Anyone have any Beta or current exp to give me Better Insight?  I just hit lvl 10.  Do Assassins get Poisens ect like in Most MMO's?  Who has the least amount of down time?  Most the Vids I see on rangers they spend most the time kiting ect....Any help from anyone who has tried both would be nice....

Only 21 assassin but yes there is some downtime, just a bit. Yes assassins do get poison but not til 16.

Will say until 22 you will die a lot, remember to watch your skill cool downs and use crit stones in your swords in the early levels.

From the rangers in game that i have seen until they reach 16 they also rely heavily on bandages and potions, but have a few skill shots til they reach 16. At 16 rangers get poison traps, at 19 you get a stun shot too. Also get herb treatment to help with healing so you don't rely on bandages too much. At 10 you have a transform skill, so use that to escape when your close to dieing.

I'm currently a 34 ranger.   Leveling a ranger can be somewhat difficult to level until you reach 16 and more importantly 19.  Between 10 and 16, your bow is a pretty weak weapon due to the lack of special attacks, but at the same time your melee is not that great either.   At 16 you get the rapid fire skill that chains off your quick shot and things start to get a little better.  At 19 you get your big damage stun shot and at this stage the bow becomes a great weapon making it pretty much useless to draw your swords ever again.

As a ranger, I am able to kill monsters that are 3-4 levels above me fairly easily since I seldom get hit.  Last night I did a campaign quest in Heiron that had me beating a 5 dot level 39 mob.   It wasn't easy, but with kiting I managed to pull it off.   Ironically the main source of downtime on my ranger only comes when I run out of MP.   Some of the stronger attacks use MP and usually after around 10 kills I'll sit down for 30 secs or so and then I am good to go.

It is a solid class, but it takes a lot of work in terms of constantly kiting mobs in PvE, and gearing your character the proper way.  A lot of people would rather not have to go through the hassle of kiting and running around all the time, and its understandable.  In this regard you may find the assassin to be more straight forward.

An observation from playing on the taiwan server is people typically pick assasin over ranger in dungeon.

They are both difficult classes to play, but I suppose I could say that Ranger is "harder". However, you'll get more parties as a ranger because there are less.

In my opinion, they are the most different of any two subclasses of a "main" class. There is little skill overlap and playstyle is not similar at all.

Rangers gravitate to strafing and distance attacks at higher levels. They can also trap and pull, and they have good stealth detection.

Assassins are a pure melee DPS class, but unlike WoW, their skill lineups and usage are very tricky to master properly. You can't just spam skills, you nearly always have to be constantly moving during melee combat.

Hope that helps.