Get rid of assassinate and mark of the prey and locate mark and stalk and throw and dirt kick and various dusts. Owaza fires off of Knock downs from kicks or punches.

Leave the weapons at what they are, but remove their ability to benifit from enhanced damage with weapons but allow them to benifit from Enhanced Damage with their hands.

Give them a series of different hand strikes that increase in the same fashion as kicks do. I.E. 91% before you learn the next.

Each of these strikes has some affect other than damage and using one, might allow a follow up kick or punch a better chance of success, or a greater effect, be it damage or maladiction. Not all blows would do this to all blows or kicks, just that certain blows complement certain other blows or kicks.

Ideas:
Type of blow Level Prerequisites Affect
----- ------ ------------- ----------
Jab 1 None Mnr dam. Stcks w/whl kick
To allow whl kick greater dam

Double punch 6 91% jab 2 jabs, doesn't stack

Sidearm strike 11 91% dble punch Drops dualwield/shield

Fingerlock 16 91% sidearm Works only if opponent has at least one hand free kicks that put opponents supine to ininflict greater damage/lag longer. Increases chance of success with Sidearm.

Eye gouge 21 91% fingerlock 3 ticks of dirt.

Sternum strike 26 91% eye gouge Reduces movement with each hit. stacks with tigerclaw making it easier to land.

knife hand strike 31 91% sternum strike Knocks out opponents, can be used to start fight. Similar to cranial in affects no confussion.

Rapid strike 36 91% Knife hand similar to H2H Pummel

3" punch 41 91% rapid strike Automatic skill big damaged when Bashed/bearcharged adds lag to opponent who Bashed.

Death strike 46 91% 3" punch If this lands it causes internal bleeding complete with niffty bloody vomit puddles. Damage over time and Strong maladictions and the victim will die inside of 5 ticks unless they save. Especially effective against softened foes, not so much against stone skinned.



Just some thoughts. Not perfect, but I think they would be cool.

I don't like assassinate as a skill. It's something that isn't preventable in some occasions. Someone hits me out of the blue, and I either die, or not. It has too little risk involved, and is too much a roll of the dice. I'd rather be ganged down than assassinated. At least I can regear, prep up, and use better tactics to get even. Against an assassin I might never get the chance. I'd be all for removing assassinate, and making assassins a more monk type of class.

I take it from your post that you have never played an assassin. Play one to assassinate people with and see how it is. There are many things you can do to prevent assassinate.

He'll need to follow you around about 10 ticks before bothering to try to assassinate you. You can control other's chance of assassinating you by making stalking you as hard as possible. You can also tell the assassin stalking you that if he wants a piece of you, he'd better strike fast, since you do not intend to let him stalk you.

Really hate assassins during cabal raids. They make it a deathwish to raid with anything less than 3 people (less than that and you won't kill the outer/inner fast enough). And raiding is boring if you do it with anything more than 2 people.

But then, if you took away the ability to stalk inside a cabal HQ, I have a feeling the number of successful assassinates would drop by more than half.. so it'd be too much of a nerf. Oh well.

What would you propose to call assassins who can no longer assassinate?

Sounds like your guys want to turn assassins into a monk. I agree, an assassin without assassinate makes no sense.

I dont really agree with removing assassinate from assassins or removing anything else. Assassinate should be an option for the assassins, otherwise they stop being assassins.

However, I do not think it should be such a huge and important part of being an assassin. Way too many assassins just assassinate simply because of the limitations imposed on them by direct combat and the high probability of not being able to remove *any* of your opponents weapons. Asssassins have a hard time *landing* the kill on warriors past 40-45 in straight up combat. So a lot of assassins chose to assassinate instead of fight. My guess is unless an assassin has some serious preps/is a villager, they will almost always chose to assassinate. I would rather fight but seeing how all the success depends on kote/kan landing and if they fail, you die, id rather not.

>I dont really agree with removing assassinate from assassins
>or removing anything else. Assassinate should be an option for
>the assassins, otherwise they stop being assassins.
>
>However, I do not think it should be such a huge and important
>part of being an assassin. Way too many assassins just
>assassinate simply because of the limitations imposed on them
>by direct combat and the high probability of not being able to
>remove *any* of your opponents weapons. Asssassins have a hard
>time *landing* the kill on warriors past 40-45 in straight up
>combat. So a lot of assassins chose to assassinate instead of
>fight. My guess is unless an assassin has some serious
>preps/is a villager, they will almost always chose to
>assassinate. I would rather fight but seeing how all the
>success depends on kote/kan landing and if they fail, you die,
>id rather not.
>
>

Huh? Is my only answer to that.

I think assassins are fine the way they are, you wanting to rid assassinate makes wonder if you ever played an assassin till you gain assassinate. Most people who get assassinated #### up, otherwise you shouldn't be in any danger, save villagers. As for beefing assassins up in hero range, I can say that an assassin who looses it's spike-toed boots has a hard time soloing any hero eq mob... other than that they are fine.

