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Perfect Dodge
This allows you to dodge all melee attacks for 30 seconds. It does NOT affect ranged attacks or spell damage. It may save your life! But pay attention to your target's attack types before you find yourself dead and without your 1-hour.

Augmented assassin's armlets +2 will give you another 10 seconds.

Larceny
Our newest 1-hour removes one buff from the enemy and apply it to yourself. What makes it interesting is if the enemy is using a 1-hour ability (original 1-hours, not new ones) you will automatically steal that 1-hour ability. Works great with Mighty Strikes, Hundred Fists, Blood Weapon, or even defensive abilities like Invincible or Perfect Dodge.

Steal
Useful in Dynamis for getting a couple extra coins! Also useful elsewhere if you put a merit point into Aura Steal, which is not a bad idea.

Also, in Dynamis, this is one of your few Job Abilities (besides Mug, Bully, and Despoil) that actively targets an enemy, making it a possible proc against Job Ability-proc monsters.

Sneak Attack
Makes your next melee attack a guaranteed critical hit, and adds your total DEX to the base weapon damage for that hit (/THF does not add the DEX to base weapon damage, only guarantees the crit). You must be behind the target unless you have Hide or Bully up. If you miss, it's because you weren't behind the target. raider's armlets +2 increases the DEX bonus to damage by 20%. The likelihood of Treasure Hunter increasing is also greater on a Sneak Attack.

Sneak Attack and Trick Attack are your main damage dealing abilities, like Meditate to a Samurai. Master these two abilities, their positioning, and their uses.

Flee
Gives you 100% increased movement speed for 30 seconds, 45 if activated with rogue's poulaines on (they only need to be on for activation). Works well for mass pulling / aggroing in Salvage, or for crossing Jeuno REALLY QUICKLY. Also the excuse of choice for people using speedhacks.

Trick Attack
The same as Sneak Attack, except it adds your total AGI to the base weapon damage, and you need to be behind an ALLY. All enmity from the attack is transferred to said ally. /THF does not get the AGI bonus to damage, or the guaranteed critical hit, just the hate transfer. Allies include NPCs that are tied to you, such as adventuring fellows and pets, but not other people's pets/fellows. rogue's armlets +1 increase the AGI bonus to damage by 15%. There is no way to ignore the positioning requirement on this one.

Trick Attack does not remove any form of Invisible, including Hide.

Mug
Every 15 minutes, you can take a generally pitiful amount of gil from an enemy that normally drops gil. Against pre-Abyssea Notorious Monsters, this is almost a significant amount of gil (~5K against Sky Gods) if you use your assassin's bonnet. Against normal beastmen, it's pitiful.

However, it is also a JA proc in Dynamis, and it also makes for a very quick, very low hate method of aggroing something (along with Steal), so it can be used elsewhere.

Hide
A widely misunderstood ability, this allows you to do three things:

1. Give yourself the Invisible effect for a short amount of time. This works in the same manner as the Invisible spell.
   

2. Allows you to remove yourself entirely from the enmity list of a monster if you are at the top. This generally works for sight AND sound-based monsters, but does not give you protection against scent. This means you can be fighting a monster, pop Hide, and the monster will stop attacking you. However, if it's aggressive and sound-based, you have a limited amount of time before it will re-aggro you if you are in its aggro radius, so run away! Great for removing unwanted aggro in solo situations like Dynamis, or for getting your AF1.
   

3. While the Hide buff is on, Sneak Attacks can be used from any direction. However, activating Sneak Attack itself will remove Hide, so remember to use Sneak Attack first. Trick Attack doesn't remove Hide, but isn't affected by it either.
   

The rogue's vest increases the duration of Hide, but since the most common usages of Hide are #2 and 3 this is not a necessary piece to keep around.

Accomplice
The 5 minute cooldown, 50% hate stealing cousin of Collaborator. More about this in the next paragraph...

Collaborator
Allows you to steal 25% of the hate of an ally, as long as you're within 20 yalms of your mutual enemy. Only 1 minute cooldown, yet it shares the cooldown with Accomplice. This is GREAT for keeping your squishy mages alive, and if you're in hate-sensitive situations you should spam this ability on your mages. The only time I would ever use Accomplice over this is if your squishy mage would die if hate was not off him/her RIGHT NOW, and you're not expecting your mage to do anything dangerous in the next five minutes.

Another interesting way to use Collaborator is targeting whichever primary DD currently has the most hate. If this makes you the primary hate target, this can work to your advantage: the primary DD can DD harder and not die, while you can swap in some evasion gear and save your healers some MP. However, if for whatever reason you're not better than the DDs at tanking - for example, if your gear is not up to par - this is probably not a good strategic option. This can also horribly backfire if the new primary hate target, thanks to you reducing the melee hate by 25%, is a mage. It is also very bad for you if your mages do something hate-intensive in the minute that Collaborator is down. So, please, exercise caution using Collaborator this way.

Your raider's bonnet +2 increases hate stolen by 10%, for both Accomplice and Collaborator.

Assassin's Charge
Your next attack will be a triple attack. Stack with a weaponskill for some really nice damage! Particularly good candidates are your single-hit weaponskills, like Mercy Stroke and Rudra's Storm. Note that a single hit cannot be both a triple attack and a double attack, so if you're using it on Mercy Stroke / Rudra's Storm, you should swap out your +multiattack gear.

assassin's poulaines +2 give you 1% additional crit rate per merit level. Problem is, most times you use this will be with a weaponskill for big damage, which means you'll likely stack it with SA or TA, which means... you have 100% crit chance anyway. So I wouldn't bother with the augment.

Finally, you may want to use it during your TP phase, but normally the time spent activating the JA negates any speed gained from the guaranteed triple attack. In conditions where you aren't attacking anyways or you're already spamming a bunch of JAs, this may be an effective usage of the ability.

Feint
After using this ability, your next hit will apply a 30 second, 50% Evasion Down debuff to the target. Meriting this to 5/5 increases the chance of the Feint hit applying a Treasure Hunter increase by 100%, from a base 20% increase. This means your chance is doubled, NOT guaranteed. Best used with a Sneak Attack or a Trick Attack (but not with a weaponskill, it doesn't apply on weaponskills) to both guarantee the next hit landing and to greatly increase a Treasure Hunter increase.

assassin's culottes +2 will increase the evasion down by 10 per merit level, but only in extreme cases (Legion and THF NMs) will you ever find this beneficial.

Despoil
In an attempt by SE to make Steal interesting again, this does the same thing as Steal, but adds a random status debuff if you succeed. I've only ever seen this succeed in Abyssea, and there's far less gear to increase its success rate than Steal. At least it no longer shares Steal's cooldown, so you can use this as a JA proc in Dynamis.

Conspirator
Grants Subtle Blow and Accuracy to party members, except for the player highest on the hate list. That exception is nullified if you're wearing raider's vest +2. Great for lowering monster TP gain!

Bully
Applies an intimidation effect to the monster! Very cool, and it works as a monster enfeeble instead of a player buff, so the monster target doesn't matter. Even more cool is that it removes the positioning requirement for Sneak Attack, allowing you to use it when you are the monster target!

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