The Assassin Cross Guide
- What is the Assassin Cross?
- What kind of people should play Assassin Cross?
- What are the Assassin Cross' strong and weak points?
- What is stacking sonic blows?
- What roles can the Assassin Cross play in PvM, PvP, and WoE?
- What are the possible builds for an Assassin Cross?
- What gear should I use for an Assassin Cross?
- What should I do in WoE, to not be a failure? (I can't target the emp, help!)
- Can I MvP with an Assassin Cross?
- Why does there exist such a class, that seems to powerful and can do so much?
1. What is the Asssassin Cross?
The Assassin Cross is the transcendent version of the Assassin, a secondary class that is grown out of a Thief. Because this guide is strictly for Assassin Crosses, there will be very little mention of Thief or Assassin in the rest of the guide. Assassins and Assassin Crosses really only have a few ways of leveling. Luckily, they're one of the easiest classes in the entire game to level. Essentially, if you buy a Triple Saharic Jur (three Drainlair cards), you can get a Wind Endow from a sage and mob Anolians for extremely quick experience. Some people prefer to do Juperos. I won't go into details, but the majority of your leveling will involve attracting massive amounts of monsters, hiding, and using Grimtooth over and over to kill them. If you equip a stun, sleep, or even curse arrow, this should be quite easy. Yes, Assassin Crosses can equip status arrows and gain the benefit for their ranged Grimtooth attack. However, elemental and attack bonuses do
not carry over.
2. What kind of people should play Assassin Cross?
The answer to this question is really quite simple -
anyone at all can play an Assassin Cross. How do you kill people? Hit your Enchant Deadly Poison key, followed by Sonic Blow, and clicking on your enemy. 9 times out of 10, your enemy will probably drop. Fun isn't it? With other classes, you have to worry about things like hide dodging and too much health, but thanks to this neat little set of skills, you're able to drop just about anyone you damn well feel like.
But those that mean you should play an Assassin Cross just because you can kill people? The answer is a resounding
no. While Assassin Cross remains probably the easiest class to play, it's one of the hardest classes (along with Professor) to play
well. In the remainder of the guide, you'll come to understand why the majority of Assassin Cross players are just plain bad.
You should consider playing an Assassin Cross if you exhibit the following personality traits:
- You're bright, and you pick things up quickly. You might not know a lot, but people rarely have to explain things to you twice, and don't usually sigh because you're slow.
- You have sharp eyes and you're not visually impaired, or at least have correction tools (like glasses). You don't have issues distinguishing colors, and you often notice details your friends miss.
- You recognize patterns. You spot trends, and in real life you often can predict things that are going to happen by watching what's happened before. In movies, you usually can guess the ending by the content of the story. In horror movies, you're never scared because you know when the suprises are coming - not because the movie itself isn't scary.
- You have limited patience, but enough patience to wait when you realize it's absolutely critical. You don't want too much patience, because you realize often you have to seize the moment.
- You can read others well. In life, you're known to be manipulative, or you often put on different personality cloaks for the fun of it.
- You have a firm need to win. You hate losing, and winning--even if it's at a game--is vital. RO is for fun, and I play because of my friends and people I meet, but that doesn't mean I can put up with losing.
- You love to communicate and speak on vent. You can relay what you see to other people, while listening to their words to help shape your decision.
You should
NOT play Assassin Cross if you exhibit the following personality traits:
- You're slow, and people often get frustrated at you because you're not picking things up fast enough.
- You're terrible at recognizing patterns, and generally have no idea of what's going to come.
- Your eyes are bad, and you can't distinguish two similar objects from one another.
- You're just a nice person, and is hardly ever manipulative and is often suprised by what others around you do. You've been a victim of a suprise party, and was genuinely suprised... maybe more than once.
- You have too little or too much patience. You either never wait for others or you wait around too long while opportunity passes you by.
- RO is for fun! You don't really care whether you win or not!
