The Only Assassin PVE Guide You Need | AION 2 transcript

Assassin can deal crazy amount of damage in PvE, but only if you know what you are doing and have the right setup. In this complete beginner guide, I will give you both. I will give you the setup as well as the knowledge you need to perform well as an assassin. We will go over which abilities to use, which macros to set up, and also how your rotation looks like. And here we will first look at the leveling setup and then what changes as we transition into the mid game.

So there's really a lot to talk about. You ready? Let's go. Okay, but before we fully dive in, let's first talk about some basics of the class. Now a lot of people think that assassin is a super hard class to play and that's why they opt for different class even though they would like to play it. Don't do that. Assassin is really not that complicated. It basically has just two a little harder mechanics. For the first one, it's just important to understand that the class has very powerful self buffs.

These buffs make you insanely strong for short duration and will give you a crazy amount of burst. And managing those buffs and using them at the right moment is one of the main mechanics of the class. Now especially in season one, you will not have enough cooldown speed to simply spam your self buffs. So it's actually important to not waste them and use them at the right moment. And then the second mechanic is all about your positioning.

That is of course a little harder as an assassin because you are a melee class. But on top of that, assassin always wants to attack from behind. There are passives and active abilities that allow you to deal more damage when you attack from behind. Means if you want to maximize your damage, you actually need to think about your positioning. And those are the two hard things about the class. And of course maintaining uptime on bosses and understanding when to use buffs can be of course challenging at the beginning.

But even if you don't play it perfectly, the class will still deal a crazy amount of damage. Now is the class a little harder to play? Yes. But I think if you like assassin and melee gameplay, you should go for it. All right, let's first have a look onto the early game setup and really understand the basics of the class. Now starting here with our four main damage abilities, we have quick slice, savage roar, hardcore, [music] and insignia explosion.

Let's go through them one by one. Now, quick slice is by default on our left mouse button. It is a three-chain attack, every chain dealing more and more damage. The ability has no cooldown, so you can spam it non-stop. It's like an auto attack. And then on top of that, with every hit that you do with the ability, you will generate MP. For specialties, you want to take in the leveling phase here absorb HP. That will give you just a bunch of life steal from this ability and make the leveling phase easier.

And then the multi-hit specialty will increase the damage of the ability. And then savage roar will be by default on your right mouse button. This one is also a three-chain attack with every hit dealing more and more damage. It has also no cooldown, so you can spam it non-stop. But the difference is that this ability will consume MP. You So, you have your left mouse button generating MP and your right mouse button consuming MP.

For specialties, you want to take here the minus 20% MP consumed. That is important because you going to spam this ability quite a bit in the leveling phase, and it will always consume MP. So, if you don't take this in longer fights, you might run out of mana here and there. That's why I really like to take the minus 20% MP here early on. And then for the second specialty, you want to take the plus 20% skill speed, which just allows you to do this whole chain faster.

Then on top of that, you can see that this ability always engraves an insignia for 10 seconds on our enemy. To understand what the insignias are for, we have to look at insignia explosion. Insignia explosion is just like a very strong damage ability that deals more damage the more insignias you have on your enemy. So, you can have up to five insignias on your enemy, and when you use the ability, you consume all those insignias and deal additional damage.

So, the more insignias you have on your enemy, the more damage you will deal with this ability. For specialties, you want to take again the multi-hit for more damage. Then also this one here that will always leave two insignias on your target after you let it explode. So, you will never consume all of the insignias. And then our last main damage ability is hardcore. Now, hardcore is an ability that we can only use after we landed a crit.

It doesn't matter with what ability we crit, but as soon as we crit with one ability, we can use hardcore. For specialties, you want to take here again absorb HP, which gives you just a little bit more life steal in the leveling phase and makes like all the bosses a lot easier. And again the multi hit on hit, which again gives the ability a little bit more damage. Now, those four abilities are all four main damage abilities.

