[Goto]

This place has been pretty desolate, recently. I was thinking it might be cool if we got back into the habit of sharing our builds. It was always quite fun to read through what other people had tried, and make suggestions. I know we have at least a couple of people who are fairly creative in their build-making, so lets see what you guys have come up with.

To get us started, here's a scythe-wielding Assassin I've been trying out the last day or so. I've seen a few similar concepts around, but these are the skills which I've found to work fairly well so far.



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1. Radiant Scythe (EotN)
2. Mystic Sweep (N)
3. Eremite's Attack (N)
4. Critical Agility (N) (PvE)
5. Way of the Master (EotN)
6. Critical Eye (F)
7. Aura of Holy Might (F) (PvE)
8. Way of the Assassin (N)


Basically it makes use of the high max damage of a scythe by providing an extremely high critical hit chance. These critical hits provide a high level of energy management (4 energy returned for each crit hit), and maintain Critical Agility. Aura of Holy Might is not essential, but will significantly increase the damage that your scythe attacks are doing. Critical Agility helps make your assassin a little less fragile with an armour bonus, and also helps to bring the attack speed of your scythe closer to that of daggers. You should have pretty powerful DPS even from your normal attacks, against base 60 armour targets I was averaging somewhere around 66 damage per second, that was with a non-customized non-max white scythe though. I would expect that to improve quite a bit with a proper weapon.

The choice of attack skills is somewhat arbitrary, but I'll explain why I like the three I listed. Radiant Scythe can hit harder than almost any other equivalent attack skill, provided your energy isn't too low. Mystic Sweep and Eremite's both have a 3/4 sec casting time, rather than acting as true attack skills. This means you can cut out the cooldown from your previous attack and jump straight into them. By using the three skills in quick succession, they function as a bit of a spike, since you're hitting pretty hard to begin with. Healers shouldn't have too much time to react if you use them right.

Having 5 skills to use just to prepare for battle is fairly taxing on your energy, but it's sustainable since it should be shooting right back up once you start hitting. You can probably cast Way of the Master before going into battle, since its duration is so much longer than the others. The same could be said of Critical Agility, since it will last 18 seconds and you only have to critical hit once to renew it. The only other skill with a casting time is Aura of Holy Might, which you'll want to wait until you're in battle position for so that you hit the enemy with holy damage from it. I'd recommend Zealous insignias though, or you'll probably be running a bit short. As far as the rest of the armour goes, I chose a Critical Strikes headpiece with a minor Crit Strikes rune, a vigor of course and attunement for the other rune slots. Stick with whatever suits you, though. Weapon choice isn't too important either. My favourite would probably be a sundering scythe, either of enchanting or fortitude. 15^50 or 15% while enchanted are both fine choices, you could also use a 'while in a stance' insignia if you make sure to keep Way of the Assassin up. Zealous might work well, but I'm not sure you'd need it. Vampiric might be good if enemies are grouped together tightly, you'd want to carry a secondary weapon for when you're out of battle though.


Depending on what you want to accomplish, you can swap things around a bit. Critical Defenses could work well if you're taking too much physical damage, probably in place of Aura of Holy Might. You could also try adding some conditions into the mix using something like Sharpen Daggers, in which case replacing an attack skill with Malicious Strike would probably be a good choice. Assassin's Remedy might also be useful, in areas with lots of conditions. Experiment a bit to see what you like, there's a certain amount of flexibility in the structure of the build.


As for weaknesses, there's the usual problems with melee builds such as snaring, blind, anti-melee hexes, etc. It doesn't really have any way I can see to end stances, but you could probably play around with finding a way to become unblockable. Enchant removal would strip away its effectiveness a bit, but it'd have to be pretty heavy enchant removal to cause serious harm. The usual, in other words.

Anyway, feel free to post comments or suggestions or whatever. And post some of your favourite builds in other topics, whether they're really effective or unusual or just because you like them.

[Neraphym]

I talked with you in game about this, but you should consider trying the Club of 1000 Bears skill in the place of Eremite's Attack. The damage is roughly the same, but it provides you with a nice knockdown effect against non-humans. Radiant, Mystic, and Eremite attacks only do damage, and relatively the same for each. Mystic has a good recharge time, but you say Radiant does more, no? Maybe drop Radiant for Chilling Victory for an even harsher spike. Because CV is expensive, Radiant will be less efficient. Also, because CV has a long recharge, you''ll need the lower charging Mystic Sweep more.

I love using my Assassin with a bow, and I am interesting in trying it out with a scythe. This build looks appropriate and powerful for just that.

Also, I have a terror scythe, which is vampiric, if you want to try one of those out.

[Goto]

I think I'll just finish Nightfall on my Assassin and get him a Hand of the Forgotten, that's pretty much my scythe of choice.

The knockdown thing on Club of a 1000 Bears is nice, but the skill is slower to activate and has triple the recharge. It does have a larger max damage, but in my experience it's unusual to be grouped so heavily that you could make good use of that. I guess you might sometimes want to use it if you knew you were fighting non-humans and the knockdown was considered important, but for the 'generic' build I suspect Eremite's would still be a better fit. Like I said it's a bit flexible, so swapping things out depending on the situation is worthwhile.

