Never think about subsequent assassins inheriting your ability uses. Use them all yourself, they aren't going to need them only you will.

Always draw a death note and never ever change it, always make it clearly assassin-themed – let every BD in game know where each kill is coming from. This will also help them find you quicker once they realize that it's your DN that's missing on the day you got occupied.

Always go for the king on N1, I mean what kind of assassin are you if you fail to show up to the annual “observe king's visitors N1” festival hosted by your neighborhood observer?

Whenever you or some other unseen is getting accused immediately poison the accuser. Let everyone know that we are the baddies here, not them. I mean it's good to be bad right? They should totally not heal your accuser and give you a medal for being so bad.

When on a stand immediately distract the king. Let him know that it's you out there and he should shut up with his leads, pardon you and go execute some bd instead. They can't distract him so let THEM discuss their innocence with the king instead.

Always use your 2-for-1 n1. It's very important to do this because all the healers and knights are still alive and there is so much players for bd to investigate. Be a good assassin and help them shorten the list. If you are lucky you'll even cross yourself off it by hitting the knight's target, isn't that great?

Always go for revealed prince as soon as possible, never let those healers and knights and even kings that are going to guard him waste their efforts.

Oh, and although this is not something specific to assassin, it is something you should always do nonetheless – always vote pardon on all the unseen members especially the most obvious ones and always vote execute on everyone else. Let the damn BD know who's the unwanted team here and who has the protection of their mighty assassin.

And last, but the most important part – if you follow any of the above rules never be assassin in the game where I'm playing unseen. OK?

Time to take this a bit more seriously.

First thing you should understand - there are actual people playing against you.
They can be smarter than you, dumber than you or just plain diferent from you. Every ToL player in general should keep that in mind. This is pretty darn obvious, but I'm putting this here anyway, because most of "oh ♥♥♥♥ i didn't expect [something]" excuses stem from this.

That said, there are still common patterns and knowing those is a notable advantage.

There are two types of patterns, the reasonable ones and the idiotic ones. Both should be known and exploited. The later should also be avoided.

However, no pattern exploitation will work with 100% reliability due to the original thesis. There are actual players playing against you and if you know the pattern what's stopping them from knowing the same pattern? From there it's a question of how they will use that knowledge and that's mostly unanswerable.

Ok, enough abstract and obvious wisdom, time for specifics.

This is a personal observation but, IMHO, fear of an investigative class kills more evil than the respective investigative class does.

I'm talking princess and observer here.

You can hide from princess by claiming a role in the same result pool (killer/offensive for us assassins chickens), and you can hide from observer by logging real visits (definitely not advisable for us chickens though), but in my experience the harm it does to you is not worth the occasional invest CC that you get for more convenient lies.

You should be “investigating” the suspicious targets or “flirting” with given claims, not with your list of of converts and conversion checks. A sheriff's log that isn't playing like a sheriff would is a fool's log, it wouldn't even need an obs to throw suspicion at you. Furthermore, when looking for assassin/nk it's the knight claims that will go up first. You wanna be among them? No? Then be more creative than that.

1st – Night chat.

FFS talk to your team. The ability to share brainz at night is what differentiates you from bd and zombies the most.

However keep in mind that no one should ever find out about your night chat. Not for as long as you have to stay undercover. It's obvious, yes, and yet many players forget about it.

For the simplest example if the prince outed to mystic but not to the rest of the court and you got mystic converted hitting prince with “n2, jalied 16, linked, told myst my number” in his log will likely get the former myst killed.

For a more serious but less common example, one of you may have found out a claim in whisper, (“I'm alch, healed you this night”) then said so in night chat. Then someone else said in day chat “2 is this, 10 is that, 16 is alch” if alchemyst never claimed to the public he can get both of you killed in a blink of an eye and get a ton of bd trust points while he's at it.

For this same reason, keep your fake logs and notes private (or just filter some information out). BD can't snoop nowadays, so your empty log isn't a giveaway anymore. Having claims in there that you shouldn't have still is.

