To: 98% of assassins in this game.

I agree with all of this.

I'd agree most of that would translate well to PC except for two points:

1. Juice gain: This seems to have been hugely untrue for me in my journey to Lvl 40 - I've gained juice far more faster as an Assault and Support than an Assassin, and more often as a tank and gunner. Assassin's just don't seem to gain much juice without an endorsement because someone will find a way to eliminate you quite easily, either because they've launched a surprise attack at your half of the map (assault, assassin) or a gunner, tank or firebase turret takes you out in their half. Whenever this isn't the case, it seems I get taken out by juicing pros who are charging straight through, or I tried to counter an assassin's approach only for her to ******* juice for the second time in as many minutes halfway through a god damn otherwise fatal grapple. I should probably swap out my custom's skill endorsement for the juice equivalent.

EDIT: Re-read your post and saw you'd say just to stick to bots. Well yeah, perhaps, except for the one major problem: That's where the rest of my team ALWAYS is. Ejectors also hardly make a profit on most waves of bots, and other classes have an easier time wiping them out without barely a scratch (see: Tank's fire blossom). So unless you're farming right at the bot spawners on a certain map that enables you to, and the opposing team are sheepish and oblivious to a lack of bots and decides to leave you alone to gain juice, there's a problem.

2. Turret destruction: How do I shot turret? Smokebombs don't seem that great when gunners use the stop, look, listen approach to leaving the spawn room much like how they would cross the road, and even then turrets wake up when you're a third through it's health bar, and still kills you before you can get it past red.

I'd probably have a better time managing this if the cloak didn't keep burning out so damn easily over time. Because people are more aware with mouse movement I have to cloak earlier more often, leaving only 10 seconds at most to get behind them, evading fire and pros such as snipers and and deployed turrets and pros. And even then to be uncloaked is a deathwish due to turret range of rockets and the spawn being most often the furthest thing back, allowing a stage performance of your acrobatics as you ragdoll yet again from an unexpected respawn assault. :/

Assassins gain juice just as fast and kill turrets just as well in the pc version as they do in the 360 version. Anyone who is having trouble juicing as an assassin is dying too much and anyone who is having trouble killing turrets as an assassin doesn't have gold RoF.

Hudson makes a really good point about the assassin's ability to destroy turrets regardless of map control. You can have the other team completely locked down, and a wiley assassin can sneak past you, wipe out your base and cut off your turret flow. Regardless of how good a gunner is at blowing up turrets, there's no way that big bald Hawaiian is going to sneak past your front line to do so.

That reminds me, it does seem a bit fruitless implementing custom classes when we all know what we could do to twist the rules into a cringe-worthy painful eyesore, but when I went to check the XBLA strategies forum it was mostly a mess of random different threads on individual classes.

Instead, since the playbook misses out quite a bit of info, how about somebody starts up a thread in this forum listing each class, then identifying the options for endorsements with them.

I know there can be plenty of combinations, I'm not really asking for those (unless of course there's some undeniably godlike combination for each class), but just a general list of "things the assassin might be interested in: (for example) Juice, RoF, Armor, Speed", then something like (Reason: Enables good turret destruction) so it would be something like

Assassin
- ...
- RoF (Enables good turret destruction)
- ...

If a trait may not be a good choice, or is unknown whether it may be useful, or may require a specific combination to pull off that most probably won't know, just don't mention it or leave it at the bottom; keep the list shorter and less confusing.

Everyone needs to help kill creeps. If you see someone in your base, kill them.

Assassins should sneak into the enemy base and clear turrets and help your creeps progress to enemy base. If an enemy Pro stands in the way, kill them if possible.

The assassin has become my class of choice, and here are my thoughts on how to play it best. For class setup, I like Armor, Rate of Fire, and Health Regen. The armor prevents enemy 'sins from killing you with a face-grapple, the RoF helps you take out turrets and stationary players, and the regen is self-explanatory.

When a match starts, the first thing I do is kill bots for money and juice. You can gain juice after just a few groups of bots, and then storm the enemy base to drop turrets and/or players. Upgrading a skill to level 3 is generally already possible at this point, and all skills can be at level 2.

It's not really worth it to focus on PKing until you have level 3 Dash and level 3 Cloak. Cloak is necessary to get behind the enemy, and dash is necessary to get out after you drop one. I recommend always grappling with the S-launcher rather than the blade. In the event that you accidentally face-grapple, you can immediately cloak on landing and back away (to get out of grapple range) while simultaneously unloading with the S-launcher to finish them off. If you have the RoF sponsor and level 3 cloak, you spit out critical shurikens so fast; the damage output is insane.

