Rogue - Assassin Changes

[Severlin]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain 10 Melee Power and +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.


Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks have an "Assassin's Mark" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

Stealthy: You also gain +20%/+35%/+50% movement while sneaking.


Tier Two

Venomed Blades: Now costs 1/1/1 AP. (As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.


Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakening Strikes: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +4 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Strikes: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) You gain 1/2/3 to Maximum Dodge. While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor and gain 2/4/6 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

[bbqzor]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.

I am pressed for time and will offer more detailed feedback later. But I need to know:

Does this round of changes include a fix to a solo rogue assassin being able to both:
1) Assassinate more than one mob from a single use of assassinate, and
2) Avoid automatically agroing other mobs when using assassinate.

If not, those need to be included. They have to do with the interactions with the "new" stealth/awareness system that went in awhile back.

If you need additional details, let me know (post or pm) and Ill make a detailed report including repo information when I have time (when Ill also provide feedback on the changes here).

[Systern]

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

If this is a cut n paste of Improved Feint... Improved Feint has been broken since U14.

(It has the issue where you need to stop the attack chain animation to use it, and also wait 1 tick for the bluff check to happen. If you hit the hotkey while holding down the mouse button, it never fires. If you Click again before the bluff check, that never fires.)

[Severlin]

If this is a cut n paste of Improved Feint... Improved Feint has been broken since U14.

(It has the issue where you need to stop the attack chain animation to use it, and also wait 1 tick for the bluff check to happen. If you hit the hotkey while holding down the mouse button, it never fires. If you Click again before the bluff check, that never fires.)

Thanks for the info. The intent is that the Bluff check would happen as part of the attack and be included in the attack's animation time.

Sev~

[Wizza]

Not impressed.

Giving them 3 PRR and 6 more dodge (when every Rogue is most likely running around with Max Dodge) is very ridicolous compared to every other melee running around with 200.

Also not impressed with the overall changes.

- What's the point of giving Melee power WHILE STEALTHED? They are not gonna attack while in stealth, just Assassinate. You lose the buff as soon as you get out of sneak, pointless.
- Assassin's trick still has an AWFUL LONG ANIMATION.
- Weakness Poison is not something I'd take. Reducing MP by 10, why? I don't wanna get hit at all on a rogue with such low PRR.
- Giving the capstone +4 Reflex save when most of the rogues are now Int rogues is pretty pointless too. They lack DPS, not saves.
- Execute is still worthless. 500 Damage when I'm doing 200 dmg per hit and it disrupts my attack chain is pretty lame. Will see with scaling MP how it is

Not a single buff to Assassinate, a 30s CD insta-kill ability, when BARDS have a 12s insta-kill ability that doesn't need them to sneak forever to get a meaningful DC and uses the highest Skill as DC.

They need more than this.

EDIT: To buff rogues, you need to take a look at TWF compared to THF and SWF, otherwise it will never be enough.

[GusTheMage]

The biggest problem with the rogue build now is not the enhancement tree, but the fact that they get hit by every ranged mob in the game. My hide / move silently skills are close to 100 yet I constantly have my sneak broken by stupid archers. It is very annoying to get right up to a mob and have your stealth broken by some mob not even near the fight.

[Severlin]

Not impressed.

Giving them 3 PRR and 6 more dodge (when every Rogue is most likely running around with Max Dodge) is very ridicolous compared to every other melee running around with 200.

Also not impressed with the overall changes.

- What's the point of giving Melee power WHILE STEALTHED? They are not gonna attack while in stealth, just Assassinate. You lose the buff as soon as you get out of sneak, pointless.
- Assassin's trick still has an AWFUL LONG ANIMATION.
- Weakness Poison is not something I'd take. Reducing MP by 10, why? I don't wanna get hit at all on a rogue with such low PRR.
- Giving the capstone +4 Reflex save when most of the rogues are now Int rogues is pretty pointless too. They lack DPS, not saves.
- Execute is still worthless. 500 Damage when I'm doing 200 dmg per hit and it disrupts my attack chain is pretty lame. Will see with scaling MP how it is

Not a single buff to Assassinate, a 30s CD insta-kill ability, when BARDS have a 12s insta-kill ability that doesn't need them to sneak forever to get a meaningful DC and uses the highest Skill as DC.

They need more than this.

~ The Melee Power lasts for 10 seconds out of stealth. I clarified the text.

~ A reduction of 10 MP is roughly 9.9% damage reduction that works on anyone the monster is attacking, so it works when the Rogue is fighting a boss and helps other characters survive when the Rogue is sneak attacking.

~ Both Assassinate and Coup-de-Grace are 15 second cooldowns. The wiki (and I believe the in game text for the bard ability) are incorrect.

Sev~

[Wizza]

~ The Melee Power lasts for 10 seconds out of stealth. I clarified the text.

~ A reduction of 10 MP is roughly 9.9% damage reduction that works on anyone the monster is attacking, so it works when the Rogue is fighting a boss and helps other characters survive when the Rogue is sneak attacking.

~ Both Assassinate and Coup-de-Grace are 15 second cooldowns. The wiki (and I believe the in game text for the bard ability) are incorrect.

Sev~

You are still asking a Rogue to sneak for 5 seconds to get this buff for 10 seconds. It is not practical to do in the middle of a fight. If we are fighting against a group of mobs, I cannot sneak mid fight and assassinate them, which is why Coup de Grace is so much better. Also, if a rogue is hit, I lose the sneak and I cannot sneak anymore because they see me. This is a buff that you get once per encounter and not even, while Coup de grace can be casted multiple times. Also, in a raid instance as MoD, Wyrm, Peaks, it's just not practical.

I still don't see any self-healing as well. You gave Barb one, every class has one, I'm expecting Rogues to have one as well. And DPS wise, they are still very behind to Barb, pallis and bards.

And TWF is still full of bugs and all around subpar compared to THF and SWF, which makes any improvement to the Rogues null. The range is horrible, the attack animation is horrible as well etc etc. Let's remember also HOW TWF IS THE ONLY FIGHTING STYLE THAT DOES NOT HAVE A +10 MELEE POWER in his feats. Rogues have to sneak for 5 seconds to get it for 10 seconds :rolleyes:

[ValariusK]

Have you decided where an assassin ought to be insofar as the DPS food chain? When able to sneak attack vs when not able to?

One specific suggestion:
Change the assassin's trick to a passive 25% fort bypass. Add to the 12th level assassin core the ability to sneak attack things not sneak attackable, also passive. This avoids questions of animation speed and will make your balancing act much easier in the future.

[Severlin]

You are still asking a Rogue to sneak for 5 seconds to get this buff for 10 seconds. It is not practical to do in the middle of a fight. If we are fighting against a group of mobs, I cannot sneak mid fight and assassinate them,


Correct. It isn't meant for the middle of a fight. It's an opener for solo rogues.



Also, in a raid instance as MoD, Wyrm, Peaks, it's just not practical.


In a raid you should be dealing out tons of Sneak Attack damage so you are probably fine there.



I still don't see any self-healing as well. You gave Barb one, every class has one, I'm expecting Rogues to have one as well. And DPS wise, they are still very behind to Barb, pallis and bards.


Rogues have UMD and don't have Rage preventing them from casting if they need a healing source.



And TWF is still full of bugs and all around subpar compared to THF and SWF,


The specifics of TWF are probably off topic for this thread.

Sev~

[Eryhn]

putting both crit accuracy AND damage into tier 3 (which is I believe the lowest tier of any tree for getting both so far and thus new) is gonna go a long way to promote /3 rogue multi builds but I fail to see what this does for pure or neigh pure rogues which are the one that need the boost.

this'll be a nice boost to some specific multiclass builds that are alreay crazy crit range fotm - people will take rogue 3 for evasion, some sneak attack and the crits and be free to take other stuff than crit in tier4 of their main trees - sure you wanna go there?!?

[Spoonwelder]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity

Assassinate on anything every 15seconds - seems a bit much - I would either lengthen the cooldown OR make it use action boosts to limit the uses.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Either Over powered nearly permanent +10% to dodge OR means nothing on any rogue at dodge cap already

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.
Capstone should add +1 to assassinate

Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)
Not a big fan of on-vorpal stuff - too random especially with the DC calc on the save being nearly useless past level 25 - make it no save and maybe I would take these or change the DC to 1/2rogue+epic levels which would get the DC to workable range)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
All good


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)
ok

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
ok - not liekly to take still to save points for Harper

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.
Interesting makes sense with the venomed blades and SA dmg getting melee power - makes it a toss up with haste boost if my math is correct

Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hit

Is this going to be done in all trees - squinting hard at Kensai
Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.
debuffs to mobs are a waste of time in general IMO UNLESS it works on a boss you will fight for more than 10seconds AND the DC on the poison is good enough to hit a boss.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds
personal opinion here but I hate these types of enhancements as I have to pay way to much attention to the mob healthbar to execute these. the 3W damage is decent enough on it's own but the timing of this to get full benefit is annoying - IMO - others may love that stuff


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.this was good enough as it was - so this is just gravy

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.
See my comments on DC below.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.
skip the PRR add 1/2/3 dodge

Sev~
My thoughts in red above. Key point is that 'Poisoned' needs to land if the rest of the key changes are to work - DC of 10+1/2rogue+Int will be on a decent assassin - 10+10+25(ie. 60Int) - so 45 - that doesn't pass muster from Gianthold on up.

Other than that I like asssassin in the first place so not too many quibles.

[Severlin]

Have you decided where an assassin ought to be insofar as the DPS food chain? When able to sneak attack vs when not able to?


Assassins should have excellent single target DPS when sneak attacking.



One specific suggestion:
Change the assassin's trick to a passive 25% fort bypass. Add to the 12th level assassin core the ability to sneak attack things not sneak attackable, also passive. This avoids questions of animation speed and will make your balancing act much easier in the future.

Interesting suggestion making the fort bypass and sneak attack work as a passive. I'll bring it up with the team.

Sev~

[Spoonwelder]

~ A reduction of 10 MP is roughly 9.9% damage reduction that works on anyone the monster is attacking, so it works when the Rogue is fighting a boss and helps other characters survive when the Rogue is sneak attacking.


Sev~ If the DC was higher - if it worked on bosses - at least up to red named - sure - I doubt any of that is true and for sure won't be under the current DC calculation/

[Severlin]

Not a big fan of on-vorpal stuff - too random especially with the DC calc on the save being nearly useless past level 25 - make it no save and maybe I would take these or change the DC to 1/2rogue+epic levels which would get the DC to workable range)


The ability to give the Poisoned state to enemies works on any hit. The on-vorpal effects are legacy and we wouldn't want to pull them from existing rogues.



Is this going to be done in all trees - squinting hard at Kensai


Yes, as we do passes on additional trees these enhancements will be combined as they have here.



debuffs to mobs are a waste of time in general IMO UNLESS it works on a boss you will fight for more than 10seconds AND the DC on the poison is good enough to hit a boss.


The intent is that the debuff works on bosses and has no saving throw assuming they have gained the Poisoned state from the original attack.



See my comments on DC below.


See my comments above. The "Poisoned" state is transferred to enemies without a save - even bosses unless they have poison immunity.



skip the PRR add 1/2/3 dodge


With Nimbleness the Assassin is likely to be at Dodge cap or near to it.


My thoughts in red above. Key point is that 'Poisoned' needs to land if the rest of the key changes are to work - DC of 10+1/2rogue+Int will be on a decent assassin - 10+10+25(ie. 60Int) - so 45 - that doesn't pass muster from Gianthold on up.

Other than that I like asssassin in the first place so not too many quibles.

Sev~

[Severlin]

If the DC was higher - if it worked on bosses - at least up to red named - sure - I doubt any of that is true and for sure won't be under the current DC calculation/

There is no saving throw for either applying the Poisoned state or applying the MP debuff to affected enemies. Only Poison immunity would interfere with this.

Sev~

[Spoonwelder]

There is no saving throw for either applying the Poisoned state or applying the MP debuff to affected enemies. Only Poison immunity would interfere with this.

Sev~
That makes it worthwhile then along with your other comments - I made the bad assumption that it required the on-vorpal to trigger the poisoned state. My bad.

So overall - thumbs up. Lots of flavor in there and enough stuff that is useable to make someone contemplate the point allocations with a few no-brainers thrown in for good measure.

[ValariusK]

Assassins should have excellent single target DPS when sneak attacking.





Interesting suggestion making the fort bypass and sneak attack work as a passive. I'll bring it up with the team.

Sev~

By excellent do you mean competitive with barbarians, or more like pallies and bards? My take is that melee DPS should go about like this
Very top Barbarians with fighters only slightly below them
Reasoning: Neither fighters nor barbs bring any significant utility to a party beyond their melee capabilities. Even the classic 'tanking' utility has been greatly diminished in the present metagame
Between 1st and 2nd tier: Rogues when able to play 'their game' (ie they're sneak attacking and using assasinate periodically)
Reasoning: Rogues bring some utility to a group---most notably trapping. The other utility they bring others can do almost as well (UMD specifically, I can use heal and rez scrolls in epics in pretty much every build I've ever had)
2nd tier: Rogues most of the time, pallies and bards--monks should fit in here also
Reasoning: Bards bring MASSIVE utility to the table as well as good blue bar self heals, Pallies have hardcore defense and good self-healing capability
3rd tier: pretty much everyone else that melees

To elaborate, I suggested putting the negation of sneak attack immunity in the 12th level core to keep it out of builds that aren't primarily rogue.
Regarding the whole active/passive thing in general though, have you ever studied how many bars typical players have and actually use? This isn't a rhetorical question. You could probably mine a fair bit of useful design information by studying the patterns of key presses and mouse clicks.

[Spoonwelder]

One more question - will there be a cooldown on Weakness poison or are we going to expect that roques will be providing a near permanent 10MP debuff to bosses?

And will multiple assassns poison stack?

[Grailhawk]

I think the later cores 12,18,20 need some melee power.

I also think Rogues need to be able to move at 100% speed while in sneak mode, there used to be a bug that let you stack the speed in stealth enhancements from Ranger, Rogue, and Monk to achieve this, its since been fixed but It was fun and let you play the game a differently then other class.

[Severlin]

One more question - will there be a cooldown on Weakness poison or are we going to expect that roques will be providing a near permanent 10MP debuff to bosses?

And will multiple assassns poison stack?

No cooldown, but no stacking.

Sev~

[Thar]

Rangers needed help more than rogues. and yes rogues need help but nothing below is going to help them not blow up due to lack of hitpoints or prr

[Thar]

And DPS wise, they are still very behind to Barb, pallis and bards.

And TWF is still full of bugs and all around subpar compared to THF and SWF, which makes any improvement to the Rogues null. The range is horrible, the attack animation is horrible as well etc etc. Let's remember also HOW TWF IS THE ONLY FIGHTING STYLE THAT DOES NOT HAVE A +10 MELEE POWER in his feats. Rogues have to sneak for 5 seconds to get it for 10 seconds :rolleyes:

with like 15d6 sneak attack damage they are at the same level of the above. They just can't take a hit like the above or have super dodge like bards.

twf is bugged, whirlwind is broken for twf as melees does like one slow animation hit in a double spin. monks get like 4 hits per 360 rotation. it is a style that is far behind dps and needs melee power or speed boost to attacks. THF is supposed to do the most per hit, sword board should do best defense, twf should do the most dps as your doing more hits. (ie per pen and paper). twf in ddo is far bhind the other styles for a number of reasons, one being light weapon requirements for best to hit.

[Thar]

The specifics of TWF are probably off topic for this thread.

Sev~

it needs to be discussed as it's a problem and rogues are the 2nd most common twf class next to rangers. just like single weapon fighting was a bard thing.

[Spoonwelder]

Rangers needed help more than rogues. and yes rogues need help but nothing below is going to help them not blow up due to lack of hitpoints or prr
Yes on the ranger comment but I call Bull on your points on rogue - there is only a 30 point difference in PRR from light to heavy - I run a TWF pally with 120prr - so the rogue should be able to approach the 60-70 point range (after adjusting for BAB) or a 13-17% difference at that range versus about a 20-25% difference in dodge.

HP there is some truth to that as it's a d4 vs a d10 but you can build a 700hp rogue at end game fairly readily which should be a reasonable figure once you take into consideration the balance of AC/Dodge/PRR (blur, ghostly, displace are common to all).

[FlaviusMaximus]

Really Good Changes:

Changing Assassin's Trick so that it works on all enemies and has no saving throw.

Lowering the AP cost of Damage Boost.

Combining Critical Accuracy and Critical Damage into Critical Mastery.

Raising the health requirement of Execute to below 30% and adding in 200% melee power scaling.

Deadly Poison providing extra DPS and additional reasons to poison enemies.

Suggestions:

Get rid of the 'sneak to gain power' mechanic. I never liked it. Some extra dodge, melee power, and a longer duration isn't going to make doing nothing for 5 out of every 15 seconds any less annoying. Assassins will be a lot more enjoyable to play if that goes away. Simply give Assassins enhancement options for +5 assassinate at tier 5, no strings attached.

Assassin's Trick is looking a lot better, but it will still be horribly flawed if it continues to require this oddly long 3-4 second animation while the character can take no other actions. Make it something that can be done on an attack like Shiv is intended to do with the Bluff addition.



Change the assassin's trick to a passive 25% fort bypass. Add to the 12th level assassin core the ability to sneak attack things not sneak attackable, also passive. This avoids questions of animation speed and will make your balancing act much easier in the future.

This does appear to be an easy work around, but it completely changes the ability. The charm of it now is that it is a 25% fort/sneak attack bypass that the whole party can benefit from. There are enough "me" enhancements in the game. They shouldn't get rid of one of the few "we" enhancements just because it is the easier thing to do.

[Saekee]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.
Please add bonus to assassinate DC


Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
Is this like the Deepwood sniper exposing strike? This is VERY low hanging fruit, very powerful, will greatly benefit assassins as well as splashes, if not more so


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.


Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

I like the poison element--will certain enemies be immune to poison? Will this be coded like monk's Sting of Ninja? Will they work together?

[Saekee]

For all rogues, we had threads going to overhaul them. One suggestion was to reconsider their bonus feats, not just their enhancement trees.
Here is the link to one of those threads (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/455542-Suggestions-for-Assassin-Revamp?p=5532131&viewfull=1#post5532131)

I suggested new class feats for rogues, of the four that they are normally able to select (Improved Evasion, Opportunist, Skill Mastery, etc.). This would give incentives for having more rogue levels. It is this post here (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/447351-Shout-Out-To-All-The-Rogues?p=5412391&viewfull=1#post5412391). See also the feedback from the master assassins afterward. Here is the list:


Improved Precision: Precision feat now bypasses 40% fort
Insightful blade: int to damage with daggers, kukris and staves (this has been covered by Harper tree now)
Heartseeker: Your equipped weapon gains Heartseeker 1. Can be taken multiple times.
Improved assasinate: adds 4 to assasinate DC. Can be taken multiple times.
Ghost: You gain permanent 10% incorporeality. Stacks with all other sources
Detonater: +6 DC to traps, 10% trap setting speed. Can be taken multiple times
Faker: +4 UMD
Cunning: +2 sneak attack die. Can be taken multiple times
Rune arm juryrig: can use Rune arms, but only for imbues
shadow mirror: 6% doublestrike or doubleshot. Can be taken multple times
etc

[QuantumFX]

Can you guys just turn the attribute adjustments to “Whatever stat you use to hit”? It would be nice to have some build diversity.

In fact, can we just change the formula to (Rogue Level + To Hit stat + Seeker Bonuses (or Sneak Attack to hit Bonuses) + Equipment Bonuses + E.D. Bonuses)?


~ Both Assassinate and Coup-de-Grace are 15 second cooldowns. The wiki (and I believe the in game text for the bard ability) are incorrect.

Since you seem to be secretly hoping that Quivering Palm will go away, I’ll just ask: How you hope to fix the absurd DC difference between Assassinate and Coup-de-grace?

Base numbers (Winner: Swashbuckler)
- Assassin: 10
- Swashbuckler: 11 (Average of a d20 roll)

Level adjustment (Winner: Swashbuckler)
- Assassin: 20 (If they’re a pure rogue)
- Swashbuckler: 23 (23 from heroic levels. It’s also worth pointing out that *ANY* multiclass build can get this DC.)

Ability adjustment: (Tie)
- Assassin: Assassinate has INT modifier built into the calculation.
- Swashbuckler: Coup-de-grace has it built in due to perform being a CHA based skill on a CHA based class.

Equipment bonuses: (Winner: Swashbuckler)
- Assassin: +4 from the MoD or Deathworm items
- Swashbuckler: +20 from +Skill items. (And, if you’re a slacker, you can just pop a +15 skill augment and roll with that.)
+2 from Luck items.
+6 from exceptional skill items.

Enhancements: (Winner: Swashbuckler as it's a tier 1 ability.)
- Assassin: +05 Measure the foe (Tier 5)
- Swashbuckler: +04 Investment into Spellsinger/Charlatan. (Tier 1)

Spell buffs: (Winner: Swashbuckler)
- Assassin: None
- Swashbuckler: Greater Heroism: +4 Morale

Epic abilities: (Winner: Swashbuckler)
- Assassin: +06 Shadowdancer twist
- Swashbuckler: +08 Just for 8 levels thanks to Epic Skill feats! +02 Grandeur (Fatesinger), +01 Skill Mastery (Shadowdancer)

[Severlin]

For all rogues, we had threads going to overhaul them. One suggestion was to reconsider their bonus feats, not just their enhancement trees.
Here is the link to one of those threads (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/455542-Suggestions-for-Assassin-Revamp?p=5532131&viewfull=1#post5532131)

I suggested new class feats for rogues, of the four that they are normally able to select (Improved Evasion, Opportunist, Skill Mastery, etc.). This would give incentives for having more rogue levels. It is this post here (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/447351-Shout-Out-To-All-The-Rogues?p=5412391&viewfull=1#post5412391). See also the feedback from the master assassins afterward. Here is the list:


Improved Precision: Precision feat now bypasses 40% fort
Insightful blade: int to damage with daggers, kukris and staves (this has been covered by Harper tree now)
Heartseeker: Your equipped weapon gains Heartseeker 1. Can be taken multiple times.
Improved assasinate: adds 4 to assasinate DC. Can be taken multiple times.
Ghost: You gain permanent 10% incorporeality. Stacks with all other sources
Detonater: +6 DC to traps, 10% trap setting speed. Can be taken multiple times
Faker: +4 UMD
Cunning: +2 sneak attack die. Can be taken multiple times
Rune arm juryrig: can use Rune arms, but only for imbues
shadow mirror: 6% doublestrike or doubleshot. Can be taken multple times
etc


Our class passes will not include additional class feats or class abilities for a variety of reasons. They will mostly focus on the enhancement trees.

Sev~

[Severlin]

Can you guys just turn the attribute adjustments to “Whatever stat you use to hit”? It would be nice to have some build diversity.

In fact, can we just change the formula to (Rogue Level + To Hit stat + Seeker Bonuses (or Sneak Attack to hit Bonuses) + Equipment Bonuses + E.D. Bonuses)?


An important part of the DDO multi-class system is attribute synergies so most of the attribute requirements will stay in place. Unless they don't make thematic sense. I can see the argument, as an example, that Sweeping Strikes might use the better of Dexterity or Strength since the tree is Dexterity based.



How you hope to fix the absurd DC difference between Assassinate and Coup-de-grace?


We don't. We don't want the abilities to be the same, or even necessarily equivalent. We'd rather look at the tree and class as a whole. Bards have to land a control effect but they have an advantages with the Coup De Grace DC. They have support spells but don't have stealth or 15d6 of Sneak Attack.

Sev~

[apep1412]

Our class passes will not include additional class feats or class abilities for a variety of reasons. They will mostly focus on the enhancement trees.

Sev~

Does that include making it so that a rogue can take a bonus generic feat instead of one of their class feats, as in pnp?

[Severlin]

Does that include making it so that a rogue can take a bonus generic feat instead of one of their class feats, as in pnp?

We want to avoid making changes to the base class structure. Our changes are focused on our enhancement trees.

Sev~

[nibel]

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Just want to add +1 to the suggestion to make those two effects passive and in different tiers. Sneak Immunity Bypass I think would be great at the Core 18 (Lethality) instead of 12.

Maybe 10% fortification bypass, +5% fortification bypass for each core enhancement beyond this one.


Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

So, basically every rogue will have free +10 dodge on long fights. Neat. Will the stacks vanish all at once (like Killer), or will they decay over time (like Master's Blitz)?


Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.

I don't think rogues need even more reflex. Rogues have Reflex as a main save (+12 at 20), and Int or Dex as a primary stat (both can be used for reflex). Assassin Capstone was already the best rogue capstone in the game. +2 dex is good to allow us to choose being dex-based or int-based.

If you really want to add a defensive benefit at the capstone, add the benefit of the old capstone back, Cheat Death (http://ddowiki.com/page/Rogue_Cheat_Death).


Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Any chance at all to turn those into passive stances instead of activated attacks? Even if they compete with Venomed Blades (the "damage" poison stance), I'm fine with it. You can swap stances as the need arises.


Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

Threat reduction on the Assassin Tree is welcome. It is the high DPS tree, and is on a class that don't want agro. IMO, all "high-DPS" trees from every class should had a choice of threat reduction, but I digress...

Will it stack with Subtlety from Thief-Acrobat/Ninja Spy?


(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Is that part already in the game? I need to update the wiki...


Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

So, that is the problem with low dice damage and scaling with melee power. I don't know the theoretical maximum Melee Power a rogue could achieve, but lets assume it is 100. A full stack of bleed will deal 5d6 damage (average 10.5) every 2 seconds. Scaling with double melee power will make this still only reach ~30 damage per tick. And that is at level 28, when bosses are reaching 6-digit HP numbers, and the endgame raids are half composed of undeads immune to bleed in the first place (Truthful One, Aurgloroasa, Abbot/Erandis).

The damage is just too low to matter in high epics.

On the other hand, on heroics there is very few sources of Melee Power. You get 10 from fighting style (if not going TWF, like most assassins), 10~30 from Damage Boost, and that is it, unless you multiclass. So even with it scaling at 200% MP, you barely have enough to boost it for more than 1-3 damage per tick.

I love the concept of bleed damage, but it is impossible to make it balanced to heroics AND epics at the same time, unless it is some weird math that only scales with epic levels, like Barbarian's Blood Tribute.


Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.

Thanks for the AP cost reduction. Can we get a change so that DAMAGE boost raises Melee Power and Ranged Power? (I know Ranged Power don't exists yet, but...)


Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits

I hope this merge expands for the other trees with critical accuracy/damage. Since the changes to AC in U14, no one cares about attack bonus anymore.


Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

1) Be careful testing that, because TWF assassins have decent attack speed, and this effect will be removed and reapplied all the time while we are in combat. Please be sure this will not be a new source of lag. Even if you need to put a limiter, like "once every 2 seconds..."


Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

500 damage against 30% health monstes is a no-save instakill on heroics (even high-level heroics, like cannith and shavarath), and I'm not so sure it will be good enough for high epics. Another problem with how things skyrocket on epics.

Maybe 250 damage, plus +75 per epic level (so 1000 damage at level 30 for a nice round number)?


Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Loved the buff. But this ability was already a necessity if you wanted to assassinate, and it will only make it more desirable.

I think the main buff Assassinate needs is making it a Tactical ability, so general tactics bonus raises its DC. That, or adding Epic levels on its DC as well.


Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Nice.


Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

3 PRR is almost nothing. But +6 dodge cap is great. With Lithe and the right light armor, you can reach 34 dodge cap on a pure halfling rogue.

[MadCookieQueen]

Unfortunately...


This is only a distraction from the Mimic festival issues.


Don't follow blindly into temptation..


also please remember if + pages of feedback about Mimic Festival being wrong was ignored...what makes you think we'll get listened to on Rogue?


Stay strong...Join the Angry Mob.

[apep1412]

Assassin's Trick: The only major problem I had with this before the change was the animation, which prevents you from attacking for a decent amount of the debuff's duration - unless you use it while in the middle of another animation. Allowing it to work on all enemies without save reduces the risk of losing 1-3 seconds of damage for nothing. It also makes assassins much more party-friendly against high fortification bosses.

Deadly Shadow: The reflex save seems like it would be more useful/thematic to an acrobat, which may be strength-based, than an assassin. Though, I suppose they already have shadow dodge.

Poison Strikes: I will likely take one of these attacks, for it's requirement for other abilities and the reduced AP costs from other enhancements. Their base effects still do not seem very useful.

Damage Boost: This will scale better for heroic levels, but worse for epic levels. Not much of a difference either way, as Haste Boost is usually the preferred option for a TWF character.

Weakness Poison: I assume this is equivalent to having an enemy deal 90% of their regular damage, except in the case where a mob gains melee power from some source. At this time, I believe the only place they can gain that is champion buffs.

Execute: The reduced AP cost leading up to it gives much more flexibility in the tree. My only concern is how the tree is going to display the prerequisite relation between this (T4), Critical Mastery (T3), and Killer (T4).

Measure the Foe: Is it intended that one can enter stealth once every 10 seconds to have this indefinitely remain at 5 stacks? Putting that into practice in actual combat may be tricky, but so is assassinate.

Light Armor Mastery: Does the sentence in parenthesis mean that this will increase the dodge cap past 25, or just a reminder that increasing Max Dex Bonus reduces its restriction on Max Dodge Bonus?

[Sebastrd]

Rogues have UMD and don't have Rage preventing them from casting if they need a healing source.

Sev~

IME, if you are scroll healing in EE, you're doing it wrong. UMD has lost quite a bit of its luster as the game has progressed. In general, my healing options on a non-caster, non-Bladeforged go Cocoon, Elixir of SOVEREIGN Healing, .................................................. ...................., Bottomless Rum, pray Cocoon comes off cooldown before I get hit again.

[QuantumFX]

We don't. We don't want the abilities to be the same, or even necessarily equivalent. We'd rather look at the tree and class as a whole. Bards have to land a control effect but they have an advantages with the Coup De Grace DC. They have support spells but don't have stealth or 15d6 of Sneak Attack.

You are seriously underplaying a bard’s spells and songs then. They literally have the ability to put anything short of bosses into the state where they can use Coup De Grace on it. (ex. Fascinate, any Dance spell, Holds, the multiclassing madness with Vanguard, Ice abilities from Warchanter.) Meaning, they can Coup De Grace an entire group of mobs while an Assassin gets one shot at an assassinate per encounter. The last class that had that kind of power got that ability trimmed into uselessness.

So, if you’re looking “at the tree and class as a whole”, why is investing into Assassinate so much more involved with less payoff? Or, to put it another way, why did your team make 5 levels of bard so much better than 20 levels of rogue?

[Hulligan]

In a raid you should be dealing out tons of Sneak Attack damage so you are probably fine there.

That 'tons' of SA is 15d6. I wouldn't call it a ton nowadays. Ok, maybe somewhere around decent. The problem is not the amount of damage done in one attack, the problem is the number of attacks made per minute. Sword&board and SWF have gone too far with intense 'combat style bonus' attack speed and tons (really tons!) of double strike, with which this puny 15d6 can't compete. I'm mainting 70%+ constant double strike on my bard, with over 100% with burst dps for bosses and with a SWF fighting style that lands twice as much attack per minute than a TWF. So let us reconsider the statement above.


