Assassin guide (PvE & PvP)

WORK IN PROGRESS. Going to edit the guide so that it becomes readable


Prelude
Howdy, everyone. To celebrate the acceptance to the cupcake ranks I'm going to bring you the English adaptation of an Assassin guide that I'm quite fond of. When the original guide gets updated or if I decide to deviate from it once I learn the class, I'll update this guide.

Class Description
As you all know, there is no Holy Trinity (tank, heal, dps) in Blade and Soul. Everybody is responsible for their own well being But still assassin is considered best in single target dps department and in soloing pve content in general due to two reasons: 1) Ridiculous animation cancelling while being invisible, 2) Invisibility that allows to steamroll through all 1-44 content.
In general if you're a fan of stealth gameplay, like to perfect your motor skills (you gotta press a lot of buttons very quickly!) and want to confuse the sh*t out of your PVP opponents this is the class for you.

PVE
Stats
Focus on pure dps. You should get enough survivability from skills.
Atk. Power — The main damage stat. The more you have, the stronger you hit.
Piercing — Chance to pierce block and overall % of enemy defense decrease. Get ~8%
Accuracy— Self explanatory. Keep it 100%
Critical — Crit chance. Invest heavily into this as Sins are quite crit proc dependant.
Critical Dmg. — Critical strike multiplier.

Equipment
For now we're pretty much stuck with morphing hongmoon weapon and accessories. Take crit bopae set and enhance the pieces with crafted crit bopae. We also need attack power diamond, everything else is up to you.

Skills
The skills and their descriptions can be fround here: https://bnstree.com/AS

Leveling advice
The main source of damage while leveling is the following rotation while being invisible (the faster you press the buttons the bigger the damage):
- > -> - >

Spoiler: Heart Stab (RB)

Costs 2 focus. Deals a ton of damage. Used instantly: 1) from invis; 2) on 5 stacks of posion; 3) when the enemy is stunned, dazed, gripped

Spoiler: Shock Kill (F)

Restores 1 Focus, can be used only during invisibility and after Heart Stab

Therefore what we need is to learn the Heart Stab skills as soon as possible.
- this can be used to get invisible

Spoiler: Decoy (2)

1.5 second counter. If proc'ed, makes you invisible, restores 3 Focus and lowers cd of our Shadow Invasion by 6 seconds

Spoiler: Sidestep (Q)

Dash behind the enemy. Resists everything (iframes) during use. If you resist any attack makes you invisible and restores 4 Focus

Spoiler: Infiltrate (1)

Dash towards the enemy. If you dash from behind, makes you invisible. Put 3 points into in order to decrease CD and make animation faster:

Spoiler: Shadow Invasion (TAB)

Deals low damage. If used on any number of poison stacks, makes you invisible

Generally it's rather difficult to aoe mobs until level 28. It's then when we get the following ability:

Spoiler: Bolt Step(RB)

Lunges 12m forward and deals damage to anyone who is in the way. Additional damage for each poison stack on the enemy

Therefore we need to stack poison 5 times with:

Spoiler: Poison Wine(4)

Deals multiple instances of damage and stacks 1 poison upon each damage tick. Allocate skills the following way:

Endgame PvE rotation
Firstly, we're going to use the following build.
Our single target rotation is going to be:

-> -> -> (if it crits) -> -> -> (if it crits) ->

Okay, there are some new skills here, gotta explain how they fit in:

Spoiler: Smokescreen(X)

Area of effect that protects from projectiles, and restores 15 Focus in 10 seconds. Also heals you a bit if you allocate it the following way:

Spoiler: Mist Slash(LB)

We're anicancelling our RB with it. Allocate for increased dmg on poisoned enemies:

Spoiler: Shadow Kill(F)

Deals a lot of damage, more so on a poisoned target:

Note that we need a way to keep 5 stacks of poison on the target. Initial stacks from Poison Wine last 15 seconds, but there's a way to refresh them:

Spoiler: Dynamite(2)

Used only in invis stance. Deals damage and refreshes poison stacks. Detonates after 7 seconds. Also can be detonated by placing a mine (Z).

That's what we're going to use to refresh poison stacks:
-> ->

Spoiler: Throwing Mine(2)

Deals damage. Stacks 1 poison.

Until we can put 5 stacks on our enemy we use the default invis rotation:
- > -> - >

And we use the following skill to refresh invis duration:

Spoiler: Shadow Siphon(1)

Only used in invis stance. Deals damage, restores 15 Focus over 5 seconds. Refreshes invisibility if used on poisoned target

Although damage dealing is important, you deal zero damage when you are dead, so pay attention to Boss's abilities

The following skills can be one used one after another for Boss cc:

Spoiler: Leaf Shift(F)

Deals damage, teleports close to target and weakens it for 3 seconds

Spoiler: Shadow Step(X)

Deals damage, teleports behind the target and weakens it for 2 secs

Here is an example of how it's all done:


PVP
Anything that I might write here will be quite bleak in comparison with Yuketsu assassin guide. Therefore I will just post a link to it. All credit of course goes to Yuketsu. The guide is just mindblowingly good and detailed.

Spoiler: Link to the PvP guide is over here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FQPf1drgC-aacGBitT6QAFqAQpPZo_b6sQQEd1iugj0/edit

 

PvP part of the guide becomes completely obsolete after Yuketsu released his Assassin PvP guide. The link to it is at the bottom of the guide.