I mixed my load out between assassin and melee. If you get the pride of the lion in the first blade mission you can do 5 rush assassination which pretty much clears out all of the smaller camps. I probably have a 130 to 140 hours in I have the whole game beat. I'm just waiting for the new DLC before I replay it as Alexios.
Chaining 5 rush assassinations will be niiiiice.
I thought about going with a combo build just so I could have a bit more fun with open combat, but I found a nice workaround with a full-Assassin build:
Equipped Typhon's Mace, which buffs your assassin skills when you're playing true to the build, but it also buffs heavy-blunt damage. Fully upgraded the overpower attack skill, and can chain up to four double-hits in a row on different enemies. That solves some of my issues when I get into open combat inadvertently. I'm not dealing a lot of damage on single hits, but chaining 2 overpower hits each on 4 different enemies at a time goes a long way towards thinning the crowd.
I also use Hero Strike, which is totally OP if you're using an Assassin build, because it converts your assassin damage to melee damage, and the game gives you wayyyy more assassin damage than melee damage, regardless of loadout and play style... so if you're building and buffing for assassin damage, you're buffing Hero Strike by orders of magnitude. I can basically two-shot any elite enemy in the game.
(1) Use Shadow of Nyx to infiltrate any area without being detected
(2) Sneak up and use a critical assassination on Elite Enemy
(3) Use Hero Strike while they're stumbling and drawing their weapon
(4) That's it, they're dead now, even on nightmare difficulty
I just finished the main quest and the cultists last night, so all primary story lines are done. Now I'm gonna work on clearing the map and getting the Platinum PSN trophy.
Then I'll start with the DLC that's been released to this point.