Eratta for Assassin damaeg?

[Aegeri]

Can be true, I think the secret to the assassin is not worrying about getting high numbers of shrouds. Put 1 on and use it immediately seems to work quite well tbh. Then again I've only seen the assassin at Heroic, I could see them falling behind at paragon.

"Falling behind" is certainly one way of putting it. Much like how you could say someone that was currently dead was "Not breathing very well". Paragon is where you really see how bad some strikers can really become and just how big the gulf is between well designed ones (Rogue, Thief, Slayer, Barbarian and such forth) and poorly designed ones (Vampire, Assassin).

 

[MrMyth]

*shrug* I'm not the one who crunched the numbers. Ask on the CharOp boards which striker they think has the lowest DPR.

Was that before or after the article came out?

Beforehand, yeah, they were pretty bad off - it was simply much easier for them to have 2-3 rounds of striker damage simply vanish.

With the feat that fixes that, I don't see any reason they would be at the back of the pack. They can wield large weapons, get reliable striker damage (that can be boosted by a feat), and are actually one of the few strikers who can potentially stack up multiple rounds of their striker damage in one round via feats and powers.

The big weakness is not having exceptionally large damage via their attack powers... but I don't think they are particularly behind warlocks, avengers, or monks. They aren't at the top tier (due to lack of multi-target or multi-attack or triggered attack powers), but I don't think they are in last place, either.

 

[MrMyth]

"Falling behind" is certainly one way of putting it. Much like how you could say someone that was currently dead was "Not breathing very well". Paragon is where you really see how bad some strikers can really become and just how big the gulf is between well designed ones (Rogue, Thief, Slayer, Barbarian and such forth) and poorly designed ones (Vampire, Assassin).

I've seen two assassins in play at high-paragon, and both were quite effective. I'm just not seeing any particularly poor design.

They can't get to the level of pure optimization as the classes you name... due to a lack of two things: Bonus attacks (via area attacks, multiple attacks or attacks made as minor actions/interrupts/etc) or Charging nonsense.

But that level of optimization is, honestly, largely irrelevant to the average game. And an Assassin can definitely be well-built and effective - at least, now that last month's article patches the primary flaws.