Sith Assassin

The class was fun in beta. I got to try all three trees at mid-level and all were fun and played very different.

As a tank, the class is sturdy and can build both single and multi-target threat quickly. There is bias in the community against tanks that wear light armor, but those people don't seem to understand that Dark Charge provides +150% to armor, putting the Sin roughly equal to the Juggernaut in armor. Many are jealous of the Juggernaut's Force Charge + Smash combo, but the Sin's Force Speed + Discharge with Dark Charge active is just as effective, minus the stun.

Deception Sins play similar to WoW's Assassination Rogues. You begin fights in stealth for better Force regeneration (Dark Embrace) and make use of Maul, Discharge, Shock, and eventually Voltaic Slash. This tree is quite effective in both PVE and PVP and offers the most effective use of stealth (Obfuscation). Notably, Deception Sins are effective kiters and hard to peel in PVP because of Static Cling, which bolsters the duration of Force Slow and reduces its cooldown.

Madness Sins use a more varied combination of melee and Force attacks and offers additional crowd control options and damage-over-time (DoT) attacks. They also receive 2 attacks with a 30 meter range that other Sins will not have - Death Field (AoE + minor self-heal) and Creeping Terror (immobilization + DoT). Notably, they can use an instant cast Whirlwind that affects up to 3 targets for 8 seconds.

In PVP, all three Sin styles allow for Taunting enemies, causing them to do less damage to your teammates. Taunting followed by Force Cloak can help ensure you don't get burned down after you taunt.

All three trees were a of fun and the class is very challenging, but very rewarding.

Generally:
Darkness = Tank
Deception = PvP
Madness = PvE

I leveled a sin to 50 as deception and it wasn't bad while questing, but just looking at the talents on madness I can see the insane amount of extra dps I could dish out in PvE. Deception is a must for PvP, unless you're going Darkness and gearing as a pvp tank, which can be very effective. I've loved playing my assassin and from what I've learned, the sin is better than the shadow. The Jedi Shadow's spells have a lot more time-delay involved. Our Shock is instant, their equivalent, Project, takes time for the animation for example.

Purple double-bladed lightsaber ftw.

I did some tanking on the Assassin during the beta weekend. I was level 26 and I tanked an instance that I can't remember the name of Athiss I think. I found that tanking was quite enjoyable. I was able to establish and hold aggro very well and I didn't feel squishy. Assassins (all assassins, not just darkness specced assassins) get an ability called Dark Charge. Its something you just activate like a stance in WoW. Dark Charge ups your threat generation and armor allowing you to be a viable tank. I also had a few defensive abilites, one of which increased my defensive abilities (mitigation) by I think 50% for 8 seconds or so, and a force pull similar to death grip. The grip combined with sprint (150% speed boost for 2 seconds on a 30 second cool down that can be reduced via a Darkness talent) helped with getting into the fight but I still found that I was envious of the Sith Warrios force leap.

Overall it was great fun tanking on the assassin and unless one of my friends goes tank for retail I may roll with it for my main.

I think tanking as assassin will be fun as it is very different from the MMO tanking sterotype.

TY for the info nehpets87, after reading your post i will have to give this class a shot as well.

Care to elaborate on why? Assassins will be doing physical DPS.

Better yet, look here: http://www.torhead.com/class/7IwygTY#screenshots;view:812

when in the loading screen the tip would say willpower is the main stat, just because they do melee damage doesnt mean that strength is their main stat. when i would equip an item with willpower my damage would increase. another tip says that your main stat is the highest stat. also how are you going to get strength if light armor doesnt have strength?

(i was an assassin in the last build)