The Assassin's lunge-grapple exploit.

The assassin is already the best bot killer due to her dagger/sword and she demolishes the moneyball the fastest plainly because she has the highest mobility due to lunge dashing/smoke bomb and as a consequence, the one who can jump in and out of a base pausing to buy juice.

Now whether her damage gets balanced or lunge has a higher cooldown is far above me and I personally think the likelihood of the assassin being nerfed is non-existent due to the gigantic Assassin Defence Force . This isn't whining nor complaining but merely providing background information far above these points there's a bug that's crippling in relatively high skill play.

A assassin can lunge at you, nick your side while flying past and preform a backstab grapple in the space of one fluid moment, The problem is that it's the last part (the actual slash during the lunge) of the animation is cut off and they go straight into grapple - this applies to standard slashing attacks and disallows counters due to the lightning speed nature of the maneuver. Slashing once, cutting off the last frames of the attack into a grapple takes cares of any facestabbed victim early on and the issue only exacerbates as the match progresses.

It doesn't matter how much health you have because every single class is going down to this exploit bar the tank, who conveniently is the only class they're going to avoid up-front, full health confrontations.

Between slashing down bot waves at the very spawn points themselves, lunge dashing when low on health and smoke bombs to get behind sight lines a assassin of this caliber can carry the entire game.

I'm fairly sure all classes can "cut" frames off their current action and move onto a grapple (example being a rev'd gunner transitioning to a grapple while firing) which may be remedied due to my request which is to fix transitioning between animations so that each action must complete before the other can performed.

To provide a visual analogy as to the seriousness of this exploit, a similar exploit existed was in Team Fortress 2 and was called "Melee Switching".

It's not picture perfect but it describes the exploitation of animations - performing a slash or lunge and cutting off the end of the animation with the grapple all while utilizing the lunge to glide past their hitbox, executing the grapple while the game considers them to be "behind" and thus gains bonus grapple damage for backstabbing.

tl;dr Enforce the completion of actions before being able to perform another action or in other words, enforce animations to go through their full length.

Yeah, I hate the lunge grapple. You can react in time to an Assassin bursting from stealth a lunge distance away but the lag can still pull you into the grapple even if you've jumped "in time".

I especially hate how Assassins can barely get the side of you and it's considered a grappled backstab. It's the epitome of BS.

The class isn't disgustingly unbalanced but there are a lot of annoying aspects to the Assassin. For example her lunge seems to be on a shorter cooldown than the Assault's charge, but a same-level lunge can still deflect a same level charge with ease. It makes blocking the Assault's charge far too easy while leaving you with an additional lunge seconds later to either attack or retreat with, now that the Assault's charge is on CD and he can't readily run away or engage with the greatest of speeds.

Lunge never deflects charge, smoke bomb does.

This is one of the few things in the game that really bothers me. It makes it really difficult to stay alive with assassins running around because they can lunge and grapple you before you can even hear them. Not even the slightest buzz sound and you're being mounted. What's even worse is the problem described by the OP. The slash never happens, they just lunge at you at lightning speed, take off a chunk of your health and perform the grapple right away. It really sucks because that extra damage kills a silver armor support with L3 passive upgrade from the front. There's not much you can do anymore to defend that. No matter how good I've been with my shotty, getting slash-front grappled or back grappled before even being heard/seen makes playing against a good assassin a very annoying and unfair encounter. This slash animation being dropped prevents you from grappling them and saving yourself from a front grapple after the slash. The slash never lands and they go right into the grapple and it cancels out the other classes grapple.

It should be fixed that front grapples aren't 1-hit kills. That's the only real problem here. They should be 1 hit kills against unarmored lights, but that's it. A medium armor class with silver armor shouldn't die from front grapples without having the chance to grapple after the slash damage.

This.

cancelling is a staple in other type's of games, why should it be forbidden in this?

because this isn't super smash bros melee (**** like wavedashing, bugs that become a requirement to play decently).

