Rogue - Assassin Changes

[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 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!!

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.