Ok bear with me here, this is my first MNC guide I will be writing, so my apologies if it's a bit hard to follow. For the people that don't know me. I'm Sylvana, mostly play on my own MNC servers and have been playing the Assassin eversince I started playing MNC. This guide will show my perspective of playing the Assassin. It is NOT necessarilly the best way to play the assassin, just the way it works best for me. My Endorsements: 1. Armor 2. Skill Recharge 3. Rate of Fire 1. Know your class. The assassin is a class that people should not see on the battlefield, and only start to notice her once they are dead already. Your way of killing people will most likely be by grappling them. Assassins focus on killing "weak" classes, and try to avoid one-to-one combat with a Tank or a Gunner. One of your worst enemies are most likely the Turrets around the battlefield. You have low armor and can't take much damage. 2. How to strike. As I mentioned before, you will want to kill players by grappling them. Know that the Assassin's grapple is less effective from the front and this will only work on other assassins that do not have an Armor Endorsement. The perfect way to strike (in my case) would be: Cloaked -> Get behind your enemy -> Grapple -> Smoke Bomb out of danger. 3. Your skills. You have 4 "skills". Dash - Very important skill. As an assassin speed is your best friend, in case of danger you want to be able to escape quickly when your Smoke Bomb skill is recharging as well. Cloak - In my opinion the most important skill. Cloaking will hid you partially from other players, giving you time to cooldown your skills or get your *** out of the danger-zone. Smoke Bomb - Useful, but your least important skill. Yes, this skill blinds enemies around you, but as the Assassin you will mainly use it to get out of the dangerzone. Assassin Level 1/2/3 - Your main focus. This increases your overal survivability and should be upped to level 3 as fast as possible. 4. Entering the battlefield So you enter a game and you're playing an Assassin. Have fun seeing people hate you in advance Here's what I do whenever I start a game. Buy Assassin Level 2 and go around killing bots / players until you have $400 to purchase Assassin Level 3. Once you have that focus on leveling up Dash and Cloak (Cloak will be more important) and buff them up to level 3 as well. By the time you have done this the game is probably progressed a bit and it depends on the state of the battle how you will be playing. 5. Patience I see assassins make these mistakes all the time. The important part of playing an assassin is to know WHEN to strike. Do not run around like a raging lunatic with the "I'm an assassin, I will kill you all!"-attitude. Observe the battlefield, locate the big fights and know where your biggest chances are to kill someone. Usually you will find some Assault players or Snipers on their own, they are an easy target for you. Once you know how your target plays (roughly) you can prepare your strike. Make sure he does not notice you and get into his area while cloaked, look for a nice spot behind his back and grapple him down quickly. If another player was around him or close to him, press E right after the kill (Smoke Bomb) and hit Jump to jump out of danger. Now once you are in safety, let your skills recharge a bit and go to your next idio...erm target. 6. Advanced Striking So you have the basics of killing people down now. Time to take on a bit tougher opponents. Remember the Gunners and Tanks? Yes, you can't easilly kill them on your own, but you CAN assist your team in taking them down without a problem. First of all make sure there is someone around that can kill the remaining HP of the Gunner or Tank. You will want a fellow Gunner, Tank or Assault player around. Strike the enemy as you would a normal enemy and immediately Smoke Bomb out of there. You will have him down to roughly 20-30% HP and your teammate can easilly take him down. Why do this? First of all, you get money for assisting in a kill, second of all, that's one Gunner/Tank less that might make it to your base. 7. Different ways of grappling players. You know my main way, just the occasional grapple and jump away, but there are more ways to get a nice grapple kill. You should know that when wielding a sword or dagger, you can charge over a short distance by pressing "R". This is a great way to get close to your enemy if he's far away, rather than burning your Dash skill. So you locate your enemy, charge towards him by pressing "R", and grapple him right after. What is the advantage of doing it this way? Not only will you be at your enemy's location faster, but you also will damage him shortly before the grapply by the sword slash the Assassin does after charging. This works well on slightly damaged tanks/gunners. 8. Taking on another Assassin. Killing other assassins isn't as easy as killing snipers etc. Why? Assassins are ALWAYS moving. And most of the time they are cloaked as well. If you picked your endorsements well, you should have an armor buff. Stupid assassins will even try to grapple you from the front. In case this happens you basically already killed them. With the Armor endorsement, you can NOT be killed by a front-grapple from another assassin. So as soon as you get up again, you grapple his *** back, followed by a charge (if needed). You will always end up winning in this scenario. In case the other assassin isn't killed by your grapple and avoids your charge (which happens sometimes) you can slash him like a crazy ninja and hope you'll get the kill. Or if you are not comfortable with it, there's always the Smoke Bomb available to jump out of danger, and most likely the assassin gets his *** shot by a bot or a teammember of you. This is my guide so far...I will expand it later ( I guess). I hope some of you found this a bit usefull and can get some basic tactics from it. Happy Grappling!
