PvP Knockdown Assassin

Those of you who play in HoH have probably run into your share of dual smite teams that run the w/e shock warrior and the r/w bunnythumper as their frontline fighters. The most devastating dual smite build I had fought was a W/A with assassin teleports so that they could immediately start dealing damage to the team and catch the team off guard at the same time. I examined some of the dual smite builds and found that the reason that some of them were failing was simply that people would just kite away from the damage. So I had an idea for a different front-line fighter. This build is to be used in conjunction with another KD assassin, Shock warrior, or a bunnythumper:

A/E

10 + 1 + 1 = 12 Dagger Mastery
7 + 1 = 8 Shadow Arts
9 + 1 = 10 Deadly Arts
9 + 1 = 10 Critical Strikes
Rest in Air Magic

Weapons: A pair of 15^50 Zealous daggers of defense or fortitude.

1.) Iron Palm
2.) Entangling Asp
3.) Horns of the Ox
4.) Shock
5.) Gale
6.) Dark Prison
7.) Shadow Refuge/Recall
8.) Res Signet

Basically you have your smiter cast Balth Aura on you, pick a target, and:

Dark Prison-->Iron Palm-->Entangling Asp-->HotO (optional)-->Shock--> Gale

It should not be a chain that you spam as fast as you can hit the buttons. Iron Palm is your initial knockdown; when your target is getting up --> Asp, then once they are standing again you can either use Horns of the Ox or skip directly to Shock. If your target does not have any adjacent allies, use HotO because it will knock them down and grant you a damage boost. As soon as they are up again, use Shock, then finish the combo with Gale for another knockdown. In between knockdowns you should be able to get in a hit or two with your daggers for an extra little bit of damage. This build should work wonders for taking down an sb/infuser, or any monk build for that matter. If you have 2 of these (maybe even 3 if you feel like running a very unusual smiting build) you should be able to completely immobilize any target. Of course, every build has its weakspot and this build's weakspot happens to be the not-often-used Ward of Stability.

This build does not have to be used in dual smite hoh builds and can be used in almost any pvp build in order to remove a target from play for a prolonged amount of time.

A modification that could be made is to remove Gale and instead run Assassin's Promise. I haven't tested AP yet, it's just a thought that you might be able to use it on a target before your team finishes them in order to replenish a chunk of your energy. If you find that you're taking too much damage, you can also substitute Gale for Recall.

Good Luck and Happy Assassinating.

BB

OOOO sounds like pain, good build bloodied maybe we might see some more use out of sins in things other than AB! Also thankyou for laying out the att distribution, also theose daggers are gonna be awful hard to acquire.

You could just use some Kenshi's Daggers or something. Thanks for the compliment on the build. I just decided to post it because I was getting annoyed that most of the sin builds used for pvp were just AoD builds that served almost no purpose, rarely did the assassin even have any good knockdown. If you're going to use an assassin to aid in dealing damage, you gotta get it right =)

The one thing that I forgot to mention was that you could feel free to drop Critical Strikes or Dagger Mastery by a point if Air wasn't 5+ (since Gale is 50% failure with air 4 or less).

I realize that the build kind of encourages the "tank" mentality, but my intention was that people would realize that your monk should have prot spirit and guardian on you for most of the time (your RC should have PS on you and if your AoE isn't spamming Guardian then what is he there for?).

I haven't had enough time to check recharges and how the combo synchronizes with itself (if Gale will finish off the combo or if it isn't needed depending on the skill of your smiter). You might even want to pack something like Expunge Enchantments as an opener (let's see...that would be 6 enchantments removed...I think you just nerfed his defenses royally).

Anyway, GL all.

If you wanted a KD build, couldn't you have done a E/X with Thunderclap and a shocking shortbow? It would knock them down once they got up.

Except that you wouldn't be able to survive any melee and that it wouldn't be an assassin. Yes, you could have an elementalist KD build, but it wouldn't work for delivering smites... It would just be a KD build. If you go E/A you generally put points into energy storage, so that means that you have less points to distribute over the needed assassin attributes.

To those looking at the hex I'm using (dark prison), it has a fairly short duration (at 15 Deadly Arts it's something like 9 seconds) but it also has the fastest recharge I could find of any assassin hex (10 seconds). To top it off, it rolls your hex and your teleport-to-foe into 1 skill.

BB I didn't adress the tank mentality because in this case the tank mentality is needed, also it came to mind that the end game ceremonials are choice daggers.

Also to public an even more effective KD would be to have three to four earth ele's coordinating dragon's stomp. Fire one!*the one's that got hit are about to get up* FIRE TWO! etc. etc.

Part of the damage of smite teams comes from warrior too. Iron palm asp and stuff is laughable damage. An assassin like that won't replace warriors in smite teams, its damage is too low. Also 2 exhaustion skills. Generally not a good build.