Rogues have UMD and don't have Rage preventing them from casting if they need a healing source.

Erhmm... you still expect us to heal with heal scrolls? A friendly reminder: turn your calendar to 2015, that is the year we're in. ;)
I guess it's just me and I should really trust in those cure serious pots from house K... (sorry, sarcasm off but this was high ball)


The specifics of TWF are probably off topic for this thread.

Wrong. If you want to improve the rogue you have start with the basics and not just polish the toppings. And basic problem is, there is no real viable option for an assassin other than TWF. Which is currently the least damage dealing combat style. You can't deny the fact that with armor up and melee power and SWF introduced a whole lot of things get unbalanced including rogues and if you're really, honestly looking for a fix (which I hope to be the case, and I hope this is the reason this thread was born) you (as Turbine) should re-think the concept of TWF. Even modifying legacy feats such as Oversized TWF, Two weapon blocking (has anyone used this EVER?) and such.

I'd suggest to take the time and rebalance TWF to match the other lines.
I didn't mention THF. It is actually doing well, with all those extra added glancings here and ther make it like an 'other form of double strike'.
So maybe an updated animation (I assume that'd be a lot of work) or increased attack speed.

Also assassination DC is very very low. It reaches a decent amount at level 20 - can't argue with that. And it stay there. No improvement. While a DC of 50 may sound good at level 20, by level 28 its value becomes zero.

The problem is, that almost nothing improves its DC, whereas every such ability is scaled up as the characters get geared up.

Let's take a warchanter, with 16 bard levels (only) and with a decent 50 CHA, usiung Spinning Ice (tier 5) :
DC: 14 + Charisma modifier + 1/2 Bard Level + Stunning modifiers

That's 14+20+8+[stunning mods*]=42+6+12+5+2=67
[stunning mods: 6 twist, 12 item, 5 combat mastery, 2 ED feat,
not counting some extra : 5 know the angles (harper), 3 fighter PL (an extra 8 just in case it fits in - which I used = 75 DC)

Let's get back to the rogue (pure 20 rogue assasssin) with same 50 INT, using assassinate (tier 5) :

DC 10 + Rogue Level + Int Modifier
[assasinate mods: 6 twist, 2 or 4 item wise]

That's 10+20+20=55+6+[2 or 4] = 58/60 DC (65 with Mythic helm from GoP which is quite hard to farm)

I didn't count Measure the Foe because in general you have NO chance to stalk on your enemies. There's just no time unless you solo gaming, which I never liked since this is an MMO not a single player game. You maybe have a few seconds... sometimes. But this is not something you can count with as a perma boost. Especiall because while you are stealthed you do not DPS.

Summary? 7-17 LOWER DC on assassinate compared to a bard. Ok, this bard won't insta kill. The swashbuckler will. With even higher DC :P . This one instead freezes like up to 10 mobs to helpless for 16 seconds. If you can't kill any trash monster in 16 seconds go and reroll...

Solution a: Know the Angles (from Harper tree) affect Assassinate DC. That would be an extra +10 in above example (still not OP! just a little balancing).

Solution b: Why can't be more effects / items increasing this DC ?

Solution c: Make stunning items (or shatter or trip to give meaning to them) affect assassinate DC also

Another point :
You are giving us DEX to attack and DEX to damage in Assassin tree core abilites. But Why would I go DEX based, if assassinate uses INT ??
Solution a: Make assassinate a multiselector (DEX or INT)

Solution b: Make DEX AND INT to attack and damage for daggers and kukries.

Some more ideas :

* You could grant an increasing % combat style bonus to daggers and kukries (+5-25% from core 2-6)

* Venomed blades at 3 ranks could gain the ability improved paralyze. Or have an upgraded version in the tree and boot the useless toxin affinity (tier 1) and shadow dagger (tier3).

* Rework Execute. With a solid DPS, it's about impossible to time the killing blow. At low heroic levels mobs don't have that much HP to make it worth even using, and at higher levels (20+) you should be dealing like 250-500 dmg per sec. In this case you are lowering your DPS by paying attention when to use a skill and also using it interrupts attack chain - so you'll end up dealing less damage then not pointing any single point in this skill.

suggestion after rework:
(passive): On sneak attack: +5d6 sneak attack damage if the target is below 40% health. Addition +5d6 sneak attack damage if the target is below 20% health.
or
Melee Assassinate attack: +5[W] damage. On sneak attack: If the target is below 33% health save vs Fortitude save (DC 10 + Rogue Level + Int Modifier) or die insantly. On a successful save, target takes 1000 damage (scales with melee power) (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

(works only below 1/3 HP so the mob has to be beaten down to 1/3 first. Must not share cooldown with normal assassinate)

* Knife Specialization (tier 5) is very weak. Let it grant +2/+2. Not much of a deal, almost noone uses daggers and kukries because of their very weak BASE properties.

ps: played assassin as a main for 4 years... now I have no toon with rogue level in it... :/ Hope this brings back some balance.

[CaptainSpacePony]

Solution b: Make DEX AND INT to attack and damage for daggers and kukries.

Some more ideas :

* You could grant an increasing % combat style bonus to daggers and kukries (+5-25% from core 2-6)

* Venomed blades at 3 ranks could gain the ability improved paralyze. Or have an upgraded version in the tree and boot the useless toxin affinity (tier 1) and shadow dagger (tier3).

* Knife Specialization (tier 5) is very weak. Let it grant +2/+2. Not much of a deal, almost noone uses daggers and kukries because of their very weak BASE properties.


I found the quoted text quite intriguing.

[Infiltraitor]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Sev~

Suggestions

Deadly Shadow: Gain +6 Dexterity and +6 Intelligence and 7.5 Melee Power.
Reason: Sneak attack dice greatly favors one specific weapon style. Also, if I'm going to capstone, I better be able to get an Assassinate DC at least within range of a multiclassed Coup de Grace.

Execute: You make an attack with +13 double strike, +13[W] damage, and +13 critical multiplier.
Reason: I really don't like the 1000 flat damage. Rather than give out consistent damage, I'd much rather have 200 damage misses 70% of the time and 3000 damage crits 30% of the time. There's a psychological reason for this. I'll remember that huge number and put it in my bio. But a constant 1000? Nope. Same DPS but much more "fun". It also scales better for when DDO goes Epic level 30.

Measure the Foe: Gain +5 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.
Reason: If I have to invest in hide skill, move silently skill, and crawl around slowly in the dark, that damage bonus needs to be noticeable. Especially if this ability has very little use in a raid tank-and-spank.

[FlaviusMaximus]

Meaning, they can Coup De Grace an entire group of mobs while an Assassin gets one shot at an assassinate per encounter.

Not sure what you mean by this.



I think the main buff Assassinate needs is making it a Tactical ability, so general tactics bonus raises its DC. That, or adding Epic levels on its DC as well.

I think they may need a minor boost to the DC. Not entirely sure what number Assassins need to hit. I calculated that my Sun Elf Assassin will have a 73 Assassinate DC at cap with a Mythic whatever-it's-called, full 5 second stealth, and a +6 tome without doing anything silly like buying potions. The DC could use a couple points added to it, but not much more.

[Hafeal]

*snip*

Sev -Hope all is well on the new PC. As always, thanks for your feedback. I really like the feedback in the thread from the players and your interaction. Here is my initial feedback:

1) I really like a push to make non-pure DPS more relevant - such as poison and bleed. The key, in practical game play, is that if everything ends up with poison immunity this will turn into a fail. And bleed is situational tool as a decent number are immune to the effect. The current system of the 3 poisons, while adding situational 'flavor', is worthless for practical play and especially useless on Elite settings, imo. To me, make the poisons a perm 'toggle' that you can switch between and add to damage at all times you are in sneak attack.

2) I was wondering if a few more bumps to stealth would be in the offing. For example, it would be nice if Assassins could sneak faster without having to take it from the Acrobat tree. Acrobats should get a movement speed bonus, like Swashbuckler (+1% level - geez my Bard is faster than anything but a darn Monk these days). As this game is played, I think it would be reasonable for a stealthed Assassin to be moving as fast as a non-stealthed character at a top tier enhancement. I think this would help quite a bit with leading a party and positioning for assassinations. If you wanted to keep sneak speed in Acrobat - perhaps just give it a bigger boost.

3) As was previously mentioned, archers a problem. How about Assassins get an equivalent to Dodge Arrows while stealthed? Just because a random arrow may head their way does not mean an assassin has to break stealth to avoid it.My initial 2 cps checking out.

[Qezuzu]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Unless Assassin's Trick's animation length is lowered, it's not a practical ability. It's only useful when used in tandem with Bluff, because Bluff allows it to activate instantly (Bluff has weird animation priority), but this is not intuitive, it's something I found on accident.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.

DEX is obsolete for Assassins. +4 Reflex Save isn't much of a boost for a class that usually has the highest reflex of any non-Paladin build. But Deadly Shadow was a strong capstone anyway.

Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

If it's an AoE bluff like Improved Feint is, it'd be great, even if it's single target this would be a very useful ability and partially make up for the lack of inherent Deception, which is something I consider a limiting factor (in weapon choice) for Assassins.


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.

Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

+10 Dodge/Max Dodge is pretty significant, and 10 MP isn't bad either. This is a really meaningful change, and not expiring on breaking stealth is exactly what this needed to make it more party-friendly and useful in general.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

This is pretty weak. One thing I really wanted to see from the Assassin pass was to make Poison a more integral part of Assassin, more thoughts on that later
.
Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

At first I thought this was a really weak ability, because if I wanted to max my dodge cap I could just take the Shadowdancer ability that raises it by 6 and use a blue augment slot to raise it another 2, but then I noticed that MtF does not increase MDB. Max stacks of MtF is +10 max dodge, for a total of 35, which is definitely going to require a lot of work to get a MDB that high without a bonus like this especially if you splash deeply into Acrobat and get the nice increases to max dodge.

3 PRR is completely inconsequential though, either add a meaningful bonus or don't at all. +5/10/15 isn't unreasonable considering Light Armor starts at a disadvantage and all this additional bonus to Max Dodge requires sitting in sneak.
Sev~

I really like the changes to Measure the Foe. It's a really game changer.

Things I would still like to see:

Make Poison a more integral part of Assassin. Poison, as it is, is 1d8 (scaling, non-crit) damage, +5 damage, a small damage debuff, and then trashy active abilities. What I would like to see is passive chance to do stat and save damage, and an active form of crowd control. I would make it a multi-selector when taking "Poison Strikes".

Tier 1: Poison Strikes: Your attacks are imbued with a poison that weakens an opponent's fortitude / numbs an opponent's body / ravages an opponent's mind. On a critical hit, your target takes a -1 penalty to fortitude / reflex / will saves, which stacks up to five times. Opponents you attack are considered "poisoned" for ten seconds.
Tier 2: Venomed Blades: On hit: 1d4/1d6/1d8 poison damage with weapon attacks. On vorpal: 1d6 CON / DEX / WIS damage.
Tier 3: None
Tier 4: Poisoned opponents take a penalty to melee power / take a penalty to attack speed / have a chance to fail when casting a spell.
Tier 5: Poisoned enemies take an additional 2d6 damage each time they take damage from any source. Additionally, you can make a melee attack and petrify / paralyze / inflict insanity (http://ddowiki.com/page/Wild_Frenzy) on an opponent, save negates. Whether or not they succeed their save, the target takes 2d12 CON / DEX / WIS damage.

Details don't matter, this is just an example of what I would consider a meaningful Poison tree.

Assassin Spells. Ideally these would be conveniences for experienced Rogues and a way introduce a stealth-based playstyle to new players or players who haven't tried it. I'd figure you'd either need to bundle them into the core abilities or make them auto-grants for leveling up as a Rogue, but either way they'd ideally be "X per day" abilities such as:
--Invisibility
--Flaming Sphere clone that does no damage
--Brief, large bonus to Bluff (Glibness)
--Camouflage/Pass Without Trace clones
--Noisemaker clone; instant cast, but you wouldn't have as long to move away (Ghost Sound)

Assassinate being functional so long as you have stacks of Measure the Foe. So if you're trying to Assassinate something, you can't mess up because an archer over yonder plinked you and knocked you out of sneak just because you were between it and a party member. This is a minor gripe though.

All things considered it's a good start though.


You are still asking a Rogue to sneak for 5 seconds to get this buff for 10 seconds. It is not practical to do in the middle of a fight. If we are fighting against a group of mobs, I cannot sneak mid fight and assassinate them, which is why Coup de Grace is so much better. Also, if a rogue is hit, I lose the sneak and I cannot sneak anymore because they see me. This is a buff that you get once per encounter and not even, while Coup de grace can be casted multiple times. Also, in a raid instance as MoD, Wyrm, Peaks, it's just not practical.

Measure the Foe is useful as it currently is. The suggest change is a straight up improvement. You don't use it in combat, you use in inbetween encounters and the 10 second timer makes it sustainable now.

Coup de Grace is a contextual instant-kill ability and Assassinate is merely stance-based. Because of the DC I used to think that CDG was superior but crowd-controlled mobs are going to die anyway.

[moo_cow]

IME, if you are scroll healing in EE, you're doing it wrong. UMD has lost quite a bit of its luster as the game has progressed. In general, my healing options on a non-caster, non-Bladeforged go Cocoon, Elixir of SOVEREIGN Healing, .................................................. ...................., Bottomless Rum, pray Cocoon comes off cooldown before I get hit again.

500 hp heal scrolls on a rogue and you are not going to use them? Hell I would use them. Nothing wrong with using heal scrolls and cocoon.

[UurlockYgmeov]

Unfortunately...


This is only a distraction from the Mimic festival issues.


Don't follow blindly into temptation..


also please remember if + pages of feedback about Mimic Festival being wrong was ignored...what makes you think we'll get listened to on Rogue?


Stay strong...Join the Angry Mob.

MadCookieQueen - you my friend are incorrigible, and I like it! I'd give you more karma - but out of it for the day.


500 hp heal scrolls on a rogue and you are not going to use them? Hell I would use them. Nothing wrong with using heal scrolls and cocoon.

Guess they forgot that there is something called wand and scroll mastery huh?

Overall I like the direction of this Sev!

[Ranidae]

Nimbleness:
does this even do anything?
Even with epic Duelist Leathers, I think rogues are usually armor capped.
Are assassins supposed to wear monk robes?

Like someone said earlier, the real problem with assassins is the stealth system.
Anyone firing an arrow past you, or any Bearded Devil swinging a pike 9 feet away will instantly un-stealth you 100% of the time.
Throw in the fact that a CR 3 monster can spot a level 28 stealthed rogue in a couple seconds, and it's just a mess.

[QuantumFX]

Not sure what you mean by this.

Perhaps I should add the solo caveat to my complaint.

Last I checked, Fascinate lasts longer than 15 seconds. (24 seconds + 6 seconds per bard level.) Provided you don’t do something idiotic like fascinate and then cleave, you can use Coup De Grace multiple times in one encounter. (For the minimum bard level to get Coup, you should be able to use it on at least 3 Coup attempts.)

A Rogue gets exactly 1 opportunity to assassinate per encounter without a group.

You should also go back up 2 levels in the discussion where I lay out how someone with 5 Bard levels gets a instakill DC that is over 30 points higher than a 20 Rogue.

When you factor these issues together, Severlin’s argument makes no sense.

[Hafeal]

I agree that Assassination attempts are too limited - especially since they do not work on bosses for the most part. Take a large encounter, like Lines of Supply on EE, backstabbing is slow dangerous work. Assassinate is great - but triggers poorly in comparison the the spawn rate and dps and crowd control necessary to make the quest viable. Many other quests are the same.

What if each successful assassinate attempt reduced the cooldown by 1/2?

Or what if there was a separate ability = to Coup de Grace for Assassins, but only while in sneak?


Perhaps I should add the solo caveat to my complaint.

Last I checked, Fascinate lasts longer than 15 seconds. (24 seconds + 6 seconds per bard level.) Provided you don’t do something idiotic like fascinate and then cleave, you can use Coup De Grace multiple times in one encounter. (For the minimum bard level to get Coup, you should be able to use it on at least 3 Coup attempts.)

A Rogue gets exactly 1 opportunity to assassinate per encounter without a group.

You should also go back up 2 levels in the discussion where I lay out how someone with 5 Bard levels gets a instakill DC that is over 30 points higher than a 20 Rogue.

When you factor these issues together, Severlin’s argument makes no sense.

[Qezuzu]

A Rogue gets exactly 1 opportunity to assassinate per encounter without a group.

With Web and Glitter traps this isn't true. I can complete a lot of EE quests without taking damage by sneaking past enemies that don't need to be killed; for required kills I can use Glitter traps to blind mobs. Blinded mobs don't react to Assassinate kills, or combat in general if you don't make any noise by moving. Meld into Darkness for bosses. And Web traps are just sex.

Which reminds me: I'd like to ask Severlin if spell traps are going to be changed, if at all. If they're fixed (i.e. made non-functional) then the Assassin changes would need to be a lot more dramatic for my Assassin to perform as it currently does in short-man and especially solo runs.

[Torvaldsberg]

Most of the comments seem to be about lack of DPS, and do seem to have merit. However, since we are giving suggestions, I do have a few that are non-DPS, but would definitely help a stealth oriented assassin be a bit more stealthy:

Movement speed while in stealth should be obtainable in the tree that is most stealth oriented or even all 3 trees, preferably as part of the normal progression.

An enhancement that eliminates or reduces the range of tremor sense(Lightfooted?) so that assassins can actually have options against spiders, oozes, etc.

A enhancement or group of enhancements that would allow assassins to remain in stealth. Unseen manipulation for doors/levers, ventriloquism for the required discussions prior to a fight, things along those lines. These could be tiers of a single enhancement, or multiple enhancements.

Another thing I would like to see would be for the cost of enhancements that normally cost 2 points to be reduced to one as long as that character is single-classed(this would be for all classes, not just rogues). It would seem sensible, since a 'pure' one-class character should be a bit better at learning class enhancements than a character who is splitting time between multiple classes. It would not harm any current builds and would give an incentive to remain single-classed. I know this last one isn't directly related to an enhancement pass for assassins, but I thought I would throw it in.

[QuantumFX]

I agree that Assassination attempts are too limited - especially since they do not work on bosses for the most part. Take a large encounter, like Lines of Supply on EE, backstabbing is slow dangerous work. Assassinate is great - but triggers poorly in comparison the the spawn rate and dps and crowd control necessary to make the quest viable. Many other quests are the same.

What if each successful assassinate attempt reduced the cooldown by 1/2?

Or what if there was a separate ability = to Coup de Grace for Assassins, but only while in sneak?

That was a tangent I almost went into with my last post.

Assassinate based on the average of your Hide/Move Silently skills would be amazing.

If they added in a “Create a Diversion” ability ( Check this link (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/bluff.htm)) somewhere to the tree, that would help the situation a lot as well.

[Linvak]

Please refer to bold text if TL DR.


I'd love to type up an essay about how much I disagree with the statements "rogues need more dmg" but I could go on forever. It's a fairly subjective topic as most things are when pertaining to class specifics and we all know how emotions run rampant on the forums. Therefore, I'll keep it simple and just say that I think you're wrong if you think Assassins need help in the damage department.

But as it's been brought up by quite a few people, aggro and sneak mode mechanics have extremely hampered the key abilities that make an Assassin so much fun. I'd like to bounce some ideas off of Sev and anyone else that may be too strong, too difficult to implement, or may be good ideas. (The aggro mechanics these days seem so buggy, and I really don't know if it's working as intended or what). I also realize Sev has said they're really only focusing on Enhancement Trees, but what the heck.

- A lvl 12, 15, 18, or 20 rogue is able to move either normal speed, or even 10% faster while IN sneak mode.
With all the new changes this game has adapted too over the last year or 2, the game moves so much faster then it use to. People are clearing mob encounters at record speeds. I personally do a lot of "jump+sneak mode in mid air+assassinate as or after I land" combos skipping the +5 DC. But some fluidity would be nice. Sneak mode is basically only good in a few quests for reasons other then assassinating. With the limit of a cooldown, would the speed update/increase be so bad?

-WHAT IF WE......Gave rogues sneak mode as an offensive stance? Or changed it to some sort of stance, not to compete with precision. Normal attack sequence and speed, normal movement speed but kept the benefits. If I'm flanking a target, that's clearly focused on someone else, is it unthinkable that an Assassin could assassinate the target without stopping their attack sequence? Now, I know this sounds a little over powered, and some negatives/punishments would need to be implemented. I personally can't think of much except the chance that you are seen, or grab aggro, you're then unable to enter the stance for a certain period of time, 5, 10, or 15 seconds. But now we're getting back to the aggro issues.

-These days, when I'm 2 manning quests with a friend, he runs his Paladin, and if I'm not hidden or extremely far behind, I grab ALL aggro, even if he's run in ahead with cleaves and dmg. They run right past him to get to me. I'm pretty sure this is WAI since they seem to be targeting the "weakest" such as clerics/casters even before rogues aswell. It seems we can thank AI intelligence for this one. Although even a brainless zombie, or unintelligent troll still seems to know to prioritize the weak instead of the RAGING BARBARIAN or CLEAVING PALADIN smacking them in the faces.

-Everything seems to have aoe/cleaves that break sneak mode.

-Rangers, aggroing onto party members and if you're in the line of sight (this makes sense to me, being logical, i have a hard time complaining about it) you're hit with the arrow, also breaking sneak mode

As far as the Enhancement Tree changes go, there were some neat improvements such as crit mastery, dodge cap increase, the ap reduction in action boost, and nimbleness. But I always felt that the tree itself was decent aside from the poison line. What I felt needed improvement most was lvl 12 and 18 core abilities. The change to nimbleness was a nice touch, but compared to Paladin, Bard, Barbarian, the lvl 18 core is rather garbage. I would definitely like to see an update there. When everyone is critting for 1,500-3000 while blizting on 19-20s, and I'm hitting for at least 300-500 non crit, 500-1000+ on a 15-19, vorpaling something under 1000 HP on a 20 is rather disgusting to think about. During the lvl 20 cap, in heroics, this ability was 1 of the best in the game paired up with assassinate.

I'd like to delve into Shadowdancer sometime with everyone, but sleep is more important, and I'll leave with this.

[FlaviusMaximus]

You should also go back up 2 levels in the discussion where I lay out how someone with 5 Bard levels gets a instakill DC that is over 30 points higher than a 20 Rogue.

The thread is three pages long. No need to promote previous posts within it.

All that matters is that Assassinate has a DC that, when focused on, works consistently in the toughest content. It's only worth mentioning what Bards can achieve if the goal is either to have them nerfed or to make Assassin DCs just as high, and I like neither idea.


Bards have to land a control effect but they have an advantages with the Coup De Grace DC.

As for the argument that Bards have to jump through extra hoops to land coup (stun, daze, fascinate, etc), one could argue that Rogues are actually in the same position since they often have to sneak around for a few seconds to land Assassinate.

[Bobby88888]

Huge Wall of text incoming, sorry :)

First up the proposed changes.
Cores:
Assassin's Trick: Improvements sound good but if it still has the really long use time is still weak, also since it aggros mobs it is again limited in usefulness since can't be used solo effectively. The suggestion to make it passive sounds good. But maybe apply on hit as a passive effect before damage (so group can still benefit, group friendly things r good). Alternatively tie Sneak Attack Immunity Bypass in with fort bypass items and have this add a bonus.

Nimbleness: This is and was useless. You can easily obtain dodge cap without +10 temporary dodge. The change is also negligible since most assassins would be hitting sneak attacks on most hits anyway, and it was probably better in its old form due to the synergy with the ideas behind the assassin but all up was and is rubbish.

Deadly Shadow: the dex isn't very useful except for dex based flavour builds but good to be there to open that option more, but it needs something more to do with one or more of survivability, damage or assassinate. (damage and/or assassinate probably)

Tier 1:
Poison strikes: sounds interesting, though the base abilities of the poisons are lacklustre and they have a very long cooldown. Maybe drop the action point cost and the cooldown or buff the base abilities and drop the cooldown. The DC of these also needs to be revised so that it is functional.

Shiv: Seems good

Tier 2:
Bleed them Out: As was pointed out earlier damage is still negligible

Damage boost: Excellent!

Tier 3:
Critical Mastery (and related removals): Really a good change specially since assassins have to invest so many action points into harper, they need to make them back somewhere.

Tier 4:
Weakness Poison: It sounds interesting but I am sceptical. If the above changes were made to the Poison Strikes (most importantly reducing the cooldown) it could go ok, but not knowing behind the scenes how mobs function in terms of melee power I can't say, but in general debuffs aren't that great, hope I'm proven wrong.

Execute: All up the changes are great. But the damage doesn't scale well at all and I'm not a fan of the 'when below x% health' mechanic since if you hit it when they are at 30.01% health it is a no go and wasted ability. Perhaps look at scaling the damage by level and maybe something about the trigger mechanic.

Tier 5:
Measure the Foe: The whole mechanic of measure the foe isn't very good. The reduction in time for stacks to build up is amazing but all the other effects (and indeed the assassinate DC boost too) should be passive bonuses. While I get that it is in keeping with the flavour of the class (which I am all for) it causes the ability to be far too weak. The new components of the ability however are all things that assassins desperately need so even if currently not well implemented is a step in the right direction and I hope it can be implemented right.

Deadly Poison: I very much like how poison is becoming a more prominent feature of the assassin tree. And in regards to this ability anything that gives assassins more damage is very good since it is something they are very much lacking at this point.

Light Armour Mastery: I'm slightly confused on this point it doesn't give you +2/4/6 to your dodge cap right? This would be a perfect place to put that if it isn't giving that but if it is that's great, more dodge is something that thematically fits the rogue and gives them a well needed boost to defences. On that note the 1/2/3 PRR is laughable at best, either give a decent boost or give something else to boost defences.


All up its a good start but needs more work.
Some other quick changes to the tree could include a action point cost reduction on Venomed Blades, quite steep for little return,
also I personally think the Sneak attack Training abilities should be made like the Halfling Sneak attack line (1 action point and just 1d6 SA die).
Stealthy should have a tier 3 ability added to it as well.
Knife in the Darkness and Dagger in the back could both do with something more being added to them as they only provide benefit to dex based assassins and are core abilities.
Nimbleness should be changed into a passive dodge bonus and/or some other benefit in relation to defence.
Lethality could also use a damage bump, melee power or SA dice would be appropriate or possibly +1 crit multiplier on 19-20 (got no idea if balanced just chucking ideas out there) or something more unique.

What also wouldn't hurt is to put Int to damage somewhere in the assassin tree to alleviate the absolutely required action points spent in harper tree which restricts build options and diversity.

What the Rogue is lacking right now is defensive ability and offensive ability and assassinate is sadly lacking, coming in dead last as the worst insta kill ability in the game, when imo, it should be the best one.

Offence should be increased via SA, the new poison theme and melee power, whilst defence should mostly be focused around dodge and evasion but the Rogue as a whole needs more PRR since the game has started down the path where the spike damage is too high without decent PRR.
The biggest issue with assassinate right now is mob AI. You CANNOT do a rog pass without reviewing and fixing the AI. When solo you can't get a double assassinate or multiple attempts since all mobs in the area instantly aggro on you as soon as the 1st hit in the sequence registers. This needs to be addressed for for any rogue pass. The Measure the Foe mechanic to build up to a semiworkable DC also needs to be reviewed and done away with. And if you are missed while stealthed, or hit by ranged attacks it needs to not break stealth at the very least. The DC as a whole needs a few more points available, but not many, it should still be a lot of investment for a good assassinate DC but you should be able to achieve a good DC.

Also the lack of self heals added confuses me, you gave Barbarians self heals who have no reason to have them added either so why skip out on Rouge who are now the only class without them (Yes I know, Rogue has UMD, Barb can't do that while raging, but that is the whole point of rage. It gives massive buffs with a few drawbacks, you might as well let them cast spells and scrolls etc while raging now).

And while I am aware you said that you didn't think this was the place to comment on 2wf vs 2hf vs swf, I think that it is highly relevant to any changes implemented to the Assassin tree since most assassins use that fighting style and as the weaker style it ever needs to be compensated for in the tree, or in the feats.

It is a good start and a step in the right direction, I am very happy to see something is finally being done for the Rogue. The poison theme emerging is great and I hope more thematic abilities can be added that boost offensive and defensive power as well as assassinate to an appropriate level. Keep up the good work. But please, please, please do not make it too easy to make a good rogue or make them OP. Take your time and do it right.
Thanks for all the hard work you guys put in.

EDIT: Rogues also should be given Wilderness Lore passive feat.
A Shadowdancer ED pass should also be made in conjunction with the Rogue pass, it certainly needs it.

[FrancisP.Fancypants]

Get rid of the 'sneak to gain power' mechanic. I never liked it. Some extra dodge, melee power, and a longer duration isn't going to make doing nothing for 5 out of every 15 seconds any less annoying. Assassins will be a lot more enjoyable to play if that goes away. Simply give Assassins enhancement options for +5 assassinate at tier 5, no strings attached.

Assassin's Trick is looking a lot better, but it will still be horribly flawed if it continues to require this oddly long 3-4 second animation while the character can take no other actions. Make it something that can be done on an attack like Shiv is intended to do with the Bluff addition.


This. So much this.

In a group, the chance of actually pulling off an assassinate is maybe 1 in 10. Between PMs fingering stragglers, melee aggroing stuff that beelines (and inevitably smacks into you, ruining your sneak), archers with ludicrous spot, and mob lag (client/server disagreement) you're lucky to pull one off if you go into stealth at the last second. Spending more than 3 seconds sneaking up to a mob is pretty much piking.

Solo you'll either be invis running or stealthing past the hairy parts of a quest. I mean YMMV, but if you plan to get a completion within a reasonable time, stealthing constantly and starting fights just because you have a very small, very brief advantage is not the way to go about it.

Assassin's trick would maybe get used a time or two per life, which is 1 or 2 more times than I use it now. Honestly, if it just knocked a second or two off Bluff it would be an improvement.

[Powerhungry]

Another thing I would like to see would be for the cost of enhancements that normally cost 2 points to be reduced to one as long as that character is single-classed(this would be for all classes, not just rogues). It would seem sensible, since a 'pure' one-class character should be a bit better at learning class enhancements than a character who is splitting time between multiple classes. It would not harm any current builds and would give an incentive to remain single-classed. I know this last one isn't directly related to an enhancement pass for assassins, but I thought I would throw it in.

I like this suggestion as it supports/strengthens pure class builds and helps compensate for the low hanging fruit that was added in the enhancement pass and made multi-classing the OP beast that it is.
Also dramatically improve capstones, similar to the assassin capstone suggested (but change the +4 reflexes to +4 assassinate DC).

[bbqzor]

I am pressed for time and will offer more detailed feedback later.
As promised, here is a quality response now that I have time. However before I begin:


I need to know does this round of changes include a fix to a solo rogue assassin being able to both:
1) Assassinate more than one mob from a single use of assassinate, and
2) Avoid automatically agroing other mobs when using assassinate.
That still remains unanswered. Can you at least tell me if you are aware of those issues? When the stealth/AI changes went in, this changed. Previously a solo rogue could assassinate 2 mobs (say on either side of a door) alone, and avoid agroing mobs except those with high proximity. Now, a solo rogue assassinating one mob automatically counts as "agro" to the others, preventing the second assassinate from landing and, to make matters worse, ensures they get directly attacked. With more than one person this does not happen, as the mobs become "auto-aware" something is up, but agro on the other person, leaving the rogue "stealthed" from an AI point of view.

