Revenant Assassin / Warlock Build and League of Whispers vs. Ninja Comparison

Hi, everyone. I was working on a character for a new campaign I'll be playing in. It's in Dark Sun. This is the basic build:

Revenant (Shadar-Kai) Assassin (Executioner) / Warlock (Sorcerer-King Pact)
Noble Adept

Str 8
Con 11
Dex 18
Int 10
Wis 13 (for Disciple of Death later)
Cha 18

Feat: Mindbite Scorn

I'm planning on optimizing Eldritch Strike so I'm going to grab mostly minor action and out of turn encounter and daily powers. Eldritch Strike will do 2d8 + 2d6 + 5 on level 1 (using an Alhulak). I am planning to take Flail Expertise at level 2 to prone at will.

Anyway, I wasn't sure what guild to go with for the assassin part. I won't be using assassin at-wills very much anyway. My main thought was to have a viable ranged attack and to make the most use out of Bloodroot Poison. I thought about using shurikens to apply the poison 3x but I don't like the other ninja path powers. So I decided to do a serious comparison between Precision Dart and Poisonous Shurikens. This is what I came up with:

Precision Dart's average damage is 8.19
Shuriken's average damage is 18.21
(assuming Bloodroot Poison on both)

Precision Dart dazes an average of 2.03 enemy turns
Shuriken dazes an average of 2.91 enemy turns

Precision Dart is more useful if there are < 3 enemies.
Shuriken needs 3 enemies to be most efficient.

If I take Precision Dart, I can get another useful power (Bola Takedown) and have a controlling ranged attack.
If I take Poisonous Shuriken, I probably won't ever use either of the other power options in the ninja path.

Anyway, it's cool if this is completely uninteresting to you all, but I spent a lot of time on my calculations and I wanted to share it on the off chance anyone is faced with similar indecision about what guild to choose for an assassin. One guild is not clearly better than another (for hybrid) but Precision Dart is not very far behind in either damage or dazed turns (due to the auto-apply on a miss and the -4 save penalty on a hit).

I'm really looking forward to playing this character. I have a cool backstory and I think the build is pretty powerful

I've never been much into the calculating to see if the build is good, so that part I usually skip over. However, I've always been interested in how people arrive at the calculations. Care to describe how you came up with the numbers?

D'karr said:

I've never been much into the calculating to see if the build is good, so that part I usually skip over. However, I've always been interested in how people arrive at the calculations. Care to describe how you came up with the numbers?

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Hi, thanks for replying. I'll try to explain the best I can. For To-Hit I used 10+level+6 for AC and 10+level+4 for non-AC defenses. So for Precision Dart, I figure I'd hit 65% of the time (on an 8 or better). Then I multiplied .65 times the average damage per die. For any die, it's the maximum plus the minimum divided by 2 (e.g. 2.5 on 1d4, 4.5 on 1d8, etc.).

For Poisonous Shuriken, it was a lot more complex, because you have to calculate the odds and average damage of more event combinations. In other words, the odds off hitting 0 enemies is .45 x .45 x .45 or about .09. But there are 3 different combinations that result in hitting 2 enemies:

hit - hit - miss
hit - miss - hit
miss - hit - hit

So you have to figure out the odds of 1 combo (.55 x .55 x .45) and multiply it by 3 or about .41

And you do the same thing for the odds of hitting 1 enemy (.55 x .45 x .45 x 3) or about .33

The odds of hitting all 3 enemies are (.55 x .55 x .55) or about .17.

If everything was done right, the percentages should add up to 100%. They're the only outcomes possible. As an aside, I just realized that I did not calculate for critical damage - this could easily be done, though I'm not really inclined to do so at this time, I suspect it won't change my decision since I'm more interested in dazed turns than damage.

Anyway, you multiply the chance of each event times the outcome. So we get:

(.09)(0) = 0
(.41)(21.5) = 8.82
(.33)(13) = 4.29
(.17)(30) = 5.1

And then you add up the totals to get an average damage of 18.21.
Oh my damage is based on rolling 1d4 for a hit (2.5) adding 1d8 for Attack Finesse if there's at least 1 hit (4.5) and adding 6 for poison (for each hit).

Figuring out dazed turns was a lot more time consuming as I had to break each probability branch into other probabilities. For example, if there was a 40% chance of enemies losing 2+ turns, I would break this up further to like 22% EXACTLY 2 turns (enemy saves, .40 x .55) and 18% 3 or more turns (enemy doesn't save, .40 x .45). Then I would break the 18% down, and so forth.

I would add together any identical events. Essentially, I used a probability tree and double-checked that all the final probabilities added to 100. Then I figured out the expected value of each event and added all of those together, just as I did with damage.

It's not perfect because there is a very small chance that an enemy could fail 100 times in a row or 1000 even. But since I was only looking for a number accurate to within a couple hundredths, I discounted events that happen extremely rarely (< 2% of the time).

