Legion - Assassination Discussion

[Jaronicity]

Your own desire to beat everyone else on the DPS meters, I suppose.

Isn't that just taking the talents best suited to the encounter? I mean, if you want to continually keep the talents you like because you like them/the playstyle and aren't fussed about your damage relative to your group's then that's your prerogative, I suppose. As a longtime rogue who never brought anything to the table other than sexy damage (until smoke bomb was introduced), I can't say I've felt the need to keep talents that I especially like if I can do more with another one (unless the difference is very minor or the playstyle too convoluted for my liking).

I'm not in beta, but I don't see, for Assassination at least, one standard talent setup that will just let us ride our way through the expansion. As under-developed as our tree is, I do think we'll be making changes to more than one talent row per encounter. As much as Agonizing Poison takes time to ramp-up, I have read it leads to superior damage over Deadly making it the choice in pure ST encounters (if there are any at all). If you need to cleave/aoe a bit more and the dots will tick a good amount then Blood Sweat will be the go to and, by extension, Hemo. If there's just burst aoe needed then I imagine you would use Deadly for the artifact trait and Master Poisoner to increase your FoK damage.

I am mostly just spit-ballin', though. I have very little interest in Outlaw and am just trying to decide if I want to pick up Assassination or Sub first. It's about a 55/45 split for me in favour of Assassination right now, because I think it will be the most well-rounded in terms of doing good ST while not being total gimp that Sub is in AoE...but, like, phat DfAs sound fun

[davesignal]

Normally I'm not a fan of constantly having to switch talents per fight, so I understand the notion of feeling 'forced' to take a talent on a specific fight because your favorite talent is ass on that kind of fight. But I actually enjoy every conceivable talent combination I've tried with Assassination, which is actually kind of amazing.

Taken on their own, any given talent might seem a little bland or underdeveloped, but the different combinations you can dream up of them actually produce a lot of subtly different varieties of Assassination. It's actually very fun to plan out what I'm going to be doing and spend a few minutes on the target dummies, swapping around to cook up an ideal setup.

[Jaronicity]

I'd much rather switch talents (and alter the style a bit within my chosen spec and efficiency in certain aspects) than have to switch specs. I hate how that's become a thing. I do think there are some nice combinations that need to be fleshed out a bit more once its live, but, yea, it's looking pretty good.

[Deleted]

Missing is Kingsbane generates combo points and it will be fine.

[Will]

Feral here too, assassi is really looking like a stronger feral so far. A fair bit less complex, but better scaling.

Now for the whole Antici vs DS thing, well I'm not amazing at maths but I did some basic number crunching, you have to calculate anticipation's value by working out the average damage each combo point gives you (taken over the course of a fight, naturally) then at various crit % values try and estimate the probability of over-capping on CPs - something new Muti does quite often because it crits quite a lot and if both weapons crit you get 4 CP in one attack.

In a worst case scenario you would waste 3 combo points, such as doing a 4 CP Muti when you're sitting at 4 CP already. I ran some beta numbers based off the pre-made level 110 gear and came to the conclusion that Antici has a significantly lesser value than DS. Simply put, the extra damage you gain from finishers (and we all know I'm 90% referring to the insane Rupture scaling) provides far more damage than you're losing from overcapping on your combo builders. DS also has the added benefit of making Rupture (at 6 CP) last 28 seconds, not 24, so that further reduces the re-application frequency and allows a little extra leg room to do other finishers.

[Deleted]

I wished they somehow reused Sinister Calling for Assassination. It would both salvage a cool gameplay mechanic and set Sins apart from other dot specs in the game.

It could work like a cooldown allowing you to briefly turn sustained damage into something more bursty.

[Bloodtista]

I'm really loving assassination in beta right now. Bleed build is insane.

[davesignal]

I wished they somehow reused Sinister Calling for Assassination. It would both salvage a cool gameplay mechanic and set Sins apart from other dot specs in the game.

It could work like a cooldown allowing you to briefly turn sustained damage into something more bursty.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no. Get that Sinister Calling shit out of here. Nope.

[Wow]

After years of asking Vendetta "Global Cooldown None" small victories.

[Deleted]

After years of asking Vendetta "Global Cooldown None" small victories.

Holy shit. Can this be for real?

[Deleted]

At least this, now it rose from complete utter boring shit to just boring shit xD

[davesignal]

Real as of the current beta build, yeah. Vendetta neither triggers nor respects the GCD.

[zulkaa]

the daggers look dope my dude

[Tellof]

I'm really loving assassination in beta right now. Bleed build is insane.

I find this kind of concerning since Mastery is still only poisons, right? Do other stat priorities come up when doing a bleed build?? Either way, I'm kind of excited about Assassination... I missed it a lot in WoD.

[elfporn]

I find this kind of concerning since Mastery is still only poisons, right? Do other stat priorities come up when doing a bleed build?? Either way, I'm kind of excited about Assassination... I missed it a lot in WoD.

the poison aspect is covered with things outside of the old standby "poison damage = DoT" Envenom, poison vial, poison daggers, venomous wounds, deadly poison, and kingsbane, i may have missed something, but that's all poison stuff, more than rupture, garrote, and hemo for bleeds, though rupture is a large part of damage, as it's always been.

[Lorentz]

I find this kind of concerning since Mastery is still only poisons, right? Do other stat priorities come up when doing a bleed build?? Either way, I'm kind of excited about Assassination... I missed it a lot in WoD.

Agonizing Poison makes all damage scale with Mastery, basically.

[Deleted]

Assassination is fine !!

#BlindForAssassination (please^^)

[Infect]

#BlindForAssassination (please^^)

+1 (again) #BlindForAssassination

[delus]

My inkling is that you'll want a more bleed focused build when you have to cleave or AOE with all the spreading and buffing of bleeds that you can do. That, or if you have significant downtime on a boss where you have to run out of things constantly then it might be beneficial to keep strong bleeds up. Otherwise, I feel like ST will use a poison based build with Master Poisoner and Agonizing Poison possibly combined with Deeper Stratagem (not sure if Anticipation will be better at lower crit levels). Fully buffed envenoms from DS in addition to full stacks of AP could yield big numbers. Who knows, maybe even DfA combined with several targets bleeding could be viable for a little extra burst.

Large scale, poison damage pulls ahead with hemo and garrote spreading fueling fok spam. The synergy between surge of toxins, poison knives and bag of tricks pretty much cement spamming fok and high finisher use for mass aoe, rupture and garrote do decent damage but its all about the energy. Basically its looking like hemo and agonizing poison may very well pull ahead in single target but hemo begins to lose its punch in small scale multi dotting and agonizing poison starts to lose appeal to blood sweat.

[davesignal]

Kingsbane helps push mastery's value up a lot, because it's a pretty sizable chunk of your damage.

I would like it to build a combo point, though.