Do you need pics or videos or something or what? Its a serious problem, and one that needs (at minimum) acknowledgement that yes, its at least known about. Its one thing that makes assassinate hold up against things like coup de grace (you can hit 2-3 mobs with a correctly setup assassinate) and QP (its slower than QP, but potentially multitarget). I am almost *certain* the changes were not intentional, as the functionality of the ability does not change in situations where there are other players the mobs can/do agro on. Only lone (solo) rogues are affected. And as something which hurts a rogues ability to sneak, and operate sneakily, it seems like the kind of thing youd want to promote, not quell.

Its an enhancement, thats why Im bringing it up. During the Assassin Enhancement Pass. Anyhow heres feedback on the rest, of course, tempered by other responses so far as noted.



Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.
The biggest issue with this was always the long animation time, the ability for it to get interrupted early, and the huge amount of dps lost due to both of those. As you mention here:


Interesting suggestion making the fort bypass and sneak attack work as a passive. I'll bring it up with the team.
making it passive would be of huge benefit. If you do not make it passive, you at least need to switch from the "slow, stand, point" animation to something much quicker. As an aside, all abilities in this boat need the same swap (like Stand and Be Judged in Divine Crusader). I know those other things are beyond the scope of this pass, but if you find time to clean up that animation, youll hit all those other things as additional benefit. First and foremost it needs to be playable, and a rogue standing still is either risking death at worst, or doing zero dps at best, and neither is appealing. Passive would be really nice here.


Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.
Good change, as it now helps most when you need it most (mob on you, bad situation, so face tanking). Can it be changed so the stacks count down 1 at a time as well? Im pretty sure on live it just clears out. Having it count down, so you can afford to actually sneak from one engagement to the next without robbing yourself of your earned dodge would be appreciated. Right now, being nimble also forces you to zerg... and thats not something an assassin really wants to be forced into over access to a defensive ability.


Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.
Good change. Nice to see equal support for Dex rogues on this one, and the Ref save boost will really help pure rogues keep up in EE situations where Ref saves get a bit... ludicrous. It also helps ensure that lacking big armor for MRR their (improved) evasion can pull its weight. Honestly, Id like to see a bit more Ref save... like +6 (sorta like one for each core, and to parallel uncanny dodge click), but step in the right direction and all. Good design direction.


Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)
Is this natural poison, magical poison, or what. What sort of "poison immune" level are mobs going to need to knock this off the table. Can you help by giving a few examples of (raid) bosses this would and would not work on? Like Arreatrikos, Lord of Blades, Lolth, Deathwyrm, Epic Abbot... where in there does this strike out? Are all constructs immune because its natural, or are warforged affected because its magical? With the changes to poison U14 made, that still seem to be off a few places, we really need a more specific idea of where exactly this is intended to work. Concept wise I like it though, just need more information.


Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
Assuming that you change the bluff to be automatic with no animation (just like shiv is now, just regular animation with a rider effect), this is a great change. I like that it takes pressure off "forcing" subtlety in acrobat for rogues into that, and assassins should (typically) be into that.


The intent is that the Bluff check would happen as part of the attack and be included in the attack's animation time.
Thats how Im reading this to mean, that its just "free" like the animation now, it just does more stuff.


(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)
Still not worth taking up. Look the first 2 AP get you 2.5 damage, that part is fine. The second and third AP pairs get you 1 damage. Its just a bad progression. Can you change it to 1d4, 2d4, 3d4? That way its worth taking all the way up, rather than just one rank. The melee power portion is fine and all that, its the die step progression thats pretty bad. Another thing to keep in mind is that spending 1 AP for 1 Dmg is pretty normal, so once you start spending 2 AP for 1 Dmg thats not good just in general. Melee power isnt the issue, regular damage would also scale with it and also could crit. Heck other trees you can just buy plain direct melee power. Its just a subpar progression, way the dmg:cost works out. Need to match that first tier where its about 1:1 (poison doesnt work on everything and cant crit so thats fair) and go with that all the way through.


Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
Cool, nice change.


Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.
From what I see, Melee Power Boosts are still NOT working correctly as Action boosts. Things like LDs Combat Brute dont turn on, Action Hero doesnt reduce the cooldown, etc. The changes here are good, 1 AP per and change to melee power is welcome. I just want to see the actual mechanic part working right too. No need for yet another broken boost to show up, games got enough of that as it is.


Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits
Good. This

as we do passes on additional trees these enhancements will be combined as they have here.
is welcome news. Spending 1 AP on critical confirmation attack rolls was a pretty terrible point tax. Side note, check tempest out... 1 ap for the atk and 2 for the dmg, it means it takes them 9 AP to get this. Cant wait for that to go down to 3 AP too... itll help the tree out Im sure, along with whatever else goes in. At least assassin wasnt that bad heh.



Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.
This is interesting, and good. I like that it encourages rogues to "strike first" as their method of defense. However, I have great concerns over what level of "poison immunity" will take this off the table. Take a chain like Orchard (epic or heroic, you could easily have a T4 in either). Its like 95% undead or constructs or elementals. Its the kind of place rogues might REALLY want some more defense, given the number of sneak immune things they hit. Its also the kind of mob selection that deploys the lollerskates against poison. So yea, hows that going to work out for us =/. The devil is in the details on this one.


Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)
The cd change to mirror assassinate and the additional scaling make this a nice change.


Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.
Wow big buff, and rather nice. It means that every 10 seconds you want to sneak at least 1 second. I actually like that, the way rogues play, its not bad to be encouraging them to tactically stealth often. And yes I have an epic rogue, and yes he can do EE, so Im not saying that out of abstract. Stealth is the only real draw to using one over something else, and I like that this works with that.


Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.
Wow, now youre *really* buying into the idea rogues can just poison everything. Again... details on what this is going to work on please.


Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.
Well... the dex armor part is nice. And its nice that its 1 per instead of 2 like other similar enhancements. So its really pushing that "hit 25 dodge" aspect for assassins and thats cool. The 3 PRR though... maybe this could be 1/3/5? Hear me out here. If the "armor up" changes go in and light drops from 15 to 10, rogues are gonna be in the hole. Rogues REALLY dont need to be in the hole. You could also add text "while in Light Armor" to the PRR part (like it is on the dex bonus part) to make sure it doesnt get stacked up badly. But I dont want to see rogues going DOWN in PRR by the time this all gets live and interacts. They need to at least stay the same, if not go up... the melee power debuff they gained helps yes. But only if it can land, and there WILL be some mobs it wont work on. Let them stay PRR neutral on those please.

Overall good changes. Some additional questions:

- Whats Toxin Affinity good for now? With taking the emphasis off DCs for the poisons, maybe you can make this +2 DC per level? Or make the poisons use full Rogue levels? Just dont see the point, if the DC isnt the focus of the ability, and its also almost impossible to get it high enough to land, why ever bother with a line that doesnt meaningfully help it land?

- Shadow Dagger needs a real DC. The cooldown is already pretty long, the damage is pretty poor, the least it can do is reliably blind. Consider, many things are 10+lvl+stat, this is worse than that (if full rogue). And even the 10+lvl+stat formula often leaves things below par, if they cannot also be assisted by something like a spell focus item, or a vertigo item, or what have you. Maybe this could add Dex AND Int? That way its useful to both dex and int based assassins, just like the capstone, but allows rogues using both to actually get the DC up there to a legit value. Maybe thats overkill, and you wanna go with higher of dex or int and use full rogue level or whatever, just saying, needs a tweak while youre in there messin around.

- Killer... can this also peel off 1 stack at a time instead of all or nothing? Look at how many group kill or huge hit effects there are nowadays. Keeping this stacked up with something like assassinate alone is impossible since they share a cooldown.. so you have to land killshots. Yes, thats not super difficult on a rogue I know. But that doesnt mean it wouldnt help quality of life if you werent completely out in the wind everytime you miss a few kills or someone procs a lot of stuff or what not. Look at old blitz, same deal right, relying on kills and being all or nothing in the opening ticks. With being "encouraged" to sneak, setup fights, move in and out to avoid getting mobbed while you backstab everything... give assassins some breathing room here. Let them miss a beat then pick it back up. This is also gonna help Deepwood Snipers, and thats cool they need it too. Both of them could use a higher quality of life, and effects that use contemporary mechanics that acknowledge a dynamic game environment will have latency or bad roll streaks. No reason to keep this one as the bad style.

Thanks for the draft, but I hope some of the questions can be answered and that the feedback helps. Cheers.

[Vyrzain]

.......Acrobats should get a movement speed bonus, like Swashbuckler (+1% level - geez my Bard is faster than anything but a darn Monk these days)........



Yes please... Speed bonus for Acrobats : )

[Oxarhamar]

Title

[SamaelBael]

Hello DDo community, time for me to step out of the (forum) shadows for the class and enhancement tree I love and play since 2009.

The changes to the tree mentioned in the op sound great in general, here are my thoughts to poisons:

The poison enhancements mentioned in this tree lack the impact that the poisons from the ninja have. I would like to see some similarity/balance there. Poison is poison, no matter which tree it is from. Maybe there could be some more synergies (drow/ninja/assassin)?

The tier 1 poison attack will most likely be a melee attack. I disagree with the inability of an assassin to apply poisons on ranged attacks. How about some form of Sting of the Ninja? Melee and ranged dot, if necessary, chained to Venomed Blades?

In both trees, the old and the now planned, it does not sit well with me that the poisons are attacks that must be applied manually mid-fight. Coating weapons should be done before the battle. If not Sting of the Ninja style/chained to Venomed Blades, how about some form of weapon enchantment? No spell point cost but able to coat the weapons of partymembers?

Some other questions:
Shiv: does the threat reduction stack with the TA's?
Move Silently/Hide: with 3 points in it +1 SA die (both halfling and shadar-kai get a bonus with 3rd point)?

From my point of view, Assassins should lie between Thief-Acrobat and Mechanic concerning its attack range. capable to do massive damage within the SA range of generally 15 feet. Pure single target damage.
Please do not tie the Poisons to melee attacks like the Assassinate and Execute attacks. Execute would gain a lot if it could be used in ranged combat (SA's 15 feet).

Time to slip back into the shadows,
Samael Bael

[Wizza]

Correct. It isn't meant for the middle of a fight. It's an opener for solo rogues.

Correct. Rogues are not supposed to party with other people, we give them abilities that are good for soloers but awful in teams. Gotcha.




In a raid you should be dealing out tons of Sneak Attack damage so you are probably fine there.

Correct as well. An ASSASSIN is not supposed to ASSASSINATE in a raid because you already do tons of SA damage. Gotcha.




Rogues have UMD and don't have Rage preventing them from casting if they need a healing source.

You are not being realistic and not keeping up with the times if you think Scroll healing is even close to being a realiable source of healing.




The specifics of TWF are probably off topic for this thread.

Sev~

No they are not. One of the reasons rogues suck so much is because TWF suck so much. If you wanna ignore the problem, be my guest, but don't you even try to say that it is off topic because obviously it's not.




We don't. We don't want the abilities to be the same, or even necessarily equivalent. We'd rather look at the tree and class as a whole. Bards have to land a control effect but they have an advantages with the Coup De Grace DC. They have support spells but don't have stealth or 15d6 of Sneak Attack.

Sev~

"They don't have stealth". Seriously? Barely anyone uses stealth if not for assassinate.

[LavidDynch]

Assassins used to be pretty good in DDO, they had effective multiple assassinate strikes (in one blow) and highest DPS -- always a bit squishy... Today they are just squishy, with no backup heal option and sneaking is more or less broken, and mobs spawn by the rates of 1000 in each quest...

- Mass bluff AOE -- that works on everything.
- Hide in plain sight
- Disarm -- Whenever an assassin breaks stealth they gain 50% doublestrike for 4 seconds and disarms its opponent for 2 seconds, render it prone to helpless.
- Devour life energy -- 5% life steal.

[amsharkwei]

Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.
-That's good ,someting useful debuff for boss fighting



Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.
-Rogue need permanent +10% to dodge



Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.
-Not so good for a capstone,+4 Assassinate DC is good


Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)
-I suggest remove the old "Poison Strikes" add these abilitys to Venomed Blades
Venomed Blades:Opponents struck by Venomed Blades are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
-Great! and the opponents struck by this attack will drop in helpless for 2 sec


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)
-If you have the "Poison Strikes"from T1,your Opponents struck by Venomed Blades are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds,some poison damage on time,stack 3/4/5 times


Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
-Make it to be a passive ability:your Venomed Blades will causes your opponent to bleed. The bleed effect can stack up to 3/4/5 times.



Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.
-haha


Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.
-haha
Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits
-haha


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.
-haha

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.
-Make it to be a passive ability:your Venomed Blades will reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.


Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)
-Good,andwe need a marker in the monster's health bar,where is the 30%


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.
-need more Assassinate DC,maybe 2 per stack?



Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.
-Make it to be a passive ability:Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Venomed Blades) do +5 damage.


Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.
-3prr is not good for a T5 ability.add 2/4/6 to hit and assassnate DC


Rogue need more Assassinate DC
and the Venomed Blades should be the soul ability for rogue

I suggest change the Assassinate's working principle:
-Assassinate have no cool down time,it use 1 Assassinate charge
-Every 15 sec,rogue gain 1 Assassinate charge
-Rogue can hold a maximum of 5 Assassinatecharges
-Assassinate can hit 2 or more targets in melee range,as a melee AOE
-A succeful Assassinate heal positive damage equal to your Rogue level
-Every Assassinate can make a Hide check,that let you never founded by monsters

[geoffhanna]

Does this round of changes include a fix to a solo rogue assassin being able to both:
1) Assassinate more than one mob from a single use of assassinate, and
2) Avoid automatically agroing other mobs when using assassinate.

If not, those need to be included. They have to do with the interactions with the "new" stealth/awareness system that went in awhile back.

This. So much.

Even though you (Severlin) have said that the pass will only affect enhancement trees. Assassins, and many rogues but especially assassins, need to have stealth fixed. It is their core thing.

[Arkantios]

Hey there Sev, these changes look decent as a start to the change of the assassin tree. I'm happy with knowing this is only the first draft and things are probably going to change. Also, since I know you're replying a lot in this thread, https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/455542-Suggestions-for-Assassin-Revamp?p=5532841&viewfull=1#post5532841 this might interest you. I realize that you've said this thread is based only upon the enhancements, but I'd like if you could at least look over this because from my perspective, it is most of the things that are wrong or that could / need to be changed with the rogue in general. Some of them being enhancement.

Anyway, thanks again for giving us rogues something to look forward to.

~ XxMazexX

[RD2play]

the assassin insta-kill should be at least as good as the swashbuckler one if not better !!! so either reduce preform to CtG to half mod, or give assassinate a way to get it higher than 120dc with not much effort.

love the idea posted to let you have a chance to keep stealthed after a successful assassinate.

[Nyata]

first off, I am really really glad rogues are finally getting some love from the dev side. so thanks much for that already!

of course though it's never quite that simple, and everyone has to put in their 2 cents, so here's mine:

quite frankly, I take objection to the expression solo-rogues... I play pure assassin/trapper rogues, because they make great team players and a worthwhile addition to any group. If the idea is to create yet another class that is supposed to be multiclassed and twisted into being able to solo end game content... you'll kill yet another reason for LFMs and grouping.

UMD as a source of healing... well... uhm.. sure. scrolls may be great... but... if you are in a pinch, i.e. mobbed, you plain simply do not have the TIME to change your main hand weapon to a heal scroll, click the heal scroll, change back and start fighting again. by that time, you are already dead.

and you will be dead by that time because taking two glancing blows from some two-handed weapon will already whipe out your measly hitpoints. yes. glancing blows and stray arrows that break you out of stealth are one of the major problems you have on a sneak-based ability like assassinate. specially since you need to stay in sneak to wait for the cooldown to finally finish.

why stay in stealth instead of dishing out the awesome sneak damage in a raid or general mob? well see above, 2 hits will kill you. basically, when I group with 'real healers' - they simply keep mass heals in mob encounters on me, keeping all other melee classes capped on HP, and me barely alive lol. sure, I usually rock the kill counts on my assassin, but only because I benefit from teamwork.

adjusting the 'hive consciousness' of a mob would go a long way already to help rogues, as someone mentioned earlier. if I assassinate one member in the mob, the rest of it should not agro on me. because that kind of is contradictory to the idea of assassinating, isn't it? they should stand in awe and wonder staring at their dead mate with a puzzled 'how the hell did that happen?' face.

[General_Gronker]

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity. Doesn't matter what you do to this if it takes as long to use as it does now.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit. You should keep this sneak attack based.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws. This is a 100% unneccessary change that just propagates power creep.


Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power. Or, better yet, GET RID OF MELEE POWER.


Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits Useless. +x to crit damage and crit confirm in any form is pretty useless. It's more like an ability tax than something useful.


Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth. Ditch the melee power, dodge, and max dodge, just keep the reduced time frame. No need for the other stuff.

[Annyee]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.


Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.


Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

Here are some suggestions and ideas. I'm not saying these are the best but I do think it is helping to go into the right direction. Ignore at your own peril.

Assassin's Trick: No save is good. Vs all enemies even better. Could it be a self buff? Like 30 buff 1 min cooldown or 15 sec buff 30 sec cooldown? This would allow it to better used with staves/glancing blows/cleaves. Also, since you have released a lot of content with massive trash waves it would make sense that the class updates would have something that works to clear all that trash. Pally light damage/Barb Frenzy extra damage works with glancing blows/cleaves so it would be within the power curve to allow Rouge Sneak Attack to do the same.

Nimbleness: Great change. This really helps push builds into at least 12 rouge lvls. After living on a blitzing Barb I am concerned that the 2 sec cooldown and 6 sec fade will limit this core ability though. Also, sneaking by design is a bit slower so at 6 sec fade off I think this would really push people away from any kind of sneak method to questing. Could we try 1 sec cooldown and 12 sec fade off one stack at a time? This would match Momentum Defense in the Acrobat line.

Deadly Shadow: I like it but...... I'm not sure. It's missing something..... Some of the other reworked capstones are really great..... How about adding some kind of Hiding in Plan Sight feature. Or better yet, remove the -%movement to speed and the -20 to jump/tumble skills while sneaking. When you think about it Assassin's are suppose to be the best at sneaking, with the capstone assassin's should not have any negatives while sneaking.

Poison Strikes: Did this get fixed? Do you know what was bugged with it?

Shiv: Maybe adjust to 10/20/30 or higher. Their are not a lot of -% threat options compared to +% agro. If you don't want Rouge's to have agro, up the -%.

Bleed Them Out: This needs a complete rework. +(w) damage is good but the cooldown on the effect is to long, the bleed duration is too short and a single d6 is still a single d6 200% or not. Max stacks is 3 anyway and even if you had 10 stacks at 400% melee power every 1 sec its still to slow. Honestly the whole idea of dot damage on a melee is just not good. Casters its great. Stack dots and kite until its dead. Melee is a different story. The whole point of melee is to kill as fast as you can and Dots are NOT a good way to do this. I would take this back to the brainstorm stage.

Damage Boost: Standard good.

Critical Accuracy: Good, not needed

Critical Mastery: Standard goodness

Critical Damage is removed.: Yep, was rolled into Mastery, good

Weakness Poison: Interesting. DeBuffs. What if it was a Tier ablity? like 5/10/15 pwr 10/15/20 sec? Or 10/20/30 for 10/20/30. Or 10/20 for 10/20 sec? I would like something like that as long as it was 1 AP per rank.

Execute: Remove the 30% life. Its a goofy game mechanic. If I have already beat a mob down to 30% why do I need an ability to instakill it? Keep the +(w) and scaling 500 but please loose the 30% req.

Measure the Foe: I like it. Again 10 sec is a really short buff. Could we get 15?

Deadly Poison: 5 extra damage is good and all but it does not cry Deadly Poison to me. Now if it had some kind of Paralyzing effect THAT would be some Deadly Poison. Compare with Bard/Barb t5 abilities and I don't think a Paralyzing Rouge would be OP.

Light Armor Mastery: Double the PRR add MRR and call it good.

[Torvaldsberg]

UMD as a source of healing... well... uhm.. sure. scrolls may be great... but... if you are in a pinch, i.e. mobbed, you plain simply do not have the TIME to change your main hand weapon to a heal scroll, click the heal scroll, change back and start fighting again. by that time, you are already dead.
.

As an alternative to healing, perhaps something similar to the Bugbear Assassin's ability to 'poof' mid-fight then come back?

[LittleLexi]

Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Sev~

While I like certain aspects of this buff - it doesn't make much sense thematically that you retain a stealth-based buff after exiting stealth. Not in this instance anyway. I mean, I could stealth to get the buff, and then walk up to a monster and stare them right in the face - yet somehow I'm "stealthily" attacking them, as long as it's within 10 seconds of leaving stealth? Can you at the very least make it so that you benefit from this ability on your next attack after leaving stealth, as long as it counts as a flanked attack? And perhaps an extra +5 boost to the DC if this attack is performed while still in stealth mode.

The reason being: I've always longed for some kind of play style that actually encourages the player to use stealth. It's really fun, and fulfills another way of playing the game that appeals to a lot of people. The last thing we need is more "in your face DPS, DPS, DPS!!!". It's nice to have alternatives, and this enhancement tree(and ability in particular) has proved to be an extremely fun, and effective one for me since I've toyed around with it. And in solo, and group play no less.

Those that are posting about it being useless in a group, or akin to "piking" while sneaking up to a mob, might want to rethink their approach. Try adopt a more strategic tact in your questing, and lose the mentality of "Must zerg through everything" "Must see big dps numbas!" "Must complete quest in x number of mins" etc.
Not to mention that in those few seconds you're not hitting mobs, while you're party members are - you're sneaking up to a prime target - such as a caster, or orange name - and 1 hit killing it. Therefore, making up for the damage you didn't do while sneaking, and then some. You'll be surprised how fun and satisfying it can be.

And if you don't want to play that way - that's perfectly fine! You don't have to invest in this tree, or specific enhancement. Let those of us who do use it, continue doing so without having every darn enhancement get corrupted into your typical generic DPS blegh...

Having said that - I would like to echoes of power many of the sentiments being made by my fellow players. i.e:

-Stealth and how it interacts with AI could use some tweaking.
-Assassins should get a bonus to speed while sneaking. Perhaps 5% per core enhancement that stacks with other sources up to a cap.
-TWF needs some addressing.
-Poison playing more of a role, and being more effective than it currently is.
-More interesting and unique effects instead of the plethora of Melee Power, Doublestrike, Doubeshot yada yada nonsense that's inserted because of a lack of creativity.

That's all for now. And thank you very much for addressing our concerns :)

[GoldyGopher]

My responses are in-line


Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.
Um, so every 15 seconds I get to smash a button for an enhancement that last 12 seconds but only targets 1 target.
I rarely use this active ability now as it takes longer to target and activate than it does to usually beat down the mobs.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.
Why not give something that is a passive if it is always going to on. My TWF Rogue Assassin currently has this on now most of the time, now it will be all of the tiome, except for the first Mob I face.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.
How many pure rogues do you think you are going to have. Right now on Kyber 8% of Rogues are pure. And the only reason the number is that high is because 1/4 of those rogues on Khyber are 2 level or lower.
How many reflex saves are pure rogues in the assassin tree missing? I gotta ask because it cannot be many as they are mostly dex builds with what a +50 Reflex save.
The +4 Sneak attack dice isn't bad.

Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)
Umm well I understand but..

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
Not bad


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
I don't nessecarily find this to be a useful ability now, more because of where else my characters need to spend AP on their abilities. So I am at best meh not bad.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.
Again the issue of AP sepnt across multiple trees, I wonder how many people take this.

Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits
I like this one! be better if it was 1/2/4 but hey.


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.
As a replacement for Critical Damage this is pretty awful. The problem has to do with spending AP, Right now Assassins are spending about 40 AP in the tree, to make this useful they will have to spend 45 to 47 AP, that's a heck of a price to pay. I totally understand what Turbine wants to do and I am okay with the concept, its just it costs too much in terms of AP

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)
20% 30% what's the difference. Against mobs that 20 to 30% makes a difference with damage scaled... wouldn't you do more than 500 HP of damage?

Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.
Okay I guess.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.
As a TIER five passive this is pretty weak considering all the AP you need to invest.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.
Again, DEX builds, Light Armor, did I miss a memo. Pretty pointless in this tree. Would rather see a passive that grants PRR/MRR at a slightly higher level.

Sev~

The first problem with the Rogue trees is they do not synergize with other trees that well in general if the primary character class is rogue. Heck they don't synergize amongst themselves let alone with other classes. This (and Thief-Acrobat) do nothing to remedy that problem.
There is very little benefit to staying pure class and far more benefit to multi-classing.

The biggest issue I have with the tree is that to get the full effect of what's available I have to spend 9 additional AP, that is a heck of high price to pay, and even higher when you want people to stay pure. Considering you are looking at 20 in racial, 15 in harper, and 49 in Assassin that's 84 points and I don't think it really improves the character, at least my characters, over what is there today.

[tpbtoc]

Why not let Assassin's assassinate like/better than Bards? Standing still, aggroed, running at full speed. The assassinate mechanic we have is horrible because of so many obstacles player has to overcome to be able to land a successful kill.

[draven1]

I think, for current meta game, what is really needed for assassin is...

1. Swiftness & Speed

Whenever a assassin disabling traps, the rest of group tend to just jump through those traps, then a rogue left far behind.

Whenever a assassin try to do something useful for battle, you should wait in sneak(measuring the foe).. then.. wait cool-time(assasinate or execute).. prepare something(bluff or assassin's trick, poison things).. enduring slow movement speed in sneak, plus A SINGLE ARROW THAT MISSED YOU can break your sneak.

But for current high lvl endgame meta, even tough EE mob can be dead like in 0.5 sec. And many encounters have so many mobs.
Heavy armored high hp, high save toons have also insane DPS.

So, usually battle scene for current end game is like this..

"Rushing ahead with high PRR(200+ sometimes 250+), using displacement toon then grab enough mobs(usually 10+) then cleaving or attack with insane attack speed(exploits, swf) while in blitzing."

So, there is very little chance for assassins, because they are REALLY SLOW and not enough DPS against mass mobs.
I dont think assassins should get AOE DPS, but they should get the TOP single target DPS to compensate lack of AOE DPS & low defense, only situational DPS.

2. Escaping crisis methods with low defense profile

As you know, rogues are squishy.
But, they are cunning, so usually they could survive for most situations using their guts & intel.

But, nowadays, too many mobs in chaos from that rushing heavy armor toons made those cunning guts & intel useless, because you can't bluff 10+ mobs at the same time and it's hard to get enough diplo DC for current EEs.


3. More bypassing crit immunes & sneak attack crits

U21, U22, U23 was undead heaven. And many classes have really high DPS boost.

[the_one_dwarfforged]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

Tier Four

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.



assassins trick - does it still take forever to use, without ability to be canceled mid use? if so its still worthless.

nimbleness - how about instead of +1% dodge on hit, or in addition to, it also adds +1/2 prr. rogues dont need help with dodge they do need help with prr. also on hit instead of on sneak is a good thing.

poison strikes - are the attacks themselves still useless? the effects i guess are interesting from a flavor perspective but not particularly useful (even the -5% hp thing, stuff just dies too quick) and iirc their dc mechanics were not great but honestly i have never paid them any attention because the abilities were pointless. cooldowns should also be examined to make sure the new line doesnt have a terrible uptime considering the minimal/moderate power youre giving it. will the poison apply on hit? on successful poison attempt? if necessary will there be a dc revamp? will it support dex/int rogues as well as int/int rogues?

shiv - what are the stacking mechanics going to be for the passive threat reduc? will it stack with items? of like amounts? with other enhancements? from the same class or other classes? of like amounts? what is the cooldown going to be? will the animation take forever (probably best to jsut use the bluff animation so at least its no worse than what we already have)? will it share a cooldown with bluff? overall this seems like it oculd be useful but if you dont carefully answer all these questions, and they are not answered positively then why would i spend ap in this enhancement?

weakness posion - do enemies actually have mp/rp? this could be a very interesting and useful dmg mitigation method for rogues, i like it.

execute - this is actually a pretty satisfying buff to this ability. probably worth taking depending on prereqs and ap splits.

measure the foe - i really like this.

deadly poison - is this going to scale with melee power? im assuming it will be added to firstnumber dmg and therefore scale regularly. right?

light armor mastery - am i reading this correctly and rogues will be able to have more than 25% dodge? or is it just raising mdb? if its just mdb then this is pointless. if it actually raises the max dodge cap then this is good.

[the_one_dwarfforged]

Our class passes will not include additional class feats or class abilities for a variety of reasons. They will mostly focus on the enhancement trees.

Sev~

off topic: fighters are screwed.

[dualscissors]

500 hp heal scrolls on a rogue and you are not going to use them? Hell I would use them. Nothing wrong with using heal scrolls and cocoon.

500 hp heal scrolls are not going to happen unless you're dumping lots of APs and valuable gear slots into picking up healing amp. While there is nothing wrong with some level of sacrifice for healing amp, most of the top rogues I read on the forums can't afford the APs to get past mediocre improvements on heal scrolls. The DPS/assassinate needs take priority.

Not seeing anywhere near 500hp returns on my heal scrolls, backing out of a fight, doing the cumbersome gear swaps, making sure I don't get whacked by a mob and have to make an astronomical concentration check, swapping back to my weapon and reentering a fight...is a lot of work to get 200-300 hps back.

[Saekee]

500 hp heal scrolls are not going to happen unless you're dumping lots of APs and valuable gear slots into picking up healing amp. While there is nothing wrong with some level of sacrifice for healing amp, most of the top rogues I read on the forums can't afford the APs to get past mediocre improvements on heal scrolls. The DPS/assassinate needs take priority.

Not seeing anywhere near 500hp returns on my heal scrolls, backing out of a fight, doing the cumbersome gear swaps, making sure I don't get whacked by a mob and have to make an astronomical concentration check, swapping back to my weapon and reentering a fight...is a lot of work to get 200-300 hps back.

It is true that wand and scroll mastery ends up being too AP costly for the assassin builds posted in the forums (like Hassan and Nokowi). But anyway with full mastery, the heal hits are double to start (so 100 hp becomes 200 if I recall correctly, or 90-->180) then healing amp boosts that double if one has 100% at least.
If you add a GS weapon with first two tiers of healing amp (assuming you already have the +60 slotted on gloves) then you can hotbar shortcut the weapon and the heal scrolls. Then with one selection you can equip both, cast, etc. I am betting you know this but just posting it for others who might not.

[Severlin]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

[Loromir]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.
Sev~

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

[Mryal]

Time to post some feedback!

First of all, its sad to see that rogue, wich was once the best melee for self healing now has the worst of all because classes that shouldnt even have self healing (barb?) have gained better methods than popping a scroll.Popping a scroll requires you to waste at LEAST a solid 2 seconds of dps, in pratice it means a lot more due to concentration checks.This should be obvious by now but in order for scroll usage to be at least remotely usefull in high end content the entire concentration system needs to be ABOLISHED from DDO alltogether.

