Hey everyone, I'm looking to make a straight assassin/murder build, who kills everyone and everything. I know it might mess up some quests, but that's not what he built to do. I'm only making him cause I think it'd be a fun rp to try, if only for a couple days.

What im looking for is a suggestions on race, skills, and abilities to help make him as successful as possible?

http://skyrimcalculator.com/177991 Dual wield a sword and dagger.

You can be pretty much any race in this game. If you want to min-max, Argonians, Wood Elfs, Khajiits, and even Dunmer make good choices.

Race: Dunmer
Skills: One Handed (dagger), Archery, Sneak, and Destruction

= Winning

Instead of destruction I woul suggest light armor for straight up no magic assassin....alchemy is helpful too

Put skills into:
One-Handed
Archery
Light Armor
Sneak
Alchemy(For Poisons)

no offence, but there is no way that is an efficient build... 2 ranged skills? NO defencive skill? destruction for sneak? no smithing OR alchemy?
wth


the most efficient way?

race: khajiit (for night vision and passive sneak/one handed/archey bonuses), if you dont mind becoming a vampire, you can pick another race, like wood elf or redguard, and become a vampire for night vision and stealth bonus.

primary skills: sneak, one handed, marksman
these are the skills you will be keeping ahead of the curve and perked priorily, one handed you dont need many perks, just the dmg multiplier, and, even if not mandatory very, very usefull, the dual wield perks (for stealth attacks that dont quite make it as a one hit kill, dual wield power attacks are the most powerfull.)
you will also want high perks in marksman, as encounters you wont be able to take full advantage of assassination/sneak, you will more than kilely require to have strong ranged capability, especially dragons, dont even try to melee those (I only play on master and have deadly dragons mod, that make dragon fighting pretty epic)
obviously sneak is top priority, you want to become as undetectable as possible as soon as possible, and get those dagger sneak multipliers as soon as possible, the rest even if pretty usefull dont have a very serious impact on combat efficiency.

secondary skills: smithing, light armor
you need smithing to upgrade your enchanted gear, aswell as get some high armor rating armor, and upgrade base weapon dmg, and any added armor rating you can get from light armor perks aswell, but protection is secondary, as a assassin you will be avoiding to take damage, not mitigating it.

skills/gear:
you will be mixing thief-nightingale with brotherhood armor for any thieving or assassination, the brotherhood gloves, will allow you to make dagger one hit kill assassinations for most of your targets, the rest is just temporary untill you get other better armor, with bonuses to bow or one handed dmg, acides from that you will want to have a high armor rating/magic resistance set aswell, for when you have to engage in direct combat.
skills or spells I cant think of nothing apart from night vision, I realize not most people mod their game, (I dont mod it either in terms of gameplay, its cheating pure and simple tbh, I only have deadly dragons to make dragons more epic) but I like having a visually realistic/stunning Skyrim, so for me areas without light or any kind are usually pitch black, as a assassin having night vision is a must as we cant use light outselves or we get spoted.
either than that, only shouts are worth mentioning, I use fury, wich gives you insane attack speed, death mark, that drops enemy armor when I want high dps on high armor targets, and disarm when Im having a problem with hard hitting melee npcs.

thats all I can think of.

If you don't mind playing an assassin that uses magic, then Illusion is also really great for Invisibility, Muffle, and the various crowd control spells.

Good suggestions above. By the way, has anyone done an assassin that character never uses smithing?

No, but I think this would be easily doable. Indeed, not using any crafting would be doable.

The 30x (or 15x) sneak dagger attack damage is massive enough to not need the damage boost from smithing.

Yep, the armor rating isn't all that important considering I am avoiding damage in the first place. If needed, I'll just use alchemy.

I think a fun, somewhat challenging assassin build would be one that just uses daggers---no magic, no archery, no enchantments, no crafting. It's all about sneaking up and going for the one hit dagger kill.

