Assassin (Huntress?) Buff

#1

Hello there, first post here. I just thought of a small-ish buff idea to Assassin’s Poison and I guess Huntress’s Trap by proxy.

From what I see, Poison is only REALLY useful in certain niche situations, where getting close, aiming properly, or high defense are a real pain. I really do feel that its fine in these situations. It doesn’t deal too much damage, but it helps get some damage safely in where you would otherwise face considerable danger or inconvenience getting close with a dagger.

Against “safer” enemies, however, Poison takes too long to deal its full scope of damage before it gets out-damaged by a second of dagger DPS or group steamrolling makes it outright useless.

My idea is to make the speed it takes for Poison to land be dependent on how close you throw it in relation to your character. It would lessen the overall time it takes for Poison to deal its full damage against closer enemies. More specifically, it lessens its most critical stage, where you deal no damage and WILL deal no damage at all if you miss. Against monsters with rapid movement or invulnerability phases, this should be especially useful.

However, it doesn’t straight up buff Poison when using it at a long range, and in fact requires a bit more skill to use efficiently (timing the shot based on range, getting closer to enemies for full impact, etc.). If nothing else, it makes sense realistically, as an Assassin would take less time to throw a Poison in the air if they were closer to their enemy.

That’s about it. I included Huntress in the title because it throws stuff like the Assassin, I heard DECA is already considering revamping Assassin sometime in the future so I’m not sure if this idea will really matter in the long run, and I hope this isn’t a repost. Thanks for reading.

#2

good idea, tell Deca how to implement it into the game.

This modification would also obey the law of physics, so DECA will never implement this (jk)

It’s a good buff to the sin but a not-needed buff to the huntress. They’ve improved her trap by miles already. Personally I’d l;ike to see server performance issues fixed before this, seeing as the performance issues affect far more people than the select few who actually do use the assassin to its fullest* potential in the current status.

*Yes, I know the assassin is currently underpowered as of now, and so is my typing accuracy

#3

Ye, huntress absolutely doesn’t require it. Just included it due to the similarity of the the abilities. Also, on telling Deca how to implement it, is there a particular problem with adding it? Is it like impossible or super complex given how the game works? Just want to clarify, thanks.

#4

This is a great idea! As you said, it would give the assassin the buff it needs, without changing him too much or making him too OP.

I’m not sure if it would be really hard to implement it, The easiest way is making multiple different bomb for each range of throw. For example, depending if you aimed at 4 or 5 squares away from you, you would have a different bomb with the same stats except for landing speed.

There is probably a better way to create such a thing, but I don’t know the exact way rotmg works, so I didn’t find a better way of creating this.

#5

Thanks for the support! Yeah, I have 0 idea about the coding behind the game. For the Assassin in general, I think that beyond a full revamp, a few clever tweaks here and there are all it needs to match up with the rest of the classes. Like maybe buffing T6 poison damage to 1K or more and giving Assassin an ST set (DECA pls)

#6

Having the throw time be based on distance will be extremely disorienting and make it generally harder to use as it will be harder to time invulnerability periods. This will also really screw over existing assassin players.

The only real buff assassin needs is cheaper mana cost on venoms as it currently very difficult for new players to use effectively due to bad pets. It would also be nice if the venom could hit invincible enemies since that is his niche, though I feel that would take away from what makes assassin so unique and wonderful. :sunglasses:

#7

Understandable points, but I’d really like to address the first part.

For one, although it may be harder to time invulnerability periods, it isn’t necessarily impossible. Furthermore, once you DO get the hang of the distance-time ratio, it would in fact be EASIER to hit things before they go invulnerable. For example, say theres a super spooky dude who goes is invulnerable except for like 1 second or less increments. With the current throwing delay you would have to predict vulnerability pretty far in advance. If you throw after he goes vulnerable, you will absolutely not hit it. But with a lower throwing delay (I’m expecting like at least .75 secs or something when real close) you would face less risk of missing and can get it in even after it goes vulnerable.

That example is pretty wonky even to me though, so lemme use an existing one. Take the Beehemoths at the Nest event. They are semi-invulnerable so you do have to time your poisons well, but thats expected. More annoyingly, however, is the fact that they flitter around everywhere at high speeds and with erratic movements. They can follow players at a weird angle and switch their focus in groups, will bounce back at high speeds once they hit a certain range, and are generally just all over the place. Predicting their given position 1.5 seconds later (the current throw time) while not running into their shots is simply a pain. If you haven’t already and even if you have, I recommend fighting Beehemoths (again?) with an Assassin. There are so many instances where a lower throw time would be a godsend, but I’m not sure how to best describe it, so you should see for yourself. This also applies to several other monsters in varying degrees and forms btw.

On everything else: A high skill cap won’t necessarily be bad even for existing assassin players (if you master it its ultimately beneficial), cheaper mana costs are ok I suppose but would just make more powerful players more OP, and making venom hit invul enemies would break the game in so many ways.

Oh and sorry for all those walls of text its a real bad habit ;-;

#8

Most people can’t commit to doing a distance to throw time mathematical problem in their head every half second just to throw poisons effectively. Especially not when counting the distance in tiles (or god forbid, pixels) while both you and your target are moving. By having the throw time be a constant you can get a feel for when to throw the poisons by actually learning enemy phases without having to spray and pray. Without a constant throw time assassin loses a large chunk of skill and leans more towards luck.

#9

Distance should certainly be in tile length lol. And you’re saying a lot of things about difficulty in doing mathematical calculations, but it really isn’t as complicated as you might think. You could even say you need to do a mathematical calculation to time your current poison shots. You need to time and memorize the invulnerability lengths of each and every enemy with them, align them with the current poison throw time, and still aim and predict shots. People probably don’t think about all of that and just get a feel for it though, as you said, but the calculations are still plausible and tentatively related.

