Assassin's Lunge - Lets Discuss it

I agree, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of custom classes have gold or silver armor. While armor is one of the best endorsements overall, if you ask people they'll 100% tell you it is to stop instakills from bad assassins lunge + face stab or occasionally getting a lucky backstab.

Edit: Some guy suggested that lunge should use some Dash energy. I like that idea a lot.

I really don't think cooldown is nearly as much an issue with lunge, especially if we're deciding we care about diversifying endorsement arrangements.

Remove that mobility from assassins and more of them are going to go gold armor, because lunge is crucial to so many getaways.

Here's the issues that I see with lunge-facegrapple:

• Easy and damaging enough to make most players take armor
• Not so damaging that it actually contributes to the team, meaning lots of assassins are dead weight
• Super annoying without being effective. It's like getting a pop-up ad while playing. You briefly lose control, click a couple times and the annoyance goes away
• Contrary to assassin-like behavior the devs presumably wanted to encourage by giving a cloak and a stronger backstab

You'll notice none of this is about anything being "overpowered." How could it be, when it usually leads to getting squashed by better players? Rather, the problem is that it's easy, disruptive, counterproductive, totally un-fun, and not within the role the devs seemed to have for Assassin.

I'm not looking for a nerf. I don't know that making useless behaviors more demonstratively useless even counts as a nerf in any meaningful sense. A reduction in damage would be more of a way of telling players "HEY STOP DOING THAT. IT DOESN'T WORK."

It does work and is effective.

Perhaps not to the assassin but 615 damage is quite a large chunk for every class.

For a very low skill maneuver. Reload plus hold alt-fire.

Assassin pick armor regardless of lunge or not. Assassins that do not die an extreme amount of times. They are quite fragile if they don't use their skills. However, once they do, are nearly unkillable outside truly bad situations (ring out, chain grapple, other assassin lunge face grapple, etc.).

Any time else they have no fear of death. Tanks will cause a defensive style assassin a bit because they are capable of doing enough damage to actually kill in more circumstances, though the slow speed pretty much removes that chance against an observant and mobile assassin.

I'm not married to the idea, but I think it's something worth considering in addition to lowering the damage from a face stab. Tackling both halves of the one two punch is going to be better than just handling half of it.

If done though, chances are Assassin would need a small buff in another area. I wouldn't be opposed to upping her base health to 325, or making dash level 1 and 2 drain a little slower.

The one thing that I'd like to see changed about the lunge is to make the assassin go perfectly straight in direction (can't turn left or right) and can't rotate/spin around. As an assassin myself, a pretty effective grappling technique is to cicle an enemy who's facing you while lunging, and land a backstab. It's pretty cheap though. I'd kinda like to see that fixed. It's too easy to manuever around during a lunge and set up for a backstab that you shouldn't have really gotten in the first place...

If something had to change on the Assassin's lunge, it could be made so it functions like the Assauls's lv3 Charge, with the cooldown tied to the main grapple. To compensate, it will do as much damage as a face grapple, but also knocks the target back a ways. Damage remains the same regardless of the victim's position.

Heres how the animation would work, the Sin lunges and performs an upward slash, target gets floated, and the Sin proceeds to deal 3 more slashes in midair, knocking the target back on the finishing blow.

This will remove the advantage of the lunge to grapple combo, but is made up for it by giving the Assassins a powerful tool to use against juiced pros, or for ring outs. This new lunge will not one hit kill in most cases, and as it depletes the grapple, the assassin cannot use it's main grapple for some time afterward.

It'd probably be easier for the coders to implement a delay between the lunge and the ability to grapple