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I have read about the assassin job, and to be honest it sounds great. If anyone from ffxi has experience w/ this job I would like to know, ive combed some of the forums for assassin and have not really found much. I do NOT want to play a job like thief in eq2 as I hated being totally gimp until my sata timers were up, and then again pretty much replaceable post 60 by any heavy hitting melee.
I may be able to help there... my friend plays ffxi and has a level 63 or so THF and I play eq2.
Ok first... forget about SATA. That only-one-decent-attack-per-fight nonsense is gone. As an assassin you get a line of specific attacks that you can only do when stealthed and have quite a big recast timer called "XXXXX Blade". You normally open up the fight with that (as you will have cast stealth in the gap between pulls) and it will do damage along the line of SATA. Then you have loads of other attacks that do similar large damage, such as Vladiminn's Focused Volley (if you go for that trait choice - read about traits to find out more). Basically assassins have loads of damage skills that do lots of different things, some just pure dps, some slow (i think), some snare, some silence etc. Each of the different line of attacks are on different timers, and there are easily enough different lines to keep you casting constantly the entire fight.
To top it all of for scouts dps, there are poisons. Poisons (as you probably know) are potions you use to give yourself an offensive damage proc. The beauty of poisons is that they have a chance to proc on every hit, not just every skill, but every hit. So for example, if you use a Vladiminn's Focused Volley (100-200 dmg per shot and 3 shots - its a bow skill) and you have a 100 dmg poison proc with an extra 30 damage-over-time (which starts immediately, giving you 130 dmg per shot) you do a whopping great (taking averages) 150*3+130*3 = 450+390 = 840 dmg in one skill (once again SATAVB damage).
As my sig says, i play a brigand, not an assassin, but since you want to know about assassins i thought i'd go that route.
Add to that the evac skills (teleporting you and entire group to a safe point in the zone), group SoW (aka. pathfinding), disarming chests and group stealth, assassins in eq2 are really far more well-rounded and flexible than THFs are in ffxi. A group will always have need for an extra scout, regardless of class.
About replacability by a hard-hitting meleer... In eq2 it is the skill hits, not the melee hits that really do the damage. You can play without using ur skills, but you will do about 1/4 of the damage you could do using them. Scouts and Mages will (or should) be far far more dps than tank classes, and no class is 'worthless'. They all have their own invaluable uses. Assassins, along with rangers, wizzes and warlocks are probably the 'purest' dps classes in the game.
oh yeah, and there are HOs (skillchains) too, but most people dont seem too fussed about those, because - unlike in ffxi - you don't really need skillchains to do massive damage attacks. They are, however, fun, and make the time fly much faster :P
In summary, the biggest difference between Assassins and THFs is that Assassins do big damage all the time and dont have to rely on a single skill repop (SATA). I agree, that was gimped. Was boring just to watch my friend play it.
hope this helps
Edited, Thu May 12 05:23:02 2005 by Monyetman Edited, Thu May 12 05:24:19 2005 by Monyetman