Not sure I understand the purpose of Assassin

[Rithm Fluffderg]

The other three classes generally make sense.

Paladin is the strong warrior who is built around fighting both on land and in water and has a disadvantage at range.
Necromancer is the spellcaster built around fighting at range and having (generally) the most mana to destroy his enemies with, and subsists off of the deaths of his enemies
Crusader is somewhere between these two, a spellcaster with a bit of grit to make it through those tough times, built more to survive than anything.

Normally, I would think that the Assassin is meant to turn the game into a stealth game, where you focus on sneaking in the shadows and surprising your enemies from behind when they least expect it. Even her passives seem to support this idea. And yet it doesn't work that way at all. Hide breaks as soon as you move, enemies don't seem to patrol so much as wait for you to come to them, and I'm pretty sure as soon as the enemy spots you, hiding doesn't work anymore. Backstab has its uses outside of stealth because, as near as I can tell, it works with any weapon so long as you hit the target from behind.

It just feels weird. It seems like they had a good idea with the Assassin and then never did anything with her.

At least she completes the alignment balance - she's the Evil Warrior to Paladin's Good Warrior, just as the Necromancer is the Evil Spellcaster to the Crusader's Good Spellcaster. Even so, it feels like she's lacking a distinctive element.

[Smkn-G1]

Assassin is the hard mode character. This character was designed specifically to have no synergy between combat and passives. It's about deliberately making that choice to gimp yourself in order to make the game more difficult.

Much like the man who wears an eye patch even though both his eyes work... it's about going 1 step beyond just thinking about being a pirate, and taking actual steps to become one.

[Rithm Fluffderg]

Originally posted by SmokeMcCloud:

Much like the man who wears an eye patch even though both his eyes work... it's about going 1 step beyond just thinking about being a pirate, and taking actual steps to become one.

You mean like how pirates used it to preserve nightvision in one eye so that when they had to run below decks for any reason, they could flip up their eyepatch and be able to see what's going on rather than stumbling around in the dark waiting for nightvision to kick in?

Since, you know, they had an actual purpose for them, it wasn't just for the aesthetic.

I really doubt what you're saying about the Assassin, too. It don't really see a lot of evidence supporting that notion.

[WickedRequiem]

Well, this game had pvp originally (not sure how active that is at this point...)

That stealth was pretty effective in PvP (although not exactly ideal in PvE).