Oh god here we go with another 10 years of these threads again. You're leaving out a bunch of context (as these threads usually do), making this a dubious comparison.
>At 20th level that means they get +20 damage to one enemy that round. Assuming a +3 rapier with current rules, that's 62.5 damage
It should be 35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) = 67.5 damage.
But you are leaving out a ton of stuff. Assassin also has Death Strike at that level, giving them a chance to double damage. Against a CR 20 creature, that's a 30% chance of double damage. They also get Envenom Weapon for an extra d6 of damage. This is still also ignoring stuff like the 9.75% chance to crit, doubling all the weapon and Sneak Attack dice.
If you account for all of this, it's 35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) + 3.5 (Envenom) + 4.19 (9.75% of dice damage) + 22.56 (30% chance of double damage) = 97.75 damage per hit.
Assassin can also potentially set up off-turn Sneak Attack on round 1 to double that for 195.5 damage if both attacks hit.
>My problem is that Wizards can use a 9th level slot
Yes, a Wizard is doing this once per long rest though. You're comparing a once per long rest max resource dump against something that will happen every fight for the Assassin.
For an actual fair comparison, you would need to average out the amount of damage both classes do over the course of a full adventuring day to account for a Wizard's resource attrition.
>Both of these abilities (Assasinate and 9th level spells) are usable once per fight, and assuming the average of 1-3 fights per long rest according to this poll, you might get one or two fights without it if you're a spell caster.
People explicitly running the game in a way it wasn't meant to be should have no bearing on balance discussion. 3 Deadly fights per long rest is the minimum you can run and still constitute a full adventuring day. Plus, buffing Assassin doesn't fix the core issue of DMs completely obliterating rest balance out of incompetence/convenience. You would have to redesign the entire encounter system to make running 1 encounter per long rest a valid way to play the game (as running a single 3x deadly encounter can even cook optimized parties).
>However, you're still a full spell caster and could have broken the game six levels ago with spells like Simulacrum
We don't even know if problem spells are still problems anymore.
So it's nowhere near as bad as you are making it out to be. And yes, we should wait until we can see the changes that have been made to other classes and spells first.
Finesse weapons let you choose whether you use Str or Dex so an 8 Str, 20 Dex Rogue can choose to take the -1 instead of the +5 for their to hit.
If they didn't get scimitar proficiency yet, they can even use those to also remove the proficiency bonus from their to hit and attack with a raw -1 to hit.
Oooh. So, to crit with Stroke of Luck you have to miss with both d20 rolls (rolling with advantage of course). For this Rogue to miss against a CR 20 enemy (19 AC) they need to roll a 1-4. There are 16 (4 x 4) combinations of d20 rolls that will allow the Rogue to manufacture a crit. There are 39 combinations of d20 rolls that give a natural crit (1x19 + 19x1 + 1x1). Together, that gives a total of 55 d20 combinations. 55/400 means a 13.75% chance to crit.
This gives us:
35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) + 3.5 (Envenom) + 5.9125 (13.75% of dice damage) + 23.07 (30% chance of double damage) = 99.98 damage per hit.
And 197.73 damage if you set up off-turn Sneak Attack.
Also, I calculated the net extra die from Envenom Weapon as being doubled on a crit. I'm not sure if it's gated behind a saving throw (like the giant poisonous snake) or just a part of the attack's damage (like the Master Thief from Monsters of the Multiverse). That would ever so slightly alter the damage.
You and a bunch of others are totally right. I took my bad take down. I appreciate you calling me out like this. There's too much negativity in this space and I regret adding to it. Here's hoping to re-balanced spells that let the martials have a more fair share of the spotlight in this edition.
I don't think it's fair to compare Assassinate with the Wish-Simulacrum combo when (a) that combo can deal arbitrarily large amounts of damage and (b) it is usually house ruled out if anyone actually tries it.
If you're looking at 20th level, you might wanna consider the 17th level ability that doubles the damage on a failed con save. That's pretty lethal.
Another thing that could even the odds is if the crafting rules allow to more easily gain access to strong poisons. Since Assassin gets automatic Poisoner's Kit proficiency, it would be able to craft these pretty reliably, and prepare ahead of time to allow them for deadly assassinations.
