I want to make an assassin build and I am curious for some feedback and advice on what perks to get, when to get them, etc etc.

RACE:

I plan to be either a khajiit or a wood elf, I think. Those seem like the obvious choices in terms of initial stat bonuses. Khajiit seems best just because their sneak starts even higher, and getting sneak up to a reasonable level is really important with any assassin character. However, I don't really see much of a use for Night Eye. I don't understand why people say it is really useful; I dont really have problems seeing stuff in the game, and night eye hardly makes stuff easier to see anyways. On the other hand, command animal is actually a pretty powerful power, while resistance to poison and to a lesser degree resistance to disease is a big deal. So I find it hard to decide which of the two races to be. What do people think?

STAT BONUSES:

At what ratio should I increase magicka, health, and stamina at level ups? I feel like I don't really need much of any of those things. I will use some illusion and alteration magic, but not enough of it that I need insane amounts of magicka. The ideal assassin would not get hit often, so he doesn't really need health much. And the ideal assassin would not get in prolonged fights much, so stamina is not that necessary beyond being used for carrying capacity and to give you more time to zoom in with your bow. Am I missing something? What is most important to increase?

PERKS:

Here's my preliminary thoughts on what I want to get, and some explanations for it. I've listed 80 perks because that's the limit. I know I almost certainly will never get all 80, so this is why I need people to tell me what to prioritize.


Archery:
Overdraw (5)
Eagle Eye
Critical Shot (3)
Steady Hand (2)
Power Shot
Quick Shot
Bullseye

I figure Hunter's Discipline and Ranger are neither powerful nor things that would serve an assassin that well. Most of these perks just serve to increase the damage my sneak attack bow shots will do. I could do without the last three, but I think they are a bit important for the inevitable times where someone doesn't die in the first stealth shot, or when fighting bosses/dragons who you can't really sneak attack.

One-Handed:
Armsman (5)
Dual Flurry(2)
Dual Savagery
Savage Strike

This is pretty simple. I will be using dual daggers a lot, so no other perks really help me that much. Dual Savagery and Savage Strike are good because most assassinations will be power attacks. The decapitation animation from Savage Strike is just an added cool bonus as well.

Sneak:
Stealth (5)
Muffled Movement
Backstab
Light Foot
Deadly Aim
Silent Roll
Assassin's Blade
Silence

This is fairly obvious. I suppose I could do without the muffled movement->light foot->silent roll->silence line of perks, but they will make sneaking easier and more convenient, and the rolling is rather fun I imagine. I decided not to go for Shadow Warrior since I think it sounds a bit cheesy and unrealistic. I dont want to be able to crouch and create a sneak attack when I was just being attacked by someone. Is there some other way to use that perk that is important that I am not realizing?

Illusion:
Every single perk.

I want this character to use illusion magic. Illusion is SO potentially helpful for an assassin character. Frenzy provides a great way to stealthily assassinate someone when there are a lot of enemies together. Calm spells are great if you are caught; just cast one and hide again. Fear spells could work similarly. Meanwhile, muffle and invisibility directly aid in stealth. I get all the perks because you sort of need all the illusion perks in order for illusion magic to work at higher levels.

Alteration:
Novice Alteration
Apprentice Alteration
Adept Alteration
Expert Alteration

This is mainly just to have the Detect Life and Detect Dead spells be affordable. I think those spells are integral for any assassin who wants to plan his route of attack. Meanwhile Paralyze seems like a spell useful for an assassin, while making the other various alteration spells affordable can never hurt.

Alchemy:
Alchemist (5)
Physician
Poisoner
Benefactor
Concentrated Poison
Green Thumb

These are mostly for making optimal poisons that will aid in assassination (as well as help in tough battles where it is unavoidable to fight face to face). I figure the last two perks in alchemy are unnecessary, especially if I go wood elf, because with the right gear, my character will be entirely resistant to poison anyways. I take Green Thumb just to make mass producing potions/poisons less tedious. Being able to make very powerful beneficial potions is a welcome benefit as well, but not THAT necessary.

Enchanting:
Enchanter (5)
Insightful Enchanter
Corpus Enchanter
Extra Effect

This will make my gear and weapons much more powerful obviously. I avoid the extra points to elemental enchantment damage since sneak attacks don't multiply that damage anyways.