It's...a little basic, but you said you'd expand on it later, I guess. Personally, I think guides should be written with as MUCH as humanly possible and with minor edits later, instead of little teeny passages that require major future work. But that's just me. Anyway, this Guide seems to be focused more on killing people. That's a big nono. The only time I see you mention bots or turrets at all is when they "are a danger" or if you're taking them down for money for Passive 3, which you then use to kill people. That's also a big nono. Not only that, but to approach the back of an Enemy while cloaked is highly inadvisable. They can hear you coming from a mile away. This is a big nono. As much constructive criticism as I can provide for you, it's probably best for me to say that you should play a little bit more before attempting to write a guide. I don't mean to sound harsh, but all that players learn from this leaflet so far is how to get themselves killed. That said, if it works for you, by all means go for it. It's certainly an unorthodox method, and if you think you can pull it off in the long run, why not? I'm all for different points of view on alternative play styles of other classes. But I will agree with you on this: It's definitely not the best way to play the Assassin. Also, I don't play much on the PC but I'm pretty sure the Lunge is triggered by the "R" key, not the "T" key.
Assassins are supposed to focus on bots and turrets in order to get (and from there on permanently keep) the money ball down. Assassins who prioritise player killing over bot killing are doing it wrong badly. That is all.
I'm going to play double-agent here. Assassins are beautiful for PKing. Assassins are beautiful for lane-pushing. The only problem is, people get what I call 'red mist syndrome', where once they start killing, they focus on it. Don't do it, because Assassins NEED, not can, NEED to do more than PK. Imo, Assassins are built to push lanes, shred bots, and ONLY PK through taking out chokepoint-holders [that Support landlocking your team to your base, i.e.]. You leave the PKing to the Gunner and to the Assault, trust me, they're much better than you are at it. You can chip in and get Assist cash [$15 really adds up] using the Shuriken Launcher, you only really need to just barely damage the hostile player to get the Assist tag on it. Despite the 'lone-wolf' feel you get from Assassins whilst PKing, don't go lone-wolf. Stick with a Gunner or Assault, let him pressure a class [make the hostiles focus on them] and slowly scoop them out from behind. Yes, take the high road. No, don't touch Tanks unless they have red health. No, don't use Cloak as a get-all, Cloak can be heard from obnoxious ranges, and it's definitely worse to be heard than to be seen. I can't stress this next chunk of text enough. IF YOU'RE NOT KILLING PLAYERS, YOU NEEEED TO PUSH LANES. Nobody has the raw bot-shredding power vested in the Assassin. Use the bots for Juice to go stomp the opposing base, shred the bots for cash for skills/turrets/Gremlins [which are highly underrated, I've gotten quite a few PKs from Gremlins alone]. tl;dr Don't play lone-wolf, play with the team. It's a TEAM GAME.
As Obsy already said, the guide only describes the most basics things, and some advice seems a little bit... wrong, at least from what I've learned from constantly playing assassin. However, it's fine if you manage to work with these methods effectively, you probably should expand the guide a little further though c:
Thank you for your view on my way of playing. I've always played the Assassin this way and for me, it works really well. Perhaps it's because I'm not playing on "high-level" that I am not focussing on the things you guys mentioned rather than stopping the enemy from progressing. But your thoughts will also help me to increase my experience with the assassin.