I really feel like the 4 encounter adventuring day should be the default metric. People who are running so few encounters per day honestly need to run Gritty Realism rules, and it's not the designers' fault that people literally ignore their advice for balancing the game.
I don't understand your math either; 62.5 damage with one attack? How are you dealing 42.5 damage with one rapier shot considering you aren't factoring in sneak attack? To that point, why aren't you factoring in sneak attack? It's the largest source of damage the Rogue gets, and I feel like ignoring it is somewhat disingenuous.
I would even say 6-8 encounters. Tho yeah, social encounters, exploration are also encounters. So it goes down to probably maybe 4 combat encounters a day. Would be nice if DM manage to make players use resources on non-combat encounters as well (using fly spell to fly over a cliff, tracking with find object etc.)
Not the original poster, but most of the traps in Tomb of Horrors, as an example.
As one example, there is a stone juggernaut in one small room that as soon as you enter the chamber, it activates and you have to make a high dex save or immediately die, crushed to death by it regardless of health, death ward, relentless endurance, etc.
Deadly non combats exist, and they're usually traps or environmental hazards; players just tend to not enjoy them because dying to inclement weather sucks lol.
This really feels like an issue with the martial caster divide rather than an issue with assassin rogue specifically. Like sure, the wizard is stronger, but that’s not an assassin thing, that’s every martial subclass.
While I don’t disagree that assassin rogues aren’t as strong as wizards,
1. A damage bonus is a damage bonus, man. I’d much rather have a “+ rogue level” to damage regularly than “auto-crit” basically never. Also, now that Sharpshooter no longer gives the -5/+10, added damage bonuses are much less common for rogues and (ideally) more valuable as a result.
2. As flawed and commonly repeated as this point is, it is still worth noting that assassinate isn’t burning resources. That doesn’t make it good by any means, just worth mentioning.
3. By this same logic used in this post, literally every non-caster in the game is in a bad place. I can’t think of a single example of a spell-free character that can keep up with a wizard in damage, or in anything really, especially at high levels.
Edit: Great Weapon Master still gives a damage bonus, and is not all that relevant to Rogue, so I removed it from the comment.
True, though +PB once per round of whatnot is a mitigation of the damage output of extra attack classes which does help the comparison here. That level 20 GWM fighter is now dealing an extra 6 damage per round if their attacks hit, instead of +40
To add on to point 3, I’m confident in saying there isn’t a single character “role” in the game that can’t be filled better by a full-caster than by a non-caster.
Tank? Heavy armor Cleric with a feat or two, or Moon Druid. Ranged damage? Wiz/Sorc/Warlock all can do that rather well in different ways. Melee damage? Swords Bard, Moon Druid, Bladesinger, Hexblade, and so on.
And all of that isn’t even touching on the things that basically ONLY spellcasters can do, like large AoE damage, strong battlefield control (looking at you, Hypnotic Pattern), healing/buffing, and all of the absurd utility so many spells offer.
A lot of this is getting addressed. Moon Druid is not gonna get as much hp or damage as it used to, and new stuff like Indomitable or the new Barb level 11 feature make these classes a lot tougher than a cleric who just has heavy armor.
So a level 3 feature scaling (where you also got one other featuere) is worse than an a level 5 one actively upcast to level 17. Sounds right.
Also, your mathbis wrong. Even if everyone does daily combat balance wrong and only plays about half as many combats as they should, Assassinate and 9th level spells are different.
A 9th level spell is once per DAY, not combat.
Assassinate actually is once per combat, but technically once per combat per creature. So with the free TWF attack from mastery, you can use it twice. EDIT: My bad, still needs Sneak Attack.
So only at the most broken of balances, you get the same uses. Rather 3 to 6 times if you have a long day.
Lastly, you don't compare base features to capstones. The Assassin equivalent would be the doubling of damage, so technically it still comes down to be dealing 65 damage ... but on top of the normal 65.
It is not per creature, because it only works i you use sneak attack which is once per turn. However if you get of turn attacks like attack of opportunity similar you can get extra hits in. Also at 20th lvl a rogue can turn a miss into a crit once per rest which is a nice bonus as well.
