Fire Blade Vortex Assassin Ascendancy, Pantheons & Bandits

Ascendancy (Shadow – Assassin)

Unstable Infusion

This is a really solid way to start generating Power Charges early through your Characters Growth Progress. Additionally, there is an additional Power Charge here which helps scaling your Void Batterys and the multipliers given by some Passive Tree nodes later on in the game. Really strong start!

Deadly Infusion

Another means to scale up our Power Charges with a whopping 50% Critical Strike Multiplier at maximum Power Charges, and a decent chunk of base Critical Strike chance. As of 3.13’s Assassin’s reworks, it no longer grants you the additional Movement Speed, but it still is in a fairly solid state, and I think it still is one of the most potent Ascendancy points damage-wise!

Mistwalker

Prior to 3.13, I think every single guide / content I ever wrote about Assassin included some form of me praising Mistwalker, and being confused about how it had remained in the game in its current state for that long. Well, 3.13 finally did what it needed to do to Mistwalker. Or did it? After the changes, Mistwalker becomes more Elusive Centered and honestly becomes better at it. By granting you 31% Dodge & Spell Dodge at maximum Elusive, it arguably got better defensively. The only argument one could make is that it lost rather unconditional Damage Mitigation as it used to give Reduced Damage taken while Elusive, regardless of whether your Elusive had already decayed heavily or not. On top of that, it also lost its 15% Increased Attack and Cast Speed, which affects a lot of builds, but not ours, as Blade Vortex only needs to get cast once every so often! Overall, I think Mistwalker remains incredibly solid and there’s not too much to worry about!

Opportunistic

Opportunistic got a lot less impressive with the 3.13 Assassin changes. It used to have a 20% Movement Speed increase, which was nice, and put it ahead over Ambush and Assassinate. Nowadays, however, I think there’s arguments to be made to make the swap. However, until further notice (read: until I personally tested it), I’m sticking with recommending Opportunistic (especially because it offers a source of damage reduction, albeit incredibly unreliable). It offers you 20% Reduced Damage Taken while there are at least two Rare or Unique Enemies nearby, which is probably great for things like fighting 10 Ritual Bosses simultaneously, but that makes you lose its 25% More Damage, which feels kind of awkward.

Feel free to experiment between Opportunistic & Ambush and Assassinate but if you want to play it safe, stick with what we know!

Bandits

There really only is one option here. You want to help Alira for Resistances and to give you some extra Critical Strike Multiplier. Perhaps, at excessive levels of gear, you can spec out of it and into killing all. This requires you to be sure about the fact that 2 skill points give you more than what Alira does, which is a rare case in this build.

Pantheons

Major Gods

Soul of Lunaris is probably your best pick. No one has ever said no to some extra Physical Damage Reduction!

Minor Gods

I would recommend Soul of Shakari here as Damage over Time cannot be Dodged or Evaded. Some extra Defenses against that is always nice!

Upgrading your Pantheons

Whilst upgrading your Pantheons never hurts you, it’s not that important for this character (besides the Upgrade for Soul of Lunaris that grants you Chain Immunity). If you have nothing else to do at some point, sure, why not, but it shouldn’t be something you focus on or spend a lot of time on.

Pantheon powers can be upgraded by using Divine Vessel in the Map Device while you are activating the particular Map that contains the boss you need. Once you’ve killed the boss and captured his soul, you need to deliver the Divine Vessel, which’ll be filled up in the map device, to Sin in Oriath.

Main Page / TL;DR