The reason I bothered to do all of that is because I'm a min-maxer at heart and I really don't like the ninja path abilities (besides Poisonous Shuriken). I was basically looking for an excuse to play League of Whispers instead for Bola Takedown. Even though Poisonous Shuriken is better for delivering poison in many instances, the math helped me to put the degree to which it is better in perspective.

Yes, I will make an enemy lose about 1 more attack per day on average. Yes, I will do about 10 more damage per day on average. But I feel that Bola Takedown can easily make up for this. How many attacks will melee foes lose over the course of the day to an Assassin that opens with a prone attack? How many flying creatures will be knocked out of the air? Not to mention that there are times I'll probably just apply my poison to my flail for Eldritch Strike.

That was very informative. Thanks for taking the time to describe the process.

D'karr said:

That was very informative. Thanks for taking the time to describe the process.

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No problem! I enjoy math and besides, having my methods out there gives others a chance to add anything I may have forgotten (like, for example, the crit damage I forgot to calculate).

In general, I really wouldn't worry about the other at-wills. But Poisonous Shuriken + Bloodroot Poison would be the way to go - damage is incidental compared to the possibility of potentially dazing 3 targets.

MwaO said:

In general, I really wouldn't worry about the other at-wills. But Poisonous Shuriken + Bloodroot Poison would be the way to go - damage is incidental compared to the possibility of potentially dazing 3 targets.

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Yeah but you're only dazing an average of .88 extra turns over Precision Dart for the entire day. Even though you can hit more enemies, you have to factor in the greater chance of applying poison with Precision Dart and the greater chance of a failed save with Precision Dart. It's less of an issue but you also need 3 targets.

I'm not saying that Precision Dart is better than Poisonous Shuriken for applying poison but is it so much better that it's worth taking a useless at-will vs. Bola Takedown? I mean, it's not for me. Bola Takedown will likely cost enemies .65 x 4 attacks per day or 2.6, assuming you prone a melee enemy as an opener, before both sides can close, or prone a ranged enemy and then get within 5 feet.

Also, Bola Takedown is better vs. fliers because you can probably drop them within melee range or even get them to take falling damage.

Just my opinion, of course. I'm still looking forward to putting the actual build into play. I haven't gotten to play lately

vtphoenix said:

Yeah but you're only dazing an average of .88 extra turns over Precision Dart for the entire day. Even though you can hit more enemies, you have to factor in the greater chance of applying poison with Precision Dart and the greater chance of a failed save with Precision Dart. It's less of an issue but you also need 3 targets.

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In general, the advantage is that Poisonous Shuriken does something you're not really capable of doing. As opposed to doing something you kind of already do. It is a daily power - you use it whenever you have three targets...

MwaO said:

In general, the advantage is that Poisonous Shuriken does something you're not really capable of doing. As opposed to doing something you kind of already do. It is a daily power - you use it whenever you have three targets...

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Well, it is something I am capable of doing. Specifically, wasting enemy actions with the daze status. Like I said, Poisonous Shuriken will not even daze on average 1 extra turn (enemies will only spend .88 of a turn more dazed). Since an enemy can't be dazed for a fraction of a turn, this amounts to some combats where Poisonous Shuriken isn't even better than Precision Dart at all and other combats where it's better by 1 turn. Admittedly, you'll have more of the latter (.88 is closer to 1 than to 0). But still, the point is that what Poisonous Shuriken essentially does is give you slightly more daze.

How this works out in actual play is that you'll Precision Dart a single enemy and it will spend 2 turns dazed on average OR you Poisonous Shuriken 3 enemies and you end up with a combination of misses and/or successful saves that average out to 3 dazed turns. So like 2/3 enemies hit, 1 dazed 2 turns, another dazed a turn, or 1/3 enemies hit, and dazed for 1-2 turns. Yes, you get more dazed turns but it's also more unpredictable.

I know the fact that you need 3 enemies is not a big strike against Poisonous Shuriken (and I noted such above) but I think it does make you play the builds differently. Like if I was using Poisonous Shuriken, I'd specifically wait for encounters w/ 3 good daze targets - either melee enemies that I could prevent from closing with my team or ranged enemies that I could get close to. In contrast, with Precision Dart, I'm more inclined to use the daze effect on a single Solo or Elite.

It may seem like I'm trying to say Precision Dart is better than Poisonous Shuriken but I'm not. I'm just trying to say that it's not much better and for me certainly not enough to give up at-will ranged proning (which I feel is more special). Also, I'm a bit more fond of improving at-will options (which I will use more) than daily ones (which come up 1/day).

I think it all comes down to personal preference. I'll try the League of Whispers build for now and follow-up sometime later with what I think about it. I'm going to mostly charge around and use Eldritch Strikes to take down enemy artillery anyway so I doubt the guild differences will stand out a whole lot.

Sorry, double post.