I will put it simply and say, you can’t compare at-will damage with once per AD effects (9th level spells). Game is not structured like that.
“Most people play 1-3 encounter per AD” right, and most tables don’t care at all about balance or the more gamey/tactical aspect of the hobby. Thoae who do knows how AD works and use the adequate budgets. An assassin should be using assassinate 4-5 times a day, not once.
If you really want to campare, please addnin everything assassin got and stroke of luck auto-crit. The assassin will be doing like 200 damage whoch is twice the damage of power word kill.
Rogue Level + PB Bonus should be better. It is good at lvl 20 but at low tier it isnt doing much. Or maybe some extra Sneak Attack Dices equal to PB when using Assassinate.
This analysis is being copy pasted about and it sucks.
1. I'd say doubling this damage would work, but it wouldn't. It would just end early game fights really quickly. That's no good.
2. Reliable damage every fight is better than a very rare crit.
3. This undersells where they also described the envonom weapon feature. Barely remember it and I'm not double checking, but I know they can add poison every round. If you want to talk about level 20, you best have a barrel full of purple worm poison. There's also poisons that can cause paralysis.
Look, we can't assess it until it's out because they were a little vague and wording matters. But I know from the last UA I have disagreements. Advantage on initiative? Is prefer adding proficiency bonus so that initiative qualifies for reliable talent. I also think keeping the old subclass progression is insane when some other classes have some levels shifted. What's worse is waiting until level 9 to get anything other than assassinate, and it's the ability to pass off a Robbie rotten disguise a bit better. Add a feature here where once per long rest you can maximise all your damage dice rolls (give the option to do so before or after rolling) and the class gets a nuclear option that only explodes harder with death strike. Call it perfect strike.
What I've just described is two instances where abilities gain synergy with later abilities to be better than the sum of their parts. I'd hope to see this everywhere but especially on martials who need the boost.
You over estimate envenom weapons. According to ua (and considering the rest is almost the same i doubt that will be different) its just 2d6 poison damage when they fail the cunning strikes saving throw. Its nice assuming we don't have almost every creature in the game immune to poison. Unfortunately many are immune to poison and also have high con which means they will also pass the save often.
The majority of creatures are absolutely not immune to poison. There are more than other damage types, and depending on if you’re playing a Fiend heavy campaign you might want a different subclass, but it is incredibly incorrect to say that the majority of creatures are immune
I have rechecked. You are about it being lower as it is 30% of monsters are immune to poison but at higher levels it seems to be more poison immune creatures (can't find exact number but I've personally found on dnd beyond more poison immune creatures at cr 13+ than not though it is closer to 50% than i thought)
I don't think looking that 20th level and comparing with e wizard is all that representative.
Better comparison would be to look at levels that are more likely to see play (so Tier 1, Tier 2 and low Tier 3) and to compare with an Fighter using Action Surge.
And you will likely see that the Burst damage of the assassin, is barely above the sustained damage of the fighter and completely overshadowed by action surge.
And outside of combat the fighter offers literally nothing while the rogue has expertise and the assassin in particular gets a very strong infiltration ability.
Fighters can use Battlemaster maneuvers and Second Wind to buff skill use and can get like that make much higher roles than Rogues can at low levels.
And if the Assassin is supposed to be a burst damage class it should at least do good burst damage even if the sustained damage is low.
If the Fighter wants to consistently use all of their uses of Second Wind outside of combat, they are more than welcome to. Why on earth would they ever want bonus action healing that also allows them to move half their speed? Sure that’s always worth giving up in exchange for adding 5.5 to a skill check, right?
You can use it on important checks and it is only used up when you actually need it to succeed (not when you still fail or succeed without it), and you can get it back on a short rest.
So if you are in session without time pressure or in one that is roleplay heavy without combat why not use it on a skill check?
There are also some things out side combat where Fighters will usually be better than Rogues like climbing an jumping.
Rogues don't have unlimited expertise or less dump stats than other classes.
