MMORPG.com Age of Conan Correspondent Garrett Perkins gives us a look at the hard-to-play assassin class in Funcom's Age of Conan.

The assassin is the classic dual dagger wielding stealth class found in nearly every MMO, able to dish out a great amount of damage while not bringing attention to themselves before melting silently into the shadows. The assassin of Age of Conan has markedly less crowd control than its counterparts found in other MMOs only wielding a fear, knock back and short stun when talent points are put toward it. This means that an assassin focuses on nothing but damage and avoiding aggro in any fight, whether it be PvP or PvE.

Read The Assassin

 I'm curious as to what the author has to say about a *General Feat* build.  I'm leveling my assassin using nothing but the General Tree.  I have increased stamina regen, increased armor, increased protection, and some damage increase.  It seems to be a decent build, but i'm just curious as to the opinion of going this route.

 So you still can't stealth when party members are in combat? (That's incredibly dumb) And it sounds like you still can't finish combos while moving, again very stupid. You'd think they would have fixed these glaring issues. All the more reason to continue ignoring this terrible game.

And really Garrett if I wanted a synopsis of the Assassin class I could have gone to the game's site. If there were major changes have you checked them out in game yet? It would be nice to see something worthwhile here, because it feels like you are just reporting on some class changes (which I could read about in the AoC newsletter), and providing a class synopsis (which basically exists in multiple places already on fansites and on the AoC website). I played an Assassin to level 74, and I must say the class was ridiculously hard in PvP if you were fighting anyone with half a brain. Of course at the time half of my abilities were broken, stats did nothing, and the servers were constantly lagging, but what I want to know is how much, or little, the assassin class has changed in playability. Would I really want to dust mine off and try it out again?

Assassin's are really deadly in early gameplay, but then again, later on you can just step one step and they are not in range to hit you... Quite a lame class, but still good when talking about ambushing.

Weapons: Daggers (duel wield) should be Weapons: Daggers (dual wield).

Seems to me that most things I have read is that with the HP gain that sins and barbs are both having more trouble because they can't quickly take down targets anymore. Don't really want to play a caster or tank and not best at heals so I am having hard time with deciding what to play but am working on PvE server with assassin now till I get a better feel for the game. This article helps not at all for me though.

The assassin is a broken class and a prime example that funcom can't balance their game for shit.

Unfortunatelly it was my class of choice and before I quit i pvped alot solo and in grp (in a FFA server). A couple of points that are in the OP's write-up and I would just like to mestion them together because they compound to the assassin being a broken class.

This is from before 1.05 as I quit before it came out BUT I played alot with 1.05 on testlive and none of the points below was addressed nor the final patch notes mention anything new from what I played.

1) Once out of stealth you can't restealth even if you are alone at the other side of the map from the battle. If anyone from your 24 man raid is in combat anywhere on the map the game assumes you are too :P And of course I don't have to mention that if any caster sees you approaching the battle out of stealth (and many will) your death is a 1 button press for them.

2) If you ever step in an (invisible) AoE from a caster you die in 2-3 tics. Thanks for playing. with +70% of players in open pvp or siege being AoE casters every combat spot has multiple AoEs running. So the point that you can assist other melees is wrong. Go even close to a melee fight and you will die before you land a hit.

3) Smallest hitbox in game + lag = most of your hits don't register. In a game where damage depends on combos (up to 4 steps) where each miss is -5% damage and missing the last means no combo at all the assassin is not functional in mass pvp (more than 20 ppl on screen depending on rig). So much for being a high dps class. I have played through entire sieges (48vs48) where the role for the 2 sins that didn't have an alt to bring was to keep a look-out away from the main siege incase the enemy were to sneak attack another part of the walls. In other words no point in having you trying to kill anything.

4) Here is the fun part. Solo lvl80 assassin on a 1on1 situation kills everything. maybe not a shield guardian and conq but those are doable also. Any caster that you charge 1on1 from stealth can only whatch as you stun-lock and kill him in about 10 seconds. This happens 95% of the time as you might miss a CC or something. charge-stun -> Grim corruption/avatar of death -> deaths gaze -> swift strikes X with lunge before last step and if he's not wearing heavy armour he's dead. If he is not dead press exelent balance and you have 100% inmmunity of ALL CC so you can finish them off. NO SKILL REQUIRED. I mention this not as an advantage of the sin but as a disadvantage showing just how broken the class is. Completely OP in 1on1 and completely useless in group PVP.

After 1.05: Every class has at least double the HP while the sin's damage feels the same. I couldn't stun-lock and kill in testlive anymore while I still had the problems in 1,2,3 when group pvping. 

maybe I am forgetting something, I didn't go over general issues that are not assassin problems only.

I don't expect to ever go back to AoC because if after a whole year they can't manage to fix such obvious and game-breaking issues  it is clear that they are never going to.

 here's something from the Assassin forums on AoC's U.S. forums-

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=199512

I played an assassin in AoC.  The fact that the class is still as broken as it was when I used to play tells me that I'm really not all that interested in accepting Funcom's "re-evaluate the game" trial they keep e-mailing me.  In my opinion, it isn't necessarily wise to ask players who left because the game was inarguably broken to come back and re-evaluate a game that is still - possibly irretrievably - broken.

Well .... i do not raid, i do not pvp .... but for the rest, assassin is my main, incredible fast killer, with corruption also have no problem surviving multiple mobs, ads, .... etc. Of course not everything in AoC is polished ... but after returning from time to time im now in for last 3 months and all looks like I'm staying. After WoW AoC is my second prefered game. AoC has become realy great game. As i do not care for "end-game" content, I'm leveling all possible classes, out of 8 have this 60 assassin, rest is around 55. So far ... so fun.

Crowd control and stealthers always seemed to me as the coward's way out of playing a game. You never really have to worry that the other player is more skilled than you because some idiot dev gave you the tools to make sure skill has nothing to do with the fights you partake in. 

Sometimes it seems like the only thing that would make a player happy who loves stealth classes would be

sv_cheats 1

god_mode 1

then pat yourself on the back at how leet you are...

I love my assasin. LOTUS  FTW!!!!!

Screw the corruption tree!!