Assassin lunge discussion

yeah this + the assasssin has no other endorsement that he needs

grapples are not tied to endorsements for damage
neither is his speed (dash, lunge are skills)
all his powers regen constantly and use parts of a bar to fire, except smoke bomb, so no real need for skill recharge
his ability to kill bots is amazing even without ROF buff to sword, that just makes him rediculous.


Right now SIN could honestly use silver armor and NOTHING in gold and Bronze and be highly competative. Thats a problem.. its also why I suggested Grapple endorsements..

than again I really dont think SIN is OP, I just find Lunge to be a bit much.. I find SNIPER to be a bit OP..

Did i?

Read again, i made what i believe to be a factual statement, the top 100 killers on the rank table are filled mostly with assaults, followed by gunners and snipers, if i am wrong then please correct me, im just making a guess here. I am also confused by how you have drifted to the subject of aim?


The sin was designed to get kills of opportunity, looking at the kill figures for the classes it appears uber have fullfilled their intentions with the class.


If you have some statistical proof that the sin is out killing the gun classes with the 15 second grapple cooldown then by all means share this with us.

Source?

Sounds like you don't like assaults. Besides, unless Uber came out and stated the distribution I don't think you can know this. I really would like to see what sort of data mining they have in place. I don't know if they took cues from Valve's TF2 stuff or not, but they certainly would be interesting to see.

Additionally, attempting to justify balance issues with data from unknown player skill levels that only represent time spent is a bad idea.

I used to think it was pretty broken, then I learned how to counter it.

Now I think Assassins are pretty bad without it. Cloak is VERY visible and audible, and without lunge you become stupidly predictable. Even with lunge people have ways to counter it, and if you're aware you can prevent it and punish the assassin. With it the Assassin is on par with the others. Without she's basically just a bot killer... Anyone can kill bots.

i'm gonna go off on a limb here and say assassins are not op. listen for the hum, depending on your class get in the air, and shoot em while they try to grapple.

assassins are the easiest class to counter, specially with so many new people to the game who don't understand how loud they are.

obviously the lunge poses a problem with this strategy, but i honestly don't run into too many issues.

For some reason i could have sworn you wrote assault not support.. so my mistake.. You implied support does not need to aim.. again my mistake.

The rest of my comments are still valid, and I can say this in response.

Not all class's benefit from PC controls equally.. For example the SNIPER benefits WAY more than a TANK, to argue that it is MOOT because all benefit is not really valid IMO.. Getting to someones back especially doing 180 turns to it from a missed lunge is much harder and in the later case actually IMPOSSIBLE on Xbox, and so was not addressed in the balancing.. now that a mouse is introduced it IS possible to instantly 180 turn, and that causes something to be doable that was not intended, or at the very least not forseen.. that is a problem that should be addressed.

Because someone gets more kills, does not mean there kills were easier.. it means that at certain times (money ball attacks) those class's have the ability to FARM kills more proficiently.. ive gone 15 and 2 as assault than in the last minute gone up to 30 and 2.. for example.. as they throw themselves out desperately trying to stop the money ball.. as a sin I would have been grappled and thorwn aside, as assault i'm tossing bombs, charges and AR fire.. for multi kills.

Also the same can be said during matches where one side is walking all over the other, in a totaly lopsided match, where one team is just FAR better than the other, a GUNNER for example or a tank can get MANY MANY more kills than an equally skilled SIN, since sin is as you said limited by the cooldown on grapple and the weak health when trying to face slash.. where as gunner is just mowing down the helpless new players..

Now take a match full of even teams those same fights are forcing the gunner to cover, to expend a clip without a kill, and reload.. where as the assassin is now FARMING 1 kill every 5 seconds.. and if using lunge correctly he is lunging away into a smoke bomb jump to cloak, so hes not even dying..

Also as say a GUNNER im ALWAYS in the fight so to speak so if properly supported (or on a better team than the opposition, i'm simply in a position as a GOOD player to get more kills by the nature of my class.

but the SIN gets CHEAP kills, that feel hollow to me, lunge grapples and lunge back grapples in specific..

on a side note, I think I have a total of like 4 deaths as an assassin thanks to lunge and smokebomb.

Listen for hum is bad advice. Only bad assassins will give away their presence like that and you'll destroy them regardless. Learn to lunge from max range. Abuse it. Love it.

being that the majority of assassins cloak up to you its not bad advice at all. obviously you should use your eyes too.

Well you will here things like listen for the hum from Freeze Traps too, which I dont agree is a solid argument either..

its like saying (dont get shot i the face if you want to counter a sniper)

even if you are in cloak, and lunge out of it from max range, they will never hear you coming. Like trying to assault a sniper, while looking and listenting for his traps.. you are either focusing on getting in close fast and doing so from cover.. or you are jumpading up to him and gonna land right on it regardless.. either way you aint gonna have time to see it coming against a compitent sniper, and you arent gonna hear it coming against a compitent lunging assassin.

this is why i play assault. I just hover, than jump around until hovers recharged.. Most assasssins just avoid me.

