Fred K wrote:
My personal build : it is +41 damage with better than a +20 to hit and no save worse than 20.
Sneak base damage is 43. Here is the math…
Base 43+weapon (av 6-8) plus 20 sneak. That yields around 50 plus 20 sneak. Typically, I’ll have bardsong running for an additional 4. I can sacrifice on saves and add another 6 base damage (more by the end of the year.) that yields between 70 and 80 base damage. Sneak yields are (base+weapon+bardsong)*3+20. Fairly routine damage above 200. In-person, crit slide rate are about 70+%. VTD, sneak crit rtes are about 15%.
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8note:I usually us the foot ghost rather than waist to get the rd sneak attack.
This is a good build. Since the third Sneak Attack per combat comes from a consumable, only works in a room with multiple enemies, and you mentioned a 70% crit rate in person, I'll go ahead and assume you'll crit with an average of 2 Sneak Attacks per combat.
So a damage modifier of +41, plus the average damage of 6.3 from the Assassin's Crossbow, will deal 142 damage on a crit plus another 20 from the Sneak Attack, or in other words 162 total. On a non-Sneak Attack round, assuming you don't slide a natural 20 you'll deal around 47 damage. Taking a 3-round combat as an example, this gives an average of (162+162+47)/3, or 124 damage per turn which will then continue to drop off if the combat lasts longer than 3 rounds or if for any reason one of the Sneak Attacks failed to land a crit.
Is 124 damage per turn from a BiS Epic build over 3 turns a large amount of damage? Certainly. Is it enough to cause problems for the game and require a fix? I'm having trouble seeing it. There are multiple other classes which can hit these numbers. Monk and Ranger can consistently slide for over 100 damage. Barbarian can hit over 100 damage via the use of Rage, or will simply outdamage the Rogue if they miss one or both of their crits. Wizards can deal colossal amounts of damage if a room has multiple targets in it. And again, if the combat lasts longer than 3 rounds or the Rogue misses/gets bumped off a crit then the Rogue's damage output will continue to drop off. Not only that, but because of how Assassin's Crossbow works, it becomes worse and worse compared to other weapons the lower your damage bonus is - as mentioned in Wayne's detailed post previously, Assassin's Crossbow is no better than other weapons unless your damage modifier exceeds +20, so even if it were to be considered a problem, it would still only only be applicable to Nightmare and Epic Rogue builds, a minority of the player base.
Additionally, as you've correctly pointed out, Rogues just don't slide crits very often in VTD, which means that Rogues will not hit these numbers during half of the events in a year.
On a more general note, I've seen a suggestion a few times to reprint Assassin's Crossbow but make it only crit on a natural 20. If that were to happen, it'd simply no longer see any play and Rogues would use Nightshade's Throwing Dagger instead as it would be a significantly better weapon which is readily available. At that point, the reprinted Assassin's Crossbow would be a dead PYP with little value to it.
I'm aware of the suggestion of a transmute path to a legendary Assassin's Crossbow with the original ability, but it's not clear to me how this would help the game. If Assassin's Crossbow is already a problem, why create an improved, legendary version of it? If Assassin's Crossbow is not already a problem, why nerf the UR version in favor of a transmuted one? That's not fixing a balance issue, it's just charging Rogue players $$$ if they want to keep using it.