And this is not only in the early game, also in the late game. Now, in the early game we will do a most of our damage with quick slice and savage raw. Because at the beginning hardcore and insignia explosion have just very long cool downs. That's why most of your damage will just come from those two abilities here. Then there are three more damage abilities that you can use that will make a small percentage of your damage.

First, we have ambush, which is a very straightforward damage ability that deals more damage if we hit from behind. Now, most of the time using this ability is just a damage [music] loss. I think the only thing that is really good about the ability is the second perk, which allows you to absorb 3% HP. So, it's actually a pretty decent healing ability. Next ability that we have is whirlwind slice. This ability we can only use when we evade an attack or if we land ambush.

[music] So, you could use first ambush and then you could follow that up with whirlwind slice. In theory not bad, but usually not worth it to use. I tried to make both of these abilities viable, but for me it was always a damage loss. But try it in the leveling phase, see how it feels for you and maybe you can make it work. But these ones here are always your four main damage abilities. And the last ability is storm rampage.

Now, storm rampage we can only use after we stagger the boss. As long as the boss is staggered, you can just spam this ability. Okay? You cannot only use that once, you can do that multiple times. The damage is not insane, but in the leveling phase it's always worth it usually to use it. What I like to take here again is the absorb 5% HP. Again, that makes the leveling phase a little bit easier. Now, this will be now all of your main damage abilities.

Then, we have three movement abilities here. First of all, we have Shadow Strike and Infiltrate. Now, both of these abilities do exactly the same. They will always make us jump behind the boss. So, if I use the ability, I will always positioning myself behind the boss. As mentioned at the beginning, one of the key mechanics as an assassin is hitting from behind. So, those abilities always allow us to reposition behind the boss.

I always like to have them on top of each other. Means, if one of them is on cool down, I use the other one on the same keybind. For specialties, for Infiltrate, you want to take the 10-m additional range. That is just so good because Shadow Strike has, by default, a 20-m range, and Infiltrate has only a 10-m range by default, but through that perk, we bring it also up to 20 m. It just feels so much better if both abilities have actually the same range.

And then, for Shadow Strike, you want to take the plus 20% caster critical damage boost for 10 seconds. That is, of course, great. We use the ability and get 20% more crit damage. So, you want to bring both abilities to level eight. Then, the last mobility spell that we have here is Flash Slice. Flash Slice will always position us on the opposite side of our enemy. So, if I use it here, it will always go on the opposite side.

Of course, the other two mobility spells are better because they always position us directly behind the boss, but depending on the boss, those two mobility spells will be not enough, and then we have Flash Slice to also try to increase our up time. Here, you also want to bring it up to level eight so that you get the additional 6-m range because, by default, this ability has only a 4-m range, which is, of course, very short.

So, with the plus 6-m, we at least bring it up to 10 m. And then, the last ability that we have here is Defiance. Now, Defiance just allows us to remove any CC effect. Okay, if you get CC'd, you will see a pop-up and you press space and that will remove the CC. And here you want to bring the ability up to level eight so that you also restore 20% HP on using the ability, which is very nice. Okay, those are already all of our normal active abilities.

Now, we have of course also stigma abilities. The first ability that I want to take is elusive clone. Now, elusive clone is the crazy cool down that I talked about in the beginning. This is the buff that just increases your damage by a crazy amount. So, what it does, it removes the cool down of hardcore and allows us to deal 20% more damage with it. Now, here the reminder, hardcore was the ability where we have to land a crit before we can actually use it.

On this ability, I have right now a 5-second cool down. It just completely removes that cool down. We can non-stop spam this ability as long as we crit with this ability, which is incredibly strong. At the beginning, this ability only lasts for 10 seconds and has a 90-second cool down. Now, because this is such a huge damage boost for us, we always need to be careful when we are using this ability. Then the next self buff that we're going to take is swift contract.

Now, swift contract will give us 20% more combat speed for 10 seconds. Now, combat speed just reduces the animation time of abilities. That means we can spam more abilities. Now, of course we will always combine that together with elusive clone and then have this one window where we completely go enrage. And then the last ability we will take here is trunil stagger. Now, trunil stagger is just a very heavy hitting damage ability that deals even more damage if we hit someone from behind.

