Assassin Rogue: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide

Deadly rogues, proficient with poison and harbouring a serious case of imposter syndrome.

What is an assassin?

They pass unseen, dealing death to those they deem worthy of it (which is often dependant on how much is being paid to kill their target). This is the way of the assassin. Whether by distraction or disguise, poison or blade, assassin’s have a whole arsenal of methods of death at their fingertips along with many ways to pass noticed.

The deadliest of rogues, assassins are not just good at assassinating. In combat, they’re quick off the mark to stab those too slow to defend themselves, have an unerringly steady aim and can inject poison with precision. Outside of combat, they’re masters of disguise and mimicry, capable of infiltrating high security institutions with the aid of some careful planning and their disguise kit.

You’ll find examples of assassins in all sorts of media. Marvel has Black Widow, Assassin’s Creed has Ezio Auditore (and all the other protagonists) and John Wick has John Wick (if you want an assassin with guns).

Assassin’s are one of the original rogue subclasses from the 2014 Player’s Handbook and they’ve had a refresh in the 2024 revision. This guide will take you through the revised version of the assassin with advice around tactics, builds and optimisation.

At a glance

Stealthy class ideal for cunning and sneaky characters
Land high damage hits with sneak attacks (even higher than other rogue subclasses)
Pass unseen with disguises, stealth and other techniques at your disposal
Become even more deadly with your poisonous attacks and incredibly steady aim

What’s changed in D&D 2024?

Quite a lot has changed for this revision. Power levels have been scaled down significantly while certain more practical elements are improved making them less of a first round wonder and a little more consistent throughout combat. These changes include:

Weakened assassinate feature – Assassins no longer causes a critical hit when they land an assassination. Instead, the extra damage is equal to their rogue level. Considering that this occurred on a sneak attack, this is a significant reduction in damage, even if it does provide a little more balanced to the power levels.
Surprised not necessary – The surprised condition has been altered and with that, so have the requirements for assassinate which only requires you to take your first turn before the target rather than have them surprised.
Advantage on initiative rolls – To help you react before your enemies, assassin’s have advantage on initiative rolls.
Enhanced poison cunning strike – When using the poison cunning strike, it deals extra damage that isn’t affected by poison resistance.
Tools – You actually get a poison and disguise kit with the subclass, not just proficiency.
Improved steady aim – They’re such good shots that assassin’s can run and gun and still get the advantage from steady aim.

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Assassin features

Assassinate – Lv3

How it works

You gain the following abilities:

Advantage on initiative rolls.
In the first round of combat, against a creature that hasn’t had a turn yet, you have advantage on attacks rolls and land extra sneak attack damage equal to your rogue level.

Tactics

Landing a sneak attack in the first round of combat is particularly important for assassins. Invest heavily in dexterity (you should do anyway) to increase the odds of this.
Steady aim will help ensure you can usually have advantage in some form to land your sneak attack.
The alert origin feat may be worth grabbing for the initiative boost. Or have an ally grab it in case you happen to roll poorly still (they can swap their initiative score with yours).
Your advantage on initiative rolls also stacks with the surprised condition as this imposes disadvantage on enemy initiative rolls. This means stealth before combat can be very useful.

Assassin’s tools – Lv3

How it works

You now have proficiency with disguise kits and poisoner’s kits and gain one of each.

Tactics

Having a poisoner’s kit is important for landing the poison cunning strike from level 5. Unfortunately, using basic poison is barely worth it at the expense of a bonus action for an extra D4 damage. It’s cool you can detect poison, but this rarely comes up.
Your disguise kit proficiency is more likely to be useful as infiltration and mimicry can be made quite common if you choose these tactics. Especially at level 9 when you become a mimicking pro.

Infiltration expertise – Lv9

How it works

If you observe someone for at least an hour, you can unerringly mimic their speech and handwriting.

You can also move and use your roguish steady aim feature.

Tactics

Identity theft is now a real ambition. Such methods of subterfuge can be hugely fun and rewarding as well as really challenging. But use them to avoid a fight. Just make sure you have a high charisma and proficiency in face skills (especially deception).
Play as a Changeling (yes, D&D 2024 is backwards compatible with old races that haven’t been revised yet) so you can look exactly like the target of your impersonation. Or use magic to accomplish this.
Enjoy advantage basically whenever you need it for sneak attack with steady aim while on the move.