- OMG, I WILL NOT SPEAK ON VENT!!!! I'm insecure about my voice, and I don't trust people on the interwebz.
3. What are the Assassin Cross' strong and weak points?
Really, the Assassin Cross has minimal weak points, other than the fact that people don't usually know how to play it. With the second best health modifier (second only to Lord Knight) in the game, Assassin Crosses come out with the third highest HP total for any character class, thirded only by the Paladin who gains extra health because of their skill set. Assassin Crosses have Sonic Blow, a skill which delivers ~800% regular damage to a target. This skill has minimal delay, and has varies stacking methods which will be explained in the following section. With Hide as a natural skill, you're able to avoid dangerous situations like Asura Strike. With Cloak level 10, you're able to move anywhere you want at an accelerated pace when walking beside walls. Even if you're not cloaked, you walk faster than normal. In addition, you have Sonic Acceleration, EDP, Grimtooth and Throw Venom Knife - which makes you the second most versatile class, seconded only by Champions and tied by Professor.
Assassin Crosses, along with Champions and Creators are the main damage dealers in WoE. In War of Emperium, anyone worth killing is a potion user - IE.
they pot. Therefore, there are three ways to kill someone using potions.
- You one-hit them, so they don't get a chance to pot back up
- You can deliver damage faster than they can hit their potion key, or they run out of potions
- You induce some status that renders them unable to pot, like Stun
The second method is exceedingly difficult to do to highly experienced players by yourself. These players sometimes even use two or three keys as potion keys just to make sure they stay alive. Since high level geared players probably won't drop to your average EDP Sonic Blow in one hit, you're going to have to rely on on intelligence to get #1 to happen, try for #3, or get help. How is intelligence (not the stat) going to help you? Think about it - potions cost money. No one uses potions when they're not taking damage, which means they think before they pot; you can use this to your advantage. If a player has 8k HP, your sonic blow does 7.5k, and their white potions heal 1.5k, would the player pot if they only took 500 points of damage? Probably not. However, if they're in the red, they'll probably pot back up to full. If you take out a small amount of damage before going in for the kill, you might be able to kill an otherwise unkillable player.
With players you can't kill, what should you do? Equip Curse Arrows, and grimtooth them. It slows them down, which means that's another few seconds they won't be able to help their team.
4. What is
stacking sonic blows?
Sonic Blow stacking is a phenomenon that is split into several categories. In essence, "stacking sonic blows" refers to making more than a normal amount of Sonic Blows go off in a give time.
Dance Stack
Dance stacking cannot be done on EternityRO. On other RO servers however, and on older versions of eAthena, it was possible to slightly reduce the delay time for Sonic Blow by Sonic Blowing, and half way through the animation, click in a direction that would land you 1 square away, and still adjacent to the target, and before moving, issuing the command to Sonic Blow again. This would jerk you around the target and more sonic blows than usual would go off. This took a little bit of practice, but keeping 20+ dance steps going proved to be a matter of stamina, and took a little more practice.
If you want to see what this looks like, I made a little recording for some a while ago. Sadly. I used hypercam and well... the quality isn't so great. And... I didn't really know how to edit videos either, so the first one is the smaller (5mb) video that is too slow, and the second is a 24mb video that's too large.
Small, slow
http://www.zetegnet.net/stacksb.avi
Large, fast
http://www.zetegnet.net/stacksb2.wmv
Double Hyper Stack
The "double" in front of "hyper stack" doesn't make it anything special. It simply refers to the fact that only two hits are stacked this way. Hyper Stacking is only possible through the use of a Poem for Bragi - a bard/clown skill. If you are under its effects, you can send off two Sonic Blows (by clicking it twice) at essentially the same time. However, note that after the second hit, your delay time is still normal.
Double Hyper Dance Stack
By far, the most difficult realizable way of stacking. This method uses the two methods described above, and links them together. Every dance step you take, you take two hits at the target.
