Game Design Acrobat is the New Shadestepper: Yet Another Thread About How Terrible Acrobat is now

Everyone knows the joke about shadestepper: it's terrible. 5 second vanish cooldowns, low backstab damage, and terrible setup time. But recent buffs have actually changed this, quite a bit. Shadestepper has gotten multiple powerful buffