Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Class Warfare

[GameBanshee News]

IGN is offering up a two-part feature (here and here) detailing the different classes available to players in Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. Let's go with the Assassin:

When compared to the barbarian, Funcom asserts that the assassin is a more straightforward class since he won't be dealing with crowd control or managing multiple enemies. Instead, the assassin is almost exclusively about locking in on one target and eliminating it, though they do have limited splash damage and area-of-effect (AoE) capabilities. The assassin is built to have the highest single-target DPS in the game.

The assassin's feat trees, according to Funcom, change how they play more significantly than any other class, mostly because their functionality would otherwise be too limited. There are corruption and lotus branches of the feat tree. Assigning points to the corruption branch give the assassin unholy DoTs, life and stamina leeches, and they shore up his armor rating to a degree. Abilities triggered from this branch will require varying numbers of soul fragments, which are gained by successfully completing combos.

While the corruption tree works to make the assassin a little more hardy, the lotus tree veers more into the realm of poison, concentrating on multiple DoTs and chances to do additional damage. Though it's a higher damage output in lotus, the assassin only gets one heal ability this way, so he'll be more fragile. Also in this branch, the lower a target's health, the more powerful the assassin becomes. That doesn't mean the lotus branch is all about killing, though, as the assassin eventually gets an AoE confuse ability by continuing to assign points in this line.

Funcom says the lotus and corruption lines are not only represented by differing feat trees, but also by stances. The assassin will have to be careful about switching stances, since moving from corruption to lotus destroys any soul fragments in his possession.