After grinding through this first week, I’m curious about how you guys are feeling about Fatebound vs Deathstalker for Assassination.
I have a build I’ve been using for world quests and heroic dungeons. It works great with Fatebound but not so great with Deathstalker.
Deathstalker seems very quirky in how it refreshes when moving from target to target. Once you lose it, it’s a PITA to refresh.
Anyway. Just curious about what others are thinking.
I don’t use Deathstalker because of how single-target focused its primary mechanic is. Fatebound doesn’t feel nearly as restrictive to try and take advantage of regardless of the situation.
Though Fatebound has some odd quirks, like getting tails on a nearby hostile target when using Slice and Dice from stealth damages the targets and rips you out of stealth. It’s… weird.
You just can’t reapply Deathmark frequently enough as Assassination. The ambush from stealth requirements hurts us pretty bad as we don’t get back in stealth often enough to maximize uptime. For heroic dungeons I am using Fatebound paired with a bleed heavy build. Tanks are moving 90 miles and pulling everything in the dungeon at once. Spreading around the 5 point Ruptures on all those mobs really helps build stacks of Fatebound fast. Trying to focus on single target seems pointless. I will figure out a strategy for raids once I start running them this week.
I like the gameplay tweaks of Deathstalker more, but I don’t like having my talent tree turned off when I’m unable to open with Ambush or use Vanish.
Posted before that if we don’t have a mark up, we should be able to throw a knife/shuriken for an extra energy cost to apply the mark.
Why would it cost extra energy? Subtlety literally swims in Deathmark applications (with it applying from Shadowdance).
Playing Deathstalker as assassination just feels terrible… But I mean people said this since it has existed and I guess Blizz doesn’t care about the discrepency. Sure, super min/maxers are gonna play it for that extra ~1.6% dps. To top it off, it’s buggy and just literally goes away sometimes too upon death.
After the first week of Deathstalker, I just pretty much play the same rotation as usual. I just started playing Fatebound on an ALT and I pretty much ignore that one as well. I’m just here for the quests and casual content so trying to play around limited or random procs just isn’t worth it to me anymore.
I feel like if echoing reprimand anima charged combo points triggered the marks…it would feel better. However Deathstalker is still only the top one for SIN if you can play it perfectly and never lose a mark due to it being a killing blow or can always restealth when needed. I feel like fatebound is so passive that you will always be able to have it be better.