Class Acts: Assassin

It has been awhile since the assassin got any support, and this article provides about two pages each of flavor and crunch content. While the black flame zealot was a prestige class in 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms, this article thankfully provides setting-neutral story information, in addition for some tips on incorporating them into Eberron and ironically into Forgotten Realms (which gets its own sidebar). Much of the information paints them as “sith” assassins, channeling their hatred and fury, which fits the theme of the shadow power source.

The real highlight is being able to swap out shade form with black flame form, which gives you damage resistance, a damage bonus, and you can use your shrouds for free. Like shade form you can sustain it. There is also a handful of feats that increase shroud damage (I thought we already had a feat that increased shrouds to a d8), keep shrouds after critting, move them to other targets after killing them, gain combat advantage against shrouded creatures, and a damage bonus with ki focus powers.

A pair of magic items thematic to assassins helps round things out: one is a level 16 arm slot that increases your crit range on targets with three or more shrouds, while the other is a level 10 rare ki focus that adds necrotic damage to fire attacks (and vice versa), with an encounter attack kicker that deals scaling ongoing necrotic and fire damage, in addition to stopping the target from regaining hit points. To top it off, the crit damage is both d10s and adds on necrotic and fire damage, making it very hard to resist.

I think a better assassin article would expand upon this theme more and provide additional power options to help differentiate them, like the blackguard. Eh, baby steps I guess.

Assassin: Executioner

The finalized, non-accidental executioner class is available for download. Having read over the class for like the third time I think, my original opinion still stands: I like it a lot more than the shadow-only assassin. This is based on the fact that when I compare them side by side, the executioner just feels like more of an assassin. This is partially due to the fact that the assassin has plenty of specialized attacks that let them roll out an assload of damage–assassin’s strike and attack finesse for starters–but also because the executioner regularly utilizes poisons, something I have yet to see any of my players do in any edition of D&D.

Having seen the assassin in play up to 6th-level in a Scales of War campaign, I can say that it’s mechanically sound, but conceptually I have a hard time working something together in a satisfactory manner. Shrouds aren’t well explained, and the class seems to focus on utilizing shadows to tear, stab, and poison your opponents. Also, the idea of trading part of your soul for “shadow-power” seems better suited for something like a necromancer or warlock, while the assassin as written makes me think more of Pride.

Really, I don’t want to reiterate most of what I’d said in the past (which is what I’d be doing if I tried to go into detail again). Most of the class features and powers were very similar to the playtest versions, with some formatting and balance tweaks here and there. I found the accompanying Design & Development article to be an interesting read, as you get to see why R&D did what they did with the dual-power sources, assassin’s strike, poisons, situational at-will attacks, etc. Whether you’re pleased or pissed at the direction they went, it might inform you about their reasons for doing so.

It just sucks that they didn’t update Character Builder with the executioner, yet. >_>

Winning Races: Revenants

Unfortunately this Winning Races article isnt just for revenants, but revenant assassins, which isnt too strange seeing as both are DDI exclusive content and I can understand Wizards wanting to pimp both as much as possible. While it does provide about a half-page of fluff content for revenants, a few paragraphs are devoted to talking about how iconic the race-class combination is in terms of mechanics and story. Really though its a page of feats and ki foci.

Every feat requires that you be a revenant assassin with the exception of Raven Queen’s Disciple, which also demands that you have bleak disciple (increases temp hp gained by 1, 2 if its bloodied). Most of them mess with shadow form or dark reaping, though a few do some interesting things with one when you trigger the other. 

For example, Quick and Dead increases your shadow step distance after you’ve used dark reaping for the entire encounter, while Death Walk lets you use shadow step as a free action after using dark reaping.

Some of them require specific class features, even if the feat doesnt modify them at all (helps restrict them for multiclassing purposes). Specter of Death requires shade form, and makes you insubstantial when you are unconscious.

Some are just really fucking awesome. Swallowed by Shadow makes you invisible after using dark reaping, while Raven’s Queen Sanction allows you to deal full shroud damage to undead and shadow creatures if you miss with an attack (instead of deducting a shroud first).

The ki focuses are a bit more flexible, though all but one utilize features of the assassin class. There are five, but I’m only going to sum up three of them.

• Cup of death adds to the temp hps gained from bleak disciple and has an encounter power that lets you shift after you hit an unbloodied enemy.
• Death shroud deals standard crit damage, plus extras based on the number of shrouds a target has. It also has an encounter power that lets you auto-shroud a target that you hit.
• Ghost mask deals d8s on a crit and lets you make an attack target Will and deal psychic damage once per encounter. 

Its a lot of interesting and useful options to customize revenants and assassins, with basically nothing in there for anything else. Its not bad, but I’d have rather seen something that supports revenants in general as opposed to on a specific combo. Still, it adds quite a bit, so if you were on the fence about a revenant assassin before this will almost certainly push you over. 

Assassin Class and Assassin Feats

Awhile back, we got an assortment of assassin stuff in a Dragon article. It provided some thematic backgrounds, a shitload of feats, a few paragon paths, and a handful of tools like the garotte wire, blowgun, and crowbar.

Most of the feats were Multiclass feats that made you really badass with the new weapons, or let you swap out powers for some more assassin-type ones. Others were more generic feats that made you better with poison, or other thematic things (like teleport after killing something, for eladrin). Basically, the entire article was about giving expressly non-assassins some assassin love. It wasnt a complete class, but more along the lines of in-depth multiclassing features like we see in Martial Power, where you can take lots of feats to gain class features from existing classes.

Since the new article is about an entire class, I expect to see…well…an entire fucking class. Not an assortment of feats that lets you dip into the concept, but a class that embraces it in its entirety. More than just being alright with a garotte wire, or being resistant to poisons. This whole setup doesnt bug me at all. I like being able to add a bit of assassin flavor to any class I feel like, but if I want to go the distance I can just play the real deal. Its a degree of flexiblity that can help out a character concept.