Dark Apostasy Assassin

Back to Basics Assassin/*

16 Dagger Mastery
13 Critical Strikes

Dark Apostasy [E]
Leaping Mantis Sting
Jagged Strike
Wild Strike
Critical Strike
Critical Eye
Dash
Res Signet


Play instructions:
With the short recharges on all the attack skills, you should be able to attempt combos very often. This build lacks much in defense - do not overextend from your monks. You should be able to attempt a lead-offhand-dual attack chain at least every 6 seconds, and if the chain fails, its no big deal. Leaping Mantis Sting is a decent snare, and with dash you should be able to land it. If you are with warriors adrenal spikeing, the extra damage and the enchantment removal are rather nice. Zealous daggers are a must. Concentrate your enchantment removal in two areas: auto removal of reactive enchantments on focus fire targets, and shutdown of elementalist energy management enchantments. This character should be an absolute bomb against fast cast air spike, as well as against teams running bonders. The secondary class is left open because there really isn't much to bring without using attribute points.

Questions? Comments? Post please.


--- edit ---

I was looking at possibly bad information on critical strike: I've seen it at 10 en and 6sec recharge, as well as at 5 en and 12 sec recharge. Anyone know which one is correct? Might need to mod my build...

Heh...hate to say it Iraq, but this guy doesn't loo half as nasty as Swordfisher's Appointment in Damascus, and they're doing the same job. Wild Blow is, in a proper Apostasy build, so good it should be Elite. Critical Strike may do it twice, but if you're not autocritting enough to feed Apostasy without a three-hit chain ye need to rework your build or playstyle. Good effort, and not a bad build, but you were beaten before ye even posted it.

I do have 3 hit chains, Mantis Sting/Wild Strike/Critical Strike, and Jagged Strike/Wild Strike/Critical Strike. Bringing two lead attacks is so that block/evade/blind doesn't hurt me as much - it lets me restart a broken attack chain.

With 16 dagger/13 Critical strike and Critical Eye, the autocrit is on 42% of all attacks, as well as any hit on a fleeing foe.

Not a bad build, but I don't think this is gonna work in PvP.

RA/TA: Not much people here uses a lot of enchantment. Having enchantment removal as an elite here isn't worth it.

HoH/GvG: There are better ways to remove enchantments. Like Order of Apostasy

a few comments, both Leaping Mantis Sting, and Jagged Strike have 8 and 6 second recharges respectively. I don't think having to wait at most 8 seconds to restart your combo justifies wasting an extra skill slot on another lead attack. Wild strike is one of the worst offhand attacks you can choose, the stance removal is useless since it can be blocked/evaded and the extra damage isn't high enough to justify using it. Sure it has a 4 second recharge but you can't use it anyways while you're waiting for your lead attack to recharge. Sub in Golden Phoenix Strike, Fox Fangs, or Jungle Strike (goes perfectly with Leaping Mantis Sting).

Now with only one lead attack this lets you bring a cover enchant for Dark Apostasy. With your critical rate that high Critical Defenses would work perfectly, though if you're uncomfortable counting on that to be your cover enchant, Sharpen Daggers or Recall would also work. There are a number of useful enchants under deadly arts and shadow arts but with your stats the way they are it is probably best to stick with the options under Critical Strikes.

If you do plan on removing some stats from Critical Strikes (is one extra energy per critical worth sacrificing that much stat point flexibility?), put them in Shadow Arts. Even with Critical Strikes at lvl 8, you get around 35% chance to crit with critical eye up. Putting some stats into Shadow arts will give you access to Shadow Refuge (only self heal you'll ever need), the teleportation spells giving you increased mobility in combat, and a number of other useful cover enchants to hide Dark Apostasy.

I would find some way to slide Wild Blow into there since it's perfect for removing Enchantments on demand without having to go through your whole combo chain. You could easily put this in place of dash, which kinda sucks as a speed boost (oooh 3 seconds of moving faster than everyone else.....damnit 12 seconds of walking).

EDIT: Actually you know something, scratch everything I just said. I agree with Laserlight, look at swordfisher's Appointment in Damascus since almost everything I told you to do is basically his build. The link is here:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s....php?t=3006471