Second, its time to review the DC of assassinate, you guys cant possibly compare it to coup de grace (remember i am a bard player and im saying this), coup de grace is better, not necessarily because of coup de grace itself, the abbility itself is perfectly balanced, what isnt balanced is that bard has acess to a quick no fail CC to use with it (ottos dance), and a virtualy no fail DC CC to use with it (low blow), not mentioning fascinate.

But now, to a more deeper feedback...i dont think turbine realizes what Assassin rogue really is to players.Assassin rogue (was) something that caused people to log on ddo, its a playstyle that was loved and ive met at least two people, paying VIP costumers for years that quit ddo single handedly because they could no longer play their rogues properly.The flavor of stealth and assassinating multiple mobs precisely was something people loved.

Honestly i dont think that assassin rogue or that even rogue feel rogue like in ddo or assassin like.In pratice, what happens is you may or may not be in steatlh, try to assassinate something, then go arround tanking mobs and meleeing them while fully detected and not caring about your placement in battle.I think assassin and rogue in general should get bonuses from backstab, substantial, stealth shouldnt be disabled in combat, instead the rogue should have means to conceal itself enough so that only the mob he is currently fighting detects him from a group (with investment of course), and well, given the current ddo state stealth should no longer reduce your speed in any way, in fact it should boost your speed in shadowdancer, otherwise people will just row back to their barbs and zerg trought with no real care.

[FestusHood]

I think they may need a minor boost to the DC. Not entirely sure what number Assassins need to hit. I calculated that my Sun Elf Assassin will have a 73 Assassinate DC at cap with a Mythic whatever-it's-called, full 5 second stealth, and a +6 tome without doing anything silly like buying potions. The DC could use a couple points added to it, but not much more.

Maybe they could just add in the insightful tactics bonus from know the angles and/or combat mastery items. Those are supposed to be blanket buffs to tactical abilities, rather than adding something arbitrary like stunning or trip modifiers. I'm hoping in future they will allow those to work with monk finishing moves which also suffer from their dc's dropping off in higher level epics.

On a side note, does the insightful tactics bonus from kta stack with combat mastery items? It seems to me they wouldn't stack, but that doesn't mean they actually don't.

[dualscissors]

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

Flavor-wise being agile and quiet goes fine with acrobat/artful dodger theme. But as a matter of functionality, you need speed while stealthing to play an assassin and not be driven crazy by moving at a snail's pace.

What would the restructuring for speed look like? Does it even make sense to have it tiered 3 times instead of an all/nothing thing? Who is going to want stealth and just do +20% speed when stealthing?!

[dunklezhan]

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.



Thanks Sev - can you please confirm whether you are aware of a bug whereby the tactic of shooting near an enemy to draw them away does not work? E.g. shooting a wall near a bugbear. Or the floor near a kobold. Or, for that matter, shooting at some scenery or even breaking a barrel near any mob with decent spot/listen that should definitely notice and certainly used to quite reliably?

Its been broken for me for ages on all builds but on my assassin, occasionally trying to peel a mobs away from a pack to assassinate them one by one, it is particularly painful because I haven't particularly built or geared for bluff on that one (which was entirely my choice, I know). I've filed bug reports but I've never seen it acknowledged in known issues or anything like that. if you are aware of it, is it intended to be fixed, or does it come under the heading of 'revamp to stealth' therefore 'not soon'?

Clearly it wouldn't be a particularly high priority, I know that. But it is quite frustrating.

[brzytki]

Assassin's Trick - please get rid of the lengthy animation or at least cut its duration in half

Nimbleness - i'd rather leave it to work on SA only, maybe add 1 PRR per stack?

Deadly Shadow - we don't really need more reflex saves and DEX, i'd rather have +2 DC here instead

Poison Strikes - making poisons more dependent/benefiting from more enhancements in tree is a good idea, but the posions themselves are really lackluster; also i'm concerned about the enemies with poison immunity cause it's not a small group

Shiv - very good improvement, some form of deception was really needed in the assassin tree

Bleed Them Out - i honestly don't know of anyone who wastes their APs on this

Damage Boost - ok, as others said might be good to include Ranged Power

Critical Mastery - finally, it will free some APs; question though - how will it be connected in the tree to tier4 abilities (Killer and Execute)?

Weakness Poison - could be fun, but again question about poison immunity

Execute - i like the buff, i used to skip it cause of a rather long cooldown and missing APs but i'll have to squeeze it in somehow now

Measure the Foe - a much needed buff, i'm glad you improved it

Deadly Poison - ok, i guess

Light Armor Mastery - i think you should make it 1/3/5 PRR


What i'd like to add or change in other, not mentioned, enhancements and some questions:
1) Killer - I really wish you could make Killer buff expire one stack at a time. There are very few buffs that expire all at once nowadays, the whole point of building up stacks is to not get rid of them easily. I understand leaving Nimbleness stacks disappearing all at once because they are easy to build up, but with Killer you need to at least put some effort to keep them (meaning land a killing blow, which when grouping with cleaving-blitzing or SWF with 50% DS for "free" ANYONE is kinda hard).

2) Toxin Affinity - just get rid of it if you are not going to rework Poison Strikes cause nobody's gonna pick it anyway; either make Poison Strikes stances that trigger once per, say, 5 seconds or change the DC formula to be at least 10 base+rogue lvl+INT mod

3) Lethality - consider upping the damage or the HP limit, in epics 1k hp is and has been for some time a joke

4) I have some questions about the threat reducers cause i've been wondering for a few years now, how exactly do they stack? We have so many sources of them now that one has to wonder how much investment in it is needed. It's been assumed that threat reducers from different sources (enhancements/items/ED) stack - is it still the case? - will Subtlety from Acrobat tree stack with Shiv? Is there a limit to threat reduction (Eladrin once said you guys were thinking of introducing a 50% limit)?

5) Also, about the new poison enhancements, will they be connceted in any way in the tree or will they be "stand-alone" enhancements?

[patang01]

Acrobat seems an odd place to have the stealth speed boost. Assassin rely so much more heavily on stealth than basically any other build. Why not move that ability over to the assassin tree?

I agree, I never understood why it was in the Acrobat tree when it's such an iconic Assassin thing.

[Mryal]

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.


Sev~

Then delay this and work on a different class (druid, arti?) until you can/have time to mess with stealth.Doesnt makes sense to mess up with rogue and not with stealth.

[Annyee]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Ty for the Dev/player interaction. It make a big difference.

If you start a official TWF thread we can post our imputes there and keep this thread on topic.

I would also like to say that given the abysmal state of the spaghetti code it is understandable that reworking the stealth system is going to be a major undertaking. However, if Rouges are ever going to be anything more than a different flavor of Ftr then it needs to happen. With a broken Stealth system no one will build a sneaky Rouge, they will just turn out to be another Ftr class, that sneak attacks, and does traps, that most people ignore anyway (PRR/MRR), and wears lighter armor (maybe heavy armor rocks and so do splash builds), and has lots of dodge, and maybe de-buffs things.... other than all that, yea, a Ftr with less HP. You get the idea.

[bbqzor]

Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

Okay this seems to be targeted at the "assassinate doesnt play nice with new stealth AI" thing... Im not sure the problem is clear. The code probably doesnt need to be redone really, but Assassinate needs to be coded as a zero-agro attack or something. The issue is when you hit a mob with NOTHING else around, because you are the only target you get the heat. Can you make a successful Assassinate generate zero threat or something? That might fool the new AI into not autojumping you when youre alone. Or make it a "zero sound" attack, so the mobs dont auto-hear it and come running. If you can just make the strike actually "stealthy" by making it a zero threat, zero noise attack, that may do it. Try that if you can? If you can log in, feel free to contact me. Like 3-4 mins and the problem can be fully demonstrated/repo/explained etc... dont think youre looking at a system overhaul just a change to assassinate to work inside the new system.

[Annyee]

Then delay this and work on a different class (druid, arti?) until you can/have time to mess with stealth.Doesnt makes sense to mess up with rogue and not with stealth.

The problem is the same problem will everything in DDo. Spaghetti Code. This is the problem that creates most other problems. I don't think the Normal player base understands how bad it is. Borked abilities, class features, ED's, broken feats, some LAG issues, and the bank tab problems all come from Spaghetti Code. If you don't deal with it now then it will have to be dealt with later and its not getting any better with time. Druids, Arti and whatever else also have the same underling problem, abet some classes/game mechanics are worse that others.

Solving an issue like this is not much different than any other systemic problem with any other system.

1. Ignore it.
2. Throw it away and start over
3. Start at the beginning of the DDo database and don't stop until you hit the end fixing code
4. Fix things as they break but no more
5. A war of attrition.

#1-3 are not realistic. Turbine has been practicing #4 for a very long time. We have seen the end result of that. A war of attrition is probably the best way to tame the Spaghetti Code Monster. It will also be one of the hardest however, what other options are there?

Rouges need an update. Rouges are suppose to sneak. Sneaking is broken. Fix it, then move over to the next lair that the Spaghetti Code Monster is hiding in. If it is going to take more resources than you have, cut the extra stuff, like Warlock.

But what do I know.....

[Impaqt]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Add a passive +10% sneak speed boost with each core. Make it not stack with acrobat.

Assassins sneak faster by default......

Acrobats CAN sneak faster if they train.

[Rautis]

One specific suggestion:
Change the assassin's trick to a passive 25% fort bypass. Add to the 12th level assassin core the ability to sneak attack things not sneak attackable, also passive. This avoids questions of animation speed and will make your balancing act much easier in the future.

Interesting suggestion making the fort bypass and sneak attack work as a passive. I'll bring it up with the team.

Sev~

This would actually be a nerf to the ability as it would turn it into self only buff. Party wide -25% fort and sneak attack immunity removal is huge boost that I have used even with the long animation and saving throw(when there is a chance of success). Not only does it do the obvious, it also allows you to assassinate certain creatures that you otherwise couldn't. If you want to buff it more just reduce/remove the animation time. Don't make it some self only thing.


As others have pointed out one of the more important things in assassin pass is to review the assassinate DC formula to be competitive with DCs in Swashbuckler, Warchanter, Vanguard etc.

In general, special attack DCs should be able to have their DCs within 10 points(and that's a huge difference already) or less of each other if invested equally. One idea I've been thinking about is to add an item property that adds to DCs of enhancement based attacks like assassinate or mechanic throwables that don't fall under sunder, trip or stun bonuses. Item should have similar bonus numbers as current stunning, trip and sunder items and probably also come on randomly generated items.

[Mryal]

The problem is the same problem will everything in DDo. Spaghetti Code. This is the problem that creates most other problems. I don't think the Normal player base understands how bad it is. Borked abilities, class features, ED's, broken feats, some LAG issues, and the bank tab problems all come from Spaghetti Code. If you don't deal with it now then it will have to be dealt with later and its not getting any better with time. Druids, Arti and whatever else also have the same underling problem, abet some classes/game mechanics are worse that others.

Solving an issue like this is not much different than any other systemic problem with any other system.

1. Ignore it.
2. Throw it away and start over
3. Start at the beginning of the DDo database and don't stop until you hit the end fixing code
4. Fix things as they break but no more
5. A war of attrition.

#1-3 are not realistic. Turbine has been practicing #4 for a very long time. We have seen the end result of that. A war of attrition is probably the best way to tame the Spaghetti Code Monster. It will also be one of the hardest however, what other options are there?

Rouges need an update. Rouges are suppose to sneak. Sneaking is broken. Fix it, then move over to the next lair that the Spaghetti Code Monster is hiding in. If it is going to take more resources than you have, cut the extra stuff, like Warlock.

But what do I know.....

This originated here in brazil:

https://gist.github.com/banaslee/4147370#file-xgh-pt-br-txt

Scroll down for the english translation.

[dualscissors]

Deadly Shadow - we don't really need more reflex saves and DEX, i'd rather have +2 DC here instead

Agreed, my DEX going from 37 to 39 isn't a waste but not a big deal either. This is a place where the capstone can feel truly worth going pure, rather than going after less pertinent boosts. The capstone should give a good boon to assassinate.





Bleed Them Out - i honestly don't know of anyone who wastes their APs on this

Having a clickie that does unnoticeable damage over time in epics is pretty weak sauce. Now sticking a vein or a kidney and slowing/status-ing/extra damage could be something...






Light Armor Mastery - i think you should make it 1/3/5 PRR

Rogues are getting a dodge perk to help with their mediocrity in HPs/PRR/self-healing. Not sure 3 or even 5 PRR is even noticeable being so far behind the survivability curve.





2) Toxin Affinity - just get rid of it if you are not going to rework Poison Strikes cause nobody's gonna pick it anyway; either make Poison Strikes stances that trigger once per, say, 5 seconds or change the DC formula to be at least 10 base+rogue lvl+INT mod

The DCs do make these a waste of space in the epic game.





3) Lethality - consider upping the damage or the HP limit, in epics 1k hp is and has been for some time a joke



Back on the point of assassins and spikey damage, here is a good place for a vorpal to do something that feels mean. Plus it comes as a core at level 18 so no one has to feel it's a gimme to make this a tad stronger for the epic game. It's a vorpal not just a basic crit.

[PhotoRob]

Suggestions

Reason: If I have to invest in hide skill, move silently skill, and crawl around slowly in the dark, that damage bonus needs to be noticeable. Especially if this ability has very little use in a raid tank-and-spank.

(Emphasis mine)

For that matter, why is it that the assassin tree does not have "Faster Movement"? A large portion of the assassin tree requires sneaking to be effective (or even work) while thief/acrobat, which does have faster sneaking, only has one thing based on sneak attack - which as we all know doesn't even actually require sneaking, just no agro.

An assassin should not have a dip into another tree be practically required to make his primary tricks be viable. (This really holds true with any enhancement tree.)

(And just saw the exact same point made two posts further down. Guess I should read more before posting. :) )

[Qezuzu]

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

Faster Sneaking remaining in Acrobat is fine but it should allow up to 100% movement speed in stealth, which would make it sneaking and maintaining Measure the Foe a lot more viable in a party setting, as well as getting a successful Assassinate off. The hitbox and speed for the "attacking while in sneak" animation should also be increased, after an Assassinate there's often some difficulty in getting out of sneak in a timely manner. The speed penalty is a major issue that prevents Assassins (who aren't very experienced) from using the defining feature of Assassin well, and the hitbox is a minor gripe.

Assassinate is the defining feature of Assassin and Execute and Shiv are too strong to be a passive. But as it stands these are the only active abilities worth using, as well as Trick which is situational. Poison is still weak, the actual Poison Strike itself is too weak for a rate of once per 6s, Venomed Blades are already a passive, the damage reduction is something I would only use in Fire Peaks, and +5 damage is simply marginal. Bleed them Out is also still too weak to justify using at a high level because the damage only ticks every 2 seconds (in which time even a freshly eTRed Assassin could have done over 1500 damage or so). Shadow Dagger is a joke at any level beyond 12. It's fine if some of the active abilities aren't completely awesome, there's some in all trees but I would still really like to see Poison being a more major part of Assassin beyond a small amount of additional damage, a debuff and an ability that's not really worth clicking.

This comment isn't directed at you but at people who claim stealth is broken. Beyond being spotted after an Assassinate (which is how it functioned before update 17) and mobs automatically aggroing if they spot a stealthed player in a group (either through seeing through their hide or from tremorsense, this is REALLY noticeable in spider-heavy quests) I don't notice anything odd about the stealth system. If anyone wants I can make a video of a minimum-kill quest completion. I simply don't get spotted if I do it right.

Things I'd still like you to consider, Sev:

One of the reasons I think the stealth-based playstyle has very low adoption is because is because the advanced strategies are not very obvious or intuitive. Keeping your H/MS scores up is obvious, not sneaking right into the face of a mob is obvious, using Invisibility is obvious, but the tools required to make stealth work at a high level are not very obvious and basically require reading a guide. Flaming Sphere is probably the least obvious, who would have thought that a garbage lvl2 wiz/sorc spell was so powerful? Even something as simple as Noisemakers is not intuitive, the fact of their existence is buried in a barter UI in House Cannith. Making noise through projectile collisions or invisible movement, sacrificial summoned monsters, Glitterdust traps, etc. none of these abilties are remotely as obvious as "smash and heal" or "shoot and kite". This is why I suggested that Assassins get Spell Like Abilities; Assassins DO get spells in 3.5e and this would be a way to make the tools of stealth a bit more explicit. Between the obscurities and the speed penalty, it's just not an attractive playstyle to many (I'd really give anything if I could find stealth-only groups even rarely :()

If you consider Heal Scrolls a Rogue's means of self-healing then you should improve it, because I'm much better off just using Cocoon and kiting or using Meld Into Darkness/Improved Uncanny Dodge when it's on cooldown. Lowering the cost of Wand/Scroll Mastery and having it include a cast speed bonus would be simple steps in doing this. I'm really not seeing a major increase in survivability here so better self-healing is important.

tl;dr reduce sneak speed penalty, flesh out the poison more, give stealth-focused SLA's and better scroll healing.

And Spell traps? Are you guys aware of their impossibly high DC (equivalent to Disable Device score)? This is code you're probably going to touch in the Mechanic pass so I'd really like to hear what your opinion on this is, it's an important ability for soloing Assassins, and as said the changes to Assassin would have to be pretty dramatic for them to perform in solo/shortman situations as they currently do (without trap CC, great survivability, AoE damage, or exceptionally high single-target damage, I just wouldn't be able to solo difficult content which is something many other classes can do).

[Annyee]

Faster Sneaking remaining in Acrobat is fine but it should allow up to 100% movement speed in stealth, which would make it sneaking and maintaining Measure the Foe a lot more viable in a party setting, as well as getting a successful Assassinate off. The hitbox and speed for the "attacking while in sneak" should also be increased, after an Assassinate there's often some difficulty in getting out of sneak in a timely manner. The speed penalty is a major issue that prevents Assassins (who aren't very experienced) and the hitbox is a minor gripe.

Assassinate is the defining feature of Assassin and Execute and Shiv are too strong to be a passive. But as it stands these are the only active abilities worth using, as well as Trick which is situational. Poison is still weak, the actual Poison Strike itself is too weak for a rate of once per 6s, Venomed Blades are already a passive, the damage reduction is something I would only use in Fire Peaks, and +5 damage is simply marginal. Bleed them Out is also still too weak to justify using at a high level because the damage only ticks every 2 seconds (in which time even a freshly eTRed Assassin could have done over 1500 damage or so). Shadow Dagger is a joke at any level beyond 12. It's fine if some of the active abilities aren't completely awesome, there's some in all trees but I would still really like to see Poison being a more major part of Assassin beyond a small amount of additional damage, a debuff and an ability that's not really worth clicking.

This comment isn't directed at you but at people who claim stealth is broken. Beyond being spotted after an Assassinate (which is how it functioned before update 17) and mobs automatically aggroing if they spot a stealthed player in a group (either through seeing through their hide or from tremorsense, this is REALLY noticeable in spider-heavy quests) I don't notice anything odd about the stealth system. If anyone wants I can make a video of a minimum-kill quest completion. I simply don't get spotted if I do it right.

Things I'd still like you to consider, Sev:

One of the reasons I think the stealth-based playstyle has very low adoption is because is because the advanced strategies are not very obvious or intuitive. Keeping your H/MS scores up is obvious, not sneaking right into the face of a mob is obvious, using Invisibility is obvious, but the tools required to make stealth work at a high level are not very obvious and basically require reading a guide. Flaming Sphere is probably the least obvious, who would have thought that a garbage lvl2 wiz/sorc spell was so powerful? Even something as simple as Noisemakers is not intuitive, the fact of their existence is buried in a barter UI in House Cannith. Making noise through projectile collisions or invisible movement, sacrificial summoned monsters, Glitterdust traps, etc. none of these abilties are remotely as obvious as "smash and heal" or "shoot and kite". This is why I suggested that Assassins get Spell Like Abilities; Assassins DO get spells in 3.5e and this would be a way to make the tools of stealth a bit more explicit. Between the obscurities and the speed penalty, it's just not an attractive playstyle to many (I'd really give anything if I could find stealth-only groups even rarely :()

If you consider Heal Scrolls a Rogue's means of self-healing then you should improve it, because I'm much better off just using Cocoon and kiting or using Meld Into Darkness/Improved Uncanny Dodge when it's on cooldown. Lowering the cost of Wand/Scroll Mastery and having it include a cast speed bonus would be simple steps in doing this. I'm really not seeing a major increase in survivability here so better self-healing is important.

tl;dr reduce sneak speed penalty, flesh out the poison more, give stealth-focused SLA's and better scroll healing.

And Spell traps? Are you guys aware of their impossibly high DC (equivalent to Disable Device score)? This is code you're probably going to touch in the Mechanic pass so I'd really like to hear what your opinion on this is, it's an important ability for soloing Assassins, and as said the changes to Assassin would have to be pretty dramatic for them to perform in solo/shortman situations as they currently do (without trap CC, great survivability, AoE damage, or exceptionally high single-target damage, I just wouldn't be able to solo difficult content which is something many other classes can do).

Have you ever pulled a lever while sneaking? Or how about creature Ai not dropping agro? All the movement penalties. And yes, getting auto agro after an assassinate is broken. Stealth was ok pre MoTU, not the best but ok. Post u14 its been broken.... very very broken.

[Ranidae]

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat ...

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.


Speed

Acrobats are agile.
Assassins are deadly.

I'm ok with speed boost staying in acrobat tree.


Stealth

One change would fix 80% of the stealth issue. Change (break stealth when missed) to (break stealth when hit + damaged).
I'd be reasonably happy with that.

[Qezuzu]

Have you ever pulled a lever while sneaking? Or how about creature Ai not dropping agro? All the movement penalties. And yes, getting auto agro after an assassinate is broken. Stealth was ok pre MoTU, not the best but ok. Post u14 its been broken.... very very broken.

Pulling a lever breaks sneak and always has. Yeah it's kind of dumb but if this wasn't the case, absolutely nothing would prevent even average stealth users from completing quests with zero effort. If it didn't break stealth then nothing except required kills and spiders would prevent me from just waltzing to the final boss.

Mobs do drop aggro, you just need to use invisibility or you need to leave the general area the mob is in.

Movement penalties have, again, always existed and I agree it wouldn't be a bad idea to remove them (with enhancements).

Auto aggro after Assassinate existed before u17, and u14. After Assassinating without drawing aggro was removed (which was u19 I think), the ability to shed aggro by, you know, running away, made it better than it was before. This is something I would consider unbalancing if it were the case, being able to Assassinate whole dungeons with out anything attacking you. A compromise would be to give bonuses to Spot to mobs in the vicinity of an assassinated ally (woah hey Bob dropped dead there's something fishy going on) but not have them instantly aggro, or have a "critical Assassinate" not draw aggro. And double-assassinating is still possible, you just need to Bluff the second target.

Unless something has changed in the last few months (I've been doing nothing but eTRing for awhile), I just don't believe the stealth system needs any major changes. I can do some tests later to confirm what I'm saying (or just find that I'm wrong, which I doubt I am). This video from u22 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsVGg1YUOgg) shows a couple things I'm talking about (shedding aggro mostly).

[redoubt]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.~

Change acrobat sneak speed to a straight movement speed buff. Then add to each assassin core:
+10% sneak speed
+10% chance to hide from tremor sense/blind sight while sneaking
+10% chance to activate switches/levers etc without exiting sneak.

Nimbleness needs to add to dodge cap with each stack. Expire ONE stack at a time (not all at once.)

Deadly shadow: Also add +10 hide/move silent. +2 Assassinate DC. -10% threat.

Assassins trick needs to be quicker.



Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks are considered to be "poisoned" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.~

How long does the threat reduction last?

Stealthy: add +5/10/15% sneak speed

Sneak attack training: add -10% threat to each tier (but only to sneak attack training in the assassin tree.)



Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.~

As others have mentioned, bleed and venomed blades scale poorly.

Venomed blades:
reduce cost to 1 AP per
1d4/1d6/1d8 per 5 rogue levels

Bleed them out takes to long to build up useful stacks. Drop the cooldown to 4 seconds. Increase bleed damage to
1d8 at rogue 5
1d10 at rogue 10
2d6 at rogue 15
2d8 at rogue 20



Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits~

Good.



Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)~

Raising the % is good. Add a second check against the assassinate DC: if below 30% the attack triggers an assassinate attempt even if not in stealth. If not assassinated, deal 500...

Killer needs to expire one stack at a time.



Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against "poisoned" enemies (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

Measure the foe:
add 5% sneak speed per stack (yes, if you get all the sneak speed bonuses you will sneak faster than your normal movement, but these are assassins. They should "appear" out of nowhere. Speed is key to this and also just to keeping up with the group in todays game.)
Have the stacks expire one at a time.

Light armor mastery:
T1 gives 2 PRR
T2 gives PRR = 2/3 BaB +4
T3 gives PRR = full BaB +6

Knife spec:
This is a very narrow category of weapons. Keep it narrow, but boost the bonus. Some options include:
+1W
+1 threat range (assassins are very good at making accurate hits)(This would be a total of +2 threat)
+1 multiplier (this would be a total of +2 now)(I think the first two options are better for an assassin than this one though.)

THEN ALSO:
Work out TWF.
Work out the auto agro problems.

There are lots of great ideas posted in the rogue forum and I don't want to repost them all here, but there are lots of neat ideas for the stealth system and I even posted one about the assassinate system for crit fails and successes causing different reactions for the mobs.

Thank you for the feedback and being active in the thread.

[Annyee]

Pulling a lever breaks sneak and always has. Yeah it's kind of dumb but if this wasn't the case, absolutely nothing would prevent even average stealth users from completing quests with zero effort. If it didn't break stealth then nothing except required kills and spiders would prevent me from just waltzing to the final boss.

Mobs do drop aggro, you just need to use invisibility or you need to leave the general area the mob is in.

Movement penalties have, again, always existed and I agree it wouldn't be a bad idea to remove them (with enhancements).

Auto aggro after Assassinate existed before u17, and u14. After Assassinating without drawing aggro was removed (which was u19 I think), the ability to shed aggro by, you know, running away, made it better than it was before. This is something I would consider unbalancing if it were the case, being able to Assassinate whole dungeons with out anything attacking you. A compromise would be to give bonuses to Spot to mobs in the vicinity of an assassinated ally (woah hey Bob dropped dead there's something fishy going on) but not have them instantly aggro, or have a "critical Assassinate" not draw aggro. And double-assassinating is still possible, you just need to Bluff the second target.

Unless something has changed in the last few months (I've been doing nothing but eTRing for awhile), I just don't believe the stealth system needs any major changes. I can do some tests later to confirm what I'm saying (or just find that I'm wrong, which I doubt I am). This video from u22 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsVGg1YUOgg) shows a couple things I'm talking about (shedding aggro mostly).

Your statements contradict each other. Either Sneaking is fine as is or its not. If it is fine as is then nothing needs improving, which you just said at least some things could use improvements.

Would you rather leave stealth as is or at the very least tweak some things to make it more player friendly, widely used, and a viable to use in quests?

[UurlockYgmeov]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.

~ Assassin's Trick animation is too long and should be significantly reduced or the functionality made passive.

~ There's a lot of concern about the "Poisoned" state abilities being too limiting if none of them work on poison immune enemies. We will look into this. My initial thought is an acidic poison that works on any enemy, or change the flavor to some kind of "Exploit Weakness" that works on any enemy.

~ Player's have concern about TWF balance since it is the style many current Assassin builds employ. That probably requires it's own thread. We don't want to dismiss the discussion, but we also don't want to derail this thread.

On the other hand:

~ Smaller damage bonuses from on hit effects can add up quickly and provide significant help to sustained DPS. While not as sexy as the big numbers from critical attacks, we will probably refrain from adding big boosts to those abilities for the moment until we can gather meaningful data from Lamannia.

~ We don't want to roll abilities of active attacks into passives. We want the Assassin's active abilities to be meaningful.

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

make it bane poison - bane to all things

[HuneyMunster]

Something that would be really nice for assassins would be something similar to exposing strike/shot that is part of deepwood stalker 3rd core. I think this is how assassins tricks should work as a melee attack as opposed to the long casting time it currently has.

As someone else mention would be nice to have poisons be sometime that you use to coat your weapons similar to how deadly works with same restricts that weapons can only have one at any time. Though this maybe should not prevent you from unequipping a weapon to put another poison on and to allow for a different type on each weapon.

Also as mentioned before allowing the 3rd point in envenomed blades has a chance to paralyze the target.

Rogues also lack any movement speed, I would remove faster sneaking from acrobat and add it as a progression to increase movement speed while sneaking by 10% for each core of each tree. Then replace faster sneaking in acrobat with showtime.

[Qezuzu]

Your statements contradict each other. Either Sneaking is fine as is or its not. If it is fine as is then nothing needs improving, which you just said at least some things could use improvements.

Would you rather leave stealth as is or at the very least tweak some things to make it more player friendly and widely used?

You're saying stealth is broken. I'm saying it's not, but would benefit from improvements like basically everything that's not overpowered to the point where it's unhealthy for the game. Stealth would be fine without changes; fine as in it works to a point where you can finish a quest with minimum kills, if you so wish. I don't want stealth, nor Assassin, to become another easy-button class. Changes to Assassin should focus making the class and stealth in general easier to get in to, and making the tree more flavorful beyond "dodge, sneak attack and Assassinate".

[dualscissors]

Also as mentioned before allowing the 3rd point in envenomed blades has a chance to paralyze the target.



Something "crippling," "hindering," or "exploiting" in the poison area of the tree would indeed give something useful to poisons, which has been outdated and useless for a long while.

It would also given a token type of CC to rogues. I would not want to pretend that I don't love many things about the rogue/assassin class. The new and cool dodge perks and poison for controlling the field might be good enough to sure up some of the inherent squishiness of the class due to weak self-healing, weak PRR, lowish HPs, very limited CC.

[Merlin-ator]

Dear Turbine:
Please stop changing everything.
Signed, Everybody who likes theorycrafting builds.

No, really. Just stop. Not 3 days after I put the finishing touches on my fighter/rogue/pala build, you announce a change DG and I had to redo the whole thing. Now you're changing how threat reduction works and I'll need to TR this really fun build. Judging by your producer's letter, it seems you're nerfing Manyshot AGAIN. This puts the kibosh on my Monkcher build, which I found so fun (especially solo) that I was going to keep a permanent archer of some sort. Just. ****ing. Stop.

[HuneyMunster]

It would also given a token type of CC to rogues. I would not want to pretend that I don't love many things about the rogue/assassin class. The new and cool dodge perks and poison for controlling the field might be good enough to sure up some of the inherent squishiness of the class due to weak self-healing, weak PRR, lowish HPs, very limited CC.

Thats part of why I said assassins tricks should be like exposing strike (The target will become momentarily confused and rendered vulnerable to sneak attacks for four seconds as if affected by the bluff skill.) Works same as deception and last 4 seconds provide the rogue with a type of 4 second cc as the target has turned around and is no longer attacking you. It would also be possible to use it to then try and get an assassinate off.

Though, this doesn't help rogues that are swarmed by multiple monsters because unlike with tempest it probably wont work on all targets in range(that are hit with melee strikes) through the use of dances with death at same time.

