Originally Posted by LaserLight

Alright...gone for a few days and this thread went to hell. Well, slid further down, anyways. As both an avid Assassin player and someone who enjoys tactical, thought-out gameplay, let me see if I can fairly sum up the problems here.

Pro-Warrior:
Warrior skills, especially the mentioned Shock Axe, perform at full effectiveness regardless of the other skills on the Warrior's bar. This allows the Warrior to use small portions of its build in different ways, letting it switch tactics on the fly to adjust to changing battle conditions. This is good, given that battle conditions can change drastically and with lightning speed in any given fight. The Warrior's natural AL provides it an excellent defense and allows it to venture further into enemy lines and do more jobs than most any Assassin can. It's a versatile, well-balanced class in which any competently designed build therein can change up jobs regularly.

Pro-Assassin:
Let's face it. Assassins hit harder than any Warrior ever created. Warrior spikes, in the terms of a killing spike delivered by Warriors alone, typically refers to a dual Warrior spike, whereas an Assassin that cannot kill its target solo is typically considered inefficient and largely pointless, if it's designed as a killing Assassin. Despite the multitudes of Assassin-bashing in this thread, an Assassin can also spec itself for disruption or pressure roles by switching out which attack sequence it uses. However, the nature of an Assassin's attack sequence essentially transforms the three, four, sometimes five skills devoted to it into a single massive skill which requires a precise ordering to work. if it does, fantastic, but if it breaks, than your huge skill is effectively interrupted. And because it eats so much of your bar, it's hard for Assassins to take a secondary offense or other utility.

An Assassin can design a skill combo that can do a lot of things, but what Moretz is getting at is that the Assassin can't break its combo down into the component skills and use them selectively as can a Warrior. Most of us consider an Assassin with a properly designed skill stream a versatile and effective fighter, but some of us, obviously, do not. And I can see their points. As much as I hate to admit it, an Assassin is not as versatile as a Warrior. Do I agree that the Assassin, as a class, requires no real skill to use and has no utility in anything but casual game formats? Of course not. I am still of the opinion that anyone who automatically says "Screw the sin, it can't do squat, let's take a Shock Axe" is cutting off a limb from his battle plan. However, the Assassin in GvG play should be taken as a support choice rather than a frontline fighter or other primary character. In that role, I believe the class could shine.

And before I get yelled at, I did some Observer-moding today to check just this point, and was very disappointed by what I saw. Not only where virtually all the teams I observed using the same general build - two Shock Axes, two/three Monks, E/Mo runner and some sort of mesmer/second El - they were all playing in the same dang Hall for Chrissakes. No real tactical variance whatsoever, the only Guilds I saw running anything different were low-ranked Guilds who didn't have the skill to figure out how to use what they had against the top 100 guys. This depresses me greatly.

Especially since Deadly Arts has some of the single most intensely damaging skills I've ever seen. Impale alone, at 16 Deadly Arts, deals over 100 damage and inflicts a Deep Wound, in a quarter of a second. Even Eviscerate has to work to get that sort of hit in, and no Eviscerate or Wearying Strike launched can hit in a quarter of a second. There are three Signets in the Deadly Arts line that can deal 90+ damage at 16 spec. Vampiric Assault, at 16, deals over 80 damage in life-steal damage. All of it may be conditional, combo-related damage, but Deadly Arts has more single-target firepower than most any other single skill line in existence. Iron Palm deals more damage than Shock and has an easily-achieved knockdown as well. Or, go the easy route and use a Black off-hand to launch straight into Vampiric Assault, then onto your real damage. It may not be a spike in the strictest sense of the term, but it's just as much damage as a Shadow Prison without having to get into nothing but weapon attack lines. Even Shadow Arts has its powerful skills, with Beguiling Haze chief among them.

personally, I find it kinda miserable that top-level GvG is relying entirely on builds over a year old, without any innovation or new things. Not even neglecting the Assassin, but basically just Holy Trinity builds - Warriors, Monks, various types of Elementalists. In top competition on down stagnation is starting to seriously suck. Can't we put aside the "Assassins suck! No, Warriors suck!" talk and just get back to the Guild Wars where people do new and different things every day?

I've typed too long, while too tired, and am not even sure what I wrote anymore. I'm going to shut up now and let people hurt me while I go drink some caffeine and monkey with my Deadly Arts builds...

Before ye get too vicious though, remember! I've got Ancient Armor. I can kill you just by shaking your hand