May 24 2025 Devblog

Addressing Assassin Cross PvE and One Sucky Boy

SinX in heRO is an undisputed powerhouse of a class after more than a decade in irrelevance. Multiple builds are available, and depending on the build, SinX can handle both solo farming and high-end party play. The GM team wants to comment on the various styles of SinX and what the GM team feels about each mainstream build.

About Assassin Cross

We'll discuss SinX according to mainstream build. There may be questions about Assassin's poison build. Like any other classes, not all skills are equally viable at the moment and we recognize that. Like any other classes, we may address it at another time if possible, but there are other classes that need much more help than one particular build for a class that has many other options at the moment.

Grimtooth

There's been no change to Grimtooth except Auger Driver release, and this was the default line of play available to Sinx for the longest time. Auger Driver powers up Grimtooth to be the best weapon available for this build, and is the baseline comparison. Grimtooth is purely for solo play, requiring nondetection against insects/demons and overall. Survival depends on h,igh flee, which drops significantly if there are a lot of enemy mobs. Power can increase substantially, but a constant EDP is required to keep up the damage. The viability of Grimtooth is less dependent on the class, but more on whether a suitable map exists for Sinx to mob up the map and Grimtooth to reap in the rewards. You can use Grimtooth as a Sin, and Grimtooth with minimum gears. Gears only make things efficient, but there are no major build-enablers. The GM team thinks Grimtooth's build is in a great spot, and it's key to the sin levelling experience.

Sonic Blow OTK

Sonic Blow OTK build is ancient build that's not very popular. Sonic Blow can do massive damage but locks you to its animation. The only way not to get killed by the retaliation is if Sonic Blow can one-shot the target. Generally, this is done by stacking as many multipliers as possible. Because of this, this is almost exclusively done as Sinx, even though it's theoretically possible as a Sin, as EDP's too big of a boost. Soul Link also enables many options because of the massive power boost. With potential elemental advantage, Sinx can try to one-shot monsters in the low 20k range up to even 50k to 60k range, resulting in this being one of the traditional ways to solo farm Biolabs.

This build has fallen way behind in popularity: it has a relatively high gear threshold, as you need all the proper cards to get as much damage as possible for the OHKO against the target of choice. It requires a lot of items, so it has a very high cost to assemble the build for minimal access to a small pool of maps with worthy targets to go after (though admittedly, if you can reach biolab then it can be well worth it.)

A potential change we are considering is to move some part of the soul link sonic blow's damage to regular sonic blow to reduce the damage difference of link vs no-link sonic blow, but do it in such a way that the total damage of linked sonic blow is the same. This way, the build may not feel as punishing without a dedicated linker in town. This is an ongoing issue that heRO GM sees in all soul links: either the soul link doesn't matter, or it's so vital to the build that it falls apart without the soul link. Many players have requested that a soul link buff be bought in town, but if that's the case, why not just remove the soul link and have the skill do what the soul link allows? How can we make it so that soul link buffs the build, but the build is functional without it? We think that what we've done with battle prof with autocasts strike a decent middle ground, so we may consider doing something similar with sonic blow: keep it so that soul link is a boost to sonic blow, but narrow the gap of sonic blow with and without soul link as well.

Soul Breaker

We have given a lot of thought to Soul Breaker: people have seen what a fully geared Soul Breaker Sinx can do: famously, one of the best builds that uses ice pick against high def target, and recent boosts make Soul Breaker much more powerful. We did not want Soul Breaker to be like any other highly spammable, fast-cast spell, so we kept its clunky cast time and after-cast delay. Instead, we really boosted its potential in damage, giving it Jitterbug Card for new potential damage, especially when there are up to 8 of them potentially. Soul Breaker still has a lot of wiggle room that you can take a safe path of all INT so that it cannot miss, but sparing any dex or int to have more str for even higher damage is always tempting, and we always prefer builds where the stat spread has a lot of options.

Soul breaker solo has a lot of risks like sonic blow and requires high damage to be relevant for farming/levelling. But in a party setting, when it's well supported and protected by the party, Soul Breaker is one of the highest damage dealers in the game, comparable with other builds such as Champion, Gunslinger (very underrated), Sniper, Creator or High Wizard with correct elemental advantage. Soul Breaker is single target, and there's no flexibility, unlike the other classes, where they may have support or AoE abilities. Soul Breaker is here to do all the single target damage possible. However, to get there, you need a massive amount of investment. Jitterbug Card is really expensive and you need multiple. You may need to incorporate a red build using Gray gear sets and Angvi card, which is also expensive. Soul Breaker build has no defensive options and no shield, making it very squishy and dependent on the team for survival. Although the damage by soul breaker is insane, we don't think that it's unfair at all. Once you factor in the inflexibility, the need for a party and the massive amount of investments required, Soul Breaker needs the numbers it is on right now to compare with a fully built Champion, Sniper or Creator to justify the investment. Therefore, we see no need to nerf to do any further edits to Soul Breaker at the moment.

