Assassin guide

Assassins have great offensive power, with daggers and bows both inflicting high levels of damage. Dark Elves also have naturally high STR, making an Assassin even more powerful. Your emphasis is almost totally on offense, with very few defensive skills — your job is to kill it before it has a chance to kill you.

An Assassin can get expensive to maintain. You may want both a dagger and bow, and the cost of arrows and soulshots will keep your profits lower than other classes.

Decide early on which weapon you want to focus on, and keep it maxed. Both dagger and bow are useful, but one can follow the other in due time.

Mortal Blow is a high-damage, high-risk skill. It only works on a critical, so it is more likely to work if you use it flanking or behind the monster. Note that, unlike the Rogue and Elven Scout, you get no Critical Chance skill to make your Mortal Blows work more often. To make up for this, you get Critical Power, which raises the damage when you do hit.

Passive hunting is sometimes the way to go, as it gives you the chance for a first hit … from behind!

Power Shot is a wonderful opening move — and it doesn't consume any arrows.

Think twice before getting a shield; Assassins are made to evade, with light armor masteries and high DEX. You probably don't want to spoil it with the -8 Evasion that shields give.

Assassins get a Drain Health spell, which can be somewhat useful when soloing the early levels. However, realize that you're not a caster and you won't do much damage or get much HP back.

Don't bother getting Unlock 2 or above. As of Chronicle 1, there are only Level 1 doors in the game, and Unlock 1 works well enough.

Daggers have a higher critical chance, but also a higher chance to miss. Accuracy is a skill which you will either love or hate; it raises your chance to hit but sucks away MP. Still, it is fairly inexpensive to keep running, and you shouldn't hesitate to turn it on going into PvP combat.

Ultimate Evasion is best used when things have gone south, since it has such a long refresh time. It greatly enhances your Evasion, which means you won't be hit for a considerable amount of time, but refresh on it is very harsh.

Open up a fight with Power Break; it works pretty often, and when it does, it decreases the monster's P.Atk by 15%, which makes killing much easier.

Stun attacks in general are powerful things. Stun Shot doesn't hit hard and uses a lot of MP, but the chance to make your opponent stand around dazed is worth the effort.

Bleed is a fairly substantial damage-over-time (DoT) move. It should be executed early in PvE combat for maximum effect. In PvP, the move is good at any time, but especially towards the end should your opponent decide running would be the better option.