one of our sneakiest little problems:
The Assassin is a combo-based Rogue specialization with a heavy focus on poison, toxins, and sustained damage. The main idea behind the spec is pretty simple: keep your combo going, make your skills stronger, stack up those nasty poisons, and slowly make your target's life absolutely miserable.
The core of the Assassin is its Combo system. Certain skills will transform into stronger versions when you keep your combo going, meaning your rotation isn't necessarily about repeatedly pressing the same buttons. Instead, you're trying to build your way toward stronger and stronger versions of your abilities while making sure you don't accidentally break the chain. And yes, you can break the combo. In fact, sometimes you’ll have to. Using certain abilities will interrupt your current combo and send your skills back to their starting versions. We’ll expand on this further down!
For resources, Assassin has two main ones: Energy and Poison Charges. Energy is the resource you spend to use your skills, and if you've played the Warrior or Shaman in the demo, you should already be familiar with how that works.
Poison Charges are a little different. They’re specifically tied to one of the Assassin's signature abilities, Poison Bomb, and you can currently store up to 10 Poison Charges at a time. Assassin has access to several different types of poisons that can be applied through their skills and various infusions. Deadly Poison and Caustic Poison are two examples, and they can stack together to create some pretty nasty damage-over-time effects. A big part of the Assassin's damage comes from setting these effects up and then making your comboed abilities hit even harder.
Poison Bomb is one of the Assassin's signature abilities and, more importantly, the main spender for your Poison Charges. When you cast it, all of your Poison Charges are consumed, and the more charges you've built up, the more damage you're going to get out of the ability. Poison Bomb also applies Caustic Poison, giving you another source of damage over time on top of the initial hit.
So, you're basically spending all those charges you've been carefully building up to turn your accumulated toxins into one very unpleasant surprise. Once Poison Bomb is used, your Poison Charges go all the way back to 0, meaning you'll have to build them up again. This creates another loop within the Assassin's gameplay: build charges, maintain your combo, manage your poisons, and eventually decide when it's time to drop the bomb and start building everything back up again.
Now that we've talked about one of Assassin's big signature abilities, how about we look at one of their combo chains?
Viper Slash is a skill that deals damage while also giving you 1 Poison Charge. On its own, the damage isn't anything particularly devastating, but if you maintain your combo, Viper Slash evolves into Viper's Bite. Viper's Bite deals almost double the initial damage of Viper Slash and, instead of giving you a single Poison Charge, it stacks 3 Poison Charges for your next Poison Bomb.
This is where the Assassin starts becoming a little more interesting.
With a full Energy bar and an optimized rotation, you can use this combo around three times before running out of Energy and being forced to break it. Alternatively, you can use it once or twice while weaving in other abilities, depending on what you're trying to accomplish with your build.
But it only gets more devastating from here. Let’s look at a three skill combo:
Much like Viper Slash, Infection deals damage and stacks 1 Poison Charge. In fact, the two abilities deal the same amount of damage (for now, anyway). The difference comes when you maintain the combo:
Infection evolves into Contagion, which deals around 1.5 times the damage of Infection and stacks 2 Poison Charges. If you continue the combo, Contagion evolves into Virulence, Virulence deals more than double the damage of the original Infection, stacks another Poison Charge, and also applies Deadly Poison for a few seconds by itself.
That combination gives the ability some pretty serious potential for sustained damage, especially when you're already building other poison effects on your target. But here’s the truly unique thing about this skill combo: Using these abilities doesn't break your previous combo.
Contagion, Virulence, and Infestation can be woven into your rotation without resetting the combo you've already been building, and they also generate Energy. That makes them extremely useful for stretching out your other combos and squeezing as much value as possible out of your rotation. So while you might initially look at Infection and think “Okay, it's just another Poison Charge generator,” there's actually quite a bit more going on once you start combining it with the rest of the Assassin's kit.
Of course, the Assassin isn't limited to just one way of playing. Through the Mastery system, you can specialize your build and push different aspects of the Assassin even further.
Would you like your Deadly Poison to be even more devastating? How about upgrading it until it is Necrotic Poison? Want to infuse your Poison Bomb with Hydra Venom? How about more survivability in exchange for a Poison Charge? What if what you actually want are more Poison Charge Stacks? Or maybe you want to go all-in on the combo system and make breaking your combo so painful that you'll think twice before pressing anything that interrupts it?
There are plenty of ways to shape your Assassin, with different twists and turns that can make the spec fit your personal playstyle. Whether you're looking to optimize every bit of damage, build around a specific mechanic, or simply pick the abilities and upgrades you think are the coolest, there's room to experiment and make the Assassin your own. We're especially excited to see what builds you guys come up with!
Rather than just telling you that Assassin is a sustained-damage spec, we thought we'd show you. So, here's an example of a 2-minute single-target damage profile from one of the builds you can create.
As you can see, Assassin isn't necessarily about one giant explosion of damage. It's about keeping the pressure on, maintaining your combo, managing your poisons, and making sure your damage never stops until your enemies drop.
Look at that, you made it to the end!
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Thanks for the support, and see you in the next one 😉