interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
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I would tell you though, hit rate in the 80s is good enough for consistency and everything. But if you’re a little worried about it, could I interest you in an Act 1 Cold mercenary with Mist? It might work better, I’ve been testing it with Blade Fury.
But given your finishers always hit now it’s probably not that big of a deal to keep Blessed aim and go with Pride.
There’s also the “Ignore Target Defense” route, but it tends to get a little expensive. A Fury will do you well and give you lots of Open Wounds and Critical chance.
I added an Eth rune to my Bartuc’s. For Super Unique monsters and Act Bosses it lowers their defense by 12%; that’s like adding a lot of AR.
But then we get to the discussion: is the AR boost given to the MA Charge skills enough? Maybe not, maybe instead of +10% per level we need +15%.
What about the baseline of +25%? Seems OK to me, I did some quick tests with a new char and had no problems in Levels 1~3 to hit monsters.
Yeah I put the Gul rune in for an extra 20% AR but it sounds like Eth would be better (and easier to come by).
What if instead of pumping the attack skills more Claw mastery also gave more AR per skill point?
Coruja, items like Um’ed Andy’s, CoH, Mara, Um’ed Stormshield, SoJ, BK + an Act 2 merc are not cheap. I think the idea was for MA assassin to be viable to play through the ladder and have fun. End-game gear can make a lot of builds work.
Otherwise, for my Hell playthrough, I maxxed Claw Mastery and I had pretty good chances to hit even on Act V (80%+).
Yes I agree.
Also, I find Infinity to be basically mandatory for the build. Which makes the whole thing complicated obviously.
I did a quick test in Chaos Sanc Hell, and could hardly kill a small group of Oblivion Knights without Infinity on the Merc.
With Infinity? They went down in 2s.
Tough balance to find. Increase the damage on PS so that it becomes viable without Infinity? Then people with Infinity become overpowered.
Yep, that’s exactly what I tried initially as well.
"Gul"ing my Bartuc’s gave me like 300-ish additional AR only. 
Then I thought of going the Eth way.
Coruja, nice summary! I came to a similar conclusion.
However I did not use Infinity, as Infinity is such a game changer.
Furthermore I forced myself to not use Death Sentry … , which is still the better choice for player 1.
Summary
I was able to kill all mobs in the game, with those 3 elemental synergies combined.
With 2 claws this feels much better compared to Phoenix on life server .
COT (claw of thunder) got nerfed a bit, as it releases all 3 charges on live server, while on PTR it has the same mechanics as phoenix. This makes phoenix the better option.
Some Learnings
- Dragon Talon with Shield is my Favorite choice, and releases 3 charges (with level 12)
- Dragon Claw with Phoenix provides only 1 charge, 2 claws is not worth it, to give up the better defense
- Death Sentry with a large radius in Payer 1 still speeds up the progress a lot and is better than having 3 synergies for phonix
- Dragon talon combined with some crushing bow on the equipment speeds up the bosses, but this is not as mandatory as before
- Natalya Set: I cannot wait to see Natalya with an upgraded pair of “Set Shoes”
- Attack Rating remains an issue, which significantly reduces the fun
Wihout the hit rating issue, I would continue to use Azure or Stormlash similar to my Dragon Talon Playstyle of the last 15 years … and combine it with Phoenix. Maybe Light Sabre coule be an option due to “Ignore Target Defense” … .
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People with infinity are already overpowered if they choose to use it with a sorceress or a javazon (and by a much larger amount than a melee assassin would be). Keeping a specific class weak because of an item 99% of players (yes I made that up) do not have is a very poor design choice (much like the recent reversion of the paladin elemental auras…)
If you think being “overpowered” is bad, or “infinity is bad” then please say so and don’t let those ideas bleed over onto other parts of the game 
I personally do not think these changes should take only the best possible gear into consideration, but rather focus more on normal gear to which most people have access.
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I would like to see some boost on all elemental MA damage because a level 40 PS doing 4k fire 9k lightning and 1700ish frost for a skill that cant be spamed is too low. And CT doing 6k single 5k Nova and 6k bolts are sooooooo low compared to a sorc lightning that can do 25k+ dmg.
What if MA elemental dmg increase in 25% or 30%?
Also would like to see the remove of cast delay from Cloak of Shadow and make the -x% defense work on bosses to help.
One more thing to note is that devs said that MA would generate charges more easly, and we received some AR that is nice but i would like to have a 20%? Chance of generate a charge when stuck.
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Yeah payout is very low compared with the time it takes to charge. It should either hit harder or charge faster.
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MA assassin will be doing 1 hit KO to hammerdin and possibly smiters in PvP, the amount of crying in the forums from the eternally overpowered Paladin will collapse the servers. It will be nerfed 2 days after release.
Meybe we can adjust the Dragon claw finisher like the Wherewolfs fury work, so we are automatically hit enemys around us. That would be a very nice QoL feature.
Only from tiger strike, but good luck trying to charge that up before dying in pvp. There’s a reason no one uses charge ups in pvp.