Envenom weapons – Lv13

How it works

An extra 2d6 poison damage when you use the poison option of cunning strike that ignores resistances.

Tactics

This makes poison your go to sneak attacking cunning strike as it costs 1d6 of damage but adds 2d6 plus the poisoned condition.
This damage can’t be resisted, but your normal sneak attack damage can which is useful. Though the idea that poison can affect undead creatures like skeletons and spectres is slightly amusing. But presumably in a world of magic, this can be done somehow.

Death strike – Lv17

How it works

In the first round of combat, if you land a sneak attack and the target fails a constitution saving throw, then damage is doubled.

Tactics

While this is less damage than it used to be with instant criticals against surprised opponents, it’s still a lot of damage with all the sneak attack dice at this level and your extra assassinate damage (which will be at least 17 at this point).
Avoid using cunning strikes for this round that will reduce your damage output unless it’s really important to do so. The exception is poison which will increase your damage output, so you should definitely use that this round.
Make sure you land your sneak attack in the first round of combat. Use the likes of the nick weapon mastery and steady aim for an extra attack and advantage to make you nearly unmissable. failing that, heroic inspiration will help too, or the lucky origin feat.

Building an assassin

Assassin’s rely heavily on landing high damage attacks, especially early in combat. Your build should work around maximising on this and ensuring you can land those all important sneak attacks and especially assassinations.

Below I’ve put together how you can build an optimal assassin.

Ability scores

Recommended options

Dexterity: Important for AC, attacks, initiative and stealth skills. A must have for any rogue.
Charisma: With all the sneaking and mimicry, you may find you need to be a dab-hand at deception or persuasion so a decent charisma is particularly important for an assassin.
Constitution: You might be dodging in and out of danger, but you’ll still likely find yourself regularly getting a bruising. Especially if you plan on getting close to your targets.

Options to avoid

Wisdom: Only useful for skills and saving throws but you’ve got too much else to focus on anyway.
Intelligence: Again, only useful for the odd skill and little else.
Strength: Pointless on a rogue. You should dump this.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	8	8
Dexterity	15	15
Constitution	15	13
Intelligence	8	12
Wisdom	8	10
Charisma	15	14

Skills

Recommended options

Acrobatics: Good for any physical activities and works with your dexterity, unlike athletics.
Deception: Crucial face skill for an assassin.
Insight: Great face skill.
Intimidation: Decent face skill and may be an important option when impersonating an official for example.
Investigation: Good option for discovering things.
Perception: Always useful, especially for the guy at the front checking for traps.
Persuasion: Top face skill. Essential for an assassin engaging in subterfuge.
Sleight of Hand: You’ll need this for unpicking locks and disarming traps.
Stealth: Essential for a rogue as you’ll definitely need to sneak around places.

Options to avoid

Athletics: You’re far better off going for acrobatics.

Species/race

There are a few things to consider when choosing a species for an assassin:

Safety first: Rogues are not as tough as other martials so anything that can help keep you safe is a good option. Resilience features can be useful too, but they tend to be secondary as you’re better off just avoiding damage altogether.
Innate spellcasting: You can’t repeat cast spells and likely won’t be investing heavily in a spellcasting ability so often not the best option.

Recommended options

Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness. For celestial revelation, all the options are useful but you usually want to avoid being surrounded by enemies, making flight your best option. Use this to launch projectiles from the relative safety of the skies. And you can still hide in the air, popping out from behind trees, buildings and other things. It’s also useful outside of combat for accessing awkward places. A bit of healing is a decent emergency option too.
Halflings (2024): Much easier hiding is great for a rogue, allowing you to hide behind your wizard (or other ranged character of medium size) and jump out with sneak attacks. Luck is universally great, but especially good for a class with lots of high risk, high reward rolls like being stealthy, disarming traps, trying to deceive others and attempting to land sneak attacks. Brave gives you a little extra resilience which is always handy.
Gnomes (2024): A Forest Gnome’s minor illusion and speak with animals actually work really well for an assassin as they don’t require spell slots. Minor illusion is a cantrip that’s great for distractions and speak with animals can be cast as a ritual for information gathering. Gnomish cunning is an excellent durability feature against some very common saving throws.

