You want to fix/buff Assassin? Here is actually how. (Basically a minor class skill rework)

General Discussion
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Warfist/Cestus claws are now 2x2 grid items, and allow up to 4 sockets.

Runewords that apply to axes now apply to claw class weapons. Voice of Reason added as a claw class runeword.

Blade sentinel can no longer miss like other trap “spells”, but can still be blocked / evaded. Base damage from level skill scaling doubled.

Blade sentinel attack range increased to 5, next hit delay reduced to 8 frames.

Blade shield attack range increased to 5. next hit delay reduced to 12 frames.

Blade Fury skill can now pierce.

Base damage scaling per level of Wake of Fire increased by about 100%, level 20 base damage now 140-160 (up from 68-77).

Wake of Fire now shoots up to 1 additional shot per 4 soft skill levels (10 shots at level 20).

Elemental Martial Arts charge skills now gain their 1st charge damage on attack. (i.e. While using Claws of Ice attacks now adds 15-35 cold damage at level 1, 231-259 cold damage at level 20). Phoenix strike now gains either cold, fire, or lightning randomly on hit.

Tiger Strike now gains a synergy with Claw Mastery, 4% increased attack damage per level (same as Dragon Claw). Note that this does not explicitly require the use of a claw to attack using Tiger Strike.

Whirlwind and all other oskill attacks now counts as a finisher move, triggering 1 charge per successful hit.

Dragon Flight attack animation is based off your hit recovery speed.

Increases the frequency Shadow Warrior uses your Left Mouse and Right Mouse button skills. Shadow Warrior now also gains the mechanic of Shadow Master where as it gains soft levels, its gear will improve in the same manner.

Cloak of Shadow now works on all unique enemies, at 1/3 the value. The blind effect still does not apply on bosses where it would override beneficial curses or debuffs, or preventing the enemy use of skills and spells.

Wake of inferno cone of damage increases in width the further the range, making it hit slow moving target more reliably.

Venom, new synergy with Cobra strike, 8% increased poison damage per level.

Increases to shield block rate from gear now apply to weapon block. Weapon block is still capped at 65%.

Cobra Strike now gains a synergy with both Venom and Claw Mastery, increasing damage by 4% per level.

Kicks are now capable of critical strikes and deadly strikes (claw mastery still does not apply).

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I was not prepared when opening this thread for this kind of spice.

My knee-jerk reaction is “this must be busted somehow,” but I recognize that is a knee-jerk reaction and am going to take some time to think about this before coming back to it in another post. It’s hard to evaluate at a glance since the WSM drawback of those weapons gets fuzzy with Burst of Speed.

Completely agree on Steel and Crescent Moon. Obviously in tandem with 4-socket claws there are bigger implications which I’ll have to think about.

Makes sense.

This should really use last collide instead of next hit delay. I can’t comment on the range.

Same as with blade sentinel.

This would be nice, along with removing its slow wind-up animation.

Agree, this is a nice change.

Or maybe hitting with 0 charges deals fire damage, with 1 deals lightning, and with 2-3 deals cold? Or cold at 2, and random at 3? In any case, interesting idea. (I’ve suggested just making its effects on finishing moves cumulative, but I’d be open to what you’re suggesting too.)

Making any non-charge up skill work as a finisher would be pretty interesting.

FHR, IAS, FCR, whichever. Anything to make it not so slow is good in my book.

This would be nice.

Also a nice idea.

Love it.

Makes sense.

Makes sense.

I do wonder if Dragon Talon really needs a big boost, or if 1Million+ Dragon Tail kicks should be a thing.

.

Some neat ideas here.