How often do you desperately need to succeed on a skill check? More than once or twice per short rest? You're probably proficient in whatever skill you're really trying to use anyways, and likely to succeed or have someone else in the party succeed on the same check due to the low DC's prevalent in 5e.
I think the assassin is less of an assassin now and more of a samurai movie hero. Assassinate feels less like a devastating ambush and more like that swordsman starting a straight up fight with a lightning fast strike.
Their version of steady aim also contributes to this move towards straight up fights rather than ambushing
I have to feel a bit like assassin was changed to make it more applicable to all situations and less of...an assassin.
The old assassin could work his way up through an organization with a good disguise and ability to unerringly mimic other people's speech, writing, and even behavior. Get to someone important, like a general, who believes he is someone else, palm a knife, and then get an auto crit and possibly double damage (at a high enough level) on them.
Assassin was the RP'ers rogue, the rogue that wanted to get creative in fun and interesting ways. False identities and infiltration that leaves one body instead of a dozen. That's not a fit for every table, but...so what. It doesn't have to be.
The new assassin lost a lot of that power and gained more power in general combat. It doesn't feel nearly as worth it to set up a mark to spend a week or more getting close to, specializing in that one kill. Not it's better on the battlefield. Now the assassin is good at being accurate while being mobile. It can do more damage no matter if it can palm that dagger and strike them in the back or if that general sees it coming and draws his sword.
And maybe that's "better" because it's stronger and more situations, but it feels like a deep loss.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think that's a larger issue than just one ability. And honestly, I think it will take a lot less Homebrewing to bridge that gap with these new versions than ever before. I wish they'd gone harder specifically on Assassin, as the main "please let me do big damage" Rogue, but it should actually be reasonably viable with Envenom Weapons there to pull up their average damage.
I mean... It won't compare to Arcane Trickster or Thief's magical shenanigans, but it should be decent.
Rouges do not need more damage, they should be the class that hits the most often. Buff their accuracy to just 90% of the time or more and they are much better.
If basically the main subclass feature you get at level 3 is burst damage feature, and you don't get another feature till level 9, that feature should actually let you do good damage. And it currently get gets you barely above the sustained damage of other martials.
And having 90% accuracy doesn't help much if your base damage is so low, that you are at 90% still dealing less damage than other classes at 65%.
It's not terribly meaningful to imagine how things might be happening at lv20.
I think Assassin is.... okay now. Advantage to initiative goes well with Steady Aim being a core feature now, so there isn't a situation where you go first and just feel bad because there's no ally next to the target to enable sneak attack.
If you go before people, it's like getting an extra turn! But... it IS ridiculous how they nerfed the whole assassinate ability, and then you see people parroting 'they do extra damage!', because +5 is apparently an amazing one-time bonus.
The first time per combat that you are able to hit a target with Sneak attack the Sneak attack Die increases from D6 to D8. And the number of sneaks attack die increases by 1 per level in assassin.
To me assassin is trying to take out a Single target and my suggestion feels more assasiny to me.
It's so sad seeing them try to fix the Assassin subclass out of D- tier only for them to fuck up in the wrong direction anyways. All they had to do was add some *consistency* to the subclass and move it away from a turn 1 ~~blunder~~ wonder. "But they did make it more consistent!".. by gimping its damage completely and locking half the features behind easy saves that do nothing on a succesful one.
An easy example of a fix can be seen [here](https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/S1-s_eAGS), by just adding some extra lines that help the Assassin consistently provide damage in combat without removing too much.