Options to avoid

Tiefling (2024): It’s hard to justify a cantrip attack over sneak attack, especially when your dexterity will be superior to any spellcasting ability. The other spells can only be cast once, and with an inferior spellcasting ability.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. Remember that you can either choose to increase one of the ability score options from a background by 2 and the other by 1, or you can choose to increase all 3 ability scores by 1.

You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

Primarily, you want to focus on increasing key ability scores with the associated origin feat being your next priority. As such, I’d suggest the below are your best backgrounds for an assassin:

Name	Ability scores	Origin feat	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency
Criminal	Dexterity, constitution, intelligence	Alert	Sleight of hand, stealth	Thieves tools
Charlatan	Dexterity, constitution, charisma	Skilled	Deception, sleight of hand	Forgery kit
Entertainer	Strength, dexterity, charisma	Musician	Acrobatics, performance	One kind of musical instrument
Guide	Dexterity, constitution, wisdom	Magic initiate (druid)	stealth, survival	Cartographer’s tools
Wayfarer	Dexterity, wisdom, charisma	Lucky	Insight, stealth	Thieves’ tools

Prioritising dexterity and charisma is best with constitution as a lesser option. Your best origin feats are alert, skilled, musician and lucky (as explained in the next section).

Guide lacks charisma or a good origin feat option. Entertainer has your worst options for skills while criminal lacks the charisma increase. This leaves you with charlatan and wayfarer with good options across the board for both.

Feats

At 1st level, you can grab an origin feat through your background and from level 4, you can pick up a general feat (or another origin feat if you want) instead of an ability score increase.

General feats are all half feats now as they give an ability score increase and the traits of a feat. But you’ll only get +1 to an ability score rather than the +2 you’d get from increasing your ability score. Make sure you go with a feat with an appropriate ability score increase (dexterity, charisma.and constitution are best for an assassin).

Below are some feats I’d recommend for an assassin:

Origin feats

Alert – It’s really important for assassins to go early in combat for their enhanced sneak attack damage. This stacks with initiative advantage from your assassinate feature and the surprised condition too.
Lucky – More ways to be reliable at important rolls is universally beneficial. Especially for when you need to land that first round sneak attack.
Musician – A universally great feat for dishing out heroic inspiration. Great for altruistic rogues. Plus you can ensure you have some heroic inspiration available too.
Skilled – You may find you need a lot of skill proficiencies as subterfuge and impostering require dexterity and face skill proficiencies.

General feats

Actor – Great if you want to impersonate others a lot and tackle some subterfuge. You’ll need some high charisma and face skill proficiencies to pull this off though. Your disguise kit proficiency and mimicry will help here though.
Defensive duelist – Better AC at the expense of your reaction is a strong option.
Inspiring leader – Great for charisma-heavy assassins to grant temporary hit points to the party.
Mage slayer – Best against mages, but having what is practically legendary resistance is also great.
Piercer – Better damage for most of the best assassin weapons. Especially when you land a critical.
Skulker – Become really reliable at hiding. Blindsight is also great in certain situations that you could even exploit in combat through things like the darkness spell (if you work with an ally).
Speedy – Good for hit and run tactics when you don’t want to use your bonus action on disengaging.

Weapons

You’ll want to go with finesse and ranged weapons that can take advantage of your dexterity for attacks. The specific weapons you choose though, will depend partly on how you want to fight and what weapon mastery properties you want to be using:

A light crossbow is your best ranged option with the highest damage available and long range attacks.
As landing sneak attacks is so important to your damage output, getting a second attack is quite important to ensure you’re not reliant on a single attack. Because you’ll need your bonus action for other things than offhand attacks, this means weapons with the nick weapon mastery are more important for you than the weapon’s damage output. This means going for daggers or scimitars.
You can grab a shortsword to pair with a dagger or scimitar for easy advantage with vex and for your second attack. A scimitar does more damage than a dagger so is a better option, unless you want to take the piercer feat, in which case, go for a dagger.
If you want 2 attacks at range, you can also grab 2 daggers and use their thrown property.

Armor

Your only real option here is studded leather as it’s so cheap that it’s easily available and you can only wear light armor anyway. No other type of light armor is better than studded leather.