How to Kill the Assassin in Hunt: Showdown

The explosive question, answered properly

Guides appear to contradict each other on explosives against the Assassin, and the reason is that they are describing two different damage types with the same word. Community damage tables separate them cleanly:

• Explosive ammunition (blast rounds): x4 — one of its strongest answers.
• Thrown explosives (dynamite, frag-style ordnance): x1 — no bonus whatsoever. So both camps are right about what they measured. If you read “the Assassin resists explosions,” that is shorthand for thrown ordnance giving you nothing. If you read “the Assassin dies to explosives,” that refers to explosive ammunition, which genuinely shreds it. Shrapnel is also very strong at x3. There is a practical caveat that explains most of the confusion: sticky bombs can knock off a huge share of its health, but they tend to fall off while it is in swarm form, so the huge dynamite bundle landing cleanly is a matter of timing rather than reliability.

Poison is the other convergent answer

Poison is well corroborated across every source, and the tables agree: poison bullets land between x2 (body) and x3.5 (head), poison bolts at x2.5, and poison clouds at x4. Throwing messages into your own poisoned space is a common way to make its clones break up before they reach you — treat the clone interaction as community observation rather than confirmed mechanics, but the poison multiplier is solid.

What to leave at home

Throwing spears are unusually bad here at x0.52, and the Assassin is outright immune to extinguishing gas. Slugs, penny shot, buckshot and arrows all come in below normal, so a loadout built on those will feel awful even though nothing is technically forbidden. Two more useful facts: the Nitro Express is the fastest normal kill by a wide margin, and the in-game researcher transcript straight-up points at its chest as the vulnerable spot. Its clones deal the real damage to your plan rather than your health — being blinded is what gets you stabbed, and blinded players are the ones it targets. Boss fights are when a third party arrives. Knowing how the clue-to-extraction flow works matters as much as the kill, and audio mistakes are usually what actually ends the raid. Multipliers are community-measured against an assumed health pool and move with patches, so confirm in-game.