Assassin

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The Assassin walks the shadows, a deadly viper ready to strike at the heart when the enemy least expects it, nowhere and everywhere all at once. Assassins are masters of their chosen weapon, the dagger, and are expert at inflicting Critical Strikes that cause massive damage. The Assassin is trained to efficiently link attacks together in a chain that does not give the enemy a chance to hit back. They have mastered the ability to move as shadows—Assassins wear only lightweight armor and prefer to avoid damage by not being there when the enemy’s strike lands. Their other magical skills include Hexes that lower the target’s defenses and protect the Assassin from harm.
–The Guild Wars Factions Manuscripts

A swift, silent master of shadows, daggers, and death. The Assassin can chain together increasingly deadly strikes that target a foe's critical areas, killing quickly and efficiently.

–In-game description

[edit] Attributes

[edit] Critical Strikes (Primary)

For each point spent on this primary attribute, the Assassin gains an additional 1% chance to score a critical hit. Assassins can also gain Energy whenever they score a critical hit in this way. The higher the rank, the more energy gained per critical hit.

[edit] Dagger Mastery

Boost the Dagger Mastery attribute to boost the damage the Assassin inflicts with daggers and the chance to land a critical hit with a dagger. Many skills, especially dagger attack skills, become more effective with increased Dagger Mastery. This attribute also improves your chance of performing a Double Attack and striking with both daggers at once.

[edit] Deadly Arts

Increase the Deadly Arts attribute to improve the duration and effectiveness of Hexes and other skills that make a single enemy vulnerable to the Assassin’s strikes.

[edit] Shadow Arts

Put points into the Shadow Arts attribute to improve skills that boost the Assassin’s defenses and allow instantaneous shadow movement. Also keeping them alive longer, and giving them a heal in the process.

[edit] Common usage

[edit] Individual target elimination

Assassins are primarily designed to use their skill combos to deal deadly amounts of damage and conditions to a single target in a small window of time, thus making it difficult for the target to receive support from its allies. Making use of Shadow Arts skills to both move rapidly around the battlefield, and prevent or escape from dangerous situations, complements the large number of abilities in the Dagger Mastery, Critical Strikes, and Deadly Arts lines that are optimized for hit-and-run strikes.

[edit] Critical Interupter

The Ranger preparation Disrupting Accuracy combined with a high critical strikes, Critical Eye, Way of the Master, and the ranger elite Broad Head Arrow form a powerful interrupter build that will almost guarantee that you interrupt every skill that the enemy activates. Critical Agility is also recommended because of the increase in attack speed and chance to interrupt a skill.

[edit] Death Blossom spamming

Assassins often utilize Moebius Strike and Death Blossom to do consistent AoE damage. Being designed to stay in combat, these often utilize more defensive skills than other assassins.

[edit] Critical Barrager

Some assassins use Barrage along with high critical strikes and skills Way of the Master, Critical Eye to inflict a large amount of damage to mobs while using skills like Way of Perfection and Critical Defenses to stay alive.

[edit] Critical Scythe

Some assassins use a scythe to deal critical hits to multiple foes in front of them. Because the scythe has a large damage output, these critical hits can be deadly. They boost their critical hit rating with Way of the Master and Critical Eye so that they are nearly sure that their attacks will be a critical hit. They stay alive with Skills like Critical Defenses and Way of Perfection, while they boost their damage per second with Critical Agility.

[edit] Shadow Form

The elite Shadow Arts spell Shadow Form is extremely useful in running and farming, due to the near immunity to spells and attacks granted by it. When using this skill along with a +20% of Enchanting weapon, the skill Deadly Paradox and the Elementalist skill Glyph of Swiftness it can be kept up indefinitely. Consider, however, the loss of offensive effectiveness.

[edit] See also

Professions
Core: Warrior • Ranger • Monk • Necromancer • Mesmer • Elementalist
Factions: Assassin • Ritualist Nightfall: Paragon • Dervish