Triple Hyper Dance Stack
I am not 100% sure on how this works. This method uses the Double Hyper Stack method, but there are three hits instead of two. After 3 hours of testing with friends, none of us were able to reliably recreate a triple hyper stack. It was random, but theoretically, it is possible.
5. What roles can the Assassin Cross play in PvM, PvP, and WoE?
The role of the Assassin Cross in PvM is purely for luring. You would equip Perfect Dodge and Flee gear and mob up monsters for your party to kill. PvM is not the most fun part of the assassin cross, but the class' amazing avoidance ability mixed with killing and forced-teleport ability makes it essential for many dungeons and high end areas.
The role of the Assassin Cross in PvP is to kill. PvP is for fun, and even if you're not using EDP, with a Soul Link, your Sonic Blow now does 1600% damage instead of 800%. Congratulations, there is not WoE reduction, and your damage is huge.
The role of the Assassin Cross in WoE really has two purposes. Primarily, you're there to take out people. In WoE, remember there is a skill reduction, and therefore EDP is usually needed to kill people. Link here, also does not provide its full damage effect. Secondarily, you're there to break Emperiums. It's not unheard of for one Assassin Cross to break the emp of an entire guild. You have massive tanking ability, and you really only require 7-10 seconds to break an Emperium.
6. What are the possible builds for an Assassin Cross?
I will only be talking about one build for the Assassin Cross - Sonic Blow/Emp Breaker, simply because I believe all other builds are a big waste. This build is the staple killing machine of RO. Having this build lets a moron kill people, but having the build alone doesn't promise success.
Here's a potential build for such a SinX build. I'm giving specific numbers, but you're free to play around with it to your liking. Remember that there's no perfect build. It's all about how you play, and what you want to focus on. Ask yourself what qualities you value.
Str: 94
Agi: 51
Vit: 75
Int: 2
Dex: 45
Luk: 1
Using this build and two Rings of Muscle (Mantis Card), you'll hit 130 total Strength with Bless, a Valkyrie Armor, and +8 strength food. Of course, if you're not going to have a valk armor, it'd be smart to change the stats around. Remember that only multiples of 10 affect your damage significantly. It will give you a 8.87 average Emperium Breaking time, and it will give you 16k HP with wool scarf and tidal shoes, along with 35 DEF assuming reasonable gear.
Here's a reasonable skill build:
http://web.hc.keio.a...XJiIfyasNbvgSJy
Please note that Soul Breaker is in there purely for PvP purposes, where you'd use it to harrass. Meteor Assault is in there only for status-inflicting purposes, which I'll explain later. You can mix the skill levels up, but this is my preference. Note that Katar Mastery doesn't add significant damage. Trust me on this one. Advanced Katar Research, however, should be maxed. Make sure you get the quest skill, Sonic Acceleration.
7. What gear should I use for an Assassin Cross?
There's really quite a large variety of Assassin Cross gear. The vital gears are:
- Armor (Valkyrie's Armor, if you can get one) carded with an Evil Druid card
- An Emp Breaking weapon, hopefully an Ice Pick
- A shield (hopefully Valkyrie's Shield) carded with a Thara Frog
- Infiltrator carded with a Skeleton Worker card or a Bloody Roar for high defence characters
- Tidal shoes carded with a Matyr card
- Wool Scarf carded with a Raydric card
- Feather Beret or other 10% reduction headgear
You'll discover switch gears later on by yourself. You'll also need to bring green potions, a few panaceas, and obviously white and blue potions. The beauty with Assassin Cross is that unless you're really serious, you don't need slim whites. You can carry a good amount of normal ranked white potions. And yes I know, Assassin Crosses are difficult to gear.
The evil druid in your armor, as opposed to marc serves really one main purpose, different from why other classes use an ED. Simply, offensive aspersio makes your weapon type Holy, which means that you're not going to be doing any damage to the Emperium. If you're wearing an ED, aspersio will not change your weapon property. To top this off, you can't get stone cursed either.
