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Just thought to inform you guys; I just found out that the damage dealt with the Assassin's poison is hasted if the poisoned character is hastened.

Poisoned some arrows and fired away agains that mage-shadowthief in Irenicus dungeon. He just finished casting hast and then he was damaged like twice per second or so.

Ok, so all you silent killers out there: Aim for the hastened enemy. :devil: :mischief:

Yup. Its the same for regeneration.

1hp regen / round (6 seconds) will become 2hp per round when hasted

Neat. The assassin's poison power never seemed that useful to me but this can help a little. Any more tips about how to make the assassin a little more effective? I know the 7x backstab is great but assassins always seem to be lackin a bit in BG2.

LACKING???!!!
Man you've really missed something here. The Assassin is great.
The x7 backstabb is great, but her most effectiv weapon is the poison, especially since the power of the poison goes up with the assassins level.

I assume you already know about poisoning your arrows, right? That is the way I dissable every spellcasters ability to cast spells. A poisoned caster is most unlikly to succed in casting any spell without being disrupted.

Why, the poison is really good against meeleers too, and since the poisoned enemy must stop for the "take damage" animation every second, your thief (and maybe also the rest of your party) get the chance of outrunning your enemies and get into safety.

You can also make the poisoning effect stack. The poison effect lasts for 24 seconds, and if you use another poison before the first one has expired the damage stacks. This can be DEVESTATING damage to your enemies.

If you want tips I can go on.

About that backstabb; always chose a weapon with as low speed factor and as high enchantment as possible.
Put your proficency ponts in scimitars and shortswords, these are the best choise for the assassin.
Do NOT spend any points in katana. Yeah sure, it's the most damaging one handed weapon type in the game, but it's a disaster if you're going backstab.
That is becouse there isn't any high enchanted ones in the game and your backstabb weapon should have as high minimum damadge as possibe; and katanas has a speed factor of 3 so if you mess up a backstabb you have less time to run and rehide.

And get proficency in shortbow for the Tuigan shortbow. That bow is the best in regarding to poison as many enemies as possible.

The down side of the assassin is that it's not a good adventure-thief becouse of the cheap thief skill source / level. The assassin is a killer and should focus on hide, move silently, and then one or maybe two other skills; Otherwise you'll be sure to end ut like a thief with just crap skills and no potensial at all.
(I say skipp detect illusion, sadly enough, and set trap; and spend you points on find trap and open lock. Those two skills are the ones you really NEED. Alternative get Imoen, Nalia or one of those to cover open locks and find traps.)


Look, I've only scraped the surface of the assassins potencial. If you're intressted in learning the thief more deeply and discover thiefs true potencial I HIGHLY recomend this Thief Guide from gamefaqs.com:

http://db.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/ ... _thief.txt

Dont get me wrong, I liked my assassin.
I played him like, well, like an assassin, put all points in Hide in Shadows and the like. I left the burglary stuff to Jan.
I knew about poisoning arrows, I even used the trick to poison explosive arrows; great against groups low-level enemies. :mischief:
But I never thought to actually stack the effect. Great idea.
Another thing I didn't know was that the poison's strength goes up as the assassin goes up in level - are you really sure about that? I vaguely recall being miffed about the poison NOT improving.
As for your weapon choices: great thinking. I equipped my assassin with a katana and it seemed a like a good idea at the time. I did give him the Tuigan bow though.
I might try an assassin again - when I start another game, but that won't be for some time. After 6 times through the entire series I decided to give it a long rest. Thanks for the tips though, I'll keep them in mind.

Yeah, I'm sure. That info comes from Chris Lee's Thief guide (that link above) and he's going though the scripting to find out improvment of traps and poison (among other things).

No I'm not getting you wrong in any way, just a little suprised.

And the poison is as follows:

At 1st level the poison does 6 dmg over 6s in 30s. Save for 6 dmg over 6s.

At 10th level the poison does 30 dmg over 14s. Save for 6 dmg over 2s.

At 15th level the poison does 42 dmg over 14s. Save for 12 dmg over 4s.
Enemies must also save vs. death or be slowed for 30s.