[Sebastrd]

500 hp heal scrolls on a rogue and you are not going to use them? Hell I would use them. Nothing wrong with using heal scrolls and cocoon.

In EE, scrolls are too slow and they can be interrupted too easily.

[Qezuzu]

Dear Turbine:
Please stop changing everything.
Signed, Everybody who likes theorycrafting builds.

No, really. Just stop. Not 3 days after I put the finishing touches on my fighter/rogue/pala build, you announce a change DG and I had to redo the whole thing. Now you're changing how threat reduction works and I'll need to TR this really fun build. Judging by your producer's letter, it seems you're nerfing Manyshot AGAIN. This puts the kibosh on my Monkcher build, which I found so fun (especially solo) that I was going to keep a permanent archer of some sort. Just. ****ing. Stop.

What the **** are you even talking about lol. These changes hardly do anything in terms of what class split you'll need.

[TackW5]

I would suggest a couple things.

1) Sneak Speed - Make the sneak speed boost core/inherent, as in Core 1, "Your movement speed while sneaking is increased by 1% for every point spent in the assassin tree," Core 12, "Your movement speed while sneaking is increased by 2% for every point spent in the assassin tree." Several of the current cores are focused on just one potential way of playing the assassin. This gives them meaning for everyone.

2) Bleed them Out - Make the bleed damage stat damage. The DPS from ticks of this, even increased by MP, are almost irrelevant, and the classic "wounding of puncturing" idea was that bleeding was more than just HPs.

[geoffhanna]

~ Changes to stealth require tech work and affect lots of game systems and are prone to side effects so we have to be careful there. Anything that involves significant changes to monster AI is out of scope for this update and this hampers any global revamp to Stealth.

(We are still going through feedback.)
(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Sev~

I don't think there is any point to a rogue revamp that does not include fixes to stealth.

Put your efforts into fighters or something that is not dependent on a special ability that is inherently broken.

[ComicRelief]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places...
*snip*
Sev~
(Emphasis added)

You know, one solution to this problem would be to eliminate (or greatly reduce the use of) the "AP spent in tree" mechanic (you could keep an "AP spent" mechanic, if you must).

Just sayin'...
;)

{I know, I know - a topic for a different discussion.}
;)

[Severlin]

I don't think there is any point to a rogue revamp that does not include fixes to stealth.

Put your efforts into fighters or something that is not dependent on a special ability that is inherently broken.

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

[Xionanx]

My 2c.

If I were looking at JUST the assassin tree:

Poison(s) and dots in general are bad, you can give the poison 500% melee power and it would still probably be bad.. IE 1d8 x 5 = 5D8.. vs an epic monsters thats trash. Want to make the poisons GOOD? Make them percent health of target per tick. Say.. 3/4/5% of target HP per tick, ticks once every 3 seconds, lasts 15 seconds, dot doesn't break stealth. (math says that 5x5 = 25% of target health if full duration.. most things will be dead before then in a grp anyway, but it would make solo'ing as a "Sneaky poisoner" better). (so rogues don't become the go to "BOSS KILLER" implement some kind of reduced damage on "Boss" mobs or a "Cap" on how much damage can be done per tick)

Rogue needs a "Hide and Heal" skill.. instant cast no resist drop into stealth that comes with a "heal" attached for XX seconds, healing stops if you attack.

Bleed them out - again, doing 1D6 damage every 2 seconds for 14 seconds is a JOKE in epics.. Bleed them out should also be PERCENT of target health based. 1% per tick, per stack, yes.. the combo of bleed them out and poison I listed above would make rogues really **** good at killing trash using bleed + poison.

Threat reduction from Shiv (or other rogue abilities).. Why not make it instead be a passive threat reduction equal to 30%/40%/50% or your BLUFF SKILLl. Yes.. some classess will see that (bard) and splash just enough rogue to get it and then max out bluff for a 50% passive threat reduction.. but were trying make the skills good right?

Again, these suggestions go under the assumption that you want Assassin to be something people want to play because it can compete on the damage front against other classes (like it should) AND have it own flavor. The main benefit of the changes I suggest is that it relies less on "big hits" and more on "lots of hits" stacking dots. Viable builds would be able to focus on increasing attack speed and TO-hit bonus while not being overly concerned with raising +DAMAGE as much, since the percentage based dots aren't effected. The assassin would become the "Combo Killer" it should be.. jump in, stack dots till the monsters is below 20% (or 30) then execute.. hit your "Hide and Heal" to get out and bandage... rinse and repeat as needed.

[redoubt]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

I outlined a whole concept on using levers and opening doors with regard to stealth. Short version:

Hide/move silent checks are used.
Each door/lever (or batch them) gets a DC.
Moving doors and levers make noise and are visible. Mobs get checks to notice them and then decide if they want to investigate.

The concept is to have the rogue remain in hiding (stealth) but the actions the rogue takes may draw attention. i.e. you cannot drop a bridge silently or invisibily. Nearby mobs will notice and may investigate. But those actions don't pull the rogue out of stealth.

[Xionanx]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

I'll take a stab at outlining the problems with stealth:

1. Not a team mechanic - in "Current" DDO 90% of content revolves around bum rushing through quests as fast as possible.. bull rushing from one encounter to the next. This rarely if ever gives any rogue "time" to stealth and make use of the stealth mechanics. As such, if you are playing with other players in a "PuG" you will likely never get a chance to make use of your "Cool stealth" abilities.

2. Not a solo mechanic - in "Current" DDO 90% of content can and will see through your stealth for pretty much no reason at all other then "hey I'm a random champ so ha ha screw you stealthy.". As such, "Sneaking" to solo is not viable in Elites. Plus there is the added annoyance that you can't "One Shot" enemies from stealth "Assassins Creed" style... so when you DO manage to succeed at getting the drop on an enemy, you likely WONT kill it, and then it and its buddies will proceed to beat you to death.

On "Paper" the idea of being able to sneak past a monster to disable a trap or secure some objective without relying on combat alone.. in "Reality" I can only think of ONE quest that being stealthy is rewarded (stealthy repo).. which BTW is still completed FASTER by a Paladin/Barb/any high AC toon just bum rushing the levers and ignoring the dungeon alert.. so yeah.. GO STEALTH!!:rolleyes:

The dungeon mechanics in DDO just are NOT suited to stealth gameplay. Note I am looking at the WHOLE of the game, just because there may be "Some" quests where its nice to have does not discount the majority of the content not being suited for it.

Stealth as a mechanic needs a complete overhaul IMO to match the game in its current format.

[Bobby88888]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

Let me create a scenario here to help me explain.

Scenario 1: I am soloing a quest on my assassin without using hires, summons etc. Say my assassin has snuck up behind a group of mobs. 2 of them are standing close together. I line it up so my assassinate will hit both of them and then I go for it.
I successfully assassinate target one, which instantly alerts the rest of the group, even those a fair distance away, to my presence. Which of course means the second target that gets hit by my assassinate half a second later survives since I now have aggro.

Scenario 2: I am soloing the same quest on my assassin. I line up to assassinate 1 enemy. I hit assassinate.
And he saves on the 1st hit, which instantly aggros him and any other nearby mobs onto me. My 2nd attempt hits the same mob a moment later and since he is now aggored on me it fails.

This makes soloing a pain as assassinate can only ever have 1 attempt on 1 target whereas before the AI changes, if you were lucky and lined it up right, you could get sometimes even 3 dead mobs of your assassinate, even when soloing.

Now I don't know how it is all coded but someone suggested that it might be possible to just code assassinate to produce no aggro rather than redo the AI at this time which to me sounds like an acceptable temporary fix until such a time as the AI can be properly gone over and fixed up.

On a related note it seems like mobs are spotting you sometimes when they shouldn't but I obviously can't say for certain on that point but it bears further investigation.

Thanks

[Blackheartox]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~
And opening a door without a single care in the world with 999999999999999 prr and 999999999999999999 hp and rushing in holding autoatack and massacring everything on ee while playing on your mobile phone, drinking coffe and counting how many pieces of hair are around your nipples didnt threathen behavior in any content?

cmon, we are used to you guys overbuffing classes, you can do better then this.

[Xionanx]

After putting some "minor" thought into it, IMO the way to make "Stealth" viable for rogues is to simply make it a toggle ability rather then an activated ability, then.. add astealth move speed penalty reduction while in stealth every 2 levels beyond 1st (3rd.5th,7th,etc) until the penalty eventually goes away entirely.

So a high level Rogue could "Toggle On" stealth, have full move speed, and always be considered "Sneaking" vs targets that haven't individually spotted the Rogue.. in other words, NO "ONE ENEMY" breaks stealth for the entire group.

This would allow assassins to to their thing, actually play like a stealth character, without being concerned that if they break stealth for 1 target that everyone in the room will spot them. Of course it also means that things like using levels, opening doors, etc.. would need to be changed to no longer break stealth. IE.. you can now "sneakily" open a door ALA "Metal Gear Solid" style without all the guards jumping you.

[nibel]

2. Not a solo mechanic - in "Current" DDO 90% of content can and will see through your stealth for pretty much no reason at all other then "hey I'm a random champ so ha ha screw you stealthy.". As such, "Sneaking" to solo is not viable in Elites.

I disagree with that statement. Champions mobs, See Invisibility, or True Seeing have absolutely no effect on your stealth play. I play stealth characters all the time, and with the exception of stupid spiders, I can sneak almost from 1 to cap. However, there is three major problems with stealth right now, that you forgot (I agree with the "not group-friendly"):

1) Invisibility is a major necessity while sneaking, if you don't have Hide in Plain sight. While I understand the monsters getting bonus to spot while you stay stealthed in plain view, invisibility makes them DO NOT get this bonus. This is incredibly useful while you are watching a patrolling mob to learn its path, or when you NEED to cross somewhere when the guards just never turn their faces away.

2) Other than Assassinate (a level 12 ability), there is no advantage from alpha striking from stealth. Sure, you get sneak attack damage, but in DDO this is not enough to one-shot a mob. Heck, it is not even enough to make a mob take reasonable damage to start with 30-50% HP left. Bosses even less. I'm not saying that everyone that can sneak behind a mob should be able to one-shot it, but rogues should had a huge boost if hitting something INACTIVE. Leave sneak attack to DISTRACTED mobs, and give a huge boost (huge for rogues, big for monks/rangers, good for the rest) if hitting anything that is not fighting someone else, searching for a noise, or charging into battle.

3) Stealth is plain broken at low levels because the mobs get bonus to spot too fast. When your hide skill is very low, and you don't have many ways to improve it yet (like wielding a Cutthroat Smallblade (http://ddowiki.com/page/Item:Cutthroat%27s_Smallblade)), staying on a mob's sight for 5 seconds is enough for them to detect you. And those low level mobs, made back when the level cap was 10, move A LOT around the dungeon, because at the time, stealth mechanics were based more on ambient light than your hide skill.

I know many people don't care about the starting levels, but when your new player want to try out stealth mechanics and is spotted by every kobold guard they meet, they will assume stealth is plain broken, and join the bullrushers.

[Blackheartox]

Why has noone linked this yet?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTccvj0gc58

This is how a rogue is and should be in dnd!

[draven1]

Why has noone linked this yet?

This is how a rogue is and should be in dnd!

Lol, +1 :D

[QuantumFX]

(We are still working on Mechanic.)

Here’s a suggestion for you:

- Rapid Fire: Add toggle: It gives any crossbow the rate of Fire of a Heavy Repeater. It fits the theme you guys set up, it gives named non-repeating crossbows a reason to exist, and it doesn’t step on Artificers.

[davmuzl]

This does appear to be an easy work around, but it completely changes the ability. The charm of it now is that it is a 25% fort/sneak attack bypass that the whole party can benefit from. There are enough "me" enhancements in the game. They shouldn't get rid of one of the few "we" enhancements just because it is the easier thing to do.

I like what you say there. There should be more good party based build options. For the rogue the poisons would be a good way to give more options to debuff enemies.

What rogues need is a good way to deal damage to undead and constructs which they are lacking right now(imo item effects like destruction and weaken consrtuct/undead should also remove sneak attack immunity- I don't know if they alreday do) but making them ignore all fortification sounds boring and too strong.

Apart from that it is important that all abilities have similar option when it comes to scaling into higher epic levels. I haven't done the math but I would be surprised if a rogue could get his assassinate DC anywhere near what other classes have for their stunning blow or as mentioned before the Coup de Grace and at the same time they have to work harder to make it work because they have to be stealthed. It may be possible but it also means putting everything into int that is possible while other classes can spend their action points on other things.

[Qezuzu]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

Yes, this please. I get annoyed when people say "stealth is broken" because seem to mean one or more of many things:
-Sneak does not actually function
-Assassinate draws aggro
-You break sneak on interacting with items
-It's not party friendly
-The game doesn't reward you for stealth (quick note, please dramatically improve the low-kill bonuses. Insidious Cunning, which is VERY difficult to achieve in a lot of quests, gives as much XP as Aggression which is easily achievable in basically every quest).
-It's too difficult to get working scores
-You can't escape aggro
-Random True Seeing champions ruin it

And so on.


I'll take a stab at outlining the problems with stealth:

1. Not a team mechanic - in "Current" DDO 90% of content revolves around bum rushing through quests as fast as possible.. bull rushing from one encounter to the next. This rarely if ever gives any rogue "time" to stealth and make use of the stealth mechanics. As such, if you are playing with other players in a "PuG" you will likely never get a chance to make use of your "Cool stealth" abilities.

2. Not a solo mechanic - in "Current" DDO 90% of content can and will see through your stealth for pretty much no reason at all other then "hey I'm a random champ so ha ha screw you stealthy.". As such, "Sneaking" to solo is not viable in Elites. Plus there is the added annoyance that you can't "One Shot" enemies from stealth "Assassins Creed" style... so when you DO manage to succeed at getting the drop on an enemy, you likely WONT kill it, and then it and its buddies will proceed to beat you to death.

On "Paper" the idea of being able to sneak past a monster to disable a trap or secure some objective without relying on combat alone.. in "Reality" I can only think of ONE quest that being stealthy is rewarded (stealthy repo).. which BTW is still completed FASTER by a Paladin/Barb/any high AC toon just bum rushing the levers and ignoring the dungeon alert.. so yeah.. GO STEALTH!!:rolleyes:

The dungeon mechanics in DDO just are NOT suited to stealth gameplay. Note I am looking at the WHOLE of the game, just because there may be "Some" quests where its nice to have does not discount the majority of the content not being suited for it.

The entire point of stealth is to not draw aggro and avoid killing things, at least in my opinion. When I have five party members who can take aggro for me and are slicing up everything anyway, how exactly can stealth be employed? I for one am entirely content just using it as a way to use Assassinate.

Stealth not being good in solo play is false. If you're getting spotted (past lvl10 or so at least) your scores are simply not high enough. Solo sneaking not being viable in elites is also completely false, nearly any epic elite can be completed with only required kills. The only drawback is that it completes more slowly (there's no way to fix this beyond just making it broken overpowered) and you get less XP (which can be solved by changing a single value).


Stealth as a mechanic needs a complete overhaul IMO to match the game in its current format.

What's the current format of the game? Zerging everything? Stealth will never match that, they're fundamentally incompatible. Tweaks can be done but there's no need to overhaul it entirely.

[dualscissors]

[edit for clarity] Assassinate agro is working fine now.

I've seen the complaint a few times in this thread that immediately after assassinating a mob, the room's other mobs will all be agroing on you - that is to say, the mob death will instantly alert them that you are lurking. As a side effect - the complaint goes - you won't get double-tap assassinates on a mob adjacent to the mob you assassinated.

This was something that I noticed as a problem several weeks or a couple months ago, but something after a hotfix seemed to revert the assassinate-stealth agro mechanic so that this broken agroing is NOT happening anymore. I'm basing [my observation that assassinate is not agroing entire rooms] off dozens of assassinate moves in the last several weeks.

[Ayseifn]

Any chance of a more general TWFing rogue prestige at some later date?

Not fan of how Knife Spec is so limiting but it's really hard to come up with ideas that make other weapons viable without overshadowing daggers/kukris.

[amsharkwei]

what is rogue need
and
what you want give to rogue


Rogue need some ability let them not spotted by monster,movement never break sneak

Rogue need some ability control the target,on hit:target drop into helpless for few sec

Rogue need more assassinate DC,maybe add dex mod into DC,or maybe add hide skill into DC

[redoubt]

[QUOTE=dualscissors;5551986]I've seen the complaint a few times in this thread that immediately after assassinating a mob, the room's other mobs will all be agroing on you - that is to say, the mob death will instantly alert them that you are lurking. As a side effect - the complaint goes - you won't get double-tap assassinates on a mob adjacent to the mob you assassinated.

QUOTE]

Implement at crit success/fail system for assassinate:

Assume mob fort save of 60 (including its roll.) Now compare that to the assassinate DC.
DC 66 and higher is a crit success. Your kill was done will such skill the you left the mob quietly leaned against the wall/table (whatever) in a manner that attracted no notice from his friends. Assassinate timer is shortened to 5 seconds.
DC 61 and higher is a success. Nearby mobs get a check (INT, spot, listen - something) to see if they notice their newly dead friend.
DC 60 or less is a fail. Mob has a W T F moment and starts looking for you.
DC 55 or less is a crit fail. You are pulled out of stealth and the mob KNOWS where you are. He calls out to his friends, "This little bleep just tried to kill me! Get him!" Cannot stealth for 5 seconds.

[Linvak]

Again, I really don't have any issues with the Assassin tree itself. If there's any trees I'm going to fret about it's Shadowdancer. The cores really need some help.

1. I really don't know what the use of threat +/- is when we have deception and everything is cleaving anyways.

2. And after you explained that Rogues have self healing in the form of UMD, we also have Shadow Walk in the form of UMD, yet our tier 4 Epic Destiny feels the need to give us 5 more charges. (5 charges of heal > shadow walk).

3. Dimension Door is always handy, but just another core with 1d6 Sneak Attack, moving on, nothing to see here.

4. Core 6....evasion? Now, I get it, people without evasion can make use of this. But what class, that's not using LD or DC and is also wearing light armor or robes, is sitting in Shadowdancer? The other part of this core, I'm really not sure if it's good or bad. I've never taken the time to check the numbers, and whether 5% extra dmg for 12 seconds ONLY after a vorpal is making much of a difference compared to some of the other core 6s given out by some of the more popular Epic Destinies

5. My final complaint, would be more about the DC of Assassinate. You're required to spend 12/24 points into 6 Int which = 3 DC which is again, required. Of all the Coup de Grace vs Assassinate complaints, this is the one I come back to the most. Bards don't need to be in an ED that offers charisma, meaning they don't have to spend half their ED points into their insta kill DC. We get +6 right away in Tier 1 Stealthy which is huge, and this only cost us 3 points. In the end, we're spending 15/24 points on our DC in an Epic Destiny.

This is a little harder to complain about, because giving us a working Assassinate without spending those points, opens up the door for being in LD in some cases, which would be HUGE dps numbers, and maybe too much. But this is why rogues dont have the PRR/HP/QUICK self healing abilities. I myself, don't find running LD fun or even a healthy playstyle on a pure assassin where 25% incorporeal is about the only thing keeping you competative. (Again, opinion/subjective) So I would still think, with 12 more points to spend in Shadowdancer, rogues would stay in SD because there are a lot of fun and interesting abilities that you just don't have room for otherwise.

I won't even get started on the epic moment. I doubt much explaining is needed there.

In terms of "tree" help --- Shadowdancer>Assassin

[Linvak]

The entire point of stealth is to not draw aggro and avoid killing things, at least in my opinion. When I have five party members who can take aggro for me and are slicing up everything anyway, how exactly can stealth be employed? I for one am entirely content just using it as a way to use Assassinate.

Stealth not being good in solo play is false. If you're getting spotted (past lvl10 or so at least) your scores are simply not high enough. Solo sneaking not being viable in elites is also completely false, nearly any epic elite can be completed with only required kills. The only drawback is that it completes more slowly (there's no way to fix this beyond just making it broken overpowered) and you get less XP (which can be solved by changing a single value).

What's the current format of the game? Zerging everything? Stealth will never match that, they're fundamentally incompatible. Tweaks can be done but there's no need to overhaul it entirely.

I have to agree with you here. Stealth, as far as sneaking around, and avoiding things, isn't a problem, unless we're talking about spiders (even though shadow form is technically allowing you to float : p and they still notice you 100% of the time).

I think if anyone is asking to be able to just fly around, insta-killing everything, and running to the end without ever being noticed or challenged is delusional.

What I'm more focused on is 2 things.

1. Assassin, assassinate, stealth, sneak, rogue. Why is it so hard to assassinate quietly? We use to be able to do this. Sometimes I'd fail the stealth check after assassinations, sometimes I'd be able to stay stealthed and move around. Coming up behind something, and slitting its throat with your other hand over its mouth, laying him/it/her down quietly should give us a decent chance of going unnoticed. I'm not sure if there's a roll in the hide/stealth check, but it seems to be 100% fail rate within a certain radius. I'm not asking for easy mode, I'm simply asking for a chance to pick a few things off here and there, using risk and reward for being an assassin.

2. Assassinating 2 mobs that are not preoccupied with someone else, is near impossible. I've done it before, but likely 1 out off 2 or 3 hundred tries. Again, i'm not asking for easy mode, but when 2 mobs are standing next to each other, and you're duel wielding, shouldn't we have a decent chance of getting them both baring DC failure. The 2nd mob INSTANTLY notices you, even when the red eye animation hasn't even had time to form, signaling that you've been spotted, and that any assassination attempts are futile. I'd like to tie this in with my other point where, I don't think this should be a 100% occurrence, but give us a chance to make that stealth check, the closer the mob, the harder the success will be.

Again, people that are asking for the ability to open doors and pull levers are asking a bit too much. Sure, when you think about traps and trap boxes which we're able to disarm quietly, you'd think that levers and doors would be the same. But we do need to think about gameplay quality, and I agree with many of the points you made.

[hi_sa1nt]

Since coup de grace uses perform. Why can't assassinate use (Int mod + 1/2 hide + 1/2 move silently)?

Allows you to invest points into other stats besides int, and still get a relatively high assassinate dc.

I've gotten my hide and move silently in the 110+ mark... and my int in the 70s... Still, now you're looking at an insta kill comparable to Coup de Grace in terms of killing dc's.

[Silverleafeon]

Reiterating some of the player concerns we want to look into, and adding some comments:

~ We wanted to avoid adding a stealth speed boost onto Assassin because it's already in Acrobat and it seems strange to have it in both places, but we have a lot of feedback from players now that without a boost to stealth speed the assassin ends up behind in groups and has trouble setting up assassinates. Based on player feedback we will discuss what we want to do with some kind of speed boost.


Sev~

Just wanted to say that if a member of the party lags way behind the group, particularly one that needs to be in the leading edge of the party, then the entire party suffers from this poor game design.

Or put more bluntly, if team cooperation (which some of us value) places the entire party in a situation of doing nothing while a party member catches up, then we are unhappy as a whole.

[Bobby88888]

I've been toying in my head with an idea for how to boost Rogue (at least assassin, maybe all) damage.

You could do it the conventional ways such as Melee Power, Crit range/multiplier, straight bonuses, etc.
Or you could play around more with Sneak Attack damage and ways to boost it.

You could just give more and more SA dice or perhaps you could let SA damage be effected by crits according to the currently equipped weapon and/or increase how much it benefits from melee power, say (just randomly) 200% or 250%, find a balanced point. Keeping in mind that at most your Rogue assassin is going to have 51 melee power at lvl 28 on live right now.

This keeps rogue damage dependent on SA and thus slightly situational, so it could potentially afford to be slightly higher??? Not to mention it is in keeping with the flavour of the class which is far more important. That's not to say that some of the other methods couldn't or shouldn't be implemented too ofc.

It could be either implemented into base SA itself or into the SA autogrant feat helping all rogues and the more rogue you go the more benefit you get due to having more SA available. This could also be used to give Ninja Spy monks a small buff right now depending on how it is implemented.

Just a thought.

Though 2wf could also use a fix (quick way just chuck 10 melee power on it all up like other styles and be done with it)


While I'm at it I might as well chuck a few thoughts on other aspects of the Rouge out there too so here goes.

Defences: Health - Assuming you have all the associated PLs you can easily hit 1000 hp. Assuming you don't have any of those (like me) you can still almost hit 900 hp. HP isn't as big an issue as some people are making it out to be and I hope nothing is touched here for Rogues. (Those values are on a pure lvl 28 Rogue)

PRR- If you have none of the related PLs you can get to ~60 PRR currently on live. I think some small boost would be appropriate here for the Rogue. Not a large one, it shouldn't go beyond 70ish at the most I think. That gets you around 40% damage reduction which may be a little on the low side, but Rogues aren't meant to be uber tough. Enough that the spike damage shouldn't be too big, hopefully. I havn't crunched the numbers but that is where I feel might be about right.

Dodge - This is where the defences of the Rouge should be mostly focused, along with evasion (or in unique abilities such as Defensive Roll - although an ability such as that that can be accessed properly by mechanics and assassins would be cool). Dodge cap for an assassin is 27 (with shippies), this stands as their main defence and could do with a substantial bump and some more dodge rating sources (at least within the tree/trees) should be made accessible to Rogues.

Other Miss chances - These constitute the remainder and currently largest portion of a Rogues defences via incorporable, blur/displace and potentially elusive at higher levels. No changes here just listing for reference.

Any changes on defences should be done carefully. A Rogues defences do and SHOULD require hard work and investment. Done right you can get fairly good will saves and slippery mind, A high reflex save with imp evasion, a moderate dodge score with other miss chances and a low but still handy PRR and MRR.

Assassinate: Be very careful here. It could possibly do with a few more points of DC to become available but perhaps this should be done through gear rather than enhancements (maybe an insightful assassinate DC augment, +1 and +2 varieties?) or chuck +2 or something on the capstone. Just PLEASE DO NOT make it so that it is easy to get it high. It should be a challenge and it is rewarding. Please please please do not change the DC formula to use skills or the like; we don't need another coup de grace catastrophe, the DC is obscene and honestly should be revised - yes I play bards too (sorry for off topic). Also as I and several others have mentioned you need to resolve the assassinate issues with how it interacts with stealth at the very least.


You CANNOT do a Rogue pass without addressing the elephant in the room - Shadowdancer ED but I won't go into that here. I will patiently await the thread for that.

Be careful with any changes please. Don't trivialise assassinate DCs and make it so that if we are luck on doublestrike and skilleda t lining it up we can get tripple assassinates off even solo. Give an appropriate damage buff whilst trying to keep in the flavour of the class (the poison ideas you put out are a great start, I love the concept provided they work on most/all enemies. Defences need a buff but make sure that the focus is on the right type of defences but don't neglect PRR. Also Rogues really need the Wilderness lore passive feat added!!! And anything you can do to encourage the stealthy playstyle more and to reward it is awsome, be that in enhancements or future quests via fun, xp or loot :D
p.s. The mechanic of measure the foe isn't a very good one, that isn't what I mean by encouraging stealth playstyle.

Thanks for all the work you guys do and taking the time to read our tedious feedback, really appreciate it

[Qezuzu]

I want to second that insane Assassinate DCs are not a good idea. Coup De Grace is poorly designed in that aspect and I don't want another easy-button ability that works "out of the box", even if it means being a bit inferior.

[IronClan]

My problem with Assasinate is it's not really viable to be multiclassed ASSASSIN. A Ninja Assassin for example is totally non-viable you can't have Monk levels without massively impacting your assassinate DC.

I would like to see Assassinate changed thusly:

DC X + 1/2 Rogue Levels

Right now ignoring capstone bonuses a 19 rogue loses 1 DC to a 20 Rogue, and a 14 Rogue 6 somethingelse loses 6 DC (which results in a basically non viable flavor build ESPECIALLY after the Capstone is improved)

After this + 1/2 Rogue Levels (still ignoring capstones) a 18 rogue loses 1 DC to a 20 rogue, instead of losing 2, and a 14 Rogue 6 something else is only losing 3 DC's instead of 6.

Or you could put a version of assassinate into the Ninja Spy tree maybe?

[Blackheartox]

Another thing that i never understood in ddo.
So, we have assasins, who should be lore wise best poison users, and stealth killer.

Yet you give the absolute best hands down poison ability to shiradi.
Honestly, i never understood that

[IronClan]

Also Yes PLEASE you must address Shadowdancer ED, if you're going to make Rogues more viable in Epic levels. Their ED is terrible, second only to Fatesinger for worst ED in the game IMO.

[SealedInSong]

Dear Turbine:
Please stop changing everything.
Signed, Everybody who likes theorycrafting builds.

No, really. Just stop. Not 3 days after I put the finishing touches on my fighter/rogue/pala build, you announce a change DG and I had to redo the whole thing. Now you're changing how threat reduction works and I'll need to TR this really fun build. Judging by your producer's letter, it seems you're nerfing Manyshot AGAIN. This puts the kibosh on my Monkcher build, which I found so fun (especially solo) that I was going to keep a permanent archer of some sort. Just. ****ing. Stop.

I am regretful that your builds might have to change after these passes, but in general it's for the greater good.

I.e. most of these changes are in response to what the player base as a whole has been asking for since the enhancement pass was just an IDEA, and they help to flesh out the game as it was intended.

Also, variety is the spice of life. Thanks.

[SealedInSong]

Okay this seems to be targeted at the "assassinate doesnt play nice with new stealth AI" thing... Im not sure the problem is clear. The code probably doesnt need to be redone really, but Assassinate needs to be coded as a zero-agro attack or something. The issue is when you hit a mob with NOTHING else around, because you are the only target you get the heat. Can you make a successful Assassinate generate zero threat or something? That might fool the new AI into not autojumping you when youre alone. Or make it a "zero sound" attack, so the mobs dont auto-hear it and come running. If you can just make the strike actually "stealthy" by making it a zero threat, zero noise attack, that may do it. Try that if you can? If you can log in, feel free to contact me. Like 3-4 mins and the problem can be fully demonstrated/repo/explained etc... dont think youre looking at a system overhaul just a change to assassinate to work inside the new system.

+1 to this.

Community, instead of attacking Severlin and his inability to say, "Yeah, instead of continuing on with the enhancement trees pass I'm going to also start a 'Stealth Up' campaign," I think bbqzor has an excellent point: just hack assassinate.

It would be a temporary work around, but really the best thing here is probably just to make assassinate attacks special in some way that prevents them from easily breaking stealth.

Better to get assassinate working properly again than to get an assassin update with a bunch of unhappy players that can't...well...ASSASSINATE.

[Wizza]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

See Sev~, this is the main problem that I have with you (and rogues) right now.

- First of all: you state that TWF is off-topic. Absolutely false: TWF being so inferior to THF and SWF is one of the top reasons why Rogues are so far behind everyone else in DPS.

- Second: you say that "We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth". That's all good and fine, until we actually see the real gameplay in place, where Barbs, paladins and Bards are tanking Red alert 20+ mobs with 150 PRR and absolutely not in danger of any kind, which leads to the third problem.

