All Along The Crooked Way - An Assassin's Handbook
"It's done. You've sold a part of your soul to the Shadow and taken its mark" the shadow creatures said.
"What will come now?" asked the assassin, still trembling after the ritual.
"It's up to you". "The Path of Shadow is a lonely one". The shadow creatures departed and left the assassin alone.
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Can we leave our hero to its destiny? Of course, not! So we'll help him with a little advice about what he should do.
Selling Points - Reasons to sell your soul to shadow
High mobility: with a lot of teleport powers including an-at will the assassin is one of the most mobile classes.Flexibility: there are a lot of different builds as the striker and the controller roles in the assassin have an almost equal value.
Spike Damage: you'll never be a whirling monster-slicer as the Ranger, but you can do pretty serious spike damage and build it up from a safe distance.
A different approach to survival: with controller hit-points and surges, you will have to change your mind about how to survive and change your strategy continuously. It can be quite refreshing and new for anybody used to defenders who trade hits with monsters.
We'll use "LBD's standard colour coding" (TM) for this handbook as it fits well our purposes but with the "green variant" using black only to generally highlight some text:
Red: Garbage, or completely overshadowed by another option.
Purple: Situationally useful, but overall pretty meh.
Green: OK. You could do worse than pick this.
Blue: Good stuff. You probably want this.
Sky Blue: You want this. Period.
Gold: Why haven't you taken this yet? A defining choice for a build, or even the whole class.
We will also show rating differences based on the Guilds whenever needed.
This Handbook covers the following sources:
AP - Arcane Power
AV - Adventurer's Vault
AV 2 - Adventurer's Vault 2
D XXX - Dragon Magazine, issue XXX
DMA 2009 - Dragon Magazine Annual 2009
DP - Divine Power
EPG - Eberron Player's Guide
FRPG - Forgotten Realms Player's Guide
MM - Monster Manual
MM 2 - Monster Manual 2
MOTP - Manual of the Planes
MP - Martial Power
MP2 - Martial Power 2
PHB - Player's Handbook
PHB 2 - Player's Handbook 2
PHB 3 - Player's Handbook 3 (what we have so far)
PHH 1 - Player's Handbook Heroes: Series 1
PHH 2 - Player's Handbook Heroes: Series 2
PP - Primal Power
I will mainly use the Compendium as a source so I may be a little out-of date on the Dragon Magazine's side from time to time.
Thanks to:
Armisael for the picture of Agent 47 - now I moved to Anomander Rake
LDB for reviving the debate about the assassin
Chanter Hound for his Assassin Handbook
Psk20, DoctoBadWolf, Awesomologist, Ozovio, HidaKenshiro, Sn0wm4n, AfossDDI e Squad for constant support, suggestion and for finding my mistakes around.
All those who will post.