The icepick is the master of all emp breaking weapons. This level 4 weapon has a low 80 ATK, but has a neat script attached to it:
CODE
bonus bDefRatioAtkRace,RC_Boss; bonus bDefRatioAtkRace,RC_NonBoss;
This script, which is similar to the Thanatos Phantom card, makes it so that the higher your opponent's defence, the more damage you inflict. Because the emperium has a ton of defence, ice picks allow you to get extremely high damage and fast emp break times. The downside is that icepicks are difficult to obtain. Because I have never played an Assassin Cross without an icepick, I'm not completely sure what alternative emp breaking weapons are. I believe, though, that the weapon people usually choose is a Mes[3] with two Orc Skeleton cards and a Desert Wolf Card. This weapon aims to boost damage. Remember that with an icepick, LUK and other crit-increasing gear will actually decrease your damage.
The Infiltrator is a high damage weapon which can be slotted. Although it's not required that you slot your infiltrator, doing so will boost your damage, and take you over the health threshold of many characters. It is expensive, so you may want more than one before you attempt to slot it. Your alternative weapon here, the Bloody Roar, does not have as much pure damage as the Infiltrator will. However, it has the unique property that it completely ignores defence. If we consider that Infiltrator[1] has 140+5 attack power, and does 1.5*1.15 (Skeleton Worker card, so it stacks by multiplication - if you use a hydra, it stacks by addition), we see that its base damage is 250.125. The bloody roar's attack power is 120.
The fatal mistake that people make here is to say that "The slotted infiltrator is always better than the bloody roar, since no one can get enough defence to make it worth it!" Let me present an argument here, purely in mathematics. It's grade 9 math, so please try to follow along as I'll make it as simple as possible. The first question is - where do people figure that no one has enough defence to make it worth it? Well, let's model this as a system of linear equations, each as a function of the enemy's defence.
Boned Infiltrator: (250.125*.01(100-X))-B
Bloody Roar: 120
In the above, you can see that the Bloody Roar is a constant value since it doesn't consider the enemy's defence, and does steady damage. The boned infiltrator on the other hand, definitely considers the enemy's defence. The B value at the end is the enemy's VIT defence. As you may know, DEF from armor reduces a % damage, and after that, VIT defence decreases a solid number equal to your VIT score. I'll consider three cases here, although you can use the same logic to do what you want: 0 VIT, 45 VIT, 75 VIT. In the following images, please look for the "x intercept", as this is the defence value that the two weapons balance out. Any higher than this value for the given armor defence, then Bloody Roar does more damage, and any lower, Boned Infiltrator does more damage.
A target with 0 VIT score, we can see that Boned Infiltrator is always better, since no one really has a 50 armor DEF score.
A target with 45 VIT score, we can see that Bloody Roar and Boned Infiltrator seem to balance out since most players have around 33 armor DEF.
A target with 75 VIT score, we can see that Bloody Roar is almost always better, since most people have over 22 DEF.
So what does this all mean? It means that Bloody Roar is better for killing anyone worth killing. It's possible that I've made a mistake in my calculations, but to my knowledge, I haven't. Just think about it - if anyone has lower than 45 VIT, they're going to get stunned to hell anyways, so why waste your time killing them? There are very few useful WoE builds that make use of little VIT scores. More importantly, classes like Professor almost constantly have huge VIT scores in the order of approaching 100. Bloody Roar is better than a Boned Infiltrator. Note that damage calculations are slightly skewed, however, because of the nature of the damage calculations, DEF ignore makes refine rate more useful. You'll find that after factoring WoE calculations, a +7 Blood Roar almost consistently outdamages a boned infiltrator. The underlying reason is that when you test with monsters, you are not factoring in reduction. Go through the actual calculations in the code if you're not convinced.
8. What should I do in WoE, to not be a failure? (I can't target the emp, help!)
Emperium, where art thou!
