Assassin

The Assassin is one of three Hybrid vocations in Dragon's Dogma. Hybrid vocations are exclusive to your main character, the Arisen. It costs 1,500 Discipline Points (DP) to switch to this vocation.

Description
The Assassin is the most versatile vocation in Dragon's Dogma. They can wield daggers or one handed swords, combined with either a short bow or shield. These assets can be changed on the fly, to suit current combative needs. Since the Assassin has access to four weapons, it is only natural that they come equipped with a multitude of skills that pertain to whichever weapon you choose to wield. The Assassin is a unique blend of the Strider and Fighter Vocations that creates the ultimate fighting machine.

Primary Weapon: Sword / Daggers

Secondary Weapon: Shield / Bow

Primary Offensive stat: Strength

Armor : an Assassin's armor requirments are similar to that of the Strider - high mobility with fair defence - though Assassins concentrate on killing with minimal chances for the foe to respond their sets may be less defensive. Specific Assassin armors usually show dark resistance, as well as being dark in color themselves.

Strengths and Role
Rewarding skills:  Skills like Clarity/Clairvoyance or perfect blocking with a shield can be very difficult to pull off due to the need for perfect timing, but very potent in the hands of expert players.

Weapon Masters: Able to use either sword or daggers, and shield or bow. Use one of 4 weapon combinations to suit your play-style or needs.

Deadly Toolkit: Wielding paralyzing toxins, fatal poisons, and devastating explosives, Assassins use all the tricks of their trade to cripple or eliminate their enemies.

Defensive Attacks: Some skills like Clairvoyance and Masterful Kill are counter-attacks, and can be used as defensive measures to avoid or reduce damage, as well as a viable means to attack.

Invisibility: The Assassin's Invisibility skill prevents them from taking damage from both Physical and Magick attacks as long as the skill is active, or until stamina runs out. While Invisibility prevents grabbing, Assassins still have access to all of their other abilities while cloaked, which makes it very deadly.

High Mobility: While wielding daggers, they have access to the dodge roll and double jump skills, and still have access to high levels of stamina and climbing power. This makes them able to easily move about the world and battlefield.

Highest Strength Growth: Assassins have the highest Strength growth of all vocations in the game, making them useful for increasing your physical power as you level up.

A Great Contributor: Combined with other Strength Augments, such as Clout, this vocation is a mighty one indeed, even deadly against the Ur-Dragon! (See boss page for more info.)

Weaknesses
Low Defense: The Assassin class has one of the lower defense ratings in the game (on par with Strider and Ranger), rendering them very easy to overpower. An Assassin caught unaware can be easily slain by bosses and ranged attackers. The Assassin also has a minimal magick defense stat, making a battlefield full of chain-casting foes problematic.

Lowest Magic Stat Growth: Assassins have the lowest gains in magic attack and magic defenses per level (on par with the Fighter and Warrior). While the Assassin was never meant to be a magic build, these stat gains render them vulnerable to magic attack and makes its build a poor choice against foes vulnerable only to magickal damage such as the Ghost family of enemies.

High difficulty Many of the most powerful skills require percise timing, which is why novice players may have a hard time with it.

Brutal Nerfs: Since Dark Arisen, effectiveness of skills such as Invisibility, Bloodlust and Autonomy have been drastically reduced, the Assassin class is still viable, but considerably weaker.

Skills
Augments: 25,600 DP Core: 10,000 DP Bow Skills: 12,900 DP Dagger Skills: 46,400 DP Shield Skills: 21,800 DP Sword Skills: 36,000 DP

Total: 152,700 DP

Skills in bold are unique to the Assassin.

Skills in italics can only be obtained via skill rings found in Dark Arisen.

Augments
For information on how augments impact stats and how stacking of multiple augments work see the Stats page.

Tips and Tactics

 * For a longer-living Assassin, it is recommended to obtain augments from Sorcerer and Warrior vocations such as Awareness and Bastion. These augments respectively increase magick defense and defense, invisibly, by 50 points.
 * increasing the Assassin's strength via the Fighter augment Vehemence and the Warrior's Clout is recommended.  Ferocity, from Warrior, will also multiply the damage from an Assassin's core skills by 10%.
 * Although the Assassin has low defensive capabilities in terms of base stats, they are the only class that can switch weapons to change the method of avoiding attacks. Be it through Forward Roll, Double Vault, Block, or Perfect Blocking, it is possible to go through any number of battles without ever being hit by changing evasion methods via equipping different weapon types.
 * In addition to their diversity in weapons and tactics, Assassin has good stamina usage due to the vocation's restriction to light armor only.
 * Make use of the Assassin's defensive mobility abilities, such as the Forward Roll and Double Vault core skills, which give him/her the abilities to dodge Area of Effect (AoE) attacks from foes such as the Chimera, Wyrm, Drake, Wyvern, Cockatrice, the Wight, and so on.
 * Although venturing out at night is more dangerous than during the day, an Assassin can acquire Augments such as Bloodlust or Sanguinity that activate at night only, which make the Assassin a more formidable vocation. Of course any Vocation can benefit from these Augments, should you choose to change Vocations.
 * A good tactic is to have a magick-based augment like Acuity and Attunement (or both, if enough augment slot space is available) so when using weapons imbued with magic attributes, such as the Heaven's Key daggers, the Assassin player will be less at a disadvantage when facing enemies immune to physical based attacks.
 * As an Assassin, the skill Gale Harness can be used to maximize an Arisen's damage output (or Hits Per Second) with attacks like Hundred Kisses and Fivefold Flurry.
 * Being closer to one's target maximizes a shortbow's damage output:

Trivia

 * The Burst Strike sword move is identical to the Stinger sword attack performed by Dante in the Devil May Cry games. The director of Dragon's Dogma, Hideaki Itsuno, was also director on Devil May Cry 2, 3, and 4.
 * The Equipment of the Assassin shown at the top of the page:
 * Weapons: Cutlass / Shortbow
 * Torso: Bandages
 * Arms: None.
 * Legs: Bandit Stalkers / Assassin's Breeches
 * Cloak: Leather Cape