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Assborn the assassin/shadeborn hybrid guide
Spec: http://rift.magelo.com/en/soultree#!...glak528/t|XtP0
There are adjustments to the spec you can make if you find the rotation better suits you with a different point layout. The points you can move around are in the SB soul in the following talents:
Cloying Void, Asphyxiate, Born of Darkness, Conflux, Dark Bonds
None of those talents really contributes all that much, the points I have chosen are the ones I find most suitable for me. Physical Trauma in assassin does not affect Consuming Depths or Strangulate which is why I took Poison Potency instead.
Selfbuffs: Virulent Poison, Lethal Poison, Inescapable Bond
Gear: Max out crit power first, then stack AP. If you are tier 3 geared then crit items are good too.
Playstyle and difficulty
Playstyle is a mix of SB and Sin with almost all main abilities being present which makes for a rotation packed with a lot of abilities. Assborn is all about priority rotation and it's a complex one. The complexity is also what makes it fun for minmaxing oriented players. There are times when it is very unclear which option is the best or least bad and ultimately it comes down to practice and knowing the interactions between the abilities to quickly find the solution. You can get decent numbers out of the spec fairly easily but maximizing its potential is difficult.
Builders
These are your builders in roughly the priority order. Rng will cause some priorities to change sometimes.
Jagged Strike / Thread of Death / Slip Away. Use on cooldown.
Strangulate. Use twice per minute (or more often if you left out the points in Asphyxiate), best time is before cooldown block so you don't waste a precious gcd during poison malice to do no damage and you don't want to redo Strangulate during Debilitating Dart. Strangulate ticks give you Blackout stacks which refund combo points when using a finisher.
Void Touch. Redo after it expires. Try to time it so you don't have to redo it during Debilitating Dart. I train 4/5 in Cloying Void to make this a 14 second duration, which allows using it quite regularly 4 times per minute without drifting but still maintaining uptime. 5/5 in Cloying Void would mean it drifting forward into less ideal times.
Backstab
Puncture
Shadow Lash
Planar Strike. Only used for disconnects.
Finishers
Shadow Flurry is your main finisher. Shadow Flurry hits once per combo point used and each hit has its separate proc activation for things like poisons. Do not be afraid to use Shadow Flurry occasionally with less than 5 combo points. For example if you need to use Jagged Strike and your previous finisher refunds you 3 combo points from Blackout stacks then it's good to do a 3 cp finisher first followed by Jagged Strike.
Direct damage and poison procs are not the only source of value on your finishers however. Maximizing the amount of Consuming Depths procs is extremely important. Let's say you use a Shadow Flurry and get a CD proc which you use. The finisher and CD have now used up 2 seconds of the internal cooldown of 5 seconds between procs. If you build up to next finisher with 2 abilities then you miss out on a potential proc. Using a lower than 5 combo point finisher is a good tool for letting you start a cooldown block with 5 combo points.
Mirrored Strike is the other finisher you will use but it is used only about once per minute to keep up the buff from it and even then it's used ideally with 1-2 combo points after a Shadow Flurry which did not proc Consuming Depths. Refresh Mirrored Strike when you don't have the finisher damage buff up from Nexus of Darkness.
Consuming Depths
Consuming Depths deserves its own section since it's such an important ability in the spec. First of all CD is not a dot, it's a direct damage ability with multiple hits and 0% chance to proc stuff like poisons and weapon procs. Each hit has its own damage calculation based on whatever buffs and debuffs are present at that time. Strangulate works the same way. This means you can use CD before raid cooldowns and the ticks that happen during raid cooldowns still get buffed by them, and if you squeeze in a CD on the last second of a buff that will only affect the first damage tick unlike a normal dot which would get the bonus to all ticks.
There is usually no hurry to use a CD proc right away, you have the whole buildup to 5 combo points to choose the optimal time. The best time is when you don't have to do any time sensitive abilities like Strangulate or Void Touch but instead your only other option would be to use a Shadow Lash. However be careful when delaying that you don't clip your old one if you get two procs in a row. Delaying Consuming Depths can also sometimes let you wait it long time that your Debilitating Dart debuff runs out, this way you don't use a gcd without proccing Debilitating Dart.
Other Abilities
Debilitating Dart. Use on cooldown with Cloak & Dagger buff active.
Expose Weakness. Keep up Expose Weakness at all times. It last 60 seconds so no need to macro it, just refresh it manually.
Nexus of Darkness. Best used during cooldown block to get an extra Shadow Flurry in for 5 more hits of buffed poisons. 2 points in Conflux seems enough to give its timing enough flexibility to still use it efficiently twice per minute.
Poison Malice. Main source of burst damage. Use together with raid cooldowns.
Bond of Night. Do NOT use bond on your target, only use it on a secondary target for some free cleave.
Cooldown Block
Ideal cooldown block consists of a combination of all your cooldowns and starts with 5 combo points while having a Consuming Depths proc up and Strangulate refreshed so it doesn't need redoing. You can try to force the CD proc by doing a double finisher leading into the cooldown block for two chances to proc it.
