Assassin's Lunge - Lets Discuss it

The Assassin's lunge is truly the lynchpin that holds the entire class together. However the question is: is it too good?

So I think we should discuss the lunge.

When do you find yourself using it the most?
What do you use it for?
Do you find it more useful or less useful than Dash? (I've seen plenty of assassins who could pretty much just use Dash 1 because they only use dashing when cloaked or during the 2second CD of lunge, that is why I bring this up.)

How do you find yourself dealing with assassin's ability to choose when and where they engage?
How do you feel about how lunge interacts with movement impairing abilities such as Daze, Ice Traps, and Shave Ice turrets?


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Now assuming that hypothetically Lunge DOES need a nerf (not saying it does or does not need one. that is the point of the previous section.) What sort of nerf do you think it needs?

Should the cooldown be increased?
Should it be tied to the dash skill? (i.e. same 2second CD on lunge, but using lunge drains your dash skill to prevent it from being spammable)
Should it be unable to be used while dazed?
Should it have its range reduced while dazed or slowed?
Should it have its damage lowered?
Should it have its speed decreased?
Should it have a delay between lunging and attacking or using skills?

IF the ability was nerfed, as an assassin what do you think would be an acceptable nerf?

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What if lunge was majorly nerfed but then given an interaction with smoke bomb similar to how it gives 2.5x jump height? Smoke bomb - lunge giving a massive boost to its damage/range/speed would be interesting.

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If lunge was nerfed, would the assassin require compensation in other areas?

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Lastly here are some stats:
Lunge is has by default a 2second cooldown. (I'm not certain if this is affected by equiping skill endorsements or not.)
Lunge grants 3000movement speed (default speed, not dashing, for assassin is 650) however it only lasts 0.7seconds. This means that you only move 2100units of distance (aprox.)
Lunge damage with dagger is 134damage, with sword its 167.


Lets try and keep this discussion civil AND open-minded. Try and look at things from points of view other than your own and understand where the person is coming from and how their experiences and ultimately opinions may differ from your own.

Sorry, but I have to do this:

Again?

If you want to discuss it again, I'll try my best to think up of something. Right now though, I think the grapple should be fixed first.

EDIT: Alright, keeping my thoughts ordered isn't easy for me, but I'll recount my experience as an assassin.

I usually use the lunge to move, attack bots, closing a gap and retreating. That's the basics of using the lunge. Sometimes the lunge just gets lagged and I get backstabbed by a good assassin looking to punish me for a reckless action.

When dealing with an assassin, I'm usually too slow to react to them, even as an assault. They typically lunge away into their base or cloak. At that point, I have to give up to do something more useful than chasing that sin around.

I haven't mastered assessing a situation, so I don't know if good sins do that or not. Myst usually doesn't, though.

I feel like getting a grip on sins requires me to predict their movement and habits. Otherwise, I'm never going to catch them.

Those are my thoughts on this, really. Lunge is a way that makes playing sin alot safer. I guess it's going to impact her game alot if we nerfed it. Maybe even make her useless.

Lunge is no more annoying than every other charging type skill in this game. The only thing that makes it stand out is the low cooldown. Keep in mind, it can't be directly upgraded. It doesn't stun, knock down or push back. It doesn't seamlessly transition into a grapple and can be countered. It does relatively low damage in comparison to other class skills. The low cooldown is what balances it, not what breaks it. Assassin has no reliable method for killing at a range, so she constantly needs to get in and out to be useful. It also can't really be spammed offensively aside from finishing off weakened enemies since grappling has a cooldown itself.

Also, I main Assassin, I'll admit. I might be a bit biased, but I can say this: In the last two weeks, I've pretty much only played Assault and Support. Between these two, I consistently felt stronger than opposing Assassin's. I rarely died to them except from well executed backstabs or if they got to me while weakened. An Assassin already in my sights (setting up for the obvious lunge into facestab) usually wasn't effective and either died or retreated. Lunge can easily look broken on paper, but in the perspective of her weaknesses I don't see it as anything but necessary.

Transportation and as an opener.

If you want to nerf it reduce the damage. I shouldn't be able to kill a tank with a lunge+grapple combo.
May also want to reduce the range while dazed.

I understand your point on getting in and out quickly. However doesn't she have dash and smoke bomb for that?

Also if you can't really compare lunge to charges because charges are one of the classes 4 "core" skills. It shouldn't ever be on par with those 2 classes skills. She effectively has an extra skill if you do try and compare it.

Also technically you can upgrade it, but its a really minor upgrade (dagger to sword increases lunge damage.)

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@hickwarrior while I saw that thread before I Felt that this thread was warranted as it is trying to approach more than JUST the lunge-grapple aspect but the ability as a whole.

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This video was posted earlier because of the issue of the air grapple at 0:45
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mb5BVcThDc

Now watch that and see how often lunge is used to allow the assassin to extend much farther than should be safe to do so by yourself in plain sight. For the first half of the game lunge is used as often if not more often than dash is (mostly to counter act level 1 dash's short duration and CD time)

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What if level 1 and 2's dash didn't drain as fast but lunge was attached to dash (say requiring 50% of your dash at level 1, 35% of your dash bar at level 2, and 20% of your dash bar at level 3?)

This would slow assassin's down, force them to pay a bit more attention to their skill usage without removing their ability to get in, and get out.

Would this be acceptable?

What I see would happen is that cloak would be used more and the dash function itself not so much. Since lunging is THE way to get out of a bad situation fast, having that on standby is crucial. Not in the least because of the lunge's bot clearing ability. The dash's usual would become neglected.

But that's just my opinion here.

You can definitely compare her lunge to the rest of the easy mode skills the other classes have. Only one of her skills actually improves her offensive capability, and that's her passive. To put it into perspective, imagine how worthless the Assassin would be without lunge. The only difference here is the Assassin relies on her lunge to define her as the class, and would be useless without it. As nice as her defense oriented skill set is, it doesn't really give her much to work with offensively. Dash is nice for movement, but for entry and escape it just makes you a free kill. Smoke Bomb is also nice, but its blind properties are hard to make strategical use of (except against turrets <3) and it's pretty much just an escape mechanism that's completely useless if you happen to have something blocking you (that said, I seriously laugh my *** off every time I see an Assassin Smoke Bomb just to bonk their head on something above them that they didn't notice). Cloak is very nice for what it does, but it's way too loud AND visible to sneak up on any aware player.

Also, Assassin is already nearly useless until, at the very least, Assassin 3 and Cloak 2 (arguably 3 for a lot of her Cloak gimmicks). Making Dash another skill that she's pretty much required to max before she can even start to be effective is just stupid.

Please no more. Can we just go ONE week, hell ONE DAY, without getting into a heated discussion about the same things? We just had a thread about this!

I don't even care if you think things are overpowered anymore, I'm just tired of seeing 3 threads about the same thing.

And no, that doesn't really mean anything about these things. All that means is that someone decided to make a thread about it for the umpteenth time so that it can turn into a 45 page troll-fest.

Reminds me a lot of a filibuster.

Actually last I checked ALL of her skills increase he offensive capability. Coming out of cloak grants a critical attack. Smoke bomb nullifies turrets and bots for extended period as well as giving her a 50% damage reduction for 1second.

Dash is the odd man out, while it doesn't directly affect her offensive abilties it, like hover for assault, greatly improves her mobility and thus both her offensive and defensive capabilities.

And while I agree that REMOVING lunge would be a horrible idea. CHANGING it might not. And as I stated earlier, try and keep in an open mind. If a nerf did happen, what kind of nerf would you want? I imagine if lunge was given a heavy handed nerf than they'd buff other areas to compensate, but a small nerf probably not (like if they upped CD from 2 to 3 seconds I doubt they'd change anything. But if they upped it to like 5 or 6 seconds I imagine they'd buff dash to compensate)

I don't see how increasing the lunge cooldown would do anything. I would save mine to lunge grapple you - no improvement from your point of view. It would make it a lot more annoying to kill bots and move faster though. It would make my job a lot harder without any benefits for the potential 'victims'.