This is a pc game, one that can and really should get updated with >>BUG<< fixes. Cancelling animations is a bug.

Strafejumping in Quake was a bug too, look what became of it.

Bug? Intended! That's all I will say. If you see an assassin lunging torwards the front of you, jump. Assassins should make you keep your finger on the jump button at all times most games. If you are twitchy to jump in anticipation of assassins, you're doing it right.

Uber makes bo-bo's, but calling this a bug is sheerly insulting to them. They know what they are doing a GREAT MAJORITY of the time.

I honestly don't see the problem. Unless you're playing on minimum settings you can see Assassins from a mile away, and every class except Support has a direct counter (and he has a high-damage close range weapon).

I have no idea how the registration works, but I would like a small alteration that would prevent backstabs from turning me 180 degrees because of the initiated angle. If it turns me so much it should have been a frontstab.

A bug that was considered a game mechanic by players, and because the high-level / competitive players whined so much about it, the devs decided to leave it in in further installments in order to prevent large scale hurricanes of sh1t being flinged at them?

Nailed it, didn't I?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag

Note the usage of "exploit" rather than "bug". It's an unintended component in gameplay that deliberately utilized by players to gain an edge. It's literally abuse of a feature not intended.

In any case, these type of assassins can and will make the approach from any direction and due to the speed gained from lunge dashing, can even come in from the other lane to lunge grapple you from behind, and/or using smoke bombs in generous amounts.

They don't rely on cloak to lunge-grapple other than to observe player moments from away, used to hide smoke bomb landings or to change angle of approach, because like any good player, they know themselves that the cloak makes them dead obvious when close. That's what makes this high effective because you don't know they're there, or they do so with such speed you're unable to counter.

Discarding the validity of an actual issue and blaming player skill on my part is without a doubt the way to go about addressing this problem. :roll:

If you think being able to backstab someone by charging them from the front was "intended," I don't even know what to say.

But if we play devil's advocate and accept that, it still widens the already huge gulf between Assassin and much weaker classes like Tank, Support, and Gunner, raising the skill ceiling and providing a powerful advantage for those who can pull it off. (Sniper and Assault have outrageous balance issues of their own, but few if any owe to an apparent bug or exploit.)

Wow. A lot of you have no clue what you are talking about.

This "combo" has always been around since the game was released, back in August, and after all that time this is the first time I am hearing a complaint about lunge grappling. Boy do PC players think they work on the quality team because all they post are threads concerning balance "issues."

Adapt or Die.

The thread isn't about lunge-grappling. It's about exploiting it to land a back-grapple while attacking from in front.

Read the Thread or Die.

I did read the thread but being on these forums for so long when I read "turns a front grapple into a back grapple" and vice-versa is something I have heard forever on these forums.

If somewhere it was explain that since using the mouse you are able to make quick and sharp turns and players are combining that with a lunge to intentionally get a back grapple when chasing from the front. That would have popped out at me.

If I got that right, you are saying those incidents are not a matter of incidence but outmaneuvering. If that's the case, I can only tell you this: it happens. Really. Try playing on high ping server yourself for example, maybe you will experience that as well - I did. More than that, I've been grappled while charging, which in return has taken my life because I have insta-turned around like a boss.

Usually can't jump in time due to lag if the 'sin is lunging from stealth. Just saying.

Ya know, I've been wondering which detail settings have an influence on that.
Since my rig isn't as beastly as it was a few years ago, I tend to sacrifice varying quality levels to get some FPS back and it hasn't been unusual to discover that one detail setting is tied in with something I didn't expect.


Anyway, as for the topic at hand, that lunge-grapple has been getting on my nerves lately, especially when the Sin using it is either well-versed in it or ping decides to work against me(I've had a close-range lvl3 Assault charge get stopped by a Sin front grapple before)

I do like Delacroix's bit about requiring one animation to finish before the next can start tho