Pickpocket:
Light Fingers (1)
Night Thief
Poisoned

While pickpocketing isn't an 'assassin' skill per se, it IS a stealth related skill that I'd likely partake in as a stealth character. So it doesn't hurt to put in some perk points into improving it. However, the main benefit here is the Poisoned perk, which gives me another creative way to assassinate people.

Smithing:
Steel Smithing
Arcane Blacksmith

Smithing perks would increase my damage some, but I can just level it up to 100 eventually, and still have really strong weapons (as have the option to use my powerful alchemy skills to make my improvements as good as someone who got all the perks anyways). The important thing here, though, is that I can improve magical items. As a dagger user, there will be a few very powerful unique daggers I will be able to get in the game. It's important to be able to improve them, and meanwhile, none of the other perks would allow me to improve those items further anyways (so there's no point in getting those perks if I am going to use unique daggers as expected).

Light Armor:
Agile Defender (4)
Custom Fit

These are sort of throwaway perks. I don't really need armor that much if I am an assassin. However, getting these 5 perks maximizes my armor rating increase from the perks, as I almost certainly will be wearing all light armor, so custom fit is better than any extra agile defender.



What do people think? What should I focus on first? Is there any perk I listed that is worthless? Is there any perk I overlooked that I should get for an assassin?

I have 51lvl assassin on expert so Ill give some thoughts:

1. You probably dont need enchanting as you will most likely use Shrouded Armor, Blade of Woe+Mehrunes Razor and Nightingale Bow. So many enchant perks just for ring and neck?
2. You might wanna focus mostly on either bow or daggers or you might be too thin spread for perks. For example my assassin has no archery/magic and does just fine. Pure melee needs dragonrend asap though.
3. If you play daggers you MUST get Shadow Warrior. Learn to time your stealth+strike right and you can backstab in the middle of combat multiple times.
4. Illusion is fun and really powerfull but to use it you need either mana or several pieces with fortify illusion. Nightingale Hood and peerless neck+ring is probably enough.
5. Dont take alteration for detect life. Theres a silent shout for that.
6. I would go for Wind Walker perk in light armor tree. Its great.
7. The Savage Strikes decapitation doesnt work with daggers.
8. If you play higher diffuculty than adept then consider taking a race with some resistance. Its mostly casters/dragon breath that kills you. My assassin is orc and I wish I would have taken breton.
9. Use lord guardian stone. 25% magic res+50 points physical resistance is amazing.

I'm playing (and working toward to) a similar build. Differences are mostly that I don't plan on alteration and will probably have fewer points in archery. One of my issues with playing a character that uses dual-wield, bow and magic is that I find the hotkey management to be rather tedious and frequently glitchy (the spell showing up in the wrong hand), so it can get a tad twitchy.

Some thoughts:

- I feel that the +50% stamina regeneration perk in the light armour tree is highly useful, if you dual-wield face-to-face.
- The same goes for the rest of the light armour perks, and for fighting stance/savage strike in the 1H tree.
- If shadow warrior isn't the goal, I think the perks leading to it can probably be saved.
- Various of the higher archery perks don't seem worth it for this build since you'll one-shot most things anyway, or have to melee them, and 15% stagger change is low.
- I think I like soul siphon as a quality-of-like perk, but unsure about "not people" restriction.

The rough build for my character looks like this:
http://www.jayzar.co.uk/#kO0000e2o001W0e|00F|u0000000000l00005|i3W

There are some unused perks, mostly because leveling after 50 really slows down. It's also flexible insofar that some of the light armour stuff could be moved to archery if practice shows that I shoot more than that I dual wield, but so far it's the other way around. Personally, I'd probably go for more points in alchemy and enchanting.

Stats ... stamina is really important when you dual wield, and you need it for archery too (less so). I'd say definitely 200 here, depending on enchants. Health, well, I always either have too little or too much. Probably a preference thing here, and also playstyle. Magicka is something I'm completely unsure about, because I have not yet put points into illusion (the character is mid 20s) as I wanted to cover the combat side first and, more importantly, because I simply didn't know if I want to put points into magicka (and how many). I'm interested in thoughts from others about this, too.