- Third: the PRR issue and self-heal. You gave self-heals and 150 PRR to EVERYONE: be them casters, Barbs, Pallies, Bards but you are afraid of giving some to Rogues as well. You think scroll-healing is enough? Not even close. Not in this state of the game. I don't understand why you are afraid of giving Rogues some of those as well, you gave it to everyone. You talk about dodge but do you know that most of the melees run around already with max or close to max Dodge? And Blitz offers either more dodge or PRR. If you don't want to give rogues high prr, then we better reach 50%+ dodge.Which leads to the fourth problem

- Fourth: Shadowdancer. This ED is half good and half bad. We, rogues, don't want to run in Blitz. We don't want to face-tank mobs and blitz them around. We want to sneak, insta-kill, be untouchable for X seconds, have superior Dodge/Concealment/Incorporeality. Some of this already happens, some of this has BROKEN abilities: Consume with no DC Showing and wonky overall; Meld Into Darkness has an horrible animation; Dark Imbuement is overall a pathetic joke; Pierce the gloom is bad as well.


If you want to fix rogues, ALL of these four points are important. Not just changing some enhancements and call it a day. That's not fixing, that's band-aiding.


Wizza~

[SealedInSong]

My problem with Assasinate is it's not really viable to be multiclassed ASSASSIN. A Ninja Assassin for example is totally non-viable you can't have Monk levels without massively impacting your assassinate DC.

I would like to see Assassinate changed thusly:

DC X + 1/2 Rogue Levels

Right now ignoring capstone bonuses a 19 rogue loses 1 DC to a 20 Rogue, and a 14 Rogue 6 somethingelse loses 6 DC (which results in a basically non viable flavor build ESPECIALLY after the Capstone is improved)

After this + 1/2 Rogue Levels (still ignoring capstones) a 18 rogue loses 1 DC to a 20 rogue, instead of losing 2, and a 14 Rogue 6 something else is only losing 3 DC's instead of 6.

Or you could put a version of assassinate into the Ninja Spy tree maybe?

I've tried to think of lots of multiclassed assassin builds, and you're right, they usually fail miserably.

On the one hand, I think it's cool that pure class assassins are actually rewarded the way I believe pure classes should be rewarded.

On the other hand, I don't think it's good for the game for the pure class assassin to be sooo backloaded that you actually can't build a viable muticlass assassin. And as you said, we're not even talking 18/2 here, we're talking 19/1 as being suboptimal to the point of not bothering.

If anyone however does have a 19/1 build they can direct me, or amazingly, an 18/2? I'd love to see it.

[SealedInSong]

Snip...
In terms of "tree" help --- Shadowdancer>Assassin

All very good points, but I suggest creating a new discussion about this so we don't derail Severlin's welcome attempt to improve this enhancement tree.

I too would love to see a revamp of the following:
shadowdancer
magister

small polishing of:
draconic incarnation
grandmaster of flowers
fatesinger

[Chi_Ryu]

A Rogue gets exactly 1 opportunity to assassinate per encounter without a group.

Hi, can I introduce you to the bluff->stealth->assassinate 3 step combo? It took sone practice to master, but now works just fine for me - even when soloing - so long as I'm not overwhelmed with foes, or being plinked by archers - and good play can help with minimising both of those, most of the time.

With the proposed change to Shiv - if it actually works - will also open up shiv->stealth->assassinate which would be likely to work even better (due to the slow animation of bluff).

(And the reason assassins often go TWF is because you can get double assassinations - something your SWF Bard won't be doing)

I'm not arguing the Assassinate is anywhere near as good as CDG, but it isn't as bad as you make out either.

[Ayseifn]

I've tried to think of lots of multiclassed assassin builds, and you're right, they usually fail miserably.

On the one hand, I think it's cool that pure class assassins are actually rewarded the way I believe pure classes should be rewarded.

On the other hand, I don't think it's good for the game for the pure class assassin to be sooo backloaded that you actually can't build a viable muticlass assassin. And as you said, we're not even talking 18/2 here, we're talking 19/1 as being suboptimal to the point of not bothering.

If anyone however does have a 19/1 build they can direct me, or amazingly, an 18/2? I'd love to see it.

Agreed, it's not just the staying pure it's the reliance on int, so Harper and daggers/kukris. Way too narrow in scope, you'll almost always end up with a dagger using 20th level rogue in SD with half their ED AP spent in Int, all level ups in int and the only thing differentiating different Assassinators being base race and a few AP here and there. Very boring and the only way to really differentiate yourself is to drop you Assassinate DC, it's already really tight to get it viable so it's not long before you just ignore their big draw and you just end up with Assassins that can't Assassinate at all.

[IronClan]

Agreed, it's not just the staying pure it's the reliance on int, so Harper and daggers/kukris. Way too narrow in scope, you'll almost always end up with a dagger using 20th level rogue in SD with half their ED AP spent in Int, all level ups in int and the only thing differentiating different Assassinators being base race and a few AP here and there. Very boring and the only way to really differentiate yourself is to drop you Assassinate DC, it's already really tight to get it viable so it's not long before you just ignore their big draw and you just end up with Assassins that can't Assassinate at all.

Yeah it doesn't take much at all for Assassinate to drop off the table due to it's extremely tight DC and lack of other opportunities due to needing INT from Shadowdancer. IMO the DC for assassinate should be reworked with this in mind.

Right now its 10 plus Rogue levels +INT mod + assassinate bonus

A) as already said 1/2 rogue levels with a higher base would be more flexible
B) I'd like to see this become DEX OR INT
C) I'd like to see a couple other gear items that have the same (non stacking) Assassinate bonus for the sake of flexibility, and because Epic Midnight Greetings is so hard to get and is on a weapon (costing you DPS compared to TF) being an old S/S/S item I'd like to see it's bonus bumped up to 1 higher than wearable gear.
D) I'd like to see a new high level Augment that gives a stacking +1 to assasinate
E) I'd like to see a new Affix call it "Skulking" and put it on a new wearable raid item (a Ring I suggest)

"Ring Of Skulking" Dodge 15%, Skulking: When sneaking undetected you are skulking; Your base sneak speed is increased to normal run speed if you have 50% Faster Sneaking Enhancement, or shadow training faster sneaking clickie) for every 10 seconds you "skulk" and remain undetected you gain +1 to your DC to assassinate (As well as the DC's of assassinate like abilities in Shadowdancer) until detected. Passive on the raid item +5% stacking incorporeal


On the other hand shadowdancer having such long standing unfixed issues/broken/non working abilities is largely masked because Assassins are forced to use every bit of their points on INT pips and then have exactly enough points left to buy Shadow Form... which leaves nothing for anything else...

[Arlathen]

Devs/Players: Take a step back and consider the following:

- Why impede sneaking speed at all?

Is it really going to break the game if sufficiently skilled characters can keep up with everyone else in a Party environment while sneaking? Instant way to make the whole system a lot more Assassin, Party and Game friendly is to just not impede the movement speed at all, or provide ways to totally mitigate the speed loss. Say, how about making it a flat 50% reduction to begin with, and then every point of Move Silently skill reduces the penalty by 1%, to the full 100% movement speed by having Move Silently at 50+ ?

I'm not a frequent Rogue player, but seriously, I'd love to use my mains Ranger Sneak skills more often in a party friendly environment.

[Firewall]

If i remember correctly the Assassinate Attack - prior to the enhancement pass - worked on ranged weapons as long as you were in Sneak Attack range. I would like to see that coming back even if it would only work for thrown weapons or more specifically for thrown daggers (for keeping the flavor of the tree).

The vorpal from the Lethality core ability is very weak and does not even provide the usual 100 damage for monsters that are above 1000 hp so it would be cool if at least that would be fixed.

[brzytki]

I'm actually quite torn on the idea of moving Faster Sneaking from acrobat to assassin. I know, I was surprised myself at first.

While it certainly makes more sense for the assassin tree to be the one with Faster Sneaking enhancement line, I'm a little concerned about APs investement. See, after the pass there probably won't be a problem in assassin tree such as wasting APs on things you'd probably never use or just to hit the threshold of APs spent in the tree. If we move the sneaking speed boost to assassin tree, all assassins will pick it just like they did till now, but take a look at what's gonna happen to those that put some investment in acrobat tree to get Haste Boost. They'll be required to waste 3 more APs for useless tier1 acrobat stuff just to be able to pick Haste Boost. It doesn't matter that Haste Boost's cost is being changed to 1/1/1 cause Kensei tree had it for 1/1/1 for some time now, in addition to being tier1.

Right now, i have 2 APs wasted in acrobat tree - one to open the tree and one more to go from 4 to 5 in APs spent in the tree. After you move Faster Sneaking to assassin tree, i'll have 5 APs wasted on stuff that hardly does anything for my assassin. That's not acceptable, unless you put something appealing in tier1 of acrobat tree, for example Extra Action Boosts like in Kensei tree.

Maybe a better way to change it would be, like other posters said, to tie it to assassin cores or APs spent in the tree.

[Silverleafeon]

Devs/Players: Take a step back and consider the following:

- Why impede sneaking speed at all?

Is it really going to break the game if sufficiently skilled characters can keep up with everyone else in a Party environment while sneaking? Instant way to make the whole system a lot more Assassin, Party and Game friendly is to just not impede the movement speed at all, or provide ways to totally mitigate the speed loss. Say, how about making it a flat 50% reduction to begin with, and then every point of Move Silently skill reduces the penalty by 1%, to the full 100% movement speed by having Move Silently at 50+ ?

I'm not a frequent Rogue player, but seriously, I'd love to use my mains Ranger Sneak skills more often in a party friendly environment.

I could go with that approach.

[Severlin]

Edited the OP:

Based on player feedback we moved the sneaking speed into the Assassin tree under Stealthy.

Poisoned Strikes now apply as Assassin's Mark to the target rather than treating them as Poisoned so it will work on all enemies and won't be blocked by enemies immune to poison.

Sev~

[Severlin]

For Assassin's Trick I think we will look into reducing the animation time rather than making it passive so the group can benefit from the debuff (as it works on live) rather than just the Assassin.

Sev~

[Orleano]

Well at least there will be some point in poison attacks now... Although i would rather see them getting their vorpal effect every time, something like "if you struck enemy with it and its normal attack, enemy gets a -1 saving throw, in 5 seconds after that he gets 1d6 stat damage (with save), in 5 seconds after he got stat damaged(failed save) he gets vorpal effect (with save); if you score a crit then evenmy gets -1 saving throw and 1d6 stat damage(without save), and in 5 seconds after that a vorpal effect (with save); If you score a vorpal then enemy gets -1 saving throw, 1d6 stat damage and vorpal effect(without save)." This way you would get enemy stunned or heartseeked (or shattermantled O_o) with better reliability.

[HuneyMunster]

Edited the OP:

Based on player feedback we moved the sneaking speed into the Assassin tree under Stealthy.

Sev~

For me personally that's a nice change as it frees up 4 action points as I want to change to shadar kai which requires 9 points to get 30 sec cd on shadow jaunt.

Off topic, I still feel Shadar kai need a look at in terms on the missing second ability option other races have in their cores. This may make them more favorable choice for assassins as opposed to drow and human.

[FrancisP.Fancypants]

(And the reason assassins often go TWF is because you can get double assassinations - something your SWF Bard won't be doing)


This is incorrect. You can get double assassinations with SWF, you just need to be positioned so both mobs are in range of your swing.

[draven1]

How about making "bleed them out" as "open wounds"?

Instead of some bleeding dots, every time you hit the target in effect of "open wounds", the target get additional bleeding damage.
Bleeding dmg is 3d6 per tier, up to 9d6 at tier 3. Scaled up by melee power. Lasts for 10 sec. Cooltime is 15 sec.
Better dmg version of envenomed blade, but it's not a toggle, but active skill.

You can even instakill a target with 'execute' when the target..
1. got open wounds or marked by Assassin's mark.
2. under 30% hp
3. didn't notice you(sneak attack)
4. assassination DC passed

-------
Thrill of murderer
If the target under the mark of assassin or open wounds effect, Assassin get +2 crit range or +1 crit range / +1 crit multiplier with 10% double strike for the target.
If the target murdered in 10 sec, you gain +1 assassination DC, stacks up to 5.

------
Can we get "Sap" feat at assassin lvl 6 for free?

With adding champions into DDO, we need more tactical decisions.
But, rogues doesn't have many tactical movements, even though it is advanced tactical melee.

How about adding 'Sap' feat at assassin lvl 6?
http://www.armchairempire.com/images/previews/pc/thief-iii/thief-iii-2.jpg
http://blog-imgs-58-origin.fc2.com/x/d/a/xdairygamesx/TDS_garrettblackjack.jpg
'Sap' is very roguish feat, but rogues are very feat-starved class. So, no rogues uses it.

It will give more flavor(Sapping Infiltrator) & improve practical usefulness for rogues.

Also, poison ability can be improved by adding reasonable DC & some CC ability(paralysis, blindness, daze, even mind control for high lvl rogue) for it.

Rogues need more tactical options.

[dualscissors]

For Assassin's Trick I think we will look into reducing the animation time rather than making it passive so the group can benefit from the debuff (as it works on live) rather than just the Assassin.

Sev~

Excellent. I am (and apparently you are) with the earlier poster that suggested party-group benefit play is more immersive than solely a "me bonus."

Really it's just the loooooo....oooong animation that prevents assassins from wanting to use Assassin's Trick.

[Severlin]

Excellent. I am (and apparently you are) with the earlier poster that suggested party-group benefit play is more immersive than solely a "me bonus."

Really it's just the loooooo....oooong animation that prevents assassins from wanting to use Assassin's Trick.


We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

[John_Rove]

Any chance that Damage Boost Can be Changed To Melee/Ranged Power boost, similar to what was done for Paladin. This, to me, makes sense as there are rogues which use ranged attacks that can currently use damage boost. If it is changed to just Melee Power, you are taking that tool away from them.

[Saekee]

How about adding 'Sap' feat at assassin lvl 6?

'Sap' is very roguish feat, but rogues are very feat-starved class. So, no rogues uses it.

It will give more flavor(Sapping Infiltrator) & improve practical usefulness for rogues.


OOOOOH this is a great idea. Please take note. Add SAP as a free feat! Love it! Not sure where to put it--maybe in the core, around level 6?

[redoubt]

We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

Cool. I (and likely others) look forward to seeing it in action!

[Mryal]

'Sap' is very roguish feat, but rogues are very feat-starved class. So, no rogues uses it.

It will give more flavor(Sapping Infiltrator) & improve practical usefulness for rogues.

Also, poison ability can be improved by adding reasonable DC & some CC ability(paralysis, blindness, daze, even mind control for high lvl rogue) for it.

Rogues need more tactical options.

Those are all great points.

[HuneyMunster]

Poison Strikes, Weakness Poison and Deadly Poison.
- Are abilities all link so that deadly also requires weakness or can u just take 2 of the three?


Does Shiv bluff portion apply a bluff similar to using bluff or deception item proc where it turn the targets back to yourself?

[HatsuharuZ]

We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

Would you be willing to change the Bluff animation to this as well? No need to change the cooldown, just the animation. The bluff effect only lasts 4 seconds, btw.

[edrein]

Any chance that Damage Boost Can be Changed To Melee/Ranged Power boost, similar to what was done for Paladin. This, to me, makes sense as there are rogues which use ranged attacks that can currently use damage boost. If it is changed to just Melee Power, you are taking that tool away from them.

Assassins are melee. I'm sure ranged power will be put in the revamped version of Mechanic.

[Fedora1]

I like the way this is going. If TWF gets a revamp rogues will be awesome sauce again, and will bring rangers back to the table somewhat.

[Severlin]

Poison Strikes, Weakness Poison and Deadly Poison.
- Are abilities all link so that deadly also requires weakness or can u just take 2 of the three?


Does Shiv bluff portion apply a bluff similar to using bluff or deception item proc where it turn the targets back to yourself?

~ You can skip Weakness Poison and still take Deadly Poison and vice versa. Obviously if you don't take at least one of the Poisoned Strikes the others will be useless.

~ I am not sure what you mean with your bluff question.

Sev~

[bbqzor]

~ I am not sure what you mean with your bluff question.

When you bluff a mob successfully (or via deception weapon proc) it physically turns around a moment. Theyre wondering if Shiv mimics that behavior (the mob turning around). I hope this isnt news and it just wasnt clear what the question was.

[Melllllkor]

dang bugs!

[Mellkor]

I like many of the proposed changes and the ideas posted here.

Now my 2 cents:

I think the focus of assassin improvements should be:

1: Increase sneak attack damage from xd6 and progress to xd8, then xd10, and finally to xd12. I think this alone will bring rogue DPS on par with recent dps changes to other classes and fits with the assassin theme.

2: Add the ability to lose ALL aggro currently on the assassin based on the hide skill. (requires something like having no mobs within sight or within a certain distance or maybe just requires a shadow charge). Kind of like a ninja vanish kind of thing, this would be really great and add a new dimension in both solo and group play.

3: increase the dodge CAP from 28% to something like 40%.

4: dramatically increase the usefulness of poisons, particularly on bosses.

5: add a tiered ability to decrease assassinate cooldown(s) and fix the current assassinate/aggro bugs!

6: For assassinate DC, I think just doubling the current bonus to measure the foe would be about right. Or increasing possible item bonus to +10 or so.

7: Improve current fort bypass abilites or add/improve specific abilities to do sneak damage on sneak damage immune mobs.

I really like this idea posted above by redoubt:

Measure the foe:
add 5% sneak speed per stack (yes, if you get all the sneak speed bonuses you will sneak faster than your normal movement, but these are assassins. They should "appear" out of nowhere. Speed is key to this and also just to keeping up with the group in todays game.)
Have the stacks expire one at a time.

[FuryFlash]

Can we get "Sap" feat at assassin lvl 6 for free?

With adding champions into DDO, we need more tactical decisions.
But, rogues doesn't have many tactical movements, even though it is one of tactical melee.

How about adding 'Sap' feat at assassin lvl 6?
...
'Sap' is very roguish feat, but rogues are very feat-starved class. So, no rogues uses it.

It will give more flavor(Sapping Infiltrator) & improve practical usefulness for rogues.

Also, poison ability can be improved by adding reasonable DC & some CC ability(paralysis, blindness, daze, even mind control for high lvl rogue) for it.

Rogues need more tactical options.

Adding sap as an automatic feat for rogues at level 6 in the core along with assassin's trick would be great! Possibly even a multi-selector between assassin's trick and sap would be good.

[Bobby88888]

I like many of the proposed changes:

My 2 cents:

I think the focus of assassin improvements should be:

1: Increase sneak attack damage from 1d6 and progress to 1d8, then 1d10, and finally to 1d12. I think this alone will bring rogue DPS on par with recent dps changes to other classes and fits with the assassin theme.

2: Add the ability to lose ALL aggro currently on the assassin based on the hide skill. (requires something like having no mobs within sight or within a certain distance or maybe just requires a shadow charge). Kind of like a ninja vanish kind of thing, this would be really great and add a new dimension in both solo and group play.

3: increase the dodge CAP from 28% to something like 40%.

4: dramatically increase the usefulness of poisons, particularly on bosses.

5: add a tiered ability to decrease assassinate cooldown(s) and fix the current assassinate/aggro bugs!

6: For assassinate DC, I think just doubling the current bonus to measure the foe would be about right. Or increasing possible item bonus to +10 or so.

7: Improve current fort bypass abilites or add/improve specific abilities to do sneak damage on sneak damage immune mobs.

Some good ideas here, though I don't agree with all of them (we are on the forums here :D )

1. Something like this is the perfect way to boost assassin DPS (which it really needs). Alternatively some form of Sneak Attack on Crit effect or effected by say 200% melee power ( as a high level assassin core) or a combo of the above 3. I also think that the poison or assassin's mark idea is another great way that can be used to do this in CONJUCTION with some of the above.

2. This sounds like an interesting idea though at this stage I'm not necessarily sold but certainly interesting.

3. Something like this is needed.

4. Yes, this.

5. At the very least yes to fixing the assassinate bugs.

6. No just no. While I think assassinate DC needs a little more, make it a small bonus only. +1 or 2 more, +4 tops. And not via measure the foe.

7. I think I mentioned this earlier as an idea but at any rate I like it in theory.


EDIT: I also want to reiterate and remind that you can't do a Rogue pass without fixing up their ED and without finishing off the shadar-Kai race (racial abilities are still missing.......)

[Severlin]

EDIT: I also want to reiterate and remind that you can't do a Rogue pass without fixing up their ED and without finishing off the shadar-Kai race (racial abilities are still missing.......)

We are not, for this update, doing any ED passes except adding Ranged Power as part of the ranged power pass, nor are we working on any iconic or racial trees. That would push the patch off by too long.

Sev~

[redoubt]

We are not, for this update, doing any ED passes except adding Ranged Power as part of the ranged power pass, nor are we working on any iconic or racial trees. That would push the patch off by too long.

Sev~

Good, bad or ugly, thank you for staying active in the thread.

[Bobby88888]

We are not, for this update, doing any ED passes except adding Ranged Power as part of the ranged power pass, nor are we working on any iconic or racial trees. That would push the patch off by too long.

Sev~

That's disappointing but I understand where you are coming from. Thanks for letting us know, really appreciate it.

[Rautis]

We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~
Nice. Let's hope it doesn't look too out of place when you use it from distance. Current Assassin's Trick isn't a melee attack but functions more like bluff. This is nice because you can use it even when using ranged weapons. Changes to assassin's trick alone boost assassins(and other rogues as spending 11 ap into assassin is not the worst idea) alot as only other options for sneak attack immunity removal that I can think of are Shadowdancer Shadow Mastery on vorpals and Wrack Construct which is very limited.

Now only thing that could use a change is the assassinate DC. While the formula is rather strong and gets workable DCs for heroics and some epics it falls behind because of no items and only one epic destiny with +6 to DC. If you compare for example Stunning Fist which gets about similar formula but with ½ character levels instead of full rogue levels gets 6(soon 5 when level 30 is possible) less from levelup part of formula. Now you have to look at enhancements, EDs and items that boost each of these abilities.

Assassinate gets a +4 DC raid item, +6 from EDs and +5 from Measure the Foe. +15.

Stunning fist gets +3 from Grandmaster of Flowers, +6 Legendary tactics, like +15 from normal stunning item, then possible +6 from insightful combat mastery(can replace with whatever half of your int modifier can be if you go harper), +3 from possible dwarf, bladeforged or warforged, +3 from kensei, +3 fighter past lives and then +3 from vanguard. +42 and I probably forgot something. Very specific build but so is level 20 rogue.

So after you drop 5 points off from stunning fist because it only gets half character level bonus the total difference in DC boosts is 22 points in favor of stunning fist. Also debuffing for stunning fist is simpler as you won't lose +5 DC from Measure the Foe if you use for example twf improved sunder for usually -6 fortitude save. On d20 system 22 DC difference is insane. There can be places where Stunning Fist only fails when foe rolls a 20 and Assassinate only works if foe rolls a 1. Assassinate is more final solution than a stun so I could understand why it would have a bit lower DC but if difference is close to 20 points it is too much. And now there are special attacks with even more DC than stunning fist that could have been used in this comparison instead. Coup de Grace for example.

I didnt add racial stat bonuses into calculations to keep it a bit simpler. There is drow race with +4 total int and WF and BF get -2 wis. I might have also forgotten some things in favor of one of these abilities.

In my opinion the issue is that there are attacks with great itemization and enhancement support and then there are things like Assassinate, Shadow Dagger, Thunderstone, Time Bomb, Ooze Flask, Tanglefoot and some Henshin Mystic attacks with little or no support to push their DCs to point where they would be meaningful abilities. It is a pity because I like these. They just aren't usable because DCs can't be boosted enough in game.

[Qezuzu]

Shadowdancer needs a pass but it's not required to improve rogues, seeing as you can, you know, use Dreadnought or Crusader like every other melee.

[UurlockYgmeov]

We are not, for this update, doing any ED passes except adding Ranged Power as part of the ranged power pass, nor are we working on any iconic or racial trees. That would push the patch off by too long.

Sev~

I blame the Kobold Konsortium and their darn control weather wands for all the snow days!

[Thrudh]

Correct. Rogues are not supposed to party with other people, we give them abilities that are good for soloers but awful in teams. Gotcha.




Correct as well. An ASSASSIN is not supposed to ASSASSINATE in a raid because you already do tons of SA damage. Gotcha.

You know Wizza, you're not known as the most positive poster on these boards... but still, you managed to get a dev to answer your direct questions MULTIPLE times in this thread, yet you just keep throwing insults his way.

Do you really think this is the way to get the results you want?

Has this method EVER worked for you, in real life, or on these boards?

[Thrudh]

If you want to fix rogues, ALL of these four points are important. Not just changing some enhancements and call it a day. That's not fixing, that's band-aiding.

Gotta start somewhere... Need to fix four things... He's fixing one of the four, and has stated he will look at the other 3 things in the future... Is that a positive step or a negative step?

I'd like to see Rogues be master of Dodge... and it looks like we are moving that way...

[Blackheartox]

You know Wizza, you're not known as the most positive poster on these boards... but still, you managed to get a dev to answer your direct questions MULTIPLE times in this thread, yet you just keep throwing insults his way.

Do you really think this is the way to get the results you want?

Has this method EVER worked for you, in real life, or on these boards?

In that specific case, you do need to give him credit.
He might had used sarcasm a bit to much, but he was still correct with what he wrote.

[Thrudh]

In that specific case, you do need to give him credit.
He might had used sarcasm a bit to much, but he was still correct with what he wrote.

I wasn't addressing if he was right or not... Sev is probably the most direct-dealing dev we've ever had... Being a jerk to him, no matter how right you are, is just immature and, frankly, stupid.

And it affects all of us...

[Taurnish]

Sap and Hamstring are excellent feats for a rogue (especially an assassin type). Both could have an enhancement tier 1 or 2 that would increase the likelihood and/or duration of the produced effect. As mentioned, the rogue is a feat starved class; therefore, the ability for a rogue (say min level 6) to pick these up as free feats would not be game breaking and would allow a few more attack options. The assassin tree could get these at level 6 while the mechanic and thief acrobat would have to wait till level 9 to pick them up. Multiclasses could then pick up the feat benefits but only with a significant investment of levels. Similar to dipping ranger for tempest benefits.

[Ycal_Mot]

Does anyone else think the iconic characters look like the lead singer in Dead or Alive? They should have a dungeon where the kobolds are signing Right round baby waving flags.

[oradafu]

Sap and Hamstring are excellent feats for a rogue (especially an assassin type). Both could have an enhancement tier 1 or 2 that would increase the likelihood and/or duration of the produced effect. As mentioned, the rogue is a feat starved class; therefore, the ability for a rogue (say min level 6) to pick these up as free feats would not be game breaking and would allow a few more attack options. The assassin tree could get these at level 6 while the mechanic and thief acrobat would have to wait till level 9 to pick them up. Multiclasses could then pick up the feat benefits but only with a significant investment of levels. Similar to dipping ranger for tempest benefits.

If these feats are going to be given to all Rogues for free, I see no reason on why Assassins get access to them earlier than Acrobats and Mechanics. If players are multiclassing for non-flavor builds, they will be heading straight for the tree that doesn't require a particular weapon when it comes to spending AP, which happens to be the Assassin tree.

[Grace_ana]

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

This is a really weak tier 5 ability. PRR is the one thing rogues are really hurting for. But 3 PRR? It's practically useless. For reference other enhancements that offer PRR:

Battle Engineer: 5 PRR at core 3, another 5 PRR at core 5.
Frenzied Bezerker: 10 PRR at core 3
Eldritch Knight: 10 PRR at tier 2
Pale Master: 10 PRR at tier 2
Ravager: 3 PRR at tier 1
Sacred Defender and Stalwart Defender: 10 PRR at core 2, 15 PRR at tier 1
Sacred Defender: An additional 25 PRR plus other stuff at tier 5 -------> this is a tier 5 ability to compare to
Tempest: 10 PRR at tier 2
Warchanter: 6 PRR at tier 1, 6 PRR at tier 3
Shintao: 15 PRR at tier 2, another 10 PRR plus other stuff at tier 5 -------->compare this also to what you are suggesting for an equivalent tier
Warpriest: 10 PRR at tier 2

If you are trying to keep this stuff all in line, you can see that the others are more or less comparable, and what you are proposing is a really weak ability. It's weak even as a tier 1 enhancement, let alone a tier 5. I'd strongly suggest you boost that PRR up a whole lot. It's not overpowered given that rogues generally have very very few sources of PRR.

[Nuclear_Elvis]

We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

Sev,
I recommend you edit your OP Assassin's Trick line to state this in a summarized way, such as "(Duration changed to 15 seconds, cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, and animation changed to shorten time)"

[oradafu]

This is a really weak tier 5 ability. PRR is the one thing rogues are really hurting for. But 3 PRR? It's practically useless. For reference other enhancements that offer PRR:

Battle Engineer: 5 PRR at core 3, another 5 PRR at core 5.
Frenzied Bezerker: 10 PRR at core 3
Eldritch Knight: 10 PRR at tier 2
Pale Master: 10 PRR at tier 2
Ravager: 3 PRR at tier 1
Sacred Defender and Stalwart Defender: 10 PRR at core 2, 15 PRR at tier 1
Sacred Defender: An additional 25 PRR plus other stuff at tier 5 -------> this is a tier 5 ability to compare to
Tempest: 10 PRR at tier 2
Warchanter: 6 PRR at tier 1, 6 PRR at tier 3
Shintao: 15 PRR at tier 2, another 10 PRR plus other stuff at tier 5 -------->compare this also to what you are suggesting for an equivalent tier
Warpriest: 10 PRR at tier 2

If you are trying to keep this stuff all in line, you can see that the others are more or less comparable, and what you are proposing is a really weak ability. It's weak even as a tier 1 enhancement, let alone a tier 5. I'd strongly suggest you boost that PRR up a whole lot. It's not overpowered given that rogues generally have very very few sources of PRR.

Just to add to this, PRR is based on the type of armor and BAB. This ability appears to be limited to Light armor, which only gets 1/2 BAB +2. As for Rogue's BAB, only get .75 BAB per level. So unless they are pausing every minute or so to scroll a Tenser, they aren't maximizing the PRR that's achievable to everything you listed.

[Grace_ana]

Just to add to this, PRR is based on the type of armor and BAB. This ability appears to be limited to Light armor, which only gets 1/2 BAB +2. As for Rogue's BAB, only get .75 BAB per level. So unless they are pausing every minute or so to scroll a Tenser, they aren't maximizing the PRR that's achievable to everything you listed.

Which leaves rogues further and further behind and makes balancing melee damage from monsters really problematic on the development side of things. High dodge is great and I use it lots. But it's only going to be at best effective around a third of the time. If a rogue gets splattered the rest of the time because there are no PRR options aside from multiple lives, that's not so much fun.

I don't mind rogues being squishier than other classes. I do think that the tier abilities should be relatively equivalent in power, and that "squishy" shouldn't mean "you're going to be the loot sacrifice for sure."

My main is an assassin, and I've invested a lot into her. She's a completionist with lots of good gear, and I've been playing her pretty much forever. She has excellent DPS and doesn't generally die more than the rest of the party, because all I have invested in her have shored up other weak spots. That being said, it's blatantly obvious when I play her that her serious weakness is PRR, and there just aren't enough sources for it for her. I don't think assassins should be handed 25 PRR for heroic enhancements or anything, but 3 PRR is just pitiful. For tier 5, no less.

