Assassin: what am I doing wrong?

So, despite my trepidation, I tried playing an assassin for the first time last night in cross fire. My "main" is gunner, which I'm pretty durn good at, but I figure I need to work on that one last achievement of 10 grapples.

Sooooo...I get behind someone, hit grapple and they're still alive. What the what?! My gunner gets killed all the time by assassins from the back and I have gold armor. What am I doing wrong?

You aren't leet enough noob.

Now that we got that out of the way, I need to ask a few questions, do you have custom assassin? What endorsements do you have? Also, are you up grading skills?

In order: armor, skill recovery, rof

I upgraded: passive and cloak to start the match, then upgrade passive to 3, then sprint, cloak, sprint if money is available.

Should I be lunging and then grappling? Is that the magical combo I'm missing?

Grapple then lunge. Also target assaults, supports, and snipers at first. Because even as a gunner with no armor upgrades I can survive and kill assassins that back stab me.

Stop going for kills and take a lane.

You sure about that order? Lunging then grappling will kill gunners, and I think even fully upgraded tanks with GobiNumb. A gunner might be able to get off Slam after you lunge them, so I would wait for them to start firing at someone else and get distracted.

I'd have to disagree with this a bit - you should kill bots. That is natural. But you shouldn't stay there. Assasins are very vunerable when someone gets the jump on them, and staying in the same area ensures you getting attacked for your opponents to remove your work and kill your bots back. If you see other enemies and you can't kill them, harass them and then maybe after go back to taking care of those bots and turrets. If you see an enemy you can kill and get away with... kill them. Killing the enemy bots and turrets is paramount to winning, yes, but you can't do that when you're dead.

Honestly, you're just getting unlucky.

A back grapple with an Assassin should kill any class but a tank, assuming they have no armor endorsements. Even if they do, Assassins and Snipers will still be killed, and Assaults, Gunners, and Supports generally will die too, unless they have gold armor and/or are lucky.

Are you trying to back grapple with a dagger? That is not necessarily a kill unless on a Sniper or Assassin. I've seen Assasults survive my back grapple with a dagger.

I guess I'm confused and thought that grapple needed to be paired with a lunge in order to kill everything from behind aside from a tank.

As a gunner, I have gold armor, and I'm unclear how assassins one shot me from behind, unless I missed seeing the lunge and only see the grapple animation. I can't hear the cloak for some reason when I'm not playing an assassin, so I get caught enough to piss me off and start bunny hopping.

I'm trying to break out of my comfort zone and get competent with all classes, not just the gunner and assassin just threw me for a loop last night. I guess I have to suck it up, take the "I'm an assassin noob" deaths and just experiment to see what works.

The thing about a lunge is that you can grapple almost immediately after it. I wouldn't be surprised if you completely missed the lunge damage.

And no, a lunge is not always necessary. Honestly, most of the time I assassinate first and then lunge and still get the kill. You just gotta know how to use what and when. That comes from practice using the Assassin, so keep working at it and you'll find out what works for you

Nowhere in my OP did I say I'm only going for kills. I know how to play this game better than most because I put objective/team first and k/d last. My issue was having difficulty killing when going for kills.

Some points

My sin setup is
gold armor- keeps your flimsy *** alive
silver RoF- Makes killing turrets a breeze, nice bonus to the launcher and ups your ability to drop enemy pros
Bronze- speed/skill
This one is up to you, speed helps against people who backpedal your slashes,
skill is obvious

-The katana back grab will kill any class nix a tank regardless of armor endorsements
only over healing will let them survive

With the dagger, I think gold and silver armor gunners survive and assaults with gold armor (backgrapple)

Lunging first will net you the ko even on tanks if they aren't sporting gold armor even with the dagger (back grapples)

always lunge first because if you try after you are vulnerable to counter charges and grapples, Face lunging is never a good idea unless your sure your opponent is either bad or out of cooldowns to counter

Often times ill "bait" a tank or assault charge simply hopping to the side, then they cant stop the face lunge
Although as a general rule of thumb I avoid tanks like the plague, and why wouldn't you? its not a favorable match up..and you get to pick your fights, which btw...don't pick fair fights!

You see a team mate put some shots up on somebody but they make cover, swing the corner and lunge them in the back while they have their pants down
oh btw you can taunt while cloaked, and if you have passive3 it wont drain your bar to do so, easy money bonus

I'm not sure how it will be after the dagger nerf but as is even a gold armor sniper or assasin will die to two back to back lunges


-SHURIKANZ OMGAD
Ya, they shred gunners and tanks. In fact they shred anything standing still or running in a strait line. Oh and one more thing you can shoot them around corners.

I can't stress enough how important it is to learn to use that launcher cuz with practice it's amazing for harassing and killing, cloak3 means the clip will all crit if you fire from cloak
re-cloak as the clip finishes and your reload starts

-Gremlins
Sin has the best bots in the game if used correctly
Traveling with your bots will turn a regular face grapple into a kill if they are after that player
they take turret fire and do nice damage to turrets, combined with smoke bomb and some slashes you can drop turrets without juice very quick

-Your sword can kill people
Yes the damage is kinda sad but I have about 1.1 thousand sword kills atm
Obviously a Good chunk of them lunge kills..id say about..half
Juiced, all it takes is 3 slashes to drop even a tank.
if your gonna go for a sword kill, jump while your doing it to avoid counter grapples
which another point leading up is to abuse your speed
The assassin is fast, your hard to hit with bullets. You can dance circles around lesser players.
Juiced, all it takes is 3 slashes to drop even a tank.

