Roguish Archetype: Assassin 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Assassin rogue is a messy, complicated, munchkin-laden option. On its own, it can be deeply underwhelming with little opportunity to shine, but when allowed to shine, can be utterly debilitating for some DMs to deal with. It all is built around their Assassinate feature; almost every other option in the subclass is deeply lacking, leaving the bulk of its power resting on something you can easily pick up through multiclassing.

3rd Level: Bonus Proficiencies and Assassinate

Assassins get two bonus tool kits: disguise and poisoner kits. With the expanded tool uses from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything this is a lot better of a feature, but still not something I’m head over heels for. It pairs with the Poiosner Feat for some bonus damage if you invest in it, which is cool, and with the Create Diguise rules from Xanathar’s you can do some interesting stuff with both kits, but nothing close to what even low-tier magic can do. A level dip in wizard will give you access to Disguise Self, and Thief rogues can weaponize acid and poisons with more efficiency than Assassins can.

Assassinate is a problematic feature, specifically in its feast or famine gameplay. If you aren’t surprising a creature, Assassinate has nearly no text. Hiding and Steady Aim already give you plenty of easy ways to get advantage on your single important attack each round, leaving it transforming hits into crits against surprised creatures feeling like the only relevant words here. When you do get this off it will destroy enemies. Getting a crit within just the rogue class is about as fair as it gets, as you’re typically working with just one attack and Sneak Attack damage for a defined cap against a single entity.

What takes Assassinate to new levels of broken is its multiclass potential specifically with paladin’s Divine Smite feature. Any effect that adds damage dice to a weapon attack can crit, and there are not shortage of these kinds of features out there. All of them doubling their effectiveness leads to encouragement to use all of your features at once to get the most out of each, which results in a character doing one massive explosion of damage, then having little left to engage fights with.

Assassins often feel like they don’t have a 3rd level feature if they aren’t getting the jump on creatures, and most of D&D isn’t setting up traps and laying in wait- it's going into enemy traps and engaging enemies in their environments. With the only other feature you’ve got being some tool kits until 9th level, you’re left hoping to go into enough adventures able to set up ambushes or otherwise be left with nothing to show for your subclass selection.

From a DMs perspective, when you do go off, it takes a prepared encounter and throws the entire balance off. Doubling the incoming damage on a single source from the rogue can immediately drop the number of threats by one, majorly offsetting the intended encounter balance. If they compensate for that and add more entities on, if you miss your attack, now the encounter that accounted for your crit is overloaded with more enemies than they intended. Its a nightmare to account for and balance around.

9th Level: Infiltration Expertise

Infiltration Expertise starts off by letting you know most tables aren’t going to have any use for this. It takes a week to establish a false identity, and when established, has next to no impact on the actual game you couldn’t work with from just your backstory. This isn’t so much a feature as a codified course of actions attached to a 9th-level rogue for no particularly good reason. So much of D&D is high fantasy adventuring spent slaying monsters and fighting for a good cause; there isn’t a lot of room for most tables to explore political intrigue, which is where this kind of feature could pay off.

13th Level: Imposter

Actor isn’t a feat a lot of people are dying to take beyond flavor reasons. Imposter is Actor, but you can also mimic their writing! Like Infiltration Expertise, this feature wants to be at tables with espionage and intrigue, where a falsified letter from the king means something. Most tables aren’t that. It will have more opportunity for utility than Infiltration Expertise likely will, as falsified documents from a superior is something that can actually affect a decent chunk of adventures. Still, it isn’t doing nearly enough for it to be all you get here.

17th Level Feature: Death Strike

Want to kill something dead? Death Strike can do that! Basically, Death Strike doubles down on Assassinates feast or famine play style, letting something now save or take double your doubled sneak attack damage from the critical hit you’re getting from Assassinate. Like Assassinate, Death Strike has all of the failings, just while also being something you have to invest seventeen levels to get to, and whereas Assassinate is guaranteed, a surprised creature gets to save against Death Strike, making the infrequency of uses compound with opportunities to do nothing because something passed the save. If it's an important target, this likely just eats a Legendary Resistance.

All Together

The Assassin rogue subclass is primarily Assassinate, and little else. The bonus proficiencies are neat, and with some effort can somewhat be built around, but most of what you get in the mid-tiers is hard to use features that won’t shine at the majority of tables. With how fickle Assassinate is to use as a player, and how miserable it is to account for as a DM, Assassin desperately needs revising. When the namesake feature’s class doesn’t contribute more than three levels to the munchkin builds it enables, we clearly are dealing with a problematic feature that needs amending. If you want to be a rogue good at killing stuff, I’d recommend almost every other subclass over this for consistency’s sake. If you’re looking to build a character with the highest single target damage in a single round, you’re in the right place.

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Rogue 5e