In my opinion lunge has to be spammable because the Assassin needs to be close to whatever she wants to destroy. She's the only class without a ranged main weapon...

See I'm not discussing just lunge grapple.

And actually you do make a point that you might not see:

except then you couldn't also lunge away immediately after the grapple ends saving you from the teammates trying to kill you because you over extended into an unsafe situation.

Smoke bomb, dash. Getting away is not the problem, getting there is.

Lunge is pretty much neccessary for the assassin to do anything. It is the fastest way to kill bots, it is used to quickly approach enemy players, killing players without grapple can only be achieved by lunge spamming. It's also required to quickly move across the map and escaping. Nerfing lunge directly would not only make it harder to kill players, it would also weaken the assassin in all other aspects.
Also, to everyone who gets killed by assassins with lunge+grapple from the front, it's your own fault. Every skilled player just jumps upon seeing the assassin lunging at him and the grapple is pretty easy to avoid, since there is a small delay between when the lunge damage is inflicted and when the assassin can perform the grapple.

If lunge is going to be nerfed, the only change I would see as appropriate would be adding a delay between using lunge and being able to perform a frontal grapple. That would allow even the worst players to avoid grapples from the front, however, backstabs and other assassin abilities wouldn't be affected.

I get grappled in the air... a lot. It is starting to seem that jumping doesn't work half the time now for grapples. Many times I've jumped just to see the grapple go through while my body is still in the air, not on the ground with the person grappling me.

That's a technical issue, and I hope Uber is going to fix it at some point.
Countering a lunge from the front even without jumping really isn't that hard with any class.

Tank: Charge or Death Blossom
Gunner: Slam
Support: Grapple or a shotgun blast
Assault: Charge
Sniper: Grapple

No matter how many times I've tried, against decent assassins it's really difficult to either counter-grapple or grapple first as a sniper. Could just be a latency difference though...

While it is true that all of those easily counter the lunge, you first also have to know where they are. I hear Assassins before I see them all the time, and since it is possible to lunge out of stealth, you would only have a very small time frame to react.

Alright, we're just going in circles here, so I'm going to ignore most of what you said.

I would, however, love to know what kind of buff to lolDash would make up for the complete and utter ruin that a 5 second lunge cooldown would do to the Assassin.

Assault charge 1,2 loses in priority to all grapples. Oh how much I hate this. I do not know how high the priority is for level 3 as I do not use it. The window is quite large to grab.

Assault level 2 is 300 damage and recharges in 8.5 seconds at base. Lunge is 134(201)/167(250) with a 2 second recharge.

Totally fair given that it is a complete extra from every other classes 4 base skills and has effectively zero cost. If it cost a gold endorsement to be that good then maybe it would be reasonable as it would preclude the gold armor endorsement.

For the following, assassins that do not run at least silver armor are disregarded.

I've actually come across face grapple spam players that are frustratingly effective given the damage potential of grapple and lunge. No attempts made to gain a backstab, just obvious cloak to lunge grapple and either continuing the fight if the potential to win is high enough or using one of 47 escape skills to get away if the odds are not in the assassin's favor. With an armor endorsement it provides enough health that I can't do enough damage quickly enough with an assault rifle, especially with the "dead zone" area where your cross-hairs provide no actual benefit for aiming that assassins in melee range exploit to untold levels just by W+M1 level skill.

I'm stuck using my skills (which don't recharge at all during a grapple...). This means bomb and charge every assassin fight assuming that they have unlocked at least one custom class. When the assassin can immediately disengage with either lunge or smoke bomb after the first hits and there is no possible way to follow.

I can't pick fights, neither can any other class. My escape skill Charge is on a relatively long cooldown even with skill recovery endorsements.

Not sure if serious. You're complaining about Assassin, as an Assault? You do realize you're practically one of her hard counters, right? I mean, nearly every one of your skills acts as an Assassin repellent. That's like a Sniper complaining about the Tank's Railgun.

I'll enjoy my ineffective W+M1 while you can enjoy pretty much every other thing you do causing a cheap ring out. Also, I think I'm going to step out of this thread now, as to not help encourage the inevitable lock coming up.