speaking of assassins after rebalance (core difficulty+)

[Aluvian Darkstar]

is it just me or posions are still useless due to stat bloat on any strong enemies, and most of those you still should aim to kill quickly as otherwise they may destroy your party? and i am yet to sucessfully use target assassination (which is tricky to execute) on anything that doesn't die from a 1 round full attack anyway, so is there even a point?

so far the only cool thing i see in the assassin is Public Execution, as its basically free dazzling display on kill. its just pity that i had to sacrifice all CHA points to get bigger INT (well, since it affects DC of anything an assassin does),

otherwise feels kinda meh. i mean, the way i built it its still a good sneak attacker (and tanky at that), but there are much better level options for just a sneak attacker. i haven't gone farther than Drezen yet, i'm just not sure if i want to continue.

maybe someone completed the game as an assassin and can tell if it get much better?

[hilburnashua]

Nope. It is still terrible. With the new mythic power there is at least a chance that your poison can effect things, but the effects of the assassin poison are so weak (at least until you get your Con poison) that it's pretty unnoticable. Tried making Greybor an assassin. Now, admittedly, he doesn't have the Int for it, but the opponents were beating his DC by far more then 4 so even with an 18 Int it wouldn't have mattered. Would have helped if the bonus to the poison's DC had been +1 per sneak attack die instead of a flat +2. I have him as a slayer 9/assassin 6 so far and it's painful how ineffective he is. I still don't have swift poisoning, which is a problem, and you can only apply the poison to the primary hand weapon, which is bad with Greybor since he is a dual wielder. That you get limited poisons per day just makes it all the worse. Doesn't help that Greybor has a base 20 move either.

For poisons to really work, and the assassin class in general, we would need something like the sniping rules from tabletop so you an poison an arrow, fire from stealth, and then restealth in the same turn and then hope the poison actually effects the opponent and then does enough to make it worthwhile.

I haven't tried doing something like putting a improved invisibility on the assassin, but since it only works on melee weapons, I doubt it is going to make much of a difference. Maybe when the assassin gets the "Hide in Plain Sight" abillty at 8th level although your going to need an extremely high stealth score.
The assassin's AC probably isn't going to be the greatest either which makes it really bad to sneak it up and open a fight with a poisoning feel like a really bad idea.

The level 10 ability, where they take at least one round of ability damage even on a save might make the class not a complete fail . -2 to -4 to Con can be really nasty when the opponent has a lot of hit dice. I do wonder how the Corruptor actually works against a major opponent that not only has immunity to poison but immunity to ability damage. Guess when I get Greybor to assassin 10 I will bring him back out and see how much better it is. But I think your going to need to stack penalties (Evil Eye, shaken, etc) to have much of a chance of poisons effecting anything much beyond Story mode.

[Aluvian Darkstar]

Originally posted by hilburnashua:

I do wonder how the Corruptor actually works against a major opponent that not only has immunity to poison but immunity to ability damage. Guess when I get Greybor to assassin 10 I will bring him back out and see how much better it is. But I think your going to need to stack penalties (Evil Eye, shaken, etc) to have much of a chance of poisons effecting anything much beyond Story mode.

Far as I saw, Corruptor doesn't make ability damage immunity go away. at the very least, i saw logs about poison failing to apply ability damage to undeads and shadows, who most certainly have the immunity against it. So basically yeah, you could poison undeads because of Corruptor, but it wouldn't do jack because ability damage immunity.

i guess i'll just reroll my character into something else. So far poisoning anything seems like a lot of work and mainly for nothing (those fortitude saves on big guys, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. they could win rolling "1" if it wasn't a critical fail). and iirc most big guys later on come with ability damage immunity anyway, so wtf, simple full attack turn seems more useful most the time

[hilburnashua]

I don't really know why they even included Assassin as prestige class, other then the class abilities were probably pretty easy to program. Holy Vindicator would have been a much better, and thematic, class. I would guess they wanted to give something for evil playthroughs but why not Anti-Paladin in that case? Bizarre, and horrible, choice to include.

[Yannir]

Originally posted by hilburnashua:

I don't really know why they even included Assassin as prestige class, other then the class abilities were probably pretty easy to program. Holy Vindicator would have been a much better, and thematic, class. I would guess they wanted to give something for evil playthroughs but why not Anti-Paladin in that case? Bizarre, and horrible, choice to include.

Probably because it was fine, even OP, in Kingmaker, and they probably didn't need to do any real work by adding it. Just copy-paste the class template. But WotR having demons and undead as 99% of enemies kinda screws the class over.

[oburec]

Originally posted by Yannir:

Originally posted by hilburnashua:

I don't really know why they even included Assassin as prestige class, other then the class abilities were probably pretty easy to program. Holy Vindicator would have been a much better, and thematic, class. I would guess they wanted to give something for evil playthroughs but why not Anti-Paladin in that case? Bizarre, and horrible, choice to include.

Probably because it was fine, even OP, in Kingmaker, and they probably didn't need to do any real work by adding it. Just copy-paste the class template. But WotR having demons and undead as 99% of enemies kinda screws the class over.

Kingmaker doesn't include the Assassin prestige class. Neither does the most popular Kingmaker mod with additional classes (CotW).