So your cooldown block could look something like this:
1. Consuming Depths
2. Poison Malice, Shadow Flurry
3. Jagged Strike, Debilitating Dart
4. Shadow Flurry (assuming 2 Blackout procs on previous finisher)
5. Consuming Depths
6. Nexus of Darkness, Shadow Flurry
7. builder
8. builder
9. builder
10. builder
11. Shadow Flurry
12. Slip Away, Jagged Strike
13. Shadow Flurry
Opening Rotation
Void Touch can be applied before pull and then stealth. Strangulate can too but you only have 3 second time window there so it's kind of risky. Opening with this spec is tricky because no matter what you do you can't build up very quickly without wasting stuff. I would go with something like this:
Void Touch prepull
1. Jagged Strike
2. Shadow Flurry
3. Strangulate
4. Mirrored Strike, ToD activation
5. Consuming Depths
6. Poison Malice, Debilitating Dart, Puncture
7. Backstab
8. Jagged Strike
9. Shadow Flurry
10. Nexus of Darkness, Shadow Flurry
11. Consuming Depths
Macros
Most of the abilities can't be macroed. I use these macros and the rest of the abilities in their own keybinds.
Code:#show backstab suppressmacrofailures cast backstab cast shadow lash cast planar strike cast @self energy manipulationCode:#show thread of death suppressmacrofailures cast thread of death cast jagged strikeAnalyzing your parseCode:#show slip away suppressmacrofailures cast slip away cast jagged strike
There are some key metrics you can look at in a parse to figure out if you are doing something wrong. In a parse of X seconds you should be seeing Consuming Depths used every 9-9.5 seconds in an average parse, about 1.6*X poison ticks (for each poison) and about X shadow flurry hits. Each use of Debilitating Dart should deal damage about 7 times.
So in a 5 minute parse you should see something like this:
~170 Consuming Depths hits (average RNG)
300+ Shadow Flurry hits
~475-480 Poison ticks
~70 Debilitating Dart hits
Example KaruulAlert set
Code:KA::AFFKCeNq9WNlu4zYU/RX1B1zupMAnUQvQh0yCjNt5CSAwtmILdixDkicTtP33Xi1JvNCOl8a QYCcSfXWOeM69vIx/LYsq835kdrbIqsp7zqsqX0w01kO9nNvXrBzUtpxkNVxJ4NpQx5u/0AELlZE x5ioJfcQo16gdm8A30vf5U60jW9vfH/7848E+5vO8fk3zUbGoHrI20ksfiA3G40r7lGrCfS1Jc+I BRBsofdOh+k2H8bdhfA/x4WwOigBR8na5/U+0T07+uSvyqlh4N3aejzLPjur8Z7ZGq/2zQbkxDti YwEShEYyYhld4NJtlG6d+KXoiQmgq1AYRqXcIMNS+1P4y20tgHTn5WuQYI6q5vz4HWN9ndvy6g57 sf/3hvLAzzy7GXmQnk/59b736nTEBiWKcRFQgGkuFY3Q0h6q28xlIJF1ObZW1PIREmqtNKfHtGUA davcMRFn7DFtDYIBY1rsy+nDHsPXHzk+AE/UDzlSIfJFwgsTRnMZrsdJuklKEU9uyUz77XF/okL6 +16VdTFZzWx8itD4qIMRQQ2jgCxlyo5Ljp2dqgU1RLtLqI17nE4y0wFQz1ZwNaLfJ4bi9+xBa4p6 kMNo0StIeV5sUnystxAVkzNyOZsWq9ojLL293dSAjrLiUWEpOYxw3XidHwX/sQwDmDjGRmjGiKR2 I7qORETh7Bzjme73+jpqdjJqdh9rnTtTsFNTf5/nSC17s6x7VvN+H1EoowszHJjIsELF/vO4hRmo hRopol1zJGRJh6xIZTkvIxV7x5EWZraeuwrA9JEgiJnGSGF8w309YfDR+W1W2Kb1p3YZMi6d03IR MHzs2CMkt97oLRT8Ne1QfwqNWz605s2U9rQ6ko52hAaImZFgqoSj42Phn5KTRW1Ag1wRtuUnQFwf cnyTYA+WjXym51fW1yyiMuNiSGcBwlu+9uWgb4f5JuQIXzrnmEozefuABaWeje7A2t8Ph7c0x7NZ yFmQUWDQ8uvzzfi+QPk6UIEkUgfmlOL5MPPYhuloNMhKCfOp5d57acvMePV3Z86cWOb6vYt9Hrhm 4bsU+PoEdrH705OpHz6t+AjurHz0F9baq9jdIV1OWr6DvgAz6yYL9wJL2W/ZrVbVIbdn1s26z7Iw DUjGFli2gkZ/IhDN5RhlZNFHTcR+y76WUuKzc/1XkY29YrEbTAwl4bVAgBIpiwrgysQTThGcQ+Qn h0roJ16UvSF0XLdFv8rIsymzsQTORzxwiG+rtIUGSKIoxxdJQhRN4g6fTeO5jNj0HxPyo6mqzt91 gg3ZqOuWHFObKXleUl+RbrXqTCk5u1vsC7s7F11ipXJaBN7d6iMvxX7ZXgtll/t5NWbBsgLWDKxN fWVfQGm7q6u8O2r/uXaxPqiM+uTris6pjszHiqo74rN7QZYgvagxh8i7edbtbLUb1qjy0ofM+JCA qCLihoSHSN0aZM31M+g2pxgn4/9j74CcrhZ+lFIyIckqFnyCV/wDY+/8/
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Originally Posted by paragonfury 
I average about 95-96k atm.
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