Oh god here we go with another 10 years of these threads again. You're leaving out a bunch of context (as these threads usually do), making this a dubious comparison. >At 20th level that means they get +20 damage to one enemy that round. Assuming a +3 rapier with current rules, that's 62.5 damage It should be 35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) = 67.5 damage. But you are leaving out a ton of stuff. Assassin also has Death Strike at that level, giving them a chance to double damage. Against a CR 20 creature, that's a 30% chance of double damage. They also get Envenom Weapon for an extra d6 of damage. This is still also ignoring stuff like the 9.75% chance to crit, doubling all the weapon and Sneak Attack dice. If you account for all of this, it's 35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) + 3.5 (Envenom) + 4.19 (9.75% of dice damage) + 22.56 (30% chance of double damage) = 97.75 damage per hit. Assassin can also potentially set up off-turn Sneak Attack on round 1 to double that for 195.5 damage if both attacks hit. >My problem is that Wizards can use a 9th level slot Yes, a Wizard is doing this once per long rest though. You're comparing a once per long rest max resource dump against something that will happen every fight for the Assassin. For an actual fair comparison, you would need to average out the amount of damage both classes do over the course of a full adventuring day to account for a Wizard's resource attrition. >Both of these abilities (Assasinate and 9th level spells) are usable once per fight, and assuming the average of 1-3 fights per long rest according to this poll, you might get one or two fights without it if you're a spell caster. People explicitly running the game in a way it wasn't meant to be should have no bearing on balance discussion. 3 Deadly fights per long rest is the minimum you can run and still constitute a full adventuring day. Plus, buffing Assassin doesn't fix the core issue of DMs completely obliterating rest balance out of incompetence/convenience. You would have to redesign the entire encounter system to make running 1 encounter per long rest a valid way to play the game (as running a single 3x deadly encounter can even cook optimized parties). >However, you're still a full spell caster and could have broken the game six levels ago with spells like Simulacrum We don't even know if problem spells are still problems anymore. So it's nowhere near as bad as you are making it out to be. And yes, we should wait until we can see the changes that have been made to other classes and spells first.
Did you include that if they miss they can make it a crit anyways
There is going to be some real backwards shenanigans to have such a low hit chance to force a miss and then turn it into an auto-crit. Amazing design
Low dex?
Finesse weapons let you choose whether you use Str or Dex so an 8 Str, 20 Dex Rogue can choose to take the -1 instead of the +5 for their to hit. If they didn't get scimitar proficiency yet, they can even use those to also remove the proficiency bonus from their to hit and attack with a raw -1 to hit.
Oh boy. Day 1 errata for sure.
No. What feature is that?
Stroke of Luck
Oooh. So, to crit with Stroke of Luck you have to miss with both d20 rolls (rolling with advantage of course). For this Rogue to miss against a CR 20 enemy (19 AC) they need to roll a 1-4. There are 16 (4 x 4) combinations of d20 rolls that will allow the Rogue to manufacture a crit. There are 39 combinations of d20 rolls that give a natural crit (1x19 + 19x1 + 1x1). Together, that gives a total of 55 d20 combinations. 55/400 means a 13.75% chance to crit. This gives us: 35 (10d6 sneak) + 5 (Dex) + 3 (magic) + 20 (Assassinate) + 4.5 (Rapier) + 3.5 (Envenom) + 5.9125 (13.75% of dice damage) + 23.07 (30% chance of double damage) = 99.98 damage per hit. And 197.73 damage if you set up off-turn Sneak Attack. Also, I calculated the net extra die from Envenom Weapon as being doubled on a crit. I'm not sure if it's gated behind a saving throw (like the giant poisonous snake) or just a part of the attack's damage (like the Master Thief from Monsters of the Multiverse). That would ever so slightly alter the damage.
Ya but they cant cast mordenkainens sword! /s
You and a bunch of others are totally right. I took my bad take down. I appreciate you calling me out like this. There's too much negativity in this space and I regret adding to it. Here's hoping to re-balanced spells that let the martials have a more fair share of the spotlight in this edition.
I don't think it's fair to compare Assassinate with the Wish-Simulacrum combo when (a) that combo can deal arbitrarily large amounts of damage and (b) it is usually house ruled out if anyone actually tries it.
C) there's a nonzero chance of that combo going away with 2024. Maybe not, but maybe given that they were trying to fix other problematic spells
If you're looking at 20th level, you might wanna consider the 17th level ability that doubles the damage on a failed con save. That's pretty lethal. Another thing that could even the odds is if the crafting rules allow to more easily gain access to strong poisons. Since Assassin gets automatic Poisoner's Kit proficiency, it would be able to craft these pretty reliably, and prepare ahead of time to allow them for deadly assassinations.