Meteor Assault

Finally, we come down to Meteor Assault (MA). It went from unusable to being a dominant skill. It is a low investment to start, so it can be a good levelling skill, high damage output due to high attack speed and decent scaling, it is AoE, it has great ceiling since it can take advantage, and it's less risky than Soul Breaker since it has protection from flee and hide. It seems to do it all with no downside, so are GMs thinking of nerfing Meteor Assault then? If so, how?

One of Meteor Assault's strengths is to "hold the button and damage appears" due to its spammability. Part of it is the lowered SP cost, but in a party or with some SP recoup setup (easter bunny or just SP items), then it's just a minor cost increase to the build. The other part is the high spamability via holding the button. Our TD members helped the GMs figure out that this may actually be something in the client we are using right now. As a lot of us are getting older, no one is interested in suffering from carpal tunnel to spam a keystroke, so we made it easier to play RO by allowing players to hold a button to spam a hotkey. However, that broke the ASPD limit of 190 (5 attacks per second). So currently, MA is overperforming because it is being used faster than it should. This bug is not unique to MA, but to some other skills too, but MA is the most obvious because it is self-targeting (skips the step to target something), and naturally ASPD scaling + 0 cooldown, so you don't need a party to set up the conditions. We may have a short-term fix to semi-address MA to make it more difficult to trigger this, but in TD, it was proven to be a flawed solution. We may deploy this fix as a "bandage measure" anyway for now while we investigate for a better solution and hope that we will bring MA (and a few other related skills that share the same bug) under control.

So, beyond this bug where MA is spammed beyond what should be the limit, are there any other problems? Beyond the damage aspect, Meteor Assault is also really defensive, making SinX tanky unfairly. Instead of going the usual full damage card setup, MA can actually swap to use a shield along with Purple Bat Doll and Hunter Fly Card. With the high speed spam, as long as the Sinx is not one-shot, Sinx will easily heal to full, and anything can be whittled down in time. We did not intend Meteor Assault to result in a "tank build" such that the setup does OK damage with near infinite survivability and damage above that of other melee classes like Lord Knight. MA should do damage with proper investment, but it shouldn't potentially end in a tanky, near-no-risk build. This is an aspect of MA that we aim to change.

Potential plans include changing the dual dagger aspect from a bonus to be the default, and any other usage of MA results in a damage penalty. Lowering the damage means the heal is lower, and less likely to mean MA is a full heal on every cast. This violates heRO's principle that no builds should perform worse than a no-change vanilla RO setup. However, MA was already given other buffs on cast time and aftercast delay, so a lowered damage scaling for non-dual-dagger builds seems justified. In light of all the other buffs, it's still better than a default MA. We hope that this will remove the SinX tank damage build.

Purple Bat Doll

But this only moves the goal post: SinX lost the shield card's % damage reduction, but they are still healing everything, such that unless they are one-shotted. So what can be done? But then the realization is that this is true of every physical class right now- if you are not one-shot, then any physical class will heal up to nearly full as long as the damage is high enough because of Purple Bat Doll and Hunter Fly. So perhaps the tank aspect is not solely the fault of MA and SinX, but Purple Bat Doll is the common denominator. Although other classes don't share the same spotlight, our TD team covers a wide variety of classes. They are aware of a few other under-utilized classes that actually do the exact same thing as SinX MA.

So, I think it's pretty easy to say that Purple Bat Doll is not going to exist in its current form and something needs to be done. At the same time, Purple Bat Doll breathes life into a few other lower-tier, non-high-end party builds, and we don't want those builds to wither away for MA's (and a few other skills') sins. We will likely change Purple Bat Doll, but potentially release Purple Bat Doll's old effect with class restrictions or build restrictions, such as for Lord Knight's Frenzy leech build. Purple Bat Doll also puts every other draining build out of commission because it is way more effective than any other draining approach. We have not decided what to do yet, but we are committed that something will change about the current Purple Bat Doll and Hunter Fly Card combo.