2nd – Information advantage.

You don't outright know who's bd and who's neut but you definitely know who's unseen and who isn't. It's a cool advantage but if you fail to hide it it will kill you.
Learn to use it, and learn to hide it.
You want to fool the better part of ToL players you'll have to imitate BD better.
While voting exe on everyone who isn't unseen can get you exed in a blink, voting pardon on anyone who you know isn't unseen isn't going to make you any less purple that you are. BD don't know who they are, pretend that you don't either.

This isn't where it ends though. There are ways to make use of your information without becoming extra suspicious, and there are times when becoming extra sus is worth the advantage.

Watch for scorned and fools. Both of them are your assets.
If person A is accusing person B of being unseen and neither of them is in your purple friendlist one of them is the above asset.

Now, how and when to use this is a different matter entirely. Also you have to figure out which is it, a fool accusation or a scorned accusation.

As an assassin, one move you may want to risk is hitting the accuser.
If it's a scorned play the accuser will live and you will know who to aid/contact (be smart about it though, nobles can screw both of you over, and even the scorned himself can out you to give himself more sheriff cred than he deserves). If it's a fool play the accusation will become instalegit and the fool will get a free ticket to glory. I would advise against putting something like “screw you” or “Yes, I'm unseen, but you're dead” in DN for that kill. That would be overplaying it.

Keep in mind that this still IS a risk. While scorned-like accuser is not a particularly appealing target for knights they may still go for it if they don't have a better one. Some observers also like to double check other investigative claims with follows. And that means trouble. But, like I said, fear of an observer can be more harmful than the observer himself.

A much safer move would be to distract or poison the accuser (or the king). There's a well known idiotic pattern of assassins throwing day abilities at whoever is accusing the unseen, and since other players know that pattern, many are likely to believe the accusation. More on this later though.

While bing evil is a collective effort, and you really should discuss your moves with the team, assassin's part in this play still deserves it's own section.

Our first and the most obvious function is killing.

Killing is a game of whack-a-mole with you versus knights, healers, mercs, and observers.
We're the mole though, not the mallet. You want top priority targets dead, but with those whacks going around the court you either want them dead while they are playing ninja or when all the whackers are playing in the graveyard.

There's a big difference between the top priority target and a high priority target though.

The outed prince with healers/guards not being able to communicate often means the sheriff/obs/princess that was outed earlier is now free for the taking.

How do we win this game of whack-a-mole?
While there's no perfect strategy (real people are not 100% predictable), there are things that may work in your favor.
Look at logs of outed knights/healers/observers. Those logs can tell you how they do their whacking.
Look for whispers FROM the king. A particularly active GK may be giving orders to the court.

When there's a new suspect at the court he may be whispering to the investigative claims to check them. Now's you chance to take down an investigative class if the healers/knights don't catch that (and many of them don't, though the better ones DO).

When there's a new proven bd or high priority claim the king may be whispering to healers/knights trying to direct the team and properly cover as many bd as possible. With luck he would forget to cover the healers themselves or even leave himself open. In any event, if you see multiple whispers from king after a prince is outed you're not likely to find that earlier outed invest as unguarded as you would hope.

Our second and the toughest to master function is being disposable.

We are the priority target to bus, live with it.
We are also the easiest unseen role to find.
Both of this are due to how the classes change.
Original assassin has highest chance to be found – he's has the most nights as purple player since the start of the game (rivaled only by original mm, but he's not findable for 3 of them) and he's never been bd, as such never having a chance to partially self-prove.
Converted assassin, on the other hand, likely has to deal with a claim he can't sustain anymore.
But the best thing about busing an assassin – unseen will often be able hide his original class (if he had any) and always resolve a claimspace conflict with newest members.
Easy example - one knight is dead, assassin claimed a knight, one knight got converted. Don't even think about busing the enforcer at this point. Anyone with half a brain will know that enforcer WAS a knight thus making assassin a 3rd knight regardless.
But DO consider bussing assassin. You gain credibility from the bus, you gain back the claim space for the enforcer (soon to be assassin though) and you gain back the ability to convert, accelerating your strive towards majority.