A 17th level assassin could one shot most the majority of the humanoid statblocks in the monster manual if it got the drop on them
I really feel like the 4 encounter adventuring day should be the default metric. People who are running so few encounters per day honestly need to run Gritty Realism rules, and it's not the designers' fault that people literally ignore their advice for balancing the game. I don't understand your math either; 62.5 damage with one attack? How are you dealing 42.5 damage with one rapier shot considering you aren't factoring in sneak attack? To that point, why aren't you factoring in sneak attack? It's the largest source of damage the Rogue gets, and I feel like ignoring it is somewhat disingenuous.
I would even say 6-8 encounters. Tho yeah, social encounters, exploration are also encounters. So it goes down to probably maybe 4 combat encounters a day. Would be nice if DM manage to make players use resources on non-combat encounters as well (using fly spell to fly over a cliff, tracking with find object etc.)
Four encounters is two or three fights. Not all encounters are lethal.
Not all all encounters that aren't combat are non-lethal (and not all combat encounters are lethal).
With a 4 encounter day they all have to be deadly tier. Please explain to me what a deadly non-combat encounter looks like.
Not the original poster, but most of the traps in Tomb of Horrors, as an example. As one example, there is a stone juggernaut in one small room that as soon as you enter the chamber, it activates and you have to make a high dex save or immediately die, crushed to death by it regardless of health, death ward, relentless endurance, etc. Deadly non combats exist, and they're usually traps or environmental hazards; players just tend to not enjoy them because dying to inclement weather sucks lol.
This really feels like an issue with the martial caster divide rather than an issue with assassin rogue specifically. Like sure, the wizard is stronger, but that’s not an assassin thing, that’s every martial subclass.
While I don’t disagree that assassin rogues aren’t as strong as wizards, 1. A damage bonus is a damage bonus, man. I’d much rather have a “+ rogue level” to damage regularly than “auto-crit” basically never. Also, now that Sharpshooter no longer gives the -5/+10, added damage bonuses are much less common for rogues and (ideally) more valuable as a result. 2. As flawed and commonly repeated as this point is, it is still worth noting that assassinate isn’t burning resources. That doesn’t make it good by any means, just worth mentioning. 3. By this same logic used in this post, literally every non-caster in the game is in a bad place. I can’t think of a single example of a spell-free character that can keep up with a wizard in damage, or in anything really, especially at high levels. Edit: Great Weapon Master still gives a damage bonus, and is not all that relevant to Rogue, so I removed it from the comment.
GWM still does extra damage every round.
Does it? I thought that got changed in the UA. Any chance you could link me to a source for this?
Here: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/H8iRpbGyNtM4 page 104
Thanks!
True, though +PB once per round of whatnot is a mitigation of the damage output of extra attack classes which does help the comparison here. That level 20 GWM fighter is now dealing an extra 6 damage per round if their attacks hit, instead of +40
To add on to point 3, I’m confident in saying there isn’t a single character “role” in the game that can’t be filled better by a full-caster than by a non-caster. Tank? Heavy armor Cleric with a feat or two, or Moon Druid. Ranged damage? Wiz/Sorc/Warlock all can do that rather well in different ways. Melee damage? Swords Bard, Moon Druid, Bladesinger, Hexblade, and so on. And all of that isn’t even touching on the things that basically ONLY spellcasters can do, like large AoE damage, strong battlefield control (looking at you, Hypnotic Pattern), healing/buffing, and all of the absurd utility so many spells offer.
A lot of this is getting addressed. Moon Druid is not gonna get as much hp or damage as it used to, and new stuff like Indomitable or the new Barb level 11 feature make these classes a lot tougher than a cleric who just has heavy armor.
Honestly the World Tree Barbarian is probably the strongest tank in the game.
So a level 3 feature scaling (where you also got one other featuere) is worse than an a level 5 one actively upcast to level 17. Sounds right. Also, your mathbis wrong. Even if everyone does daily combat balance wrong and only plays about half as many combats as they should, Assassinate and 9th level spells are different. A 9th level spell is once per DAY, not combat. Assassinate actually is once per combat, but technically once per combat per creature. So with the free TWF attack from mastery, you can use it twice. EDIT: My bad, still needs Sneak Attack. So only at the most broken of balances, you get the same uses. Rather 3 to 6 times if you have a long day. Lastly, you don't compare base features to capstones. The Assassin equivalent would be the doubling of damage, so technically it still comes down to be dealing 65 damage ... but on top of the normal 65.