WoE really does take experience. It's sad to say, but it's impossible for me to give you a lecture on how to target the emperium and people, and have you do it well. However, there are general hints you should take. First, make sure your angle is not too top or bottom heavy, which means you're on a diagonal but slightly tilted towards the straight-down angle. This makes the emperium easier to target. Secondly, don't be afraid to change your camera angle. Good Assassin Crosses always keep changing their angles to get better views, and to check for angle-hiding people.
For those of you looking for a good video to watch of a SinX, see the following thread. NSB 11 and NSB 12 are good references. Watch how he targets the emperium, and how he pulls away.
http://www.eternityr...hp?showtopic=83
However, WoE isn't all about how well you can target the emperium. It's also about picking out your targets. If you're playing an Assassin Cross, you should really have a good idea of what each class looks like standing alone, stacked on top of people, and most importantly in a Storm Gust or Meteor Storm. With an Assassin Cross, you are
not allowed to turn off effects. Did you catch that? Unless your computer crashes when you have effects on, you're going to have to deal with the screen lag. Watching where you're going, what's in front of you, and where you'll end up is so important, that noticing spells and effects will often save your life.
Finding Targets
"But then how do I target people if I really can't see them under the effects?" - Predict their movements. Spam Sonic Blow. You can never Sonic Blow your own guild or allies, so don't be afraid to spam the skill. The reason I mentioned patterns before is that you really do have to predict your enemy's moving patterns when you can't really see them. If there's a SG, 4 MS, and a LoV going off, chances are you can't see your enemy at all. You'll need a sixth sense for where he's going, and sonic blow accordingly. This is where intelligence also comes in. You're going to need to browse through the ladders now and again, and try to remember some of the key players in every guild and what their classes are. You can't always tell what class someone is under effects, so a quick browsing of the name should really help, if you already have that information known. Remember those Jab Change Monsters? Yeah, this is where being able to pass that test without the help of your friends comes into play.
Escape & Stealth
Escaping and stealth is the MOST important aspect for an Assassin Cross. Sometimes you'll be overwhelmed - that's a fact, and you're going to have to learn to deal with it. Luckily, you have the advantage of a level 10 Cloak, which lets you walk faster than other people, and move around. This means that you just have to outsmart your opponents. Don't run in predictable patterns. If you're getting chased by a ruwach or sight, sonic blow the target then run away so they get distracted. Don't think linearly, and you'll be ok. Try walking in the same direction twice if there's a sniper detecting you.
9. Can I do MvPs with Assassin Cross?
Yes, you can do certain MvPs, as long as you have the HIT to actually hit with Sonic Blow. Let's do a small calculation.
Sonic Blow: 8x
Soul Link: 2x
Enchant Deadly Poison: 4x
Lex Aeterna: 2x
Sonic Acceleration: 1.1x
Elemental Weakness: up to 2x
8*2*4*2*1.1 = 140.8x regular damage. If you include a Type 4 elemental MvP and use the right element, this means you'll get ~281.6x your regular damage off. That's really.... high. I won't explain specifically what MvPs you can do, but if you're bragid, you can get two of those off at once. If you do 1k regular damage, you'll be doing ~600k damage in one bragid Sonic Blow. Realistically, that's a little too high of a guess. You have to take into account DEF, and other factors as well. The argument still stands, however, that Assassin Crosses can MvP well.
10. Why does there exist such a class, that seems to powerful and can do so much?
Well, mostly because people use this kind of skillbar:
However, having read this guide, you're on your way to becoming a good SinX. Gravity's way of balancing out the class, was to let numerous morons screw up their build, and not know how to play. Played well, Assassin Cross is amongst the two overpowered classes in Ragnarok Online. Make sure you use /bm, since almost all of your skills should be in your hotkeys, even ones you think may not be useful. Gear switching is extremely useful, and if you don't have any gear to switch, practice switching arrows. Your Cloak, Sonic Blow, White Potion and Blue potion keys should be in the main area of your hand, and easy to press.
That pretty much sums it up for now. Try not to fail.
07/10/2008, 18h56
