Tactics question

[wally]

I'm in the process of taking a solo assassin as far as I can reasonably take him (on core difficulty) to see how far he can get before the game just outpaces him (i'm betting  that sooner or later, it will)


For Improved Illych, the rune assassins are the biggest pain in the buttocks--I can use detect illusion to counter their potion-quaffing invisibility, but it seems to me that no matter what, I can't detect them right at the beginning when they're just sort of chilling in the halls and corridors.  Basically, then, my assassin has had to either 1) soak up the backstab, hoping for a critical miss or 2) set traps to nab the guy if he doesn't have puppy companions.

Failing those two options, I had to resort to leading them into enclosed rooms and slamming the door on them.  Because of the limited number of such rooms, there was pretty much no way that I could deal with Illych and get his acorns (very important because of the summoning).

Was this intentional?

If not, is there something I can do locally to fix it?

thanks,

-wally

[jester]

soloing an assassin must really be hard, because after his sneak attack he is left naked next to the most powerful foes and that almost always goes awry. Never tried it but a Bountyhunter can go far, because he (a) has more traps to work with, /b) they actually damage a lot of creatures and © you can throw them at enemies which you cannot see yet. So sorry lots of babble and still no good advice for your assassin  :wacko:  

[wally]

actually, the assassin's poison skill is incredibly powerful in the early game.

picking up a shortbow which has a RoF of 2 per round, the assassin can pump an enemy so full of poison it's really quite disgusting--it's a minimum of 12 poison damage if the enemy makes the save (i think) and maximum of 24 poison damage if the enemy does not (also, I think) and it's delivered every second, so it's also good for spell disruption for a bit.

Not only that, but the poison damage animation slows down enemy pursuit so you can run off and hide in the shadows to repeat the entire backstab-missile-poison cycle again.

This becomes even more deadly with the Tuigan bow (RoF = 3) or darts (also RoF = 3).  Note, this poison damage affects monsters even if they are immune to the missile damage (though it doesn't work if the weapon is "ineffective")

so this is a way to kill the Otyugh at range, as well as the iron golem.



*potential bug*

I was killing the main slaver guy in the slave-quest with my assassin, and I had set a snare, then got him to follow me into the sewers (where the snare was).  I turned on the poison ability before he triggered the trap.  I didn't manage to get another hit on him, but I seemed to be dealing poison damage to him.


so if I can poison traps in this manner...that would be *disgustingly* powerful.

is this a game feature?

-wally