Diablo II - Why I Hate Assassins
by Flatty

Gather around, boys and girls, it's time to talk about my least favorite character in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, the Assassin. Now, I understand that the assassin was introduced in the expansion, and can therefore be by no means as good as the original characters. However, to this I say 'phooey'. The Druid was also introduced in the expansion, and except for being a tad bit (snicker) underpowered in the elemental category, I think Druids are plenty good in general PvM (player vs monster) play.

Back to the topic at hand, why I dislike... no, HATE the Assassin. First off, I shall attack the Assassin's appearance. I'm sorry, but even without armor on, she just looks stupid. She looks like a hunchback with claws. Adding armor to her just gives you different shades of black on a hunchback. No matter what armor you use, her body never looks cool like an Amazon in a full plate, or a Barbarian in a breast plate, etc. Now let's talk about the sounds the Assassin makes. I'll admit, I do like the idea of a character saying 'hiya', but the Assassin makes it sound like she's passing a kidney stone in the process. Just not an enjoyable experience like I'd expect a good solid 'hiya' to be. When the Assassin gets hit by an opponent, she makes a mildly orgasmic sound. While this may excite the younger Diablo II player, I must say it has no effect on me beyond irritation.

Moving beyond the semantics of the Assassin, I also dislike her skills. First I will gripe about the pile of shit Blizzard decided to call 'Cloak of Shadows'. The idea behind this skill is to turn the screen completely dark, reduce everyone's light radius to .01, and piss them off beyond belief. No, it actually has something to do with defense, but I haven't bothered to look. All I know is that when I'm running around killing cows, or doing whatever else in party play, the LAST thing I need is to have my screen go completely dark (even with 2 Lightsabres equipped -- that's +14 to light radius! -- ) and then have the darkness reside to reveal that I'm now surrounded by 200 pissed off cows weilding battle axes. Thanks, Assassin.

"But wait," you say! "Not all Assassins use this skill!" I say 'phooey' to you. It's not the Assassin using this skill... I doubt anyone in their right mind would use this skill, but instead it's their Shadow. The idea of this minion is a good one; a personal clone of the Assassin, capable of fighting on a very similar level, and even looking the same. Cute. However, Blizzard had the great idea to make Cloak of Shadows one of the spells that the Shadow relentlessly casts on their own. Thanks, Blizzard.

The other Assassin skills that absolutely drive me nuts are traps. More specifically, the trap that shoots lightning bolts and also does corpse explosion (a necromancer skill, look it up). Assassins tag along in cows, wait for you to kill a single cow, and thenjust slop down their traps around that dead cow and then laugh gleefully as the exploding cow corpse takes down an entire cow army nearby. This means that the Assassin gets the credit for the kills, and thus a significant amount more experience. I can't stand characters that need to feed off of others during cow runs. I understand if you're too low of a level to kill a cow, but when you're level 96 and need other players to generate corpses for you, that's just sad. Even Necromancers, who also use corpse explosion, have developed a way to make their own corpses with Iron Golems. Also, when I'm trying to magic find in cows, the last thing I need is an Assassin with their damn traps nullifying my magic find and stealing my experience. Thanks, Assassin.

Now we'll talk about PvP (player vs player) a bit. The most popular type of PvP Assassin is a traps + mindblast Assassin. The way this build works is that the Assassin slops down a few traps next to you, and then repeatedly casts Mind Blast on your character (which stuns and knocks them back). Of course, if you have your mouse over another character and you knock them off screen, you can just keep holding down your mouse button and continually cast Mind Blast on them from many screens away. This is called scrolling. Assassins just can't help but to do it. You're not even given the chance to attack the Assassin, as your character is stuck in stunlock from the Mind Blast. Now, there's some real talent. However, i do have to give credit to the melee Assassin duelers out there. You give your class a good name.

But, it's not all bad. There is one part of the Assassin I do like. The sound she makes when she dies. It's just very satisfying, for some reason. Tenfold when it's my PvP Barbarian that dishes out the punishment.

Flatulence187 on USEast