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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giore" data-source="post: 8472937" data-attributes="member: 7033411">I don't mean to be rude but:5 of these are  powerful and extremely costly magic items, some of which are not directly available to rogues without further investment in feats or multiclassing.other 6 entries are from other classes and some of these features require a significant investment in other levels. Rakish audacity isn't feasible at all, since it's from another rogue subclass. Alert feat i am aware of, it's a good option, but even this one is no small investment, if you think about it. The assassin really needs ASIs as soon as possible. Inspiration shouldn't be something you can rely on (at least at my table is rare), but, yes, it works. I admit i didn't think about bardic inspiration, but you still need someone else to grant it to your murderboi at the right time. Same with the spells (guidance is actually a good idea though). There also are other spells that could do the trick, like gift of alacrity, which you can obtain through the fey touched feat (which is arguably the best option here).NONE of these options is something the assassin has access to by default and all of them require hard choices (multiclassing for several levels, giving up juicy ASIs for feats) just to not suck.  Same with the magic items, the one's that boost initiative have exorbitant prices and you're unlikely to see one before tier 3 (again, that's how we usually roll).I personally think that being forced to invest some of the most valuable resources  you have just to make the class do what it was supposed to do on its own it's the sign of a huge design problem.The issue here is that you can prepare and work in advance to obtain a reliable advantage on attack rolls, by sneaking around.You can also get closer to your target by infiltrating and use deception and disguises. You can also stack damage, with sneak attack, poisons, or any kind of weird multiclass combo or lots of different items, both cheap and not so cheap. The game mechanics allow you to properly prepare in pretty much every aspect and stack enough bonuses to sneak and hit reliably. But you just can't do it that easily with initiative. You can't plan so to have a situation in which initiative will be favorable to you like you do with attack rolls. You can get some bonuses out of your build, take feats, multiclass, etc. thus giving up other really useful options. Multiclassing is especially taxing and can severly posptone the moment in which your killer kiddo will finally be viable. Otherwise you can plan to totally depend on someone else's help, without which your subclass features are worthless.And yes, there already are ways to make the assassin work and i really like the class. I'm actually playing one. it's frustrating, though, that such a potentially flavorful and entertaining class needs so much work just to do bare minimum because it clashes with core game design features.5e is good but has lots of weird flaws and "bugs" and i really hope they'll fix this one like they fixed the ranger and (kind of) fixed the sorcerer with tasha's items</blockquote>

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