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Dragon 394
Design & Development: Executioner Assassin
by Rodney Thompson and Stephen Schubert

The designer and developer of the assassin talk about poisons and playtests.

Talk about this Article here.

It's a far cry better than the previous botched preview with incompatible features but still misses the mark I think of what it could have been.  There is no good reason poisons couldn't have just been an article for dragon with new alternate daily powers for traditional assasins but an essentials version should have done more.  Bits and peieces of the various essentials assassin had merit but I'm still dissapointed in the whole for how it will play in practice (not how they imagine it will play from the DesDev article).  The class is under powered damage wise and accuracy wise with the wrong kind of class feature support.  It should have had more at will hide and mobility support as well as ways to exploit being hidden and surprise especially.  I would have loved a theif style class (low encounter and no daily design with heavy at-will utilty and damage) but whiel preserving some of the more signature core assassin at will mobility with teleports, maybe incorporating a strong lonly enemy punishment feature (like nightstalkers but that scales up and compounds with any damage bonus for being hidden or having surprise).  Assassin strike encounter power being a single use is fine thematically but give some setup powers that will let us maximize it (predicatable damage bump from a nornal assassin strike and not really abusable like auro crits).

I hope the Heroes of Shadow has a lot to suppliment the traditional assassin as I don't see any of my players being interested in these mechanics over a Thief or the old-school Assassin.

i very much appreciate reading this discussion on the design and development of the executioner.  it provided me with a more concrete understanding of the class.  i would love to see this done with all new classes.

Dec 29, 2010 -- 7:15AM, RubicantX wrote:

Dec 21, 2010 -- 6:26AM, Herrozerro wrote:

I like the clarity of how the assassin is supposed to work.  It plays quite differently then most other classes.

"Then" is something that happens after something else.
"Than" is comparative.
Just FYI.
Love the kitty pic.

Seriously? Using words like then instead of than are some of the most common mistakes made on forums. More often than not such mistakes happen not due to a misunderstanding of the word's use but rather due to typos that don't get caught by your web browser's spell check. It is only a single letter of difference, after all, and most of us type by habit. Was it really necessary to call him out like that?