Just don't expect more experienced players to not expect your bus. So make it look natural or don't make it at all.

And keep in mind that busing in not always the best way to be disposable.

If you can do some damage with a self-sacrifice it may often be a superior move.
Say, one BD got called up for logs and his class is the one you want out of the court.
Go ahead and lie about his logs being fake.

If you're the latest target he occupied say you weren't occed that night. People may think he's the newest assassin/mm that couldn't keep faking his original claim.
If he should be occ immune say you occed him and he wasn't immune.
If he's not occ immune say you occed him and he WAS immune.
If he's an obs say you visited his last target.
Hell, if he's a visiting role you may claim a merc that stood guard there or even a prince that jailed his target.

Just remember that you HAVE to be at least as convincing as your target.
There's very little point in claiming occupation on your victim without a good butler log.
And saying that you're the prince will generally get you busted outright. Especially if your target can disclaim being in jail that night and/or when the real prince is alive and well.

But remember you don't need to live with your claim till the end of the game, you just need to get your team to voting majority. And just delaying your death from this day to this night can help them get there.

Heck, even claiming prince when being voted up can be beneficial. You'll either get the prince to out himself, or take up his night and execution use (which is unarguably better than just being exed during the day). And if he's dumb enough to risk letting a fake prince go, you may even convince him you're the hunter and start gathering claims the next day.

In any case, if you attracted court's attention don't just stand there looking like a fool, fools don't live long.
Wost thing that can happen if you lie and fail is the same as what will happen if you don't lie at all.

That is however only as long as you don't drag your team down with you.

Like I said, we are disposable, only ever consider cross-faking with other unseen if you're a step away from majority. If you're not, you don't want ANYTHING at all linking you to the rest of the team.

Oh, and don't forget the general mumbo-jumbo with the patterns. If you plan to get bussed you may as well lie about your own teammates. So long as you aren't too convincing it will look like unseen trying to drag a bd down with them. Your “totally BD” allies can then push for your execution and look like heroes. Long as they don't push harder than the lameness of your lie allows them to.

Our third and the least obvious function is being the direct line to EK.

Only 2 people know about the use of distraction. You and the person you distracted.

“You” are always the assassin, your target however will be of variable allegiance and should according to original patterns act like their allegiance dictates.

Consider distracting the king early D2.

If the king shouts “unseen game I've just been distracted” you may 99.99% write him down as GK.

EK would have no reason to say that. Only you and him know that you distracted him. And there's literally 0 chance of you shouting “this is EK I distracted him and he didn't say it's unseen game” so there's no place for pretense from him to you in that case.

Furthermore, if the king shouts “unseen game I've just been distracted” while you did NOT distract him it's most likely EK sending your team a message through you. I can't stress this enough, don't be an idiot - don't poison anyone on that day or EK's head will likely roll.

Keep in mind that you're dealing with actual players though. Some EKs may be dumb enough to not catch the hint, some GK's may be sly enough to fish for your trust just to betray you (never actually met those kind of ninjas, but, you know, it's a possibility).

And our forth function, if we can really separate that from the third is being the court manipulator.

The above mentioned idiotic pattern of assassins throwing day abilities at anyone who's even remotely close to being a threat to unseen can be turned to our advantage.

Distract the king while he's pushing a lead on BD. If he backs off – 99.99% it's EK. You saved bd's ass but you just got the EK some cred and you can relatively safely tell him that it was you and that the lead was fake.
If he pushes further, 99.99% it's GK but you just got him to exe a bd and he lost some cred.

When it's not a king that's accusing a bd, poison the accuser. If it's scorned play, you just got him some minor cred, if it's sheriff on a fool, you just poisoned a sheriff (not much good it'll do you though). In either case credibility of the accusation goes up and none can trace that bump to your team members.