EDIT: Okay, I looked at 4-socket runewords that could go into the War Fist and Battle Cestus if those became 2x2 4-socket weapons. Famine is tame. Kingslayer adds Vengeance and Passion adds Zeal, but neither seem problematic for claw class weapons (even if those skills could trigger charge effects as finishing moves). Fortitude is fine. Oath is fine. Phoenix could be potentially useful for Fists of Fire, except… I think Hand of Justice would be the obvious winner here. Dual wielding Hand of Justice gets you level 32 Holy Fire (which you can boost to 46 with Dragon body armor if you want) on top of 33% IAS, -40% enemy fire resistance and ITD. That said, that doesn’t seem busted since people can already get level 44 Holy Fire with double Dragon and Hand of Justice.

I’m kind of really into this idea of making the “fist” style weapons 2x2 now.

Sadly Doom is 5-socket, so while Crescent Moon would support Claws of Thunder and Phoenix/Hand of Justice would support Fists of Fire, Blades of Ice would be… left out in the cold.

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I was thinking of any runewords that would help claws of ice and not be busted… none came to mind. Best bet would be just allow CoI be used without claws, but that kinda goes against the whole “ethos” of a MA Sin. The nuance of allowing more runewords to claws that are otherwise absolutely useless honestly b/c of their speed keeps them tame in terms of raw power.

I thought about how powerful triple fire aura would be on a FoF sin, and its actually not that great.

The reason it works so well with Paladin and Sorc is because paladin can bump its synergies and sorc combines it with enchant and fire mastery. Sin just gets a minor attack fire damage boost that comes at a serious opportunity cost of using anything else that could boost the FoF skill itself higher to get more returns, but still be an interesting option.

Overall nothing is meta-pvp breaking or pvm OP as when enigma teleport was added. It just gives the Sin enough QoL and removes a LOT of clunkiness with the class to make it actually feel good outside lightning trapper or CB stacking kick sin.

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Poor cloak of shadows. Forever bound to a cooldown of 5 seconds plus skill level. Too bad it’s so much more powerful then Dim Vision.

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Whirl Wind never procs so how could it count for a finnishing move.

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Whirlwind in this case refers to the barbarian melee skill, which is granted as an oskill by the chaos runword.

A staple of pvp sins and fun to use in pvm.

The new additions of allowing ww to count as a finisher move gives you 3 major use cases in pvm and pvp.

The first being that with an MA skill charge expendable, a ww sin would not miss with the first 3 hits and also would be a very powerful damage delivery medium for the elemental MA skills.

Further with the new viper strike venom synergies, this allows for a very powerful “poison MA sin” build that is currently not even a thing – to give parallels to the fire, cold and lightning skills in that tree.

WW acting as a finisher would also allow very powerful life/mana leech when needed if you were to spec into viper strike, claw mastery and venom fully. The last major new synergy pairing would be of course tiger strike, allowing VERY powerful but limited build up ww attacks, making it still similar to it’s barbarian counterpart but with its own mechanics and play style.

You can also draw parallels with the viper strike venom ww sin using a plague MH for the -poison, similar to how now claws of thunder could use a crescent moon rw, or fof using lawbringer/ Phoenix.

The changes listed are short, but massively impactful on how many new builds would be available to assassin’s for both pvp and pvm.

I typed this up on my phone, half of the reply is all over the place since I can’t actually see the text I’m typing on this site through mobile. Not going to edit it lol.

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Can I counter with all 3 os melee RW can be used on claws. Black early would be bonkers on an MA sin. Granted her skill tree needs lots of love to be playable. Dual Crescent moon claws of thunder build sounds spicy.

I feel like cobra strike doesn’t make a whole heck of alot of sense. Since when do cobras have massive recovery irl? Just give it poison dmg synergies with venom as you stated and give some cool AOE charge up skills:

Charge 1: +X poison damage over Y seconds
Charge 2: Rabies poison spreads to enemies X radius
Charge 3: Poison cloud explosion

Inferno needs to just deal damage in a cone period. Same with arctic blast.

Where Shadow master and Valkyrie gain randomized gear I feel as though they should spawn better weapons then +5 cold damage. What weird skills honestly.

Just make WW not bugged so we can play our dumb meme builds. Also WW should proc on attack effects period. IDK about charge release though may feel clunky going in and out of WW constantly.