At high levels this becomes somewhat easy, because high level sneak is so powerful. But getting there would be a good challenge.

while illusion is an obvious usefull ability to get both to assist with stealth related stuff but also for the other effects, when making a assassin you really dont need any of the sneak support from it, theres alot of ways to get acess to invisibility, potions, nightningale special power (only works outdoors and during night time this one), vampire invisibility, stone the 100 skill perk (not invisibility but pretty close), muffle you get from talents aswell as gear.
honestly when creating a char that already uses at least 4-5 skills taking a skill tree that is so perk point required to fill up and costs so much mana can be too taxing


I did start an assassin much like the one I described in my previous post that instead of investing in smithing invested in alchemy, the result while pretty interesting I would say was generally less efficient.
basically without smithing your dagger and weapon base dmg will be significantly lower, to put in perspective how penalizing it is, lets work with base 10 numbers: a dagger does 10 base dmg, x30 = 300 dmg, with smithing it does ~15, x30= 450, so you see base dmg is pretty important when your assassin kills come from such high multipliers, luckily if you take alchemy instead, you can not only recover that lost dmg, but potentially surprass it by alot, if you perk for potent poisons, you will be able to make poisons that can even out damage the backstab itself.

the pros is that you actually get the possibility of doing more dmg, with less need of perk investment, since you wont need so much archery and one handed damage perks, the cons is that you will be relying on consumables, and you will be MUCH weaker in any situation where you dont use any poison AND especially hard, on any situations where you are forced into direct confrotation and dont have the nice high normal weapon dps and armor rating.


I would have to disagree, playing on master difficulty at least.
even with strong investment in smithing lvls 25-30 ish will begin to have quite a few targets that will not be one hit killed from stealth, not to mention the other situation, that will also be quite a few, where stealth openers wont be a possibility.

I havnt played a single character build apart from my priestess (passifist who was roleplaying a non killing char with healing and illusion) that did not relly on one of the crafting trees, not in master.

I, for one. Most of your damage comes from Multipliers, just the Shrouded Gloves, or Handwraps (I prefer the Jester's gloves when I can get them) takes you up to 30x base damage with a dagger, not counting Armsman. Sure, you could get Moar damage with Smithing, but if i don't need it, I'm not going to invest 75-85 more skill levels to get it. Assassins are the last characters that need Smithing, if you need that extra oomph, that's why Daedra invented poison.

All you need is Sneak, and a Weapon Skill. Feel free to add more on top of that. Armor is optional, if you're good enough to never be detected, much less targeted, and hit. Sneak is your primary defense, and Evasion is a pretty good backup. My main assassin build (Pictured in my Avatar) is unarmored, and 2 handed. She's killed everthing on Adept, including Giants, the 2 Deathlords in Lost Volskygg, and Warlord Gathrik with no more than a double damage multiplier. How good are You at sneaking? That will determine how much your character will have to invest in it.

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/559814891155278184/40F01F05D6B6D7EADC05ED63B16AC29DC9183DE6/1024x819.resizedimage
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558688305181100035/A6602C2901EB87DC7B1452175AF4B7F25B24DE56/1024x819.resizedimage
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/559814891160918045/699ED70AD8BA9895A39E563ABC7951023D1D6675/1024x819.resizedimage
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/1171184187772617956/4E52DF52C30156416139139E3A7CEC56A8BEFA80/1024x819.resizedimage
http://skyrimcalculator.com/178234
Her signature move is Silent Roll+Great Critical Charge to backstab someone across the room before they have time to react.

A 2 handed specialist who sneaks and odesnt use armor (thus add points to armos perks) sort of the japanese sword saint sound like afairly powerful build...not my style but powerful nonetheless

What's wrong with a gay assassin?

You don't really need to put points into one-handed if you're going for the stealth assassin route. The bonus to Armsman might be nice but at 16x damage for a successful backstab, you were already going to kill just about anything in the game.

It begs the question though - how subtle do you plan on being? "Assassin" means different things to different people. What I think of when someone says "Assassin" generally doesn't bring to mind the dual-wielding broad daylight ambushers the Dark Brotherhood sends after you, etc.