I agree with many of your points, though not the ones about reducing the assassins strength. I don't know about you bit i'm a big fan of people wasting their time trying to reduce my assassins strength.

In the fight that KaguMaru describes though where I was lagged out by bash for 8 rounds and I did more damage to him with backfists than he did to me, those points are mostly invalid though. Partly because of the reasons I described, but also because of the situation of the fights (I don't want to say too much because I don't want to give our characters away).

As I said I also had many levels above him, lets just say KaguMaru was trying to fight a hero level assassin when he only had mid-rank skills and spells availiable too him.