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The idea here would be leave it mostly alone as a 1 point wonder for general mob control with blind, but pumped up it becomes a powerful buff for taking down tough enemies with a longer CD or tool in pvp for getting more reliable hits in.

I agree 100% but general game play bug fixes are not specifically assassin fixes.

I could argue all day about many skill names don’t make much sense. However, the added synergies are thematic and would make the skill quite powerful without any mechanical changes other than adding a synergy bonus.

Leave the skill at the core alone, and address the skill tree in a manner where small but powerful changes makes them viable choices.

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I agree I suppose I have a mild hatred for “recovery” skills ie: hunger, cobra strike. They don’t seem useful for highly optimized builds with lots of leech on gear, but maybe that’s a core game issue and not just an issue with the skill itself.

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Agreed. Nah I totally get you, but it’s what the skill is.

It could be interesting combined with new potential rw oskill finishers or as a much better sustain tool for playing through the game as a MA sin.

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Just changing the cooldown to a flat 6 seconds, or, even better, none at all would be a breath of fresh air for this skill. It doesn’t need more power and the same excessive cooldown. It needs more freedom of use and flexibility from cooldowns.

For the PvP use, waiting too long gives the opponent a chance at free hits while you’re trying to catch them in the aoe, too far away from the relatively small aoe, and you missed your one shot to use it before you and they are fighting to the death.

Slow missiles got a more powerful buff tied to the characters survival, but it didn’t get the unnecessary cooldown that this has. :confused:

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Hmmm, indeed.

The increase to next cast delay does seem incredibly arbitrary and a unneeded penalty on an unused skill.

Agreed when it comes to pvp windows of attack. Admittedly, I don’t know the exact range that CoS blinds or darkens the screen offhand or how light radius works with it as an opponent.

A flat ~6 second next cast delay would absolutely make it feel less clunky to use.

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The flavor isn’t strong, but having a leech skill is valuable for hardcore, so removing that completely seems like a disservice to that part of the community.

100%

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i dont really have any feelings regarding the rest of the stuff, i dont really care if its implemented or not. but this change is actually an interesting change. it would justify the slowness of those weapons. the art would look funky but i doubt anyone cares, as we already have blood raven’s charge which doesn’t fit its grid.

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Voice of reason in a 2×2 claws

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Ooooh, yeah I totally missed that.

Sword and mace only, but absolutely a great candidate to add as a valid claw class runeword.

Good call.

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If it’s slightly too tall for 2x2, they could also just rotate it a bit. Plenty of melee weapons have their art slightly tilted instead of upright.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I really like making these 2x2 with up to 4 sockets and unrestricting the weapon types of more of the melee runewords (or at least allowing them in claws).

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Bingo.

A HUGE part of what makes MA sins clunky or just not great is forcing them to use claws, but at the same time give basically zero options for runewords and uniques to work with.

The only “good” pvp skill for an attack based sin is whirlwind, which doesn’t even work with the charge mechanic at all. Kicks are really more of a pvm boss killer and blade sins still are very niche and don’t even use claws at all because claw mastery doesn’t apply to those skills and just no good high damage options.

2x2 slow hard hitting war fists help blade sins options as much as they do ma sins.

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It does it just doesn’t apply the AR. The calculations for blade fury are inaccurate on maxroll and D2r. As confirmed by some PvPers that have taken a shine to blade fury. I ran one last season for PvM. Still a very clunky skill and blade sentinel is annoying as it should always hit and apply on hit effects but it doesn’t seem to consistently.

I’ve tried to convince people to revisit the skill, so it gets more attention. But it’s fallen on deaf ears. Season 1 changes were good but some minor QoL changes need to be addressed.

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It’s tricky because it’s a bit cart-before-the-horse, or chicken-and-egg. I’d gladly play Blade Fury if it didn’t have the terrible wind-up, and had some way of getting okay AOE. My first Assassin in LOD offline was a Blade Fury assassin, but it really struggled by the time it got to Hell difficulty.

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