Earlier today I got a rather funny kill

I noticed an enemy gunner going 1v1 with a team assault
The assault died but the gunner was injured, so I dash and face lunge right into him dropping him to critical health. Being an average gunner his first response was obviously to slam, which I hopped over and to his left to avoid the soon incoming gunfire while slashing him twice. As I landed at his side I proceeded to quickly flip kick him in the dome for a cheeky melee kill.

I bet his face was red.

Honestly in my opinion the sin is the hardest class to get used to and learn, it's a lot more then just point and shoot.
I was AWFUL when starting with the sin

Hope you can take something from this!

Gunners who take level 3 armor will be tricky, they can survive a backstab. Tanks can just flat out survive a backstab. Also jump vs a gunner who survives a grapple. If the server isn't too laggy you will dodge the slam.

What you need to do vs people who have stacked health is hit them with a charging slash (reload) and immediately follow into a grapple. With lag you probably want to hit the grapple button before you see the slash land.

Also, you don't want to be stalking and killing players a ton on assassin. Assassin's strong points are her mobility, her juice gain, her juice attacks against a base, her gremlins, and the speed at which she kills bots.

You usually want to go light on the upgrades, heavy on the gremlins, and try to build juice by killing bots whenever you can. Always open by buying gremlins for both sides. I know you probably don't believe me about how amazing gremlins are. Just try it, play a game where you never upgrade anything past lvl 2 and spend all your spare cash on gremlins. The enemy team will forever be on the defensive. Try to track the annihilator and hit it on cooldown. In pubs you can slowly upgrade over time, lvl 2 cloak and lvl 2 dagger are cheap and make big differences.

For endorsements you want RoF and Armor. Some prefer armor gold, RoF silver other prefer RoF gold, armor silver. Try them both, I like gold RoF because if you opponent leaves an opening you can walk into their base, smokebomb a turret and chop it down fairly quickly. Plus gold RoF gives you a bit better juice gain. For your bronze endorsement speed is a good choice, but a lot of things work. If you are serious about assassin, having a bronze juice set-up specifically for overtime is helpful (all endorsements turn gold at overtime.)

Be opportunistic about kills, don't stalk people and seek them out. Only hunt a player if they have a good position, you have low juice, and they are doing massive damage to your team and must be killed.

Actually, it depends on the playstyle, if you are good with the shurikens, lvl3 cloak is a must, and the sword helps out a lot, except against tanks/gunners.

I TOTALLY agree about gremlins though, went one game 29-41-3, it was hilarious.

Ya my starting tactic as sin goes something like

Rush out of spawn, hit both grem spawns, upgrade lvl2cloak as I slam the second spawn
Push a lane with them, drop any bots or pros in my path

then try my best to dismantle the turrets while killing off any bots that spawn

if met with heavy resistance, switch lanes or fall back but don't bother with gremlins again until you have built up a full juice bar and upgraded passive to lvl2

juice into the base, reak havoc and then split, the ani is up soon and you got the cash to tap that

THIS is the point where you buy more gremlins, they have no turrets or bots...its time to shine for your team

spam off about 2-4 waves depending on your cash level and if anyone on your team has spawned anything, travel with them kill off any bots trying to spawn and get that ball down

once down, keep it down even if it means cloaking and firing off a few shots from diff angles

At this point I've saved up enough for the katana and will upgrade depending how the game is going
Sometimes the money is better saved for the second ani

however if the enemy team is heavy on tanks and gunners, or they have very good base defense I may opt for cloak3 instead

Thanks for these suggestions. I tried playing a bit last night and did okay, although I still have a little practice to do to get behind people. I like practicing on Ammo Mule the most because there's tons of space to maneuver.

Last night I would upgrade passive all the way before putting any money into anything else and concentrated on clearing lanes and tried a little smoke bombing of turrets. I also found how easily shurikens can tear through gunners, which makes me wonder why more assassins don't use them against me...of course, I tend to do a lot of hopping around if there are assassins on the other team, so I'm not an easy target.

The assassin really does take a lot of patience, and my gunner mentality is run and gun, not stalk around and wait for an opening, so it might not match my mentality very well. I just figure I should try to get good at all classes.

Speaking as a gunner with accuracy and clip size endorsements, I've never been out gunned by a shuriken shooting assassin, unless she caught me off, guard, a sliver of health and a bounce breathing down my neck.

I think I got killed by shurikens once in my early gunner career when I was just starting to learn the game. But some gunners (the bad ones) will stay stationary for longer than others, and I got a kill one one that was up near his spawn, just camping bots. Never moved once as I let shurikens fly.

Any class that is standing still and not paying attention is easy to kill with any other class.

I consistantly outgun gunners as the assassin, the shurikens tear through them and have godly range, i keep my distance and wreck

Obviously that gunner is not me.