It is not per creature, because it only works i you use sneak attack which is once per turn. However if you get of turn attacks like attack of opportunity similar you can get extra hits in. Also at 20th lvl a rogue can turn a miss into a crit once per rest which is a nice bonus as well.
If you're taking 20th level, they also get to double that damage. If they get a critical, even better.
I will put it simply and say, you can’t compare at-will damage with once per AD effects (9th level spells). Game is not structured like that. “Most people play 1-3 encounter per AD” right, and most tables don’t care at all about balance or the more gamey/tactical aspect of the hobby. Thoae who do knows how AD works and use the adequate budgets. An assassin should be using assassinate 4-5 times a day, not once. If you really want to campare, please addnin everything assassin got and stroke of luck auto-crit. The assassin will be doing like 200 damage whoch is twice the damage of power word kill.
Rogue Level + PB Bonus should be better. It is good at lvl 20 but at low tier it isnt doing much. Or maybe some extra Sneak Attack Dices equal to PB when using Assassinate.
This analysis is being copy pasted about and it sucks. 1. I'd say doubling this damage would work, but it wouldn't. It would just end early game fights really quickly. That's no good. 2. Reliable damage every fight is better than a very rare crit. 3. This undersells where they also described the envonom weapon feature. Barely remember it and I'm not double checking, but I know they can add poison every round. If you want to talk about level 20, you best have a barrel full of purple worm poison. There's also poisons that can cause paralysis. Look, we can't assess it until it's out because they were a little vague and wording matters. But I know from the last UA I have disagreements. Advantage on initiative? Is prefer adding proficiency bonus so that initiative qualifies for reliable talent. I also think keeping the old subclass progression is insane when some other classes have some levels shifted. What's worse is waiting until level 9 to get anything other than assassinate, and it's the ability to pass off a Robbie rotten disguise a bit better. Add a feature here where once per long rest you can maximise all your damage dice rolls (give the option to do so before or after rolling) and the class gets a nuclear option that only explodes harder with death strike. Call it perfect strike. What I've just described is two instances where abilities gain synergy with later abilities to be better than the sum of their parts. I'd hope to see this everywhere but especially on martials who need the boost.
You over estimate envenom weapons. According to ua (and considering the rest is almost the same i doubt that will be different) its just 2d6 poison damage when they fail the cunning strikes saving throw. Its nice assuming we don't have almost every creature in the game immune to poison. Unfortunately many are immune to poison and also have high con which means they will also pass the save often.
To be fair, it’s 2d6 poison damage **and** the poisoned condition
Its really strong if they aren't immune. Problem is many are immune.
Then don’t use that feature on a creature that’s immune?
What im saying is that due to the fact that majority of creatures are immune it's actually not that good.
The majority of creatures are absolutely not immune to poison. There are more than other damage types, and depending on if you’re playing a Fiend heavy campaign you might want a different subclass, but it is incredibly incorrect to say that the majority of creatures are immune
I have rechecked. You are about it being lower as it is 30% of monsters are immune to poison but at higher levels it seems to be more poison immune creatures (can't find exact number but I've personally found on dnd beyond more poison immune creatures at cr 13+ than not though it is closer to 50% than i thought)
Oh no a level 20 feature is better than a level 3 feature. Who would have foreseen this.
I don't think looking that 20th level and comparing with e wizard is all that representative. Better comparison would be to look at levels that are more likely to see play (so Tier 1, Tier 2 and low Tier 3) and to compare with an Fighter using Action Surge. And you will likely see that the Burst damage of the assassin, is barely above the sustained damage of the fighter and completely overshadowed by action surge.
And outside of combat the fighter offers literally nothing while the rogue has expertise and the assassin in particular gets a very strong infiltration ability.
Fighters can use Battlemaster maneuvers and Second Wind to buff skill use and can get like that make much higher roles than Rogues can at low levels. And if the Assassin is supposed to be a burst damage class it should at least do good burst damage even if the sustained damage is low.
