Soul Knight – How to Use Assassin First Skill

Assassin First Skill Guide

Dark Blade is a skill has requires a bit of reactivity and practice to get the hang of, yet it isn’t really hard to master it. This makes it the ideal skill to practice for beginners.

Here are a few tips to get used to it:

• Practice keeping track of how many chains you have left.
• Don’t recklessly consume your charges. You have 5 resets until your skill goes on cooldown, and 9 seconds without iframes isn’t forgiving with below average stats. Instead, only chain when you’re sure you can kill the enemy you’re targeting, or when you feel like you can’t dodge an incoming enemy attack. This also requires you to have minimum knowledge of enemies’ HP. Knowing which enemies have low HP so that you can chain easier is a great asset you can develop.
• Make good use of the skill’s stalling mechanic. If you wait for 7 seconds after a skill reset, all your chains will instantly charge back up to 5. This acts like a strategical reduced cooldown. For example, if you know you’re low on reset chances and there’s only a few enemies left in the room, and you’re confident you can survive without activating your skill, use those 7 seconds to be ready for an eventual next wave of enemies. Don’t rush things.
• Pick strong burst weapons. The skill works well mostly with shotguns, snipers, some rifles, crossbows, throwables; any weapon that can deal a quick burst of damage is good for chaining. If you use clawgrip (4 fingers) or semi-claw (3 fingers), you might as well prefer bows as burst weapons. Just keep in mind that charging weapons may be impractical to use with only 2 fingers, although a lot of them have strong burst damage.
• Keep an eye on your armour. Since you don’t have a lot of it, it’s easy for it to get chopped down to 0. Keep in mind that your skill can also be used as a panic button, as in quickly escaping from a dangerous situation (not necessarily to chain).
• Use the skill’s inbuilt slash to your advantage. 12 damage may not seem like much, but it makes resetting easier if you know who you’re chaining on. Enemies with low enough HP will allow you to chain without having to damage them beforehand or afterwards, which can be great tactical usage of the slash.
• Try chaining on weaker enemies first. Usually, if you go immediately for the bulkier enemies, you won’t be able to deal enough damage to chain properly. Instead, damaging the group of enemies with your weapon and avoiding the attacks with a quick chain on a weak enemy buys you enough time to damage everyone consequently, allowing you to kill the bulky enemy(ies) with a chain.
• During bossfights, use the skill as an escape tool (panic button). You won’t be able to chain (unless the boss spawns other enemies, in which case you can use this to your advantage to chain during the fight), so the only good way to use it is when you feel you’re being cornered/have no way to escape in general.
• Adapt your skill usage in function of the biome you’re in. Yes, you’d tend to use the skill a bit differently depending on the biome. This is mostly due to regular enemy HP differences, and sometimes other stuff.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Forest, Dungeon, Grave, Halloween: there are more enemies below 13 HP than in other biomes, so you can easily make use of the slash.
• Glacier, Relics, Ruins, Knight Kingdom, Swamp, Cave, Volcano, Spaceship: these are your average biomes, with not a lot of weak enemies in later stages, so you can start being careful with your slash and make use of your weapons a bit more.
• Chiseltown, Neo Isle: these are the annoying biomes. Most enemies have more HP than usual, so chaining becomes more difficult. Make sure you damage them enough before trying to chain.
• Remember that the skill can be used to avoid debuffs such as Poison and Burn.
• Melee weapons can help, but are nowhere near necessary. Contrary to what his kit suggests, Assassin doesn’t really need melee weapons, since Dark Blade has more than enough iframes for survivability. You can carry one along in case you mess up, but in general, prioritise DPS. A good primary burst weapon and a throwable is the ideal build for this skill.

I sincerely hope this was helpful. Good luck to you!