I play an Assassin in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. Right now I am level 37 on the Scourge server. I would be a much higher level if the assassin didn’t have so many weaknesses, which is what this post will focus upon. There are many good aspects of the class as well, don’t get me wrong. I have fun or I would have rerolled a long time ago.

The Assassin as defined in the Funcom manual is:

Assassins are the most lethal killers in Hyboria. Those aspriing to the top of this profession face the deadliest regime of training, discipline, and study, and the ones who survive are executioners supreme. No other class can deliver blows as deadly as an assassins’. Their arsenal of lethal combos is complemented by their ability to slip past enemies unseen.

Assassins can dual-wield daggers with lightning speed. they can modify their attaks against specific targets, such as unholy attacks against heavily armored foes, or poision attacks versus mana users. Few can stand against an assassin in combat.

Ok, so this means that Assassins don’t rely on their brute strenght to win fights, they rely on their intelegence and ability to manipulate a battle. Ok, sounds good and very assassin-ish. The only problem with this is that Assassins in the game as of now do not do more damage than any other class, we can barely keep up. We also don’t have the HP to stand toe to toe with mobs which makes leveling very slow. One more thing, about sneaking past monsters… Yeah right. This guy on the Assassin forums has a level 80 assassin and his signature reads “I am a level 80 Assassin, I have 800 Hiding and I stealth attack for 2000+, but a level 20 dog can still detect me.”

What’s bad about Assassins

• Assassins have no hp, which means they die very fast in combat. This applies to PVP and PVE.
• Assassins have damage on par or below other classes.
• Stealth is broken.
• We use cloth armor, which means we get beasted easy.
• There is no escape mechanism. If you get rooted, you are dead.
• We don’t do enough burst damage versus classes with 3x our HP.

What’s good about Assassins

• The play style is very fun and challenging. It never gets boring. You have to be on your toes to avoid getting killed all the time.
• Stealth Attacks are cool, they just need to be buffed some and they need to be easier to pull off, I don’t know how many times I have been in melee range of a mob, stealth attacked, and missed the mob all together.
• When stealth works, it is magical.
• The potential for a great class is there, it just needs some fine tuning.

Don’t get me wrong, as I said earlier, I love my assassin. The only other class I would play would probably be a barbarian and only because they seem to be specialized to do just as good as an assassin and they are also able to make up for the Assassins weak areas because of their superior armor and hp.

I can’t wait to see what kind of improvements Funcom rolls out to the Assassin class, any thing would make me happy.