And most of assassin moves are unarmed combat moves already(exept for few that use nifty assassin tools such as dusts and caltraps). Assassins aren't meant to be h2h warriors, h2h warriors are for that. I don't see how this would make a versatile class more versatile that it already is. This would make assassins more warrior-like, which isn't something I'd like to see. Let's keep assassins as they are, assassins.

It seems to me like it would make them more Martial artist like.

I like the idea to throw out H2H specs.

thats the thing, h2h warriors are sort of a heavily diluted version of what a h2h expert should be. Pretty much like WWF wrestling. Thats why i think they should be removed and h2h skills of assassins should be expanded. Warriors already have weapon specs and what not, let warriors use weapons so they dont rehash any assassin skills. As it is, a h2h warrior will beat the crap outa an assassin most of the time, simply because of brute force damage/lagging they can do h2h while assassins cant.

The way it is right now, you got two diletante classes, both jack of all trades and masters of none. Neither is a master of h2h. What about letting ALL warriors keep some toned down version of unarmed defense to go with a general training of h2h but no more.

BTW, the only true h2h skills assassins get are tigerclaw and backfist. I just dont see how you kote/kan with a sword and shield, or spear or staff or whatever :P

I like the ideas, im not sure how they would work out for balance purposes but assassins need a bit of beefing up for hero ranks.

With my last experience, hitroll of 41, ive missed 18 out of 23 kote (perfect) against target with lower dex, and 21 out of 25 attempted kans against the same. In that time warriors just hit you too damn much because of enhanced reactions, to take them head on. Ive parried/dodged axes and maces better than spear/sword/dagger. Kote crunches only about 1/8th of the time, kanse screams about the same. I think they should reduce lag on missed kote/kan to one round, like a missed trip. Throw and ground control is useless past mountain storm kick which hits much more often. Assassinate lag on success is 2 rounds, which I think is extremely annoying. Little chance for a clean getaway. Perfect assassinate offers no benefits that I have seen, if there are any, do tell. Tiger claw misses about 75% even when perfect, id rather double spin kick someone than do that. Reduce tigerclaw lag to 1 round. Every friggin mage runs away with 2 rounds lag.

I really do think that assassins need to get more H2H skills. Especially maledicting ones. Some current skills are pretty much useless, strangle, poisondarts (lag way too damn long and misses too damn much). I do thikn that assasins should be masters of h2h combat in the respect of bone breaking, internal bleeding, joint breaks, special head hits etc. They should do away with h2h warriors and expand the assassin h2h abilities. What do h2h warriors do really? Vital, vital, pummel pummel and crushing...bleh. Warriors already have enough, legacies, specs, beastly hp, enhanced reactions. Any other melee class pretty much gets tooled unless the warrior sucks or the assassin is uber prepped.

I think that at hero level assasins should get another type of blindess dust that doesnt initiate combat.

Another issue is group fights. Assassin vs group of 3. If he surprises the group he really cant do anything because none of the other people are fighting him directly. Warriors can do their specs, everyone can do their #### to people who they dont fight directly. Maybe some skills that only work when they arent fighting the target directly?
So assassin gets to wait until the mob dies or they all flee and beat the crap outa the assassin. IMHO an assassin should be able to maledict the living #### outa someone who has their back to him!?!??! Right now, he cant kote,kan his target, wtf else is he gonna do, nerve the guy for that crappy -con or dex?

Most warriors arent stupid and flee/quaff after they lose one or more weapons.

SO many poeple make assassinating assassins??! HAH!

Your failure rates for kot are way higher than mine ever were, which surprises me.

I'd have said I succeeded about 70-80% of the time with a crunch about 50% of those, in pk, for kotegaeshi. Kansetsuwaza was less reliable for me, so I always favored kotegaeshi, primarily for reliability purposes.

Yeah i know, thats what I heard from other people. It just might be bad luck, I dont know. But then the kind of bad luck ive had is really really really rare. :(

Just because warriors have a leg up on you doesn't mean assassins need a power boost.

You have to bear in mind, a paladin, voker, etc probably can't easily kill you either. That doesn't mean they need more power. You however can one-shot that paladin or invoker, which is something no one else besides a (lucky) lich can do and even then, invoker/paladin can prevent it from the lich if they just don't let them get the first attack.

Given that, I'm not particularly inclined to make assassins stronger against the one combo that has significant advantages against you enough to make you double think assassinate + flee, IE, axe specialist warriors. You still have the chance to do that, just as it stands now you're taking a risk, and I can live with that considering against most classes (shaman, healer, invoker, paladin, etc) failing an assassinate poses no real threat.

I hope it's not too confusing.