I'll play around with trying to slot in Chilling Victory somewhere. I was trying to go for a quickly repeatable spike that shot off faster than you could normally activate attack skills. Nevertheless, it may be the case that the AoE damage from CV is more useful, even though the scythe hit itself is weaker. If the attacks were to be swapped around, Mystic Sweep is probably superior to Eremite's because having enchants on you is more likely than having enough enemies surrounding you. Also it's unlikely that Chilling Victory would be used at the start of a combo, so I don't think it would really make Radiant Scythe less efficient. You'd almost certainly use Radiant first, since you want your target to be low on health to spike them with CV. Also worth pointing out that unlike Banishing Strike, Chilling Victory will only do the conditional damage based on your target, not anyone else you hit.

Thanks for the input, when I get some time I'll do a few trials and see which seems to flow better. I'd be interested to hear about your bow build, if you'd like to share sometime.

[Neraphym]

Critical Strikes: 14
Marksmanship: 12


1. Keen Arrow
2. Penetrating Attack
3. Triple Shot
4. Volley
5. Critical Agility
6. Critical Eye
7. Way of the Assassin (E)
8. Way of the Warrior



If I remeber testing correctly, Way of the Assassin actually is overkill on the critical percentage. I could do with a better elite, perhaps Barrage over Volley. I could then add another skill...

[Goto]

By my calculations you should have about a 76% chance to critical hit without Way of the Assassin, so I guess it probably is overkill.

I wouldn't have thought that the 28 max of bows would lend themselves quite as well to a solely damage-based build using crits. Admittedly you've tried it and I haven't, but I'd have thought you'd get more success by trying to go for something else at the same time. I'd be tempted to suggest losing Volley and taking Disrupting Accuracy, for some fairly poweful interrupts. If that was the case I guess it almost might be worth keeping Way of the Assassin just to ensure you were able to interrupt when you wanted to. If the AoE of Barrage/Volley is considered more important, what else? Sharpen Daggers maybe? Spreading some bleeding might help increase the damage a bit, I guess. There's always the usual options like Critical Defenses, I guess.

[wibble]

I don't think there is much variety for useful Paragon builds...

1. Spear of Fury
2. "Save Yourselves!"
3. Focused Anger
4. "For Great Justice!"
5. Aggressive Refrain
6. "They're on Fire!"
7. "There's Nothing to Fear!"
8. Res / Anything

Use Aggressive Refrain at the start for 25% IAS and keep up with ToF, cracked armor doesn't really do much - if you're getting hit then your party's probably dead

Spear of Fury, FA & FGJ are building adrenaline to spam SY (god mode for all the party) which also fills up your energy for shouting TNTF, ~60% damage reduction if somebody else is spreading the burning.


I wonder how long until "Save Yourselves!" is linked with Strength

[Neraphym]

It got very annoying renewing Disrupting Accuracy, Critical Eye, and Way of the Sin several times during each battle. The build was very effective at interrupting targets, but didn't do damage very well. I prefer a 'set it and forget it' skillset, which is why I love Avatar of Balthazar and those permanent or 60+ second enchants (Attunements, Faithful Intervention, Illusion of Weakness, Way of the Master, etc).

Sharpen daggers sounds nice... I'll consider it, actually.

[Rylkan]

On a side note, critical with a bow on a 60 AL is around 70 depending on different factors. But thats about the max, if I remember right.

Now as for Goto's build, it definitely has the defense and damage part. I think it loses out a bit though in the healing. Admittedly, has superb defense, but the healing factor is missing. I'd have to play with it more to get a good idea of how it plays, but I also have this image of Sins as having a bag of tricks up their sleeve. So for me it is a bit too tankish. But I am not a tank person. I however see no fault with it as a tank. (:

And on a side note, thats the issue with alot of Sins. They just 1 2 3 4 5 gank. No finesse or creativity.

[Goto]

It's not really all that defensive. I mean Critical Agility helps because it'll boost up your def to 90, but I was mostly after that for the increased attack speed. Assassins die so quickly under normal conditions, hopefully the increased def makes it sustainable.

As far as healing goes... I couldn't see too much of a way to incorporate healing without delving into a third attribute and weakening the other two. I also don't think very much of the assassin self-heals, personally. Dervish is a little better, but to get anything truly effective you'd probably have to be taking away multiple skill slots, which it would have trouble sparing. If you do want to play around with attribute points, you could probably take a point from critical strikes (want to keep it at least at 13 for energy management), don't like the idea of dropping Scythe Mastery below 12 though. I suppose you could go for a major or sup critical strikes rune, but diminishing your max health in order to provide healing seems a bit counter-productive.

My philosophy is that it's okay if a single person doesn't have everything covered, they're part of a team and others will make up that weakness. This build has the assumption that you'll be in a team with healers, so it's probably more important to focus on killing enemies. It's important not to over-reach, I know a lot of Assassin builds try to be self-sufficient so they can shadow step out of monk range but this isn't one of them. I know all you rangers like to bring some healing along with them everywhere, but not all the other classes can get reasonable healing out of only a few attribute points.


I was looking over some stats, and I guess Way of Perfection would still be reasonable at lowish levels of Shadow Arts, at least since you're using a scythe.

[Neraphym]

If healing and defense are concerns, and you don't want to sacrifice points into another attribute, consider using attribute-independent PvE skills.

[Rylkan]

Oh, by 70 damage on 60 AL I mean without attack skills or preps.

[x..]

i'm gonna make an awesome tanker when I get on