This is the same for my idea, just with a bit more skill required. Keep in mind that your character is centered at a specific point on your screen. The distance between you and any given point on a screen will more or less always be constant, and so that point will always have same distance-time modifier. After some usage, you should get a feel for that too, without any complicated explaining. Simply superimpose the enemy you are trying to hit on that grid, and it should hardly be a problem.

Moving forward, I strongly disagree with you regarding skill, and on several different levels. My idea, in essence, requires MORE skill than it currently stands. It requires a greater understanding of distance and time on top of aiming for enemies, and so absolutely requires more skill. Of course that’s not what you meant, because you were instead implying that no one would even be able to time their poison. Even though, as I explained in the first paragraph, it is perfectly plausible, if people couldn’t master their shots it still wouldn’t imply more luck than skill. That makes absolutely no sense. To clarify, a fair comparison would be if a noob who couldn’t aim their spell bombs meant that spell bombs required more luck than skill. That reasoning just doesn’t work out.

#10

Gonna be honest here, I somehow forgot the screen moves with you. So fair point there.

I do still think that a solid time is better as to not have to memorize X more timings for X amount of tiles for every boss.

As for luck over skill. Having differing throw times would very much so discourage learning the class and many people would go on to believe that timing is random rather than on some weird formula. This would greatly encourage spamming poisons rather than timing them. Similar to how many people believe trickster decoys walk in a random direction when that is not the case.

#11

I think on memorizing we really just have differing opinions but we both get the general gist of it. Don’t think the discussion will go anywhere on that atm.

For differing throw times, I would think there should be some sort of addition to Poison’s description. Not sure how it would be written tho tbh. My idea of the formula would be pretty simple though: just (values are just for sake of portrayal) say .5 second default when aiming on char and add .1 second per tile or something.

#12

What about simply making the poison land faster, but with a constant speed (not depending on range)?

#13

Sure, I’m perfectly fine with that. I sorta like my idea a bit better for a couple reasons, but it’s obviously pretty complicated and probably divisive in some way, so just making it land faster is a solid enough buff.

#14

Unfortunately, Assassin has another major flaw. The majority of bosses repeatedly flash through invulnerability over and over again. Because your poison takes 2 seconds to land and vulnerable phases rarely last that long, Assassins must have extreme timing and previous knowledge of the boss. Your idea fixes steamrolling (sort of), but the poison was meant to be utilized from a distance. Your solution would make this even harder, forcing players to calculate how long the poison would take to land based off of their distance to the boss. I believe that DECA is reworking this class, so hopefully they come up with a good idea to bring Assassin some power.

#15

Before I give a proper reply to your response, I want to talk a bit about my personal opinions on Poison’s relation to Assassin. Poison’s appeal is its long-range, AoE, armor piercing damage, but this ultimately clashes with Assassin’s mid-close range dagger. One prioritizes getting close, and the other is meant for staying away, as you yourself said. Furthermore, they aren’t equal: an Assassin’s dagger would deal way more damage compared to a poison to all but the most armored enemies over a similar period of time. As such, when close range, Poison is just a subpar, slow source of damage, and when far away (usually against tough enemies with lots of health), its just a way to get SB and other classes can do it more efficiently in most cases anyways.

However, the niche it encompasses is still somewhat useful, and so I don’t really wanna change that. My idea is meant to make it more useful in situations where its niche doesn’t apply (most situations), which implies occasions when you can get close to enemies.

Moving on to your analysis, I’ve already discussed the difficulty of timing your shots with my new system above in this thread, and it seems to mostly be matter of opinion so I’ll only say a little about it.

Optimally, the time it takes for poison to land at a distance will hardly be changed with this new system. It is only at mid and especially close range that timing will be notably lessened. To reiterate my previous point, its niche of long-ranged damage will still be kept intact while making it more efficient where that niche doesn’t apply.

I also want to address the fact that lower throw-times means that vulnerability phases can be more accurately abused. Instead of planning where your enemy will be 1.5 seconds later and whether it’ll be vulnerable 1.5 seconds later, if you can afford to get closer to it you can instead predict where and when to throw, say, only 0.75 seconds later, which I feel should be considerably easier. If the enemy is a fast chasy annoying thing, this should be especially helpful.

But yeah, DECA is thinking about reworking the class so its all good. I just wanted to put forward my idea of a slighter but still significant change that would be buff the class in a unique way.

#16

Spell of the Ancients: Pierce > Murky + T6

#17

Ye, wizard basically makes assassin moot (way more damage, spell is insta, longer range staff).

#18

@FinalSay
Just so you know, #ideas:classes is for new classes not buffs to classes.
moved to #ideas:other

#19

Sorry about that, and thanks for the help. I’ll keep it in mind in the future.

#20

I actually really like the though of your idea, being physics based and not just a set speed. I would also like to contribute to your idea if i can: so the poisons damage would be multiplied by 1.1 (every time ot inflicts damage) per square away from the enemies it lands on (so take the Baneserpent Poison for example, it does 120 damage over 7.5 seconds which equates to 900 damage in total. Being, lets say, 5 squares away from the enemy you are trying to hit, 1.5x more damage is dealt (120 x 1.5 = 180 x 7.5 = 1,350) which may seem overpowered at first…). This creates a balance between using the dagger to do damage and a poison at the same time as you will have to gain distance to deal more damage with te ability, this may balance out the damage dealt with this class compared to ranged classes (although you could stand far away from a target to deal more damage and then run up use the dagger on it). Your mechanic and this suggestion could make the assasain more desirable to play whilst still being balanced.
I dont know, just a suggestion.