[draven1]

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.



I think PPR boost on assassin is not bad, but also not proper.
I would rather see more OMG button, shorten cool-time of it much, higher dodge cap, more dodge things, and MORE INCREDIBLE DEADLY DPS.

And rogues already have good source of damage reduction for emergency.

"Defensive roll" & "Cheat Death" Buff it.

Squishy, but DEADLY & Nimble. It's an assassin!

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor(This also affects maximum dodge.) & gain 1/2/3% dodge. You also gain 3/6/10% double strike & movement speed & chance to bypass sneak attack immunity.

Dont forget even HEAVY ARMORED DEFENDERS WITH HUGE TOWER SHIELD have 10% movement speed enhancement & shield charges(like wings).
Why don't swift light armor toons have it? Why those defenders are FAR MORE FASTER than fluffy light armor toons?

Why high defense profile toons also have higher & far more easier DPS(non situational better crit profile & AOE cleave & ever-lasting blitz & 200+ PRR/MRR) than low defense profile toons?

There is no reason besides flavor to play low defense profile classes now.
This is why every group has so many heavy armored pally/barb/bards with LD or DC now.
They also have higher HP, saves, more PRR by defender enhancement that doesn't really need to be true defender(without shield).
This is completely wrong balanced.

[Xionanx]

You know the problem I see with giving EVERYONE PRR? If everyone has it why not just get rid of it entirely and make monsters do less damage?:p

I few ?weeks? ago there was a thread I posted an idea about changing how PRR works so AC/Dodge/DR/Etc all balanace out better then it currently does.. but meh, no one cares enough to look it up.

The way I see it, the "idea" behind PRR is that the "tanky" guys in their heavy plate need to be up front getting aggro and then soaking up the damage. The "Cost" they should be paying is that they do moderate DPS for the benefit of being really hard to kill.

On the flip side, the guys in light or no armor with little to no PRR should be doing HIGH damage IE the "Cost" of doing high damage is when they get hit.. they get HIT HARD.

The problem however, is that currently some of your highest DPS builds also have some of the highest PRR and MRR.. this is NO downside to being tanky other then being accused of being a "FTOM Build".

So why not implement a DIFFERENT bonus to LIGHT ARMOR.. follow along, as this would benefit ALL classess not just rogues.
MP = Melee Power SP = Spell Power (universal) RP = Ranged Power

Heavy Armor +0 MP/SP/RP
Medium Armor +15MP/+0SP/+5RP
Light Armor +30MP/+15SP/+20RP
Robe/Outfit +30MP/+30SP/+30RP

Number are just examples but you get the idea. The more PRR/MRR the armor gives, the less MP/SP/RP the armor gives and vice versa.. so the be the "highest DPS" you wear a robe and deal with taking big hits.. to be the best tank you wear heavy armor but do less damage.

[Qezuzu]

I don't think Assassinate's DC should be bumped up very much but what about changing its DC formula to more easily accommodate multi-classes? You can't splash much, if at all, in other classes without neutering your Assassinate DC. Even 18/2 loses 3 DC.

What about changing it to 10+INT mod+[APs spent in Assassin tree / 2]? You could cap it to +20 (40 AP). It would have the same cap, it wouldn't change things for pure Assassins who are going to be spending 40 AP anyway, but it would mean Assassin-based multiclasses can actually, you know, exist.

[flaggson]

The sap idea is brilliant

[SealedInSong]

Assassinate gets a +4 DC raid item, +6 from EDs and +5 from Measure the Foe. +15.

Stunning fist gets +3 from Grandmaster of Flowers, +6 Legendary tactics, like +15 from normal stunning item, then possible +6 from insightful combat mastery(can replace with whatever half of your int modifier can be if you go harper), +3 from possible dwarf, bladeforged or warforged, +3 from kensei, +3 fighter past lives and then +3 from vanguard. +42 and I probably forgot something.

So after you drop 5 points off from stunning fist because it only gets half character level bonus the total difference in DC boosts is 22 points in favor of stunning fist. Also debuffing for stunning fist is simpler as you won't lose +5 DC from Measure the Foe if you use for example twf improved sunder for usually -6 fortitude save. On d20 system 22 DC difference is insane. There can be places where Stunning Fist only fails when foe rolls a 20 and Assassinate only works if foe rolls a 1. Assassinate is more final solution than a stun so I could understand why it would have a bit lower DC but if difference is close to 20 points it is too much. And now there are special attacks with even more DC than stunning fist that could have been used in this comparison instead. Coup de Grace for example.

I didnt add racial stat bonuses into calculations to keep it a bit simpler. There is drow race with +4 total int and WF and BF get -2 wis. I might have also forgotten some things in favor of one of these abilities.

In my opinion the issue is that there are attacks with great itemization and enhancement support and then there are things like Assassinate, Shadow Dagger, Thunderstone, Time Bomb, Ooze Flask, Tanglefoot and some Henshin Mystic attacks with little or no support to push their DCs to point where they would be meaningful abilities. It is a pity because I like these. They just aren't usable because DCs can't be boosted enough in game.

The fact is that the formula for assassinate, as others have illustrated but not necessarily as clearly as above, forces all assassins to go down one path with almost no variation.

That's not good for the game, and it's one of the reasons the prestige is hardly relevant in current endgame. Without a change to the formula, it will stay irrelevant.

(Also, I'd be incredibly tickled to see things like Thunderstone and Cauldron of Fire actually usable. They're awesome theory abilities and laughable in implementation.)

[draven1]

Can we get infinite thieves tool as a unique item?

Or just more stackable tools over 50 in a slot? Maybe up to 1000 like spell components?

This will make rogues happy :D

[IronClan]

Shadowdancer needs a pass but it's not required to improve rogues, seeing as you can, you know, use Dreadnought or Crusader like every other melee.

Have you run an assassin that's giving up 6 INT and 25% incorporeal to have better melee DPS? If you're going to be in LD you might as well make him a Staff build and add 6 monk (or just reduce your rogue levels to a 5) like everyone else does.

I am disappointed they wont improve Shadowdancer, they said the same thing about Fatesinger when they did the Bard pass and of course it's still not been touched. This is one of those things, if you can't get a Rogue Enhancement/Destiny ability improved RIGHT NOW, a bug or broken feature looked at, or bad mechanic tweaked right now, it's not going to get attention later.

[oradafu]

Can we get infinite thieves tool as a unique item?

Or just more stackable tools over 50 in a slot? Maybe up to 1000 like spell components?

This will make rogues happy :D

Yes! A bit off topic, but...

I've been asking for an infinite Epic thieves tool, since Update 6 when the old Epic item system still reigned. My suggestion was that the Tools would be Exclusive +6 or +7 enhancement and with a finite number of uses that recharge over time (ala Eternal Wands). That way Thieves tools wouldn't lose their value completely since trappers would need to carry them in quests with a real high number of traps.

But yes, anything to help cut down some of the clutter in inventory for trapping. Whether it's bigger stacks or being able to combine stacks. Or Eternal Tools! Heck, Arcane Archers don't need really to carry arrows anymore nor Arties need to carry bolts and they have Quivers to hold some of their excess ammo.

Also off the subject of the Assassin tree, but still Rogue related, I don't know why there isn't an ability available to Rogues in the Mechanic tree that contains a x% chance of preventing tools from being used (similar to the rod usage via the Past Life: Student of Artifice). This is completely a fluff ability that would cause any true unbalance between Rogues and Artificers.

[Chaios]

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity. As powerful as that change is, I'm with those who prefer it more or less like the original, just quicker.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.
basically gives +10 dodge whenever a rogue is in combat for more than 10 hits? Someone said they wanted rogues to be the masters of dodge or something like, well, that looks something like it... but will it allow a characters Nimbleness-modified dodge to exceed the dodge cap?


Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.
Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks have an "Assassin's Mark" for 10 seconds.) I would rather not have threat reduction attached to this because 1)I often use it to help shed aggro 2)I often use intimidate+cleave to obtain aggro. For me aggro management is a balancing act and I don't always want to minimize threat. In fact, as much as I like the idea of Shiv being changed to allow a pure-rogue access to a Bluff attack, I'd almost be willing to trade it for a rogue Intimidate-attack.
I like poison strikes as individual attacks rather than as set of stances, so please ignore anyone who says they would prefer them as stances...


Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
Maybe Bleed Them Out could be an Intimidate attack :) Or maybe a Poison Strike could be added that inflicts an Intimidated effect...


Weakness Poison: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.Does this apply to all enemies under the effect of Assassin's Mark, or just the ones Marked by the attacking character?

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.If this effect applies to enemies under the effect of another party member's Assassin's Mark, will the Damage bonus stack if the target is under multiple Assassin's Marks?


Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.I agree with those who would prefer a dodge bonus to PRR.

I was thinking about some things posted regarding giving rogues innate spell-like-abilities for various things.The Shadow Dart ability has always annoyed me because it does this. When I use shadow dart (which of course I do) I "roleplay" that I'm throwing quicklime in my opponents eyes because that is what I think a rogue would do: A rogue would use preparation and trickery to do what other classes rely on divine intervention or infernal pacts to deliver. I am for giving rogues traps and bombs that emulate spell like abilities, like maybe a trap that dispels True Seeing in a given radius, things in this line. Also, I would change Shadow Dart to Quicklime and make it do less damage but dispel True Seeing and any other "sensing" type effects in addition to blinding the target for a period of time.

Thanks!

[oradafu]

Have you run an assassin that's giving up 6 INT and 25% incorporeal to have better melee DPS? If you're going to be in LD you might as well make him a Staff build and add 6 monk (or just reduce your rogue levels to a 5) like everyone else does.

I am disappointed they wont improve Shadowdancer, they said the same thing about Fatesinger when they did the Bard pass and of course it's still not been touched. This is one of those things, if you can't get a Rogue Enhancement/Destiny ability improved RIGHT NOW, a bug or broken feature looked at, or bad mechanic tweaked right now, it's not going to get attention later.

Well, the Devs did say outright when the EDs were made that Shadowdancer was built almost exclusively for Assassins and Pale Masters in mind. When people brought up the lack of goodies in there for Acrobats and Mechanics, they told us that the LD was where they planned the majority of Acrobats to stay exclusively and directed Mechanics, Arties and bow Rangers to Shiradi Champion.

And since ranged Arties (which still make up the majority of the class) still have to unlock 3 un-useful EDs to get the ED that the Devs planned for them to use, it doesn't look like ED tweaks (big or small) are happening since each sphere now has 3 EDs.

[Wizza]

You know Wizza, you're not known as the most positive poster on these boards... but still, you managed to get a dev to answer your direct questions MULTIPLE times in this thread, yet you just keep throwing insults his way.

Do you really think this is the way to get the results you want?

Has this method EVER worked for you, in real life, or on these boards?


I'm quite frank and sincere in all my replies. If I get a replies from a Dev where he states that an ability is good for SOLO play in an MMO, you can bet I'll be snarky. And stating that TWF is off-topic is really..not good, let's put it that way.

And I just want to clarify that I've not insulted Severlin in any way. I'm just direct, sometimes snarky, never insulting anyone. Besides, we are all grown man, I think he can handle some snarkyness :) He didn't reply to my latest reply, which I was expecting.

In real life I've no problems of game balance and stuff like that :rolleyes:



Gotta start somewhere... Need to fix four things... He's fixing one of the four, and has stated he will look at the other 3 things in the future... Is that a positive step or a negative step?

I'd like to see Rogues be master of Dodge... and it looks like we are moving that way...

I stated elsewhere, in the deathwyrm bug fixes thread IIRC, that this approach is wrong. They are fixing only ONE thing at the time which i dislike. I would like to see two of those points fixed in one patch and two in one other. Not one in a month, another the next year, another one in three years.



Edited the OP:

Based on player feedback we moved the sneaking speed into the Assassin tree under Stealthy.

Poisoned Strikes now apply as Assassin's Mark to the target rather than treating them as Poisoned so it will work on all enemies and won't be blocked by enemies immune to poison.

Sev~

Why did you move the sneak speed into the Assassin tree? We need points into TA tree to get Haste boost and that was the best choice. What are we going to get now to get Haste boost? +3 to Quarterstaff to-hit? :rolleyes:

It was in no way crippling to assassins to have Sneaking speed there. It was actually good to spend points in something useful instead of dumping them into +3 skills just to get to Haste boost.


We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

Can we have a video? No idea what you mean with slicing motion. Good change finally.

[XavierVenSretrojeph]

Okay, so I have played a rogue for as long as I have played DDO, a couple of years maybe. As such I've seen some of the highs and lows of the class and I can say DPS wise, we're definitely on the shabbier side of DPS more so then ever before. I can suggest some things that need to be fixed, but unless asked directly for my input I'm not going to say how they need to be fixed, just why.

Assassinate DC, is a major problem, I've invested a lot of time (and money) into shaping my rogue to get a 74 assassinate DC. Problem, still not high enough of a DC for say, endgame. I won't lie and say that with that DC I don't get a lot of mobs failing and dying to my blades, but I don't see enough of EE higher end mobs failing that save. A big problem with the DC lies in Measure the Foe and the 5 DC that grants you, but too many times you don't get the chance to just stealth and wait 5 seconds before attempting to assassinate a mob. However if you want the best possible chance, you have to wait that 5 seconds, and that just doesn't bode well.

Fortification bypass is something else that is a problem, I run my rogue with at an almost constant 100% fort bypass. Problem? It's not enough. I may run around with an additional 29d6 SA damage, but against anything that I can't break fort on, it's useless, nonexistent dps. This has sadly always been a problem though, as my ability to gain more fortification bypass was covered, mobs gained more and more fortification to the point where unless I'm using assassins trick, and the mob is lucky enough to fail the save, my dps is just lacking in it's own area of expertise. This shouldn't happen.

Stealth has and probably will continue to be a problem for forever. One problem is movement speed while in stealth, too many classes now have the ability to move very fast, so if you're in stealth, you're at the back of any party, far away from the combat that you crave. Another problem is move silently/hide vs the mobs spot/listen. If I try hard enough I can get my hide and move silently skills to 150+, as it is, I run them around 120 each. Yet almost any mob on an epic quest will somehow remember that he dropped something and turn around, and somehow manage to spot the assassin that was just moments away from ending his or her existence. Unless you're running around in a group, stealth is useless as you have a very low probability of actually being able to sneak up on a mob, especially with those archers that will always manage to peg you even out of your render distance, because they saw you from a mile away, almost like you weren't even in stealth. Which of course breaks your stealth and now you have to deal with every mob because you have no chance of getting back into stealth unless you can kill that archer that is shooting you from the clouds, without angering every mob from you to him. Which brings me to my next rant.

UMD is not something to be used for self healing unless in heroics. It's great for utility. But endgame, if you're reverting to scroll healing to heal yourself, you might as well chug CSW pots because your chance of getting off a heal with a scroll when you're just dying for hp, is very minimal, that mob isn't going to say, oh, it looks like you need a heal so I won't interrupt your concentration while you fiddle with that piece of paper there. Scroll healing is not something you do in the middle of combat unless you're actually quite certain you will die. And quite frankly, unless you're using enhancements to increase your scroll healing ability, it's just something you don't do at all, because getting back say, 250 hp with a scroll is nice, but oh, I have to heal 750 hp, so now I have to wait and do that two more times before I'm ready for the next group of mobs.

Either way, I would have a few more points to bring up but I'm sure I'll get ridiculed for what I've already said, and hopefully the things I've said can help someone put some assassins problems more into perspective.

I've put a lot of time and effort into my build, and whatever changes you make to the assassin tree, I am sure I will find a way to make it work, whether for better or worse. I love playing my assassin, though it is a struggle to constantly enjoy game play with all of the problems any assassin will find.

[Rautis]

Assassinate DC, is a major problem, I've invested a lot of time (and money) into shaping my rogue to get a 74 assassinate DC. Problem, still not high enough of a DC for say, endgame. I won't lie and say that with that DC I don't get a lot of mobs failing and dying to my blades, but I don't see enough of EE higher end mobs failing that save. A big problem with the DC lies in Measure the Foe and the 5 DC that grants you, but too many times you don't get the chance to just stealth and wait 5 seconds before attempting to assassinate a mob. However if you want the best possible chance, you have to wait that 5 seconds, and that just doesn't bode well.Very nice DC. Is it with or without Measure the Foe? The biggest problem for me with it is that it gets removed if you also try to debuff the monster before your attack. For example as a mage the DC can be about equal to assassinate but they can use multiple debuffs to bring mob saves down considerably. As Assassin if you do that you lose 5 DC and get aggro which can make it impossible to stealth for the attack. I usually use Improved Sunder in combination with the -1 fort save poison attack so the rogue doesn't have to wait in stealth before the attack. And as twf that is likely to result in -8 fortitude save which is more than +5 DC from Measure the Foe. I know most rogues don't have improved sunder but up to -20 fortitude save with it and poison combined can really soften those really tough monsters. It does take 30 seconds of fighting to get there though.


Fortification bypass is something else that is a problem, I run my rogue with at an almost constant 100% fort bypass. Problem? It's not enough. I may run around with an additional 29d6 SA damage, but against anything that I can't break fort on, it's useless, nonexistent dps. This has sadly always been a problem though, as my ability to gain more fortification bypass was covered, mobs gained more and more fortification to the point where unless I'm using assassins trick, and the mob is lucky enough to fail the save, my dps is just lacking in it's own area of expertise. This shouldn't happen.
Your fort bypass is also impressive. I haven't experienced similar issues as you have however. I thought monster fortification is 100% at maximum. Are you sure it is not sneak attack immunity you're experiencing? Fortification and sneak attack immunity are two different things. Before you had to be using Shadowdancer or be lucky with Assassin's Trick to be able to remove immunity occasionally. With no DC for assassin's trick it gets alot easier and is also possible in other epic destinies. This is the strongest buff so far in this set of rogue changes.


Stealth has and probably will continue to be a problem for forever. One problem is movement speed while in stealth, too many classes now have the ability to move very fast, so if you're in stealth, you're at the back of any party, far away from the combat that you crave. Another problem is move silently/hide vs the mobs spot/listen. If I try hard enough I can get my hide and move silently skills to 150+, as it is, I run them around 120 each. Yet almost any mob on an epic quest will somehow remember that he dropped something and turn around, and somehow manage to spot the assassin that was just moments away from ending his or her existence. Unless you're running around in a group, stealth is useless as you have a very low probability of actually being able to sneak up on a mob, especially with those archers that will always manage to peg you even out of your render distance, because they saw you from a mile away, almost like you weren't even in stealth. Which of course breaks your stealth and now you have to deal with every mob because you have no chance of getting back into stealth unless you can kill that archer that is shooting you from the clouds, without angering every mob from you to him. Which brings me to my next rant. Recently I have not even taken these skills on my rogue builds. UMDing an invis scroll is often more reliable for things like disabling traps in places where archers could see me. And I rarely solo with rogues. Only issue besides stealth skill system breaking in epics is that Invisibility, a level 2 spell is so strong in this game. I came to this game from Neverwinter Nights online modules where Priests and Mages remembered to cast their long lasting buffs right after brushing their teeth in the morning. This meant See Invisibility or True Seeing when they reached high enough levels. Afterall, you wouldn't ever become an evil caster of epic level if you were stupid enough to be ambushed by an adventuring party aided by some level 3 or so Wizard. And ofcourse, being the helpful guy you are you carried Invisibility Purge or Faerie Fire with you so those foolish fighter and barbarian minions could have their daily dose of fun crushing adventurer skulls.

[SamaelBael]

Please keep in mind that the uniqueness of SA works within 15 meters.
The focus on melee attacks should be in TA,
ranged focus for mechanic and
assassins should benefit from the SA range the most. Melee and ranged combat should benefit from this tree, within the SA range at least.
Attacks should be possible with ranged and melee weapons.

Since the last enhancement tree overhaul classes became a lot more restricted to specific weapons.
Rogues have all changes to attack/damage modifiers in their core enhancements, which are useless for the other trees. how about changing it similarly to Harper's int mods?

Assassins are not ment to be on a battlefield. Not in the middle of whirling steel and hails of arrows.

They do care about the concealability of their weapons and their intent. Be it poison, a dagger or a pistol.

Give the assassins full access to their abilities and attacks in SA range. SA range is 0-15meters standard, +5 mechanic 1st core, +10 elf cores.

that would not only give them higher survivability (out of cleave range) but would move them closer to the ranger, away from standard fighter/paladin/barbarian.

[Xionanx]

Yes! A bit off topic, but...

I've been asking for an infinite Epic thieves tool, since Update 6 when the old Epic item system still reigned. My suggestion was that the Tools would be Exclusive +6 or +7 enhancement and with a finite number of uses that recharge over time (ala Eternal Wands). That way Thieves tools wouldn't lose their value completely since trappers would need to carry them in quests with a real high number of traps.

But yes, anything to help cut down some of the clutter in inventory for trapping. Whether it's bigger stacks or being able to combine stacks. Or Eternal Tools! Heck, Arcane Archers don't need really to carry arrows anymore nor Arties need to carry bolts and they have Quivers to hold some of their excess ammo.

Also off the subject of the Assassin tree, but still Rogue related, I don't know why there isn't an ability available to Rogues in the Mechanic tree that contains a x% chance of preventing tools from being used (similar to the rod usage via the Past Life: Student of Artifice). This is completely a fluff ability that would cause any true unbalance between Rogues and Artificers.

+2

This is something that comes up time and time again. IMO Thieves Tools should not have usage limits to begin with, that mechanic needed to be dropped about the same time everyone stopped carrying "Healing" kits.:rolleyes:

"Enchanted" Thieves tools should start being available at about level 1 with the minimum level needed to use them raised with the total + it gives to DD and Open lock. As the game is now, there I cant think of any reason not to be using +5 tools at level 1 unless you are completely new to the game and cant afford the price of them on the AH. They are super cheap, abundant, and virtually infinite already if you put any thought at all into being a trapper character.

Its about time we got a "New" magic item.. Thieves Tools

[Saekee]

I'm quite frank and sincere in all my replies. If I get a replies from a Dev where he states that an ability is good for SOLO play in an MMO, you can bet I'll be snarky. And stating that TWF is off-topic is really..not good, let's put it that way.

And I just want to clarify that I've not insulted Severlin in any way. I'm just direct, sometimes snarky, never insulting anyone. Besides, we are all grown man, I think he can handle some snarkyness :) He didn't reply to my latest reply, which I was expecting.

In real life I've no problems of game balance and stuff like that :rolleyes:




I stated elsewhere, in the deathwyrm bug fixes thread IIRC, that this approach is wrong. They are fixing only ONE thing at the time which i dislike. I would like to see two of those points fixed in one patch and two in one other. Not one in a month, another the next year, another one in three years.




Why did you move the sneak speed into the Assassin tree? We need points into TA tree to get Haste boost and that was the best choice. What are we going to get now to get Haste boost? +3 to Quarterstaff to-hit? :rolleyes:

It was in no way crippling to assassins to have Sneaking speed there. It was actually good to spend points in something useful instead of dumping them into +3 skills just to get to Haste boost.



Can we have a video? No idea what you mean with slicing motion. Good change finally.

Sev mentioned moving haste boost to tier 1 and making it cheaper precisely so that assassins and mechanics can access it more easily. I think he hasn't updated the first post yet to reflect that.
The only other reason for non-staffers to use acrobat tree was for shadow toggle but that is being changed (fixed).

[brzytki]

Sev mentioned moving haste boost to tier 1

Really? It would be awesome but i haven't seen it mentioned anywhere.

Edit: Unless you are talking about his most recent post in acrobat thread, if so it's about new passive movement speed enhancement, not haste boost.

[Wizza]

Sev mentioned moving haste boost to tier 1 and making it cheaper precisely so that assassins and mechanics can access it more easily. I think he hasn't updated the first post yet to reflect that.
The only other reason for non-staffers to use acrobat tree was for shadow toggle but that is being changed (fixed).

I missed it. Can we have a link?

[Saekee]

I missed it. Can we have a link?

It is on page 6 of acro thread in which he states they are adding a speed boost to tier 1 (on iphone so hard to link--sorry). Maybe I misunderstood it though? I had suggested earlier in the thread that haste boost be moved to tier 1 like Kensei since it would make it more accessible to mechs and assassins. And I agree, sans faster sneaking and the corrections to shadow dodge, there is nothing else in that tree of interest to non-staff users.

[Wizza]

It is on page 6 of acro thread in which he states they are adding a speed boost to tier 1 (on iphone so hard to link--sorry). Maybe I misunderstood it though? I had suggested earlier in the thread that haste boost be moved to tier 1 like Kensei since it would make it more accessible to mechs and assassins. And I agree, sans faster sneaking and the corrections to shadow dodge, there is nothing else in that tree of interest to non-staff users.

Speed boost sounds like Speed boost, as in Sprint boost, not haste boost.

[geoffhanna]

We get concerned when players make blanket statements about stealth being "broken" without really outlining what they mean. While we love player feedback and welcome specific suggestions about stealth, I just don't want to set up false expectations about things stealth should allow. We wouldn't want players, as an example, to have the expectation that characters should be opening doors and pulling levers while remaining in stealth. This type of behavior would threaten too many types of content. Without specifics we can do nothing to address people's concerns.

Sev~

This is a fair question. Being one who has played forever, I sometimes forget that information I consider to be universally known really isn't.

Apologies for the delay as well. I wanted to reply right away but was dumbfounded. Not because I couldn't think of anything to say, but because I had too many things to say and no time to work them into coherent thoughts. Now I have the time. On the plus side, this has already given me Monday's blog article :)

There are style problems with sneak that have always been present:


Many encounters contain unsneakable monsters. Sometimes it seems like most of them do
No one will wait for the sneaky guy to catch up
No one will wait for the sneaky guy to power up anything that requires being in sneak
So many places where a quest will not advance until you have killed all the monsters
The fear of “threatening too many types of content” hobbles stealth play. The pendulum is swung too far. Swing it back a little.

There are style problems with sneak that are the result of game changes:


More stop points added to previously sneakable quests prevent most sneak-only completions
Dungeon alert


The worst part of these style issues is that they are due to tabletop sneaking rules and precedents. Which normally I am all about. But tabletop stealth is different; it can be applied to specific circumstances. It is not a play style. But in MMO it is.

There are issues with the implementation of Assassinate


A successful Assassinate should not break one out of sneaking
Assassination requires sneak but you cannot sneak while already in melee


And there are some specific technical issues with sneak


The bad guys inerrantly hit you with ranged at the first sign of finding you
It is supposed to be possible to shake off pursuit if one is able to retain sneak but that does not work *
Monsters that hear you inerrantly follow your path when sneaking
Monsters that do not show indicators of being able to see you are still able to hit you with single-target spells. Which breaks sneak and now everyone sees you.


* This does not work for me, ever. I assume it is bugged. But maybe I am just inadequately skilled.

Here is a paragraph from the Shadowfell Conspiracy release notes that describes how the stealth rework is supposed to determine when you are detected:



You are invisible but the monster has True Seeing, See Invisibility, tremor-sense, or is within 2 meters and facing you.
You are hiding, but the monster’s spot plus all modifiers is sufficient to beat your hiding skill plus all modifiers, or you are within 2 meters and it is facing you.
You are hiding AND invisible, but some combination of both 1 and 2 are true.
If they are swinging and hitting you but don’t have the icon over their head, they are making blind attacks where they hear you making noise, and you’re making so much running around and getting hit that they can figure out where you are.


Except they do not swing and hit blindly. They go to precisely where you were and always hit you.

Summary

It has never been possible to use sneak effectively in a group
It has rarely been possible to use sneak effectively when soloing

And that is why stealth is broken.

[Chi_Ryu]

Why did you move the sneak speed into the Assassin tree?

I don't know... perhaps because it actually fits thematically (even if it is inconvenient for getting haste boost)?



A successful Assassinate should not break one out of sneaking
Assassination requires sneak but you cannot sneak while already in melee


Whilst I broadly agree with most of your points, I have some issue with these.

For #1, a successful assassinate already does not break you out of stealth; although unfortunately the newly aggro'd monsters will spot you in a nanosecond since stealth and searching is still not working very well.

For #2, it is difficult to sneak in combat, but by no means impossible - in fact with some practice I find it reasonably easy to sneak long enough to assassinate something. You need to make sure you do not have the aggro or line of sight of ranged and spellcasting monsters, and you need to ensure you are not surrounded by melee monsters. Choose your target, and then bluff, immediately sneak and hit assassinate (all very quickly in succession) and it will work just fine.

This will fail if you get hit by another monster midway through (so consider your placement in the dungeon and possible cover - e.g. doorways and pillars. Also, aside from the usual incorporeality, blur/displacement, dodge you can hit your uncanny dodge if off timer). Having a summon to get aggro can help too (scrolls are cheap).

I have used this frequently in melee combat, even whilst soloing. It is tricky to get to grips with, and to be fair it is not feasible in all situations (Devil Assault style encounters are just too overwhelming - at least for me), but certainly possible in a lot of situations. In group situations, it's quite simple with reduced threat enhancements/ED/weapons to happily assassinate anything that moves every 15s, including undead when using Assassin's Trick (NOTE: unlikely to work all the time due to the low DC of AT, and the fact that I don't generally have 100% armor piercing).

My Rogue life was the most enjoyable of all I played on my main, FWIW. I would love to play another with some of these proposed changes, even if it won't be "king of DPS."

[Saekee]

Speed boost sounds like Speed boost, as in Sprint boost, not haste boost.

my mistake--I thought he had followed my suggestion :(. He was referring to the new speed boost as in faster movement for acrobats (he has updated the first post to reflect changes). So at least that will be good for assassins as well and something to take on the way to haste boost--not sure of the AP cost yet.

[redoubt]

Have you run an assassin that's giving up 6 INT and 25% incorporeal to have better melee DPS? If you're going to be in LD you might as well make him a Staff build and add 6 monk (or just reduce your rogue levels to a 5) like everyone else does.

I am disappointed they wont improve Shadowdancer, they said the same thing about Fatesinger when they did the Bard pass and of course it's still not been touched. This is one of those things, if you can't get a Rogue Enhancement/Destiny ability improved RIGHT NOW, a bug or broken feature looked at, or bad mechanic tweaked right now, it's not going to get attention later.

Actually, I was that assassin. Sort of anyway.

Back when Divine Crusader came out I was an INT spec'd assassin with DEX to damage. Makes perfect sense right? I was in Shadow Dancer with all my destinies capped out. I moved into DC to get it filled out as well. What I found when I got there was:
1. My DPS was way better.
2. My healing was way better.
3. My survival was way better.
4. I kept up with the group because I never tried to sneak.
5. I didn't miss assassinate...

I was disappointed to find that a destiny different from the "assassin" destiny was actually better for my character and made grouping more fun. I actually did another iconic reincarnation and did another 20 rogue life in DC on a knife spec.

[redoubt]

I would rather not have threat reduction attached to this because 1)I often use it to help shed aggro 2)I often use intimidate+cleave to obtain aggro. For me aggro management is a balancing act and I don't always want to minimize threat. In fact, as much as I like the idea of Shiv being changed to allow a pure-rogue access to a Bluff attack, I'd almost be willing to trade it for a rogue Intimidate-attack.