From what I start seeing is that the whole dual wield aspect may not be needed (provided you get shadow warrior so you can backstab them in the face after the opening), especially not with illusion in the picture. I still have it and am pretty sure to keep it because it breaks the sameness of the build a bit and gives me another combat style for when I feel like it. It's definitely useful to have early on.

Go 50-50 or 60-40 hp/stamina. If youre dying get resistances.

My main concern there is the fact that the detect life shout has a 30-50 second cooldown for 10 seconds of detect life. I dont really want to have to wait around a bunch before entering rooms because my detect life shout is on cooldown. I also want to be able to use the throw voice shout to get enemies where I want them to be, and that won't work if my shouts are on cooldown.



I mostly agree with this. I probably won't use nightingale bow though because I hear it doesnt work properly with sneak attacks. Idk if that's true, but if it is, I'd definitely like to be able to have a well enchanted bow. With that said, though, you are mostly right about enchantments. At the very least, I think these perks would be things I would leave until near the end of my leveling to do, and just use them to make uber powerful stuff for fun. For most of the game, Shrouded Armor + Blade of Woe + Mehrunes Razor will be good.



How much magicka do you think I'd need? I don't really need insane amounts of health or stamina, so I sort of have the option to pump up magicka some in order to facilitate illusion.

The more I think about this, the more I question whether there is a point in having illusion and archery, in addition to the dagger stuff. With bow sneak attacks so strong, where would you use illusion spells? Or differently put, which situations would you use a bow in where illusion (or backstabbing) wouldn't suffice? Dragons aside.

I'm actually leaning toward dropping archery for my build entirely, and just relay on illusion and backstabbing. Dragons and bosses may still be a problem. I'd actually like to do away with dual wield as well, which then in turn would allow for fewer perks in light armour. But yes, there's dragons and bosses ...

I've thought about this too. Part of me wanting illusion and archery is just to give me different options to use in a fight; that makes things more fun for me. However, I do actually think archery is useful when there are guys who are far away and difficult to get to with melee (ie. a guy on top of a castle, etc etc). I think illusion is useful if there are a lot of enemies together (such that you can't really dagger sneak attack them without being detected, and if you use your bow to kill one, you'd alert the rest). Eventually, I think one's sneak gets so good that you can actually backstab multiple enemies right in front of each other. However, that feels a tad unrealistic to me, so I'd like to avoid doing that even if it is possible. Illusion is also useful as calm is a good panic button.

I think for myself, I decided to ignore illusion for my current build. Perks-wise, I can't fit it all on the same character while leveling. Now, in his 20s, I would have trouble with lower stealth, dual-wield and lower 1H skill, and by now I would also need a decent investment in illusion for it to work, which would also have resulted in a higher level (I just started to squeeze in some smithing skill because the character's performance has started to tapper off). From the end-build perspective, it works out well, but the "getting there" is a bit harder, particularly with also having to juggle magicka. And there is the hotkey problem (see my thread http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1290385-hotkey-issues-dual-wield-1hspell/, which applies directly to this build). As I do want dual-wield (more of a RP thing), this is crucial.

So for myself, I think I'll get some archery (I feel that everything above Eagle Eye and the crit perk may be an overkill for this build) and wait with illusion for a different character, or at least until the patch (next week?) to see if the problem is being addressed. I did see some posts where people say that mobs at higher levels still resist even with maxed and perked-out illusion, but I didn't look more deeply into that. Lastly, looking at some potions, several of the illusion advantages can be somewhat emulated by potions (frenzy, invisibility) and Shadow Warrior (indirect calm).

Yeah, getting there will be hard with all the stuff I want to use. It's especially tough because illusion is worthless unless you pay attention to it (without updated spells and some perks, spells won't work on the enemies you find at any given level).

What I figure, though, is that backstabbing and such is so powerful as it is that I dont REALLY need huge perk investments in it early. All I need are some sneak perks and the x2 backstab gloves and the damage takes care of itself. At high levels, that might not be true, but by that time, I will be able to perk other stuff besides illusion.

