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.