Okay, enough about the stigmas. Now, let's talk about the passives. In the early game, we have two passives that we want to focus on, exploit weakness and rear smite. Now, exploit weakness will give us more crit chance, increase our attack chance, and has a chance to summon five clones that will deal additional damage and on top of that engrave five insignias. This passive just has everything. Now, this passive alone will always engrave enough insignias for our insignia explosion.

And on top of that, it gives all the other stuff. It's crazy. And then the second passive you want to focus on is the Rear Smite. Now, Rear Smite gives you a PvE damage boost and back attack damage boost. Now, this is going to be one of the main reasons why you as an assassin always want to hit from behind. So, you can utilize the back attack damage boost that you get from this passive. Now, obviously in the leveling phase, you cannot always use the back attack damage boost, but the passive is still very good because you just get the PvE damage boost.

So, it's still a very good passive that you should put a high focus on. Okay, but this is going to be your early game level setup. Okay, then let's talk about our early game macro. As you can see, we have only one row here in our macro. And this is only the first line here. So, what our macro will do, it will always prioritize insignia explosion, then go into hardcore, and then lastly go into Savage Roar. Now, how you want to play it now is you want to hold your macro button, and at the same time your LMB, so that the game can do all the animation cancels.

If you have no idea about macros animation cancels, I've linked you a video on the top right. Go watch that. In that video, I really detailed explain how all of that works. Besides that, in the leveling phase, just get a feeling for all those abilities. Don't put more into the macro and really understand the core of your class. Then for the leveling phase, it's important that you get your active abilities as fast as possible to level 12 because they will just give you more damage and you unlock the second specialty.

Through your skill points, you can level them up to level 10, and after that, you will need the DaVinci board. I've put together a simple preset here for you guys that you can just follow. It just uses 82 points. You will get that relatively fast, and And will level your most important abilities and unlock the most important stats. For that, it only focuses on the first three pages. So, you just start with the first one, then you go into the second one, and then you go into the third one.

That will level your most important abilities to level 12, [music] and it will give you at the same time a few of those very important nodes. You will find the link to those presets, of course, in the video description. Just follow them in the early game. It will make everything a lot easier. All right. So, you reach level 45 and you're starting to progress into the mid game. Now, let me tell you what are your goals here and what is changing.

One of the main goals for your progression is going to be leveling all of your skills, your active, your passives, and your stigmas. But, especially your active abilities, because they're just very powerful specialties. And the most important specialty that we want to unlock is the hardcore specialty on level 16, because this allows us to reset hardcore cooldown on landing a critical hit. We remember that we can only use hardcore when we crit.

So, every time we crit with this ability, we reset the cooldown and we can use it again. So, as long as we crit with this ability, we can use it non-stop, non-stop, non-stop, which is, of course, insane and will heavily increase our damage. You might be wondering what is then the difference to elusive clone, which completely removes the cooldown. That is a very good question, and the answer is pretty simple. This whole process here, landing the ability, doing a crit, abilities being reset, and you use it again, has a delay.

If you just remove the cooldown with the elusive clone, you can just spam the ability faster because there is no delay anymore. But, it's still incredibly strong and it's going to be a crazy damage boost for you in the early game, because the up time of elusive clone is not that high at the beginning. So, main goal, get your hardcore to level 16. And then, because landing a crit now becomes so incredibly important, I will also take you the additional critical hit chance from the third perk, so that we crit more often with this ability.

And then the next priorities will be leveling quick slice and insignia explosion. Now for quick slice, if you get it to level 16, you can ignore all block and evasion, which is not that important, but you also guarantee that the ability always lands as a crit, which heavily increases the damage of the ability. And by now you should have understood that you use your quick slice non-stop to animation cancel all those attacks.

