The what? yeah flourish assasin. What makes assasins hard to play, usually because you have to wait all the time for your skills to recharge so you can get your chain in.
However unlike warriors assasins dont need elites to kick ass =) So I build a PvP arena knockdown assasin, tried it out, find tuned the synergy and now I feel its close to perfect.
A/Wa
dagger mastery 16
Critical strikes 11
Deadly arts 9
+8 energy armor
daggers +15% dmg while health above, zealous + health mod
daggers +5 energy, zealous + health mod
Skills setup:
Mark of instability: For 20 seconds, the next time you hit target foe with a dual attack skill, that foe is knocked down.
Black lotus strike: Must strike a Hexed foe. If it hits, Black Lotus Strike strikes for +10-27 damage and you gain 5-17 Energy
Twisting fangs: Must follow an off-hand attack. If it hits, Twisting Fangs strikes for +10-18 damage and struck foe suffers from Bleeding and Deep Wound for 5-17 seconds.
Scorpion wire: For 8-18 seconds, the next time you and target foe are more than 100' apart, you teleport to that foe and that foe is knocked down. This spell has half the normal range.
Falling spider: Must strike a knocked-down foe. If it hits, Falling Spider strikes for +15-31 damage and target foe is Poisoned for 5-17 seconds.
Horns of the ox: Must follow an off-hand attack. If it hits, Horns of the Ox strikes for +15-27 damage. If struck foe is not adjacent to any allies, that foe is knocked down.
Flourish: All of your attack skills become recharged. You gain 1 energy for each skill recharged.
res signet
The weakness of assasins lies in that when an attack misses, your chain is interupted and you have to wait until your skills recharge. No longer this is necessary. You push flourish and TaaTaaaaa all your skills are recharged, and flourish recharges 8 seconds later well in time for your next attack.
Now the skill setup, as one can see no recall etc. making this assasin build slightly less strong on the defensive sight. However, offensive this guy is great. How is this skill setup meant to be played? I tried to get as much synergy of the skills as possible, offering maximum flexibility. Several chains are possible, and they have been made as independend to eachother as possible.
First the main chain attack:
Mark of instability, very rapid cast time allowing you to jump right in. Use black lotus strike, which is an off hand attack. This attack when hits, put back your energy (almost) to its maximum and skips the lead attack. After black lotus, hit with Twisting fangs (dual attack), which gives +17 dmg, deep wound + bleeding + knock down (->MoI). While your target is sitting on the ground follow up with falling spider, which is an off hand attack, again skipping your lead. This poisons your target and adds 36 dmg. As your foe is getting up you finish of with the dual attack horns of the ox, which does +31 dmg and again knocks your target down and leaves him sitting on the groun with poison + bleeding for another couple of seconds.
This is usually enough to kill anything even warriors with 100 armor. If the chain is interupted somehow, run away use flourish get back in. The problem is flourish recharges your attack skills but not your hexes. So we need to bring two hexes enabling us to place attacks at regular intervals. The second hex is scorpion wire,
which brings us to the second possible attack chain:
First we cast scorpion wire. You run in use black lotus, twisting fangs and then get out quickly, run to safety. Possibly with some warriors chasing you. Just when they are about to catch up you reach 100' mark (aproximatelly 1.5 agro buble radius) and you teleport to your target putting him on his ass. Quickly follow up with falling spider and horns of the ox which puts him down once more.
3rd short attack chain,
cast scorpion wire, run away to safety. Teleport kicks in, falling spider + horns of the ox.
The nice thing about this build is you can fail, without having to wait a long time for the recharge. You miss, flourish, setup the same attack chain again. Usually the hex is still on the guy. Scorpion wire is a nice trick to catch those running guys. Energy is no or little problem with this build. Where flourish sucks for wars, it rocks for assasins.
Basically, one can build all kinds of flourish assasins, I just happened to chose a knockdown build.
edit: Played this assassin in HA (yeah we had a build with an assassin and it worked). I did modify the build a bit. Scorpion wire takes to lang to cast and is removed before you can get out of range for the skill to kick in, so I changed the skill to mark of death. Also enables you to use it at the same time as mark of instability to increase the pressure (deep wound + mark of death reduce healing significantly).
m