Should we really be discussing it based on the absolutely awful majority of assassin players? Just because a lot of them are the type that run right at you in cloak trying for facegrapple after facegrapple as you float in the air shooting them, doesn't mean that this is what we should be balancing around.

i wasnt suggesting anything balance related really ? just seems like a lot of folks have a problem with something thats not really that big of a problem

They CLOAK in from behind to avoid your TEAMS ability to see them not yours, than lunge from the range outside of audible to you and land the back grapple while DASHING AND NOT CLOAKED AFTER LUNGE.

so no.. its not possible.. if they play smart..

or you see them coming they lunge you dodge, they wiz past and 180 turn grapple your back..

If i see a sin lunge now I just hit my charge as an assault.. works every time.. same for tank I imagine.. or gunner slam.. there are ways to deal with one whos dumb enough to let you see him coming.. they arent the problem

its the ones who use lunge to avoid being heard before a back grapple that are annoying and a bit abusive of the system IMO.

now there i do agree. lunge needs maybe .5 seconds before you can grapple. (this is clearly a balance related post )

Ok you need to expand more on the data here, give more details on your average kill/death ratio from assault and sin, you gave us a rough indication with the assault, but you neglected to give specifics on the sin.


Not interested in "how" he feels, thats a matter of preference, im only interested in raw data so we can establish if there is any truth to the (15 second cooldown) grapple being heavily abused by the sin.


From my experience the sin is functioning as designed, nobody here has provided data to prove otherwise and the kill leaderboards are still dominated by the gun classes.

Hearing uncloaked Assassins is not too hard, develop an ear for it. Know when to jump, I have an instinct when I need to jump much to the dismay of my fellow clanmate who loves Assassin.

Develop a sixth sense

not to mention every single one dashes around, as they dash they kick up smoke around their feet and it leaves a trail. clear indicator

e/ incase theyre cloaked :lol:

The point about assassins being, in a word, killwhores, was brought up. It has also been brought up about lunge-grapples being cheap, not OP.

What I want to input taking these two ideas is that sure, you were weakened from battle, retreating, then suddenly, lunge-grapple out of no where and you lost your killstreak. Ok, you feel cheated, sure.

But being a team based game with an objective, does cheapness, especially this level of cheapness specifically that you can't spam it constantly and you risk being exposed to enemy fire, really matter?

If we talk about good sins wanting to abuse this mechanic, how many times is he going to be able to do this with all the variables in play here?

Random ice traps, gunners and tanks on patrol, a random assault passing by, eliminator bots being spawned, supports dropping firebases in random spots...

I believe we've already established this method isn't OP, just annoying. But even if it's annoying is this tactic necessarily contributing to victory as a whole? I don't believe so.

tl;dr - Annoying? People seem to agree. A factor that helps the assassin and her team win? Most likely no.

In general, assassins are probably the worst class, due to every other class having some form of hard counter or two to them, and they don't get much in return for that.

We mine as well assume gold armor, since damn near everyone runs it these days.

Assassin - Survives up to a sword facehug, blind and damage reduction escape
Assault - Survives up to a sword facehug, high flight time, high jump, fast acting heavy damage bomb with burn, best grapple in game which usually takes priority over yours and has barely any cooldown in comparison
Gunner - Survives up to a sword facehug, stomp, two grapples for countering, can sometimes be flat out immune
Sniper - Survives up to a sword facehug, several traps which scream 'headshot this' if close enough or 'flak this', if you get grappled first it's either a reverse-escape or ringout
Support - Survives up to a sword facehug, shotgun wildly outdamages sword, firebase and air strike can ensure you go down as well
Tank - Survives the sword backstab, high damage knockdown charge, jet gun will flay you before you can finish the job, charge --> death blossom practically instagibs

I can't remember the details of what survives dagger backstabs with gold armor, but that a lot of assassinations are botched/many players are twitchy and what should've been a backstab is a facehug/lag, it's still wildly significant that even at max upgrade they still survive it. Plus in most cases grappling is a sure death as if you accidentally facehug, they'll survive, and you're left extremely open to a counterattack/grapple.

If armor endorsements didn't exist, assassin would be a lot better. Even if they wind up getting you into an instant kill grapple, any nearby teammate can kill you before it finishes easily, and as a comparison, snipers don't have to be right up on someone and have no cooldown on headshots. Though gold armor tanks survive those too, I think. If anyone knows if a backlunge/backgrapple bypass tank's inability to die to a backgrapple, do share.

Though on the subject of tanks, I think if they couldn't annihilate a bot squad with death blossom assassins would be a bit more in balance with the other classes.

So here we are, discussing one really good thing on the assassin when others are by far more powerful in general. Makes one wonder why every single team has an assassin, or two, or three, the team with two assaults tends to win, heh heh.

Your mention of lunging and grappling had my thumb twitching over the spacebar.

But I don't feel like it is OP or anything, cheap sure, but not OP, because assassins need a way to close the gap quickly due to their humming causing players that are familiar with the sound to jump frantically, making grapples much more risky on the alerted players.

With half of the other classes having abilities that can troll assassins, charges/stomp, it's pretty necessary imo.

Almost all of those are invalidated by lunging first. Additionally, if you facegrapple a no armour assault he only has a sliver of health left, just hold left click after the grapple and there is literally nothing he can do to avoid that slash (believe me, I've tested).