You will use this ability non-stop. And if you can guarantee here the crit, that is of course very strong. And then on top of that, we will also go with the fourth perk here, that will reduce insignia explosion on every hits that we do. Then for insignia explosion, we keep the multi hits, but now we also reduce the cool down from 10 to 7 seconds. Now in combination with the quick slice insignia reduction, we going to spam this ability much, much more.

You're starting to see that now our damage is not only depending on quick slice and savage roar. Simply because we will reduce the cool down of insignia explosion and also hardcore way more. Besides that, we only want to level our flash slice to level 12 to be able to use it a second time. Again, just a little bit more mobility here for us. And then the last ability that you want to level is storm rampage. It has for sure the lowest priority, but it's still very good.

If you get it to level 16, you can take the last perk here, minus 1 second all skill cool down on hit. So you will hit with this ability so many times in a row. And on every hit, you will reduce all your cool downs by 1 second. That also counts for your stigma abilities. So if your elusive clone and your swift contract is on cool down, you can use storm rampage when your boss is staggered to reduce those cool downs. But you only want to use it then, because otherwise this ability is a damage loss.

It's only good if you can actually reduce the ability of elusive clone and swift contract. If those buffs are running, you just going to stay on your normal rotation. And then for our stigma abilities, our fourth stigma ability is going to be Savage Fang. Now, Savage Fang is just a straightforward damage ability that will engrave five insignias for us. And we will always use that as an opener. Place it here right before insignia explosion.

So, our opening will be always Savage Fang into insignia explosion, so that even our first insignia explosion will deal the maximum damage. But, you won't level this ability. Your main priority first is going to be leveling Triniad Stega to level 10. Simply because of the effect that it gets here. Minus 10% all skill cooldown on hit. So, you will first use your self buffs, and then right after that you use your Triniad Stega.

And that will immediately reduce both of the cooldowns by 10%. Now, important here, this 10% cooldown reduction is current cooldown. So, it's important that you always use Triniad Stega right after you use both of these abilities. We take this because we want to reduce the cooldown of those two abilities. And then after you leveled Triniad Stega to 10, you will put all your points into elusive clone. Now, first of all, you get of course a bunch of cool effects here on this ability, but most importantly, you increase the duration of this ability.

On level 20, this ability has a 20-second duration. And our class is just so dependent on this ability, so increasing here the up time of the ability is just insanely insanely good. And then after you have that on level 20, you can focus on Swift contract and Savage Fang. Now, Swift contract also gets a bunch of nice passives here that will also heavily increase your damage. And then for Savage Fang, the level 15 perk will give you 10% more PvE damage for 10 seconds, which is also nice.

But, first of all, get your Triniad Stega to level 10, and then get your elusive clone to level 20. Then for the passives, of course, our main priority stays exploit weakness and wrist might. And these passives are just insanely strong, but now we have two more that we will focus on and that is assault stance, which will increase our critical damage, and impacted, which increases our double chance. These are the only four passives that you want to focus on.

All the other ones you can of course get to a basic level because they still will increase your damage, but really actively you only want to focus on exploit weakness, ruthless might, assault stance, >> [music] >> and impacted. These are going to be the four abilities that you are going to focus on. Then for the macro, we leave everything as it is. The only thing we change is that we put savage fang at the beginning of our macro.

And then for the rotation, it's actually pretty straightforward. The first thing that you always going to do is buffing yourself with elusive clone and swift contract. Right after that, you jump with shadow strike behind the enemy to position yourself and get the critical damage boost buff from the ability. Then right away you use trinity of stagger to reduce all your active cooldowns by 10% [music] and then you just go into macro.

And then it's just all about repositioning, trying to stay behind the boss, and just having a high up time. And besides that, there's just one more setting that I would change if I were you. Go to settings, then go to info display, combat, and then you see here on the bottom display boss orientation indicator. Switch that to back. That allows you to always see where the back of the boss is. That makes it just a lot easier to position yourself.

But yeah, that's basically it. Everything that you need to know for assassin. I hope everything was understandable. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments. If you like the video, maybe you consider liking the video and subscribing to the channel. Thanks for watching, guys, and I see you in the next one.