If the Fighter wants to consistently use all of their uses of Second Wind outside of combat, they are more than welcome to. Why on earth would they ever want bonus action healing that also allows them to move half their speed? Sure that’s always worth giving up in exchange for adding 5.5 to a skill check, right?
You can use it on important checks and it is only used up when you actually need it to succeed (not when you still fail or succeed without it), and you can get it back on a short rest. So if you are in session without time pressure or in one that is roleplay heavy without combat why not use it on a skill check? There are also some things out side combat where Fighters will usually be better than Rogues like climbing an jumping. Rogues don't have unlimited expertise or less dump stats than other classes.
How often do you desperately need to succeed on a skill check? More than once or twice per short rest? You're probably proficient in whatever skill you're really trying to use anyways, and likely to succeed or have someone else in the party succeed on the same check due to the low DC's prevalent in 5e.
I think the assassin is less of an assassin now and more of a samurai movie hero. Assassinate feels less like a devastating ambush and more like that swordsman starting a straight up fight with a lightning fast strike. Their version of steady aim also contributes to this move towards straight up fights rather than ambushing
I have to feel a bit like assassin was changed to make it more applicable to all situations and less of...an assassin. The old assassin could work his way up through an organization with a good disguise and ability to unerringly mimic other people's speech, writing, and even behavior. Get to someone important, like a general, who believes he is someone else, palm a knife, and then get an auto crit and possibly double damage (at a high enough level) on them. Assassin was the RP'ers rogue, the rogue that wanted to get creative in fun and interesting ways. False identities and infiltration that leaves one body instead of a dozen. That's not a fit for every table, but...so what. It doesn't have to be. The new assassin lost a lot of that power and gained more power in general combat. It doesn't feel nearly as worth it to set up a mark to spend a week or more getting close to, specializing in that one kill. Not it's better on the battlefield. Now the assassin is good at being accurate while being mobile. It can do more damage no matter if it can palm that dagger and strike them in the back or if that general sees it coming and draws his sword. And maybe that's "better" because it's stronger and more situations, but it feels like a deep loss.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think that's a larger issue than just one ability. And honestly, I think it will take a lot less Homebrewing to bridge that gap with these new versions than ever before. I wish they'd gone harder specifically on Assassin, as the main "please let me do big damage" Rogue, but it should actually be reasonably viable with Envenom Weapons there to pull up their average damage. I mean... It won't compare to Arcane Trickster or Thief's magical shenanigans, but it should be decent.
Rouges do not need more damage, they should be the class that hits the most often. Buff their accuracy to just 90% of the time or more and they are much better.
If basically the main subclass feature you get at level 3 is burst damage feature, and you don't get another feature till level 9, that feature should actually let you do good damage. And it currently get gets you barely above the sustained damage of other martials. And having 90% accuracy doesn't help much if your base damage is so low, that you are at 90% still dealing less damage than other classes at 65%.
It's not terribly meaningful to imagine how things might be happening at lv20. I think Assassin is.... okay now. Advantage to initiative goes well with Steady Aim being a core feature now, so there isn't a situation where you go first and just feel bad because there's no ally next to the target to enable sneak attack. If you go before people, it's like getting an extra turn! But... it IS ridiculous how they nerfed the whole assassinate ability, and then you see people parroting 'they do extra damage!', because +5 is apparently an amazing one-time bonus.
The first time per combat that you are able to hit a target with Sneak attack the Sneak attack Die increases from D6 to D8. And the number of sneaks attack die increases by 1 per level in assassin. To me assassin is trying to take out a Single target and my suggestion feels more assasiny to me.
It's so sad seeing them try to fix the Assassin subclass out of D- tier only for them to fuck up in the wrong direction anyways. All they had to do was add some *consistency* to the subclass and move it away from a turn 1 ~~blunder~~ wonder. "But they did make it more consistent!".. by gimping its damage completely and locking half the features behind easy saves that do nothing on a succesful one. An easy example of a fix can be seen [here](https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/S1-s_eAGS), by just adding some extra lines that help the Assassin consistently provide damage in combat without removing too much.