And yeah, the hotkey thing is a big problem. I've found that using bows can help this issue a bit btw. If you have your dual daggers out, and you want to use a spell, you can quickly switch to your bow, and then immediately switch to your spell. This way you can go back to the daggers without going into the favorites menu because the spell comes after the bow. Since the bow is two-handed, the spell doesn't actually replace anything in a previous load-out; it just becomes a new load-out. Of course, this is annoying in and of itself, but I find it less annoying personally.

Illusion is a complete waste.... thats what SNEAK is for.....

Assassins DON'T use magic.

If assassins don't use magic, then why did the Dark Brotherhood armor in Oblivion have a fortify illusion effect on it? In my mind, assassins can absolutely use magic, and I think it's clear Bethesda agrees with that. If you don't want to use illusion yourself for role-play reasons, then that's fine, but I think it's very easy for many people to justify using illusion as an assassin.

No , I looked over the entire illusion spell list , all worthless if you have high sneak and boots with muffle on them....

Thats 100 skill and several perks that could better be spent in smithing ior enchanting so you can have an OP Bow/Knives

This is true, muffle boots do eliminate muffle spell. And invisibility will be common from your potion perks- and is not an astounding improvement when you already have high sneak. If you take away muffle and just use some pots for the situational invisibility- Then the illusion tree starts to wither considering the amounts of perks it needs (all of them)

Good on your for realizing the smithing game- most don't. steel-arcane, you save yourself 7 perks that way.

Light armor stamina recovery is awesome unless you don't mind the cheddar of pausing the game to chug pots all day.

I agree with you on shadow warrior as well, our characters may wind up being similar. I did take stability and 3 resistance magic in the alteration tree. Stability is a 50 percent increase in the duration so it makes the armors more useful.

Good luck.

About invisibility , my Rogue may as well be invisible even when hes not invisible.... 100 in sneak plus sneak augmenting gear and muffled boots is so crazy that I can even stand right in front of a person and it still says hidden... you don't NEED "full" invisibilty , plus if you have full invisibility you ruin the fun of sneaking around cautiously

You don't necessarily need Muffle or Invisibility with high sneak and muffle boots, but those are not the main spells in the illusion tree.

- You might need frenzy spells if you are faced with a group of enemies in close proximity. It's pretty hard to stealthily kill super close enemies one by one without being seen, and in my mind, if sneak gets so good that I CAN backstab people right in front of others without them noticing, then that feels wrong, and I'd rather go about that situation in a different, more legitimate feeling way. Frenzy provides that different way. That's just my feeling on that though; I'm sure most people don't feel that way about incredibly effective stealth.
- Calm spells can allow you to get away and hide again if you are seen. Sure, Shadow Warrior can do something similar, but it's less effective, takes 100 sneak to get (ie. you'll get it much later in the game, limiting its overall use), and also seems less legitimate to me.
- In a pure role play sense, fear spells can be a bit fun. You can imagine that things are so afraid at the sight of you (presumably a legendary assassin) that they run away in pure fear. You then kill them in cold blood when they cower. It fits with the assassin role play, even if its not necessary to get through fights.
- You mention that you can have boots with muffle on them instead of using a muffle spell. That's true, but someone who uses illusion doesn't need muffle enchantment on his boots and thus can enchant the boots with something else. This is, of course, useful if you choose to take advantage of it.

EDIT:
Also, I don't really need perks into enchantment and smithing in this build. Ultimately I will probably want to use unique daggers (such as blade of woe and mehrunes razor). They are awesome and you only need two perks (to get arcane blacksmith) to max out how much you can improve them since they aren't technically a certain type of dagger that the perks help you improve (ie. they aren't daedric or elven or something). Same with the armor I will be using, which will likely be the dark brotherhood stuff, which is unique and so extra smithing perks won't help.

As for enchantment, the only enchanting perks I left off this build were the increase fire/frost/storm enchantment damage and the soul trap perks. The soul trap ones are totally unnecessary, and the extra elemental enchantment damage is nice but not very necessary. That damage doesnt multiply with sneak attacks, so elemental damage will only be a small part of my damage, and if I use the unique daggers I just spoke of, I won't have those enchantments anyways.

So where are the extra perks you think I should have? I realize that without having to up illusion, I can get other perks more quickly, but it's not like I'm planning on missing integral smithing and enchantment perks.