I usually get dash to level 3 first. Mobility with the assassin is key. Anytime you take damage and it isn't from a weak bot, you should be getting the hell out of harms way. Run over to the other side of the map and drop some bots there. PKs should only be kills of opportunity, which will come frequently if you're staying mobile. Use cloak sparingly, and never forget to shut it off manually when you don't require it so that it can regenerate.

The best assassin is the one that never takes any damage, and if you can learn how to survive above all else, killing stuff is rather elementary.

I was going to comment but Hudson said it all.

/thread

This thread's been beat to death already, but I figured I'd mention that I think that everybody is at least partially right. The assassin should not be singularly focused on kills, but to just focus on lane pushing would be a waste of the assassin's killing potential. Moderation in both is key. Killing enemy pros should not be overlooked with regard to pushing a lane, but if all you do is cloak and run in for some kills all the time with tunnel vision, your lane will get pushed anyway. As assassin, my strategy is to exercise map control. This often involves a good amount of player killing because it makes it so they can't get a foothold on the map. However, it also includes A LOT of ejector usage (I love those things) and I always foot the bill for the annihilator. Shurikens are great (especially with lvl 3 cloak) but I honestly pick off other assassin's that just sit there shooting them all the time to push their lane that way. A gunner, tank, sniper, or assault should be the ones clearing the waves regularly (and I do this when I play these classes) rather than sitting the class with the best mobility down in one spot. Another part of the map control is building up juice and cloaking into their base to destroy their turrets or money ball which often can win the game for the team.

The worst part is that these assassins take the spots of someone who can play assassin.

I'm not saying i am this uber awesome super Ninja assassin and everyone should back off when i'm on the server. But atleast i don't play Deathmatch. I focus on the lanes, hitting the annihilator, taking out bots. protecting my team from assassins, grappling that jackbot that is coming for us. Then killing players comes as last priority. I had a fun fight yesterday where there was four assassins on the other team. And i decided to let tank a go. What happend was i got ganged by all of them at the same time. And still they didn't manage to take me. So what happend was that while they where busy fighting me, it was just a support and a assault on their team that contributed. And they couldn't hold their own against the other five of my team.

I'm still learning the ropes, but I did vastly better acting on the tips in here as an assassin than when I was just taking a break from Support.

Good advice everyone, thanks!

You use dash to get out? Cos I always try to use the smokebomb jump immediately so A) the guy who saw me for sure is temporarily blinded and B) anyone else looking in my direction won't see where I went when I then cloak in mid-air on the way up, Ghost In The Shell style. How does this compare? Because it seems everytime I go to do it I always narrowly manage to get out of a gunner's/tank's slam/fire blossom or their grapple. Only exception is when someone else is in position to grapple me.

Smoke bomb works too. It's really situational I suppose. Sometimes I want to save it so I can use it a few seconds later to get elsewhere on the map. Against tanks you can also use smoke bomb first, to blind the tank, which allows you to drop him with a few shurikens before finishing with a grapple. Even when you smoke bomb though, dash lets you move around so quickly after landing that you can usually shut off cloak to let it recharge once you're out of the thick of things and not worry about taking much damage, if any. Since dash recharges so quickly, it's better to drain that than to drain cloak.

It's -beta-. If they bother you so much, look for bugs and stuff while playing? Can't really expect people to be that good, really. The best are allegedly from 360 and they all seem to be fairly bad. Not that I mind or anything. I don't get worked up over public matches in a beta (lol).

Even if the OP was entirely correct, taking a horse to water and making it drink are two completely different things.

The delay before dropping one makes it completely useless as an escape after a non-fatal grapple in either direction (dealing out or being hit). Sins are so squishy that if ANYTHING has its gun pointed at you, you'll get shot up before that delay is over - at least, mashing the e key and spacebar results in my death 90% of the time when attempting escape under fire.

Absolutely, but it can be useful for escaping when you grapple and your target dies, but there are still enemies in the area. You can smoke bomb and jump up and over a wall or whatever else will break LoS. This assumes of course that the other enemies are not close enough to grapple you or gun you down before you jump up and away (but if this is the case, then I think one has to reassess how they're selecting targets).