It was touch and go there for a little while, but man am I glad that the voting for Blade and Soul NEO Classic Divine Gems went the way it did because my enjoyment of the game has ramped up quite a bit.

The voting ended with the suggestion for me to re-roll in the game with a more technical class and without any of the free purple goodies. I recall that the Assassin was a pretty demanding and involved class, so that was what I decided to go with, and for once my memories didn’t lie to me; this class is just as fun and involved as I remembered.

A lot of the Assassin’s kit, as one might expect out of the class name, is about taking out single targets as quickly as possible. That primarily means that I have to react to attacks a bit more and capitalize on the openings that I make for myself. So it’s more of the Blade Master counter stance stuff, only with tighter windows and more payoff over just mere defense. In fact, counterattacking is the Assassin’s bread and butter.

I’m not going to come off as an expert in this class, but it’s become very clear to me over the course of this journey that I have to unleash hell the second I’ve got an opening to enter my counter state. This, in turn, has required me to pay a little more attention to the animations of the enemies I’m fighting, which also means that I’ve got to actually sit up and invest myself in combat.

And I’m not talking just a couple of little tricks here and there. Sure, there are a pair of regular combos that I use in regular rotation, but then I can choose to unleash a spinning slash, or trip up my target to smash down on them with a massive aerial stomp. Or I can backdash and then close back into melee distance for a pair of big swipes, followed up by an immediate darting attack. The point is the Assassin gives me a lot of tools, and having a lot of tools is what keeps me coming back to the fights with a smile.

I’m actually nearing a point in the main story that I recall bouncing off of when I first was playing BandS more casually. I mostly recall this because I got to the scene where my character first uses the Dragon Pulses to windwalk, which featured some of the cooler cinematography from the BnS Classic Divine Gems for sale game’s engine and easily one of this MMO’s finest pieces of music. So as you can tell, smashing the “F” key to get through the cutscenes and get into the combat has been the modus operandi, and it’s been very successful in reinvigorating my time in-game.