I had seen this build the other night, and was waiting to see if anyone mentioned Exhaustion. Glad to see Spura did. Doesn't appear that anyone else saw Shock and Gale in the same skillbar. Kind of disappointed nobody else caught that, honestly.

In a KD chain, that's going to be 15-20E gone, skimmed right from the top.

Better options? Mark of Instability, Falling Spider, and Twisting Fangs. You grab a KD, in addition to Deep Wound and Bleed, the Deep Wound greatly assisting in killing your target. Your chain would go something like the following:

Dark Prison-->MoI-->Iron Palm-->Entangling Asp-->Falling Spider-->Twisting Fangs

That's a quick and rough idea. Might be slightly energy-intensive, so you could swap out Asp. It shouldn't be too much of a problem swapping it out, as your target is already on the ground from Iron Palm, which enables Falling Spider, which being an off-hand, allows you to launch into Twisting Fangs, which triggers another KD from MoI.

And hell, if you were to replace...Asp with Assassin's Promise...you may very well be able to kill the target with such a chain.

OR...this idea just hit me.

Dark Prison-->MoI-->Iron Palm-->Mantis Touch-->Twisting Fangs-->Falling Spider-->Horns

Now that's a lot going on, obviously. You'd probably be able to get by without using Horns at the end, and could probably replace Horns with Assassin's Promise for skill recharges, because the target should be dead by that point. lol. But generally, the Elite slot is pretty open I suppose.

Another build which I use now is
Dark Prison > MOI > BLS > TF > FS > CS

The KD comes with both dual attacks, deep wound and bleeding from TF + Poison from FS = good degen on top of kd's.

If you looked at the end of my first post I said that you could substitute Gale for something else if you didn't find it to your liking. The build is easily altered to use Prison > MoI
Dark Prison > MoI > BLS > TF > FS > Iron Palm > Shock

@Claymore, how is Critical Strike doing a second knockdown? The only dual that does knockdown (without MoI) is Horns, and MoI wears off after the first dual attack.

I'll keep working on this thing.

EDIT: You can probably swap out Gale for Falling Spider and swap Shadow Refuge/Recall or your res sig for Twisting Fangs for something like this:

Dark Prison > Iron Palm > Entangling Asp > HotO > Shock > Falling Spider > Twisting Fangs

That's 4 knockdowns, poison, bleed, and deep wound along with your Balth Aura and the Zealot's Fire damage. If they aren't dead yet you can just recycle Iron Palm, Asp, and HotO to finish, which is another 3 knockdowns.

Anyone else notice the 60 second recharge on Dark Prison?

That means once you do your initial KD with Iron Palm you have to wait until your only hex recharges before you can KD with Iron Palm again. Still though, that shadow step and slow down is a great combo, but a one minute recharge bottlenekcs the efficiency of this build.

My solution: uhhh... don't really have a good one that packs as much punch/surprise as Dark Prison. I'd say just use MoI.

And maybe this website doesn't have the updated skill descriptions, but does Entangling Asp count as an offhand attack? Hard to go from Iron Palm (lead attack) to Horns of the Ox (dual attack) without that offhand attack inbetween.

This build does bring up some more ideas though, thanks.

DP isn't 60 second recharge last I checked. It's like 10. Entangling Asp is an offhand, that's why Palm > Asp > Horns/any dual attack works.

Quote: Originally Posted by Bloodied Blade

Quote: Originally Posted by Claymore

Quote: Originally Posted by Bloodied Blade Entangling Asp is an offhand, that's why Palm > Asp > Horns/any dual attack works. Try it. I guarantee Horns or Twisting Fangs won't connect.

Quote: Originally Posted by Claymore MOI is a hex, lasting, for me 22 seconds, so however many dual attacks you can get in, in 22 seconds will have a KD. So Twisting fangs is the first KD and Critical strike is the second dual for the second KD. Note an important clause in MoI's description: "the next time" you hit with a Dual Attack.

Quote:

Thanks for the advice there Siren. I had apparently misread the description on Entangling Asp (it says it has to follow a lead attack so I assumed it was a dual attack). So are we good with:

Dark Prison > MoI > BLS > TF > FS > Iron Palm > Entangling Asp as the combo?

Or maybe:

Prison > MoI > BLS > TF > FS > Horns > Iron Palm ?

It doesn't re-apply the poison, but it saves 5e and gives you a second dual attack to play with in the event that MoI is disabled so that you can change up quickly to Prison > BLS > Horns > FS > Iron Palm if needed.

Well I do stand corrected, still curious as to why when my critical strike hits the enemy gets kded.

Are you using any enchantments? There might be one that has ...when you deal a crit, foe is KD'ed... I mean, we have like 3 or 4 that do stuff like that.

Other than my attacks, only using critical eye, and a shadow step skill, and res sig. I have no other explaination, been using this build for a couple weeks now.