I thought I would post this burst guide for Assassins I found on another thread. It has a hit rotation that is very informative for full blown Deception Assassins. I can definitely see what I've been missing. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=177739 Hope this helps people!

Your experiences are unfortunately very typical for the Deception spec. It's safe to conclude based on this thread and many others that the Deception spec is not the spec of choice for many Assassins. And as Bioware tries to kill hybridizing specs, it will be interesting to see what becomes of Deception or if people will simply abandon it in favor of the Shadow spec that a majority of voices appear to agree is just much better in general.

Your insights definitely help a lot and I thank you for sharing them. What you've described meshes a lot with the strategies I've been using which is good since it means I don't appear to be missing anything too obvious. It also definitely seems to confirm the reality that as clothies, using the interrupts to stay alive is a must. Does anyone know of the full breadth of changes if any Bioware has made to the Deception Spec the past couple of updates? I've noticed definitely that if I hold off on my interrupts until the silvers or golds start casting, I'm doing much better. But then again, Talos is still a huge life saver in general. I pretty much never go down if Talos is healing, but I know to keep aggro off of him at all costs.

Sounds like you're Darkness spec, not Deception spec which is what we're talking about.

I've been messing around with my 50 Dec Assassin some more and I'm beginning to think the key is not to use your 4 interrupts in a normal hit rotation but to hold the interrupts for when you need to stop your opponent from casting or doing a special attack. I think the tricky part is realizing that only one of the interrupts ignores cooldown whereas the other 3 are affected by the standard cooldown timers. I know I used to use 2 of my cooldown-affected-interrupts in my hit rotation which probably explained some of the issues I was having early on trying to fight golds and multiple silvers with survivability instead of holding on to them to limit the damage of the mobs. Generally trash mobs aren't the problem- just the bosses and when you're getting hit by multiple silvers or a silver and a gold. I've begun to suspect that the Dec Assassin is more about limiting your opponents' ability to do damage than trying to dish out a ton of damage yourself. The spec isn't built to be high dps. It's a steady stream of damage going out that relies heavily on limiting the amount of damage coming in. Can anyone who's successful with the Deception Assassin taking out golds the SAME level as you confirm that this is how you're playing your Deception Assassin? I'll try it some more the next time I'm in game. I could do things on my Sith juggernaut like wipe out a group of 6 trash mobs in under 8 seconds, seek out and kill gold mobs for fun, or solo 2 gold mobs- things I could never do on my Dec Assassin. 2 very different styles of play with very different damage outputs and defense strategies. Any other 50s out there have thoughts on this?

Of the 3 Assassin specs, Deception is the hardest to play because it relies very heavily on interrupts to make up for the fact your dps isn't very high. Yes, you can bypass a lot of content being sneaky but the xps and loot you're not getting will hurt you if you're also not making sure your companions' gear are updated- which you can't do if you're bypassing content and not collecting stuff to sell.

When I fought Zash, she didn't match level with me so I don't know if this was a change that happened recently. I was 3 levels above Zash when I finally beat her, and I had about 200 hps left. I tried fighting her at 2 lvls above and couldn't pull it off. But I admit, my Khem had only default quest gear which meant he wouldn't last as long as he could. Lesson learned.

After I got Talos, I never died again unless I was experimenting or learning my other companions. Use him for all boss fights. Gear him up (and your other companions) and gear yourself up. Keep aggro off of him and you'll never die. He will keep you up no matter what if you just keep him focused on healing you.

I don't think the class has a problem at 50. The problem I think is that this class takes a lot more to learn how to play while leveling and that's where a lot of the frustration seems to be coming from. Gear up your companions, don't be afraid to run, kite, or be sneaky ******es and interrupt your opponent. Don't necessarily blow your interrupts in standard damage rotation. The key to survivability is to prevent your enemy from casting those ugly spells that kick your *** as a clothy.

It's a very different style of play with a lot of subtlety. If you're not subtle, this class is not for you.

I agree with this. As a lvl 50 Deception Assassin, my own experience bears this out. Of course along the way we learn how to play our classes and also to gear up your companions. The freebie quest gear is the bare minimum your companions should be using. You HAVE to gear up your companions if you want to give yourself larger margins of error and better overall performance, nevermind enjoyment.

This makes total sense. As I'm leveling my Sith Warrior Juggernaut to compare to my experience lvling my Assassin Deception spec to 50, I've noticed that gearing both myself and Vette up as much as possible early on makes a huge difference. Everything goes by faster. I went from handily beating my opponents to annhilating them. In the second floor of the Black Temple, I took out a group of 2 silvers, a wandering silver patrol, and a group of 5 trash mobs all at the same time. Pulled them all and took them all out. They never got me below half health. Vette with her top of the line dual blasters was just taking them apart from a distance while I destroyed each target I hit. So gear definitely makes a huge difference. I had so much fun doing that I cleared out the entire second floor of the Black Temple several times just to level my slicing. So the easy lesson here is definitely don't rely on the companion quest gear rewards. It's pretty paltry and considerably under what you can get in the auction house or from vendors.

Leveling fortunately isn't the issue as much as beating the storyline bosses and taking on multiple silvers or waves of opponents. The issue I and a lot of others had was that this spec feels weaker than all the others. My experiences leveling a Sith Warrior definitely appear to confirm this. But to be clear, playing a Dec Assassin is more challenging, but not less fun and the point of this thread is to see if we're missing something obvious or if the Dec Assassin spec itself really is underpowered. Once I got Talos it was easy street. Gear up Talos, keep aggro off of him and you'll never go down. I found Talos made the entire spec simple to play- didn't matter what combat rotation you used. I think we're all specifically interested in the strategies of those who beat shadow Zash and shadow Thanaton in the storyline quests at the level of the quest. I can see beefing up Khem with as high a gear as he can receive and beating Zash as was mentioned in the thread. What I would like see is for those who claim they beat Zash with nothing but default gear for Khem give us the strategy for how they did it. So far none of the people who claimed they were able to do it have given us an explanation for how they did it. I did it at 3 levels higher than the quest level, Khem in default quest armor died and I used a heal pack but I beat her.

I'm in agreement with you here. I'm leveling a Sith Warrior Juggernaut after I got my Dec Assassin to 50, I found that my Warrior can solo way more things than I could ever with the Dec Assassin. My Juggernaut is even soloing elite champions, something unthinkable as a Dec Assassin. Instead of posts from people who end up sounding mean spirited and like jerks (like Alenorah is portraying) let's have the folks who were able to take on Zash at the level she was at tell us what strategy or attack rotation they used to take her down. Did they use interrupts only to interrupt? Did they gear their companion as high as they could get them? Which companion did they use, etc? I'd certainly be interested if there was indeed something a lot of us were missing or if the claims that it's doable are actually not real. I'll level another Sith Assassin to just to test it out.

You're not alone noticing this. There's a pre-existing thread about this where we discuss if this is all in our heads or if specific strategies need to be used. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=184665 There is general consensus that the Deception spec is weaker than both Madness and Shadow BUT the spec is not unplayable- just very challenging. There are a number of key things you have to do the most important of which is to gear up your companion as high as possible for the level. The discussions are still ongoing in the other chain if you want to read up on it.