I will politely disagree. Here is why:

I'm currently on a Paladin life before going back to rogue. I've found that intimidate is useful on this life. I've also had to purposely leave certain items and weapons in the TR cache because they have threat reduction on them. I think this is appropriate. I think it is good for the game to have to make those sorts of choices.

I've tried to play games where every character can do anything and I rank them behind DDO. I like that some classes/PREs/Destinies are set up in +POS threat, some are -NEG threat and some are neutral. I like the challenge of figuring out how to piece together parts of all those things to create a build that handles agro the way I want it to.

I think that if you want a build that can go back and forth between + and - threat, it should be possible, but also be a challenge.

Lastly, I am of the opinion that assassin should be a -NEG threat PRE. I could see adding the options for +POS threat in the other trees, but I have less experience in those and will let others comment on things like stick builds.

[patang01]

We changed the animation. It's now slicing motion that take less than a second instead of the three second point animation. Looks pretty good in combat. We also cut the cooldown to 6 seconds and changed the duration to 15 seconds so an assassin can keep it up on two targets.

Sev~

That's great and great news about sneaking speed moved to assassin. I might want to use mine when this goes live. Great work.

[redoubt]

Why did you move the sneak speed into the Assassin tree? We need points into TA tree to get Haste boost and that was the best choice. What are we going to get now to get Haste boost? +3 to Quarterstaff to-hit? :rolleyes:

It was in no way crippling to assassins to have Sneaking speed there. It was actually good to spend points in something useful instead of dumping them into +3 skills just to get to Haste boost.



Now they need to move sublety into assassin (and replace it in the TA tree with threat gen.)

I would be very happy to keep my assassin completely out of the TA tree.

[Qezuzu]

Have you run an assassin that's giving up 6 INT and 25% incorporeal to have better melee DPS? If you're going to be in LD you might as well make him a Staff build and add 6 monk (or just reduce your rogue levels to a 5) like everyone else does.

I am disappointed they wont improve Shadowdancer, they said the same thing about Fatesinger when they did the Bard pass and of course it's still not been touched. This is one of those things, if you can't get a Rogue Enhancement/Destiny ability improved RIGHT NOW, a bug or broken feature looked at, or bad mechanic tweaked right now, it's not going to get attention later.

I personally only give up +4 INT (you can't take the last two and also have Shadow Manipulation+Shadow Form) which is the difference between still only having eMG or having Dark Diversion/Mythic Muffled Veneer. Even when counting all 3 points in DC, well, it's not something that's going to prevent Assassinate from being effective. It's rather rude to say I'd be better off taking a heavy multi-class than remaining pure just because I want to use a better destiny.

Also you don't give up 25% incorp, you can still get 10% from an item. And Dreadnought/Crusader don't just give better damage, but also better survivability (MiD can be twisted).

I won't say that Shadowdancer doesn't need an overhaul, but it's not something I think needed to be addressed in order to make Assassins better.




Summary

It has never been possible to use sneak effectively in a group
It has rarely been possible to use sneak effectively when soloing

First one is true, but what exactly can be done to make stealth-play (which is inherently slow and calculated) compatible with how most PUGs are going to run (zerg and smash)? Even if you give 100% movement speed during sneak, I'd still only be using sneak as a way to get MtF stacks, not as something that would actually resemble what I would consider stealth-play (minimal kills and never taking aggro).

As for "rarely been possible to use sneak effectively when soloing"; well, I don't want to explicitly say you might be doing it wrong, but...

[Xionanx]

This is a fair question. Being one who has played forever,... SNIP

And that is why stealth is broken.

Exactly what I said, but in a better more coherent thought out fashion. Well done sir!!

I often stare at the screen with incredulity when I see dev's state their lack of knowledge about things that are pretty much universally accepted by "veteran" gamers and people who aren't deluding themselves.

[slarden]

Devs/Players: Take a step back and consider the following:

- Why impede sneaking speed at all?



This is a great point. It would be great if rogues can sneak at full speed. Maybe make it part of all 3 capstones.

[Myrrddyn333]

My thoughts in red above. Key point is that 'Poisoned' needs to land if the rest of the key changes are to work - DC of 10+1/2rogue+Int will be on a decent assassin - 10+10+25(ie. 60Int) - so 45 - that doesn't pass muster from Gianthold on up.

Other than that I like asssassin in the first place so not too many quibles.

Personally, after playing a rogue/Assassin for 6 yrs, the cooldown for Assassinate is fine. It got lengthened once already, from 10 secs to 15 secs. Assassinate is fine the way it is. For now....

[Full_Bleed]

Many of these changes are quite welcome. Glad to see this work being done.

But rather than parse what's been discussed many times in this thread I'd like to mention something that thematically bugs me about assassins...

I'm not sure why they aren't the best at killing helpless targets. Nothing should be more natural to an assassin than that.

Lethality offers some acknowledgment of that assertion, but some core bonuses to helpless damage or more "lethal" crits against helpless would be fitting.

[redoubt]

Many of these changes are quite welcome. Glad to see this work being done.

But rather than parse what's been discussed many times in this thread I'd like to mention something that thematically bugs me about assassins...

I'm not sure why they aren't the best at killing helpless targets. Nothing should be more natural to an assassin than that.

Lethality offers some acknowledgment of that assertion, but some core bonuses to helpless damage or more "lethal" crits against helpless would be fitting.

That is an interesting thought.

We used to have auto-crits on held mobs. Maybe something similar could be brought back for assassins. At the same time, it could not be wide open. Nothing that would make taking X levels of rogue the new FOTM. When we had auto-crits I made maiming rocksplitters for my casters and even my cleric. Held mobs were dead mobs.

Not much is different today with held mobs though. A held mob is still a dead mob.

My first pass at an implementation of your idea would be to put it in "Knife Spec".

Knife Specialization: You gain a +1 Competence bonus to Critical Damage Multiplier with daggers and kukris. Daggers also gain a +1 Competence bonus to Critical Threat Range.

OPTION 1:
ADD: You automatically crit on helpless mobs when using a dagger or kukri.
- this is likely the highest damage option.

OPTION 2:
ADD: +2 range/+1 multiplier on helpless mobs when using a dagger or kukri.
- this is likely the #2 damage option. It will produce slightly higher max crits, but significantly less often.

OPTION 3:
ADD: you do 2x sneak attack damage to helpless mobs when using a dagger or kukri.
- this is likely the lowest damage option. It also plays on the sneak attack concept which is very much a "rogue thing" flavor wise.

How to keep it balanced?
1. Assassins have poor crowd control and little means to produce a helpless state. It would need to stay that way, or narrow the range of states the auto-crit would apply too.
2. It has to stay the knives. Opening this up to other weapons would be too powerful and would set up a 5 rogue FOTM. People have complained that "knife spec" is too weak. This could be ONE way to boost it.
3. Heavy analysis of the actual math BEFORE going forward at all.
4. Knives have poor base damage and crit profile.
5. Any additional damage does not get to "double dip" with the +50% helpless damage already in the game. i.e. if you are getting auto-crits, you don't get auto-crits AND then 50% more on top of that.

Again, this is just an initial pass at an idea. I'm intrigued by the concept of assassins being "the best at killing helpless targets." This is brainstorming.

[nibel]

It is supposed to be possible to shake off pursuit if one is able to retain sneak but that does not work *
Monsters that hear you inerrantly follow your path when sneaking


* This does not work for me, ever. I assume it is bugged. But maybe I am just inadequately skilled.

I have shaken off pursuits in my rogue all the time. The key is having a very, very, VERY high Hide/MS skills, and breaking line of sight.

The trick to break pursuit is: First, break line of sight. This can be made as easy as Invisibility (if the mob don't have See Invisibility/TS), or as situational as turning a corner or jumping down/up a ledge. As soon as you are out of sight, hit stealth, and move away. The mobs will come to the last place they saw you, and then start swinging, then start searching, then give up, and stop or return to their patrol posts.

If you just jump out of melee range and hit sneak midair, and walk away, MOST of the time, the mobs are in the autospot range, and it will not work. Breaking line of sight first always work.

If the monster has found you because it saw you (and not because you went too close of it to autospot), it got enough bonus on their spot skill to surpass your Hide skill, thus it will always see you in stealth. No, they never lose their bonus to spot (as seen by the +eyes over their head when you are stealthed and in line of sight).

The monster following the sound of your steps is because their inherent Listen skill is better then your Move Silently skill. Get a MS switch item, and you will probably make them stop while searching because they stop listening to you (There is no mechanic to give bonus to listen).

Stealth have many problems in mechanics and concept, but this is not one of them.

[dualscissors]

Many of these changes are quite welcome. Glad to see this work being done.

But rather than parse what's been discussed many times in this thread I'd like to mention something that thematically bugs me about assassins...

I'm not sure why they aren't the best at killing helpless targets. Nothing should be more natural to an assassin than that.

Lethality offers some acknowledgment of that assertion, but some core bonuses to helpless damage or more "lethal" crits against helpless would be fitting.

Regarding "Lethality," the problem with these high level powers (lvl 18) that do the vorpal thing is it's potent in heroic content.

In EH or EE vorpaling a target for 100 damage - a paltry 100 because they all have well over 1000 HPs - might make one wish you could skip the core AP expenditure because it's so irrelevant.

[Mryal]

Few ideas, all seem easy to make:

Assassinate : Change DC to 13 + Rogue Level + Epic Levels + Int.Change from Stealth Melee Assassinate Attack to just requiring Sneak attack.If used on stealth no agro is generated and stealth remains.Removing the stealth requirement would allow it to be used on raids and groups, wich is what people want.Allowing it to generate no agro while on stealth would allow it to function properly when sneaking trought quests.Of course some stated that 'wow its op this way you can just solo a quest by assassinating' well yes, you can.But that will take at least 3 times longer than using a barb cleaving everything.

Measure the Foe : The bonus to assassinate DC can then be removed as its DC is beign buffed, the whole mechanic that severlin posted doesnt makes sense to many (including me) so i propose this:
After 3 seconds while sneaking, you gain Measure the Foe : Your next attack is considered an automatic critical hit roll and bypasses 100% enemy fort.On vorpal the target is killed(no save).

This encourages people to use sneak while in groups.And finnaly, replace Light Armor Maestry (possibly add some of its benefits to capstone and such) with:
Vanish: Activate to immediatly enter stealth and drop all agro you may have, for the next 8 seconds the penality to movement speed while sneaking is removed.Cooldown : 1 minute (can be adjusted).

Lethality: Since the core is weak theres room for another thing here, and i suggested it beign to enable rogues to assassinate constructs, rogues are skilled with traps and mechanic devices regardless of actualy beign a mechanic rogue or not.

[Grace_ana]

I agree with those who would prefer a dodge bonus to PRR.



The problem is that rogues pretty easily reach their dodge cap, and the cap is simply not high enough to give adequate defense in high level content. More sources of dodge are completely redundant and useless. And while I understand the sentiment behind "deadly but squishy," there is no such thing, because soulstones do no DPS. The idea that a melee build should have weak defenses is what keeps rogues behind.

However, if you really wanted to make rogues masters of dodge and have an excellent tier 5 enhancement, you could make it simply remove the dodge cap. Then rogues can stack enough dodge to matter in difficult content. It's ultimately self-limiting, because you have to make trade-offs for it - do I want that feat or the DPS feat? Do I want that item or a trapping item? Every class should and does have to make choices regarding their gear and build, balancing DPS, survivability, and utility. I would like to see a truly reasonable and valid balance available to rogues.

[redoubt]

The problem is that rogues pretty easily reach their dodge cap, and the cap is simply not high enough to give adequate defense in high level content. More sources of dodge are completely redundant and useless. And while I understand the sentiment behind "deadly but squishy," there is no such thing, because soulstones do no DPS. The idea that a melee build should have weak defenses is what keeps rogues behind.

However, if you really wanted to make rogues masters of dodge and have an excellent tier 5 enhancement, you could make it simply remove the dodge cap. Then rogues can stack enough dodge to matter in difficult content. It's ultimately self-limiting, because you have to make trade-offs for it - do I want that feat or the DPS feat? Do I want that item or a trapping item? Every class should and does have to make choices regarding their gear and build, balancing DPS, survivability, and utility. I would like to see a truly reasonable and valid balance available to rogues.

All the sources of temp dodge need to increase the dodge cap while they are active.

So if you have a 25 dodge cap and are at 25 dodge, THEN you get more dodge from nimbleness your dodge actually goes up. In this case as much as 10 points for a total of 35. Same for measure the foe, so it grants another temp 10 dodge (that goes away after 30 seconds) for a total of 45.

It would be nice if:
Untouchable: Passive Bonus: Gain 1% extra dodge for each Shadow Charge you hold.
in Shadow Dancer also increased max dodge by the number of Shadow Charges you hold.

I think with those minor changes, assassins would be the masters of dodge.

[Grace_ana]

All the sources of temp dodge need to increase the dodge cap while they are active.

So if you have a 25 dodge cap and are at 25 dodge, THEN you get more dodge from nimbleness your dodge actually goes up. In this case as much as 10 points for a total of 35. Same for measure the foe, so it grants another temp 10 dodge (that goes away after 30 seconds) for a total of 45.

It would be nice if:
Untouchable: Passive Bonus: Gain 1% extra dodge for each Shadow Charge you hold.
in Shadow Dancer also increased max dodge by the number of Shadow Charges you hold.

I think with those minor changes, assassins would be the masters of dodge.

Except temp dodge doesn't do you much good when it only takes one or two hits to take you down and you don't have time to build up the temp dodge. If rogues are going to be masters of dodge, why shouldn't an assassin fully invested up to tier five be able to use as much dodge as they can get instead of being restricted? It would be an ability in keeping with the nature of assassins and help their survivability enough to let them stand toe to toe with other classes.

Temp stats are not reliable. They also contribute to lag, btw, because of the constant recalculations. I'll pass on overloading temp stats.

[dualscissors]

Except temp dodge doesn't do you much good when it only takes one or two hits to take you down and you don't have time to build up the temp dodge. If rogues are going to be masters of dodge...

I think getting a *substantial* bonus to both Dodge % and Dodge Cap (not just a token 3-4 pts.) will go a long ways toward survivability combined with increased bluff/turn-around perks that were mentioned, plus Incorporeality, Displacement and close-to-okay-PRR. Those stack for a pretty hefty miss chance.

Yeah, I know it would be nice if there were a better self heal option that scrolls or status-busting Silver Flame pots and granted rogues won't handle a Disintegrate blast to the face as well as a high PRR/MRR class...

If you simply need to land a few hits to get that temporary dodge up to 35%+ (if it is set at that bar), that seems to me to be a substantial boon to miss-chancing enough of those big nasty hits. On norm/hard we can handle the damage. While we might enjoy the ease of shield/heavy armor level survivability, I don't think that is the design goal. (It also may be that pally survivability is just silly and the Devs don't want to replicate that.)

[redoubt]

Except temp dodge doesn't do you much good when it only takes one or two hits to take you down and you don't have time to build up the temp dodge. If rogues are going to be masters of dodge, why shouldn't an assassin fully invested up to tier five be able to use as much dodge as they can get instead of being restricted? It would be an ability in keeping with the nature of assassins and help their survivability enough to let them stand toe to toe with other classes.

Temp stats are not reliable. They also contribute to lag, btw, because of the constant recalculations. I'll pass on overloading temp stats.

The shadow dancer dodge is built up and then stays until you shrine.

The new version of nimbleness will only take 10 sneak attacks to get to max. This is a very quick build up.

Measure the foe is less helpful, but would provide short term gains.

I don't know how/if this would affect lag issues.

I'm all about boosting assassins some. Just trying to brainstorm with you.

[Powerhungry]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.

Making assassin changes without addressing the OP bard changes...
Knife specialization - tier 5 ability - 30AP + 2 for the ability = 32 points AP plus 5 rogue levels and 12 character levels
Swashbuckling - core ability - 5AP + 1 for the ability = 6 AP plus 3 bard levels
both give the same +1 threat range +1 crit multiplier but bard has SIGNIFICANTLY lower requirements
An assassin should be the best at killing helpless/unaware targets but currently a bard is (Coup de Grace is OP compared to assassinate).
Only being able to assassinate while stealthed means you get one shot if you're lucky (archers and AoEs break stealth).
A Fascinated, Sleeping, Dancing, Dazed, Tripped, Mesmerized, Paralyzed, Petrified, or Stunned enemy is easy to achieve multiple times in a battle. Bard's fascinate DCs are 100+ in epics so only enemies immune won't be affected. In a party with a CC wizard it's laughable comparing a bard instakilling vs a rogue assassinating.
Add +10 assassinate DC to the capstone.
Remove the stealth requirement and allow it to work on any target Coup de Grace works on.
If stealthed while assassinating, add another +10 DC. Yes capstone 10 + stealth 10 is +20. Even on a maxed out assassinate build it's still lower than a poorly built bard's Coup de Grace DC).

[Pehtis]

Here is the first draft of potential changes to the Assassin tree.


Core Abilities:

Assassin's Trick: This now works on all enemies and no longer has a saving throw. Targets now lose 25% Fortification and their Sneak Attack immunity.

Nimbleness: Nimbleness no longer requires sneak attacks and works on any hit.

Deadly Shadow: You gain +2 Dexterity and +2 Intelligence. You gain +4 Sneak Attack dice. You gain +4 to Reflex saving throws.


Tier One

Poison Strikes: (Opponents struck by these attacks have an "Assassin's Mark" for 10 seconds.)

Shiv no longer reduces threat when you attack. It instead offers an additional passive component that reduces threat of all your attacks by 5/10/15%. The attack portion now also makes a Bluff check using your Bluff skill.

Stealthy: You also gain +20%/+35%/+50% movement while sneaking.


Tier Two

(As a reminder, Venomed Blades now scales with 200% Melee Power.)

Bleed Them Out: The bleed damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Damage Boost: Cost reduced to 1 AP per level. Changed to boost Melee Power by 10/20/30.


Tier Three

Critical Accuracy is removed.

Critical Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) + 1/2/3 bonus to critical damage and to confirm critical hits


Tier Four

Critical Damage is removed.

Weakness Poison: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) reduce the Melee Power and Ranged Power of the opponent by 10 for 10 seconds.

Execute: Melee Assassinate attack: +3[W] damage. If target is below 30% health, deal 500 damage. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)


Tier Five

Measure the Foe: Gain +2 Melee Power, +2 Dodge, +2 Maximum Dodge, +1 to hit and +1 to the DCs of your Assassinate ability for every 4/2/1 seconds you remain stealthed. This effect stacks up to 5 times and lasts for 10 seconds after you come out of stealth.

Deadly Poison: Your attacks against enemies with an Assassin's Mark (from Poisoned Strikes) do +5 damage.

Light Armor Mastery: (1/1/1 AP) While wearing light armor you gain 2/4/6 to maximum dexterity bonus of your armor. (This also affects maximum dodge.) You also gain 1/2/3 Physical Resistance Rating.

Sev~

My suggested change to Assassin Tree enhancement is as follows:

The problem with rogues in general is their lack of survivability. Happy to be squishier than other classes as long as there were some options to survive in higher level content. This is where dodge comes in. Dodge begins to become less relevant in high level content due to not surviving the hits you receive.

My proposal is a simple one. Add the dodge number to PRR/MRR of any class that has EVASION as part of their core CAPSTONE. Therefore it is only available to light armour/robe wearers. The increase is no where near game breaking and is simply a useful tweak during level 20+ content. This will also provide an extra incentive for any pure builds. It's a balanced approach without making them overpowered.

My thought behind this proposal is since I am in the process of dodging anything, the hit I DO receive should be like a serious grazing hit (just a flesh wound :) ). Limiting this kind of damage mitigation to those classes with Evasion keeps it balanced. Hence Assassins would benefit.

Many splash builds will complain it should be much lower of course. I will leave that to the Dev's to decide, if they like the idea enough to implement. Rangers (oh I so want this on my tempest), Monks, and some Bards will also find this useful if included in their trees as well.

[Dramentia]

There should be in my opinion a permanent improved deception. A paralyzing effect. poison stat damage should be a toggle for each stat. and faster sneaking. I can insta kill on my monk or bard better than I can my assassin. The DC's really need increased. Or done away with on all but bosses.

[Nascoe]

snip

Yeah, I know it would be nice if there were a better self heal option that scrolls or status-busting Silver Flame pots and granted rogues won't handle a Disintegrate blast to the face as well as a high PRR/MRR class...

snip

Sorry to jump in there (and I might be wrong/misinformed) but neither PRR nor MRR helps anyone much against spells like Disintegrate (typed FORCE) anyway. PRR helps with physical damage and MRR all of acid, sonic, fire, electric, cold, alignment, light, positive, negative, poison, and rust, but not with FORCE. And Disintegrate has a fort. save so the reflex component of wearing a shield with MRR isn't going to help them either.

Sure heavy armor wearers might have a better fort. save than the average rogue can achieve, but that is something a bit different.

Now I do think the idea discussed - having enhancements /dodge boosts more often raise the dodge cap - as that would make dodge more of a boon for higher lvl characters who run into caps does have some merit and I would like it if the devs had a look at how /what to do for it.

[Grace_ana]

I subscribe to the KISS method. You can have lots of temporary dodge, and have it raise the cap temporarily, but it has to be substantial and proc immediately or it's useless....or, you can skip the rigamarole and just make the tier 5 enhancement remove the dodge cap. The second suggestion is simple and skips the lagfest while everything recalculates during melee. If what you're saying is that the dodge would have to kick in during a battle right away, then why not just make it permanent? Is there some OP exploit by having high dodge at a rest shrine or something?

Dodge items don't even stack anymore, and lots of the dodge enhancements don't stack anymore either. So there's only so much an assassin (especially a pure rogue like most are) can get. It just makes sense to stop playing proc games with survivability.

[Fedora1]

King of Dodge belongs to Acrobats, not Assassins IMO.

Assassins are masters of stealth and one-shot kills, not standing toe-to-toe with fighters, paladins, and barbarians in prolonged combat and killing tons of trash mobs.

I'm not trying to take away anything from the proposed changes, but theme-wise I don't know where this master-of-dodge for an assassin came from. Good at it, sure. Master? Not the way I see it.

[Vyrzain]

King of Dodge belongs to Acrobats, not Assassins IMO.

Assassins are masters of stealth and one-shot kills, not standing toe-to-toe with fighters, paladins, and barbarians in prolonged combat and killing tons of trash mobs.

I'm not trying to take away anything from the proposed changes, but theme-wise I don't know where this master-of-dodge for an assassin came from. Good at it, sure. Master? Not the way I see it.

/agree

[dualscissors]

The Acrobat should be even dodgier, which isn't to say that the Assassin isn't super dodgy too. They have to be if they are going to stay alive since they strike out in all of the other survivability areas.

Acrobat's also get a big improvement in their tree for the rogue special ability, Defensive Roll.

[Fedora1]

I think a better way to go for assassins would be enhancements that further reduce their threat/agro and the ability to remain stealthed after attacks. Mabye abilities that mimic blur/displacement rather than extra dodge? This would make assassins more of the "never seen/never heard" killers that they should be, not the fancy parkour style of acrobats.

Still I'm not against what the devs have proposed, just trying to think of out of the box ideas with all the dodge disussions happening.

[BigErkyKid]

Sev kept saying that sneak attack deals "massive damage". However, how does a pure rogue compare in DPS even while sneaking with a pure barb raged? Or with a paladin? I suspect that SA is not as massive as it looks like, give the weapons those rogues are restricted to and their lack of melee power enhancements.

Add a lot more SA dice or let it crit (or go in the inside the damage numbers that are multiplied when they crit) and then I think "massive" might be a good adjective for the DPS of SA.

[Fedora1]

Sev kept saying that sneak attack deals "massive damage". However, how does a pure rogue compare in DPS even while sneaking with a pure barb raged? Or with a paladin? I suspect that SA is not as massive as it looks like, give the weapons those rogues are restricted to and their lack of melee power enhancements.

My Shadar-Kai pure assassin never had any trouble keeping up with dps/kills using the Shadar-Kai daggers (Risk/Reward) and then switched to Sacrificial Dagger and Blade of the HIgh Priestess which he used up to 28.

That was before the Pally/Barb pass, so he might not lead the kill count anymore, but it's still respectable. I thnk he had like 25d6 SA? And with deception/imp deception he was getting SA most of the time in partys since something else usually had agro.

[dualscissors]

I think a better way to go for assassins would be enhancements that further reduce their threat/agro and the ability to remain stealthed after attacks. Mabye abilities that mimic blur/displacement rather than extra dodge? This would make assassins more of the "never seen/never heard" killers that they should be, not the fancy parkour style of acrobats.

Still I'm not against what the devs have proposed, just trying to think of out of the box ideas with all the dodge disussions happening.

Newer toons might not have enough displacement clickies to have this up much of the time. More seasoned toons will already have blur on all the time and substantial displacement resources.

Agro management is definitely good. Soloing, though, agro shedding isn't an option since the mobs don't have a second target choice. More deception procs would allow sneaking and keep some of the heat off of your rogue, though.

[Severlin]

Still catching up on the thread but...

~ Based on player feedback bumped the PRR for Light Armor Mastery to 2/4/6.

~ We wanted a little more burst out of stealth so we bumped the Melee Power granted by Measure the Foe to 4 per stack.

~ Assassinate is already a fairly good ability so we won't be buffing the DC in this tree, but instead we will be looking to have items that add to the DC in greater amounts that currently possible in the next few updates.

Other stuff:

~ If we have time we will tweak the Bluff skill to have a longer duration and maybe an animation that doesn't have the rogue standing there pointing for like 3 seconds. I agree the current skill is really bad; at this point it's a matter of time since we are already working weekends to make up for all the snow days we had this winter.

~ We spent some time looking at TWF animations as well but I don't want to derail this thread.

Sev~

[Nascoe]

Still catching up on the thread but...

~ Based on player feedback bumped the PRR for Light Armor Mastery to 2/4/6.

~ We wanted a little more burst out of stealth so we bumped the Melee Power granted by Measure the Foe to 4 per stack.

~ Assassinate is already a fairly good ability so we won't be buffing the DC in this tree, but instead we will be looking to have items that add to the DC in greater amounts that currently possible in the next few updates.

Other stuff:

~ If we have time we will tweak the Bluff skill to have a longer duration and maybe an animation that doesn't have the rogue standing there pointing for like 3 seconds. I agree the current skill is really bad; at this point it's a matter of time since we are already working weekends to make up for all the snow days we had this winter.

~ We spent some time looking at TWF animations as well but I don't want to derail this thread.

Sev~

OK, nice to see you understand the sentiment that 3 PRR isn't much of an improvement. Its still not a great amount, but at least its a bit better now

I like the idea of bringing in more items to boost assasin DCs, when reading some of the comments, I had the same thought that this could help a bit. And it at least gives some purpose to the loot in the next updates apart from just making us even stronger over the board (still need more good bucklers, light shields, a few medium armors actually worth wearing though).

I understand that you don't have the resources to get into stealth, but it would be good if some of the things mentioned above by various posters would get looked into, because some (the archers being able to hit/almost hit you from huge range when in stealth for example) seem like they are now working properly.

Good to see you picked up the TWF issue (I'd expect you to get to that one in the future as you promised to adress ranger and druid wolf builds later in the year), it will help rogues as well.

[redoubt]

Still catching up on the thread but...

~ Based on player feedback bumped the PRR for Light Armor Mastery to 2/4/6.

Thanks again for staying active with the feedback.

Could you specify which things affect affect the 25% dodge cap? I ask because there are many ways to increase the max dodge bonus or armor, but few that increase it past the 25% cap. It will be easier to provide feedback if we knew for sure how the abilities affected the 25% cap. For example, nimbleness in core three is really good if it does increase the dodge cap. If it does not increase the dodge cap, then for many builds, it may as well not be there (because these builds will already be sitting at max dodge.)


~ We wanted a little more burst out of stealth so we bumped the Melee Power granted by Measure the Foe to 4 per stack.

Ok.


~ Assassinate is already a fairly good ability so we won't be buffing the DC in this tree, but instead we will be looking to have items that add to the DC in greater amounts that currently possible in the next few updates.

This is a biggie. Many of us have been asking for this for a while now. Thank you. Nothing crazy, but maybe a couple extra points and a few new options for itemization. Maybe a stacking augment...



Other stuff:

~ If we have time we will tweak the Bluff skill to have a longer duration and maybe an animation that doesn't have the rogue standing there pointing for like 3 seconds. I agree the current skill is really bad; at this point it's a matter of time since we are already working weekends to make up for all the snow days we had this winter.

~ We spent some time looking at TWF animations as well but I don't want to derail this thread.

Sev~

Glad to hear you guys are looking into TWF.

Thanks again.

[Severlin]

Could you specify which things affect affect the 25% dodge cap? I ask because there are many ways to increase the max dodge bonus or armor, but few that increase it past the 25% cap. It will be easier to provide feedback if we knew for sure how the abilities affected the 25% cap. For example, nimbleness in core three is really good if it does increase the dodge cap. If it does not increase the dodge cap, then for many builds, it may as well not be there (because these builds will already be sitting at max dodge.)


Bonuses to Maximum Dodge increase the cap beyond 25%.

Bonuses to Dodge don't increase the cap beyond (25% + Maximum Dodge)

Bonuses to the Maximum Dexterity Bonus for armor don't increase the cap beyond (25% + Maximum Dodge)

Sev~

[Blackheartox]

Sev is measure the foe gving only melle power or ranged as well?

[Wizza]

Still catching up on the thread but...

~ Based on player feedback bumped the PRR for Light Armor Mastery to 2/4/6.

~ We wanted a little more burst out of stealth so we bumped the Melee Power granted by Measure the Foe to 4 per stack.

~ Assassinate is already a fairly good ability so we won't be buffing the DC in this tree, but instead we will be looking to have items that add to the DC in greater amounts that currently possible in the next few updates.

Other stuff:

~ If we have time we will tweak the Bluff skill to have a longer duration and maybe an animation that doesn't have the rogue standing there pointing for like 3 seconds. I agree the current skill is really bad; at this point it's a matter of time since we are already working weekends to make up for all the snow days we had this winter.

~ We spent some time looking at TWF animations as well but I don't want to derail this thread.

Sev~

We are starting to get somewhere. I really would like some numbers on the Max Dodge that Assassins in SD can achieve as I can't at the moment. I think the +4 Reflex save from the Capston should be another +4 to Max Dodge or just Dodge or more Sneak attack. I wouldn't mind having Shadow Mastery HERE instead of Shadowdancer, maybe with some increased chances. That +4 Reflex is just..bad. Something like:

Shadow Mastery: Passive Bonus: You now have Evasion. In addition, when you CRIT (not a natural 20 like there is in SD) on a melee or ranged attack, you envelop the target in shadow, granting it 10% vulnerability to physical damage and removing its immunity to sneak attack for a short duration, if applicable debuff lasts 15 seconds [1]).


I would also like an answer to this:




Why did you move the sneak speed into the Assassin tree? We need points into TA tree to get Haste boost and that was the best choice. What are we going to get now to get Haste boost? +3 to Quarterstaff to-hit? :rolleyes:

[ddorimble]

Any chance Killer stacks could expire one-at-a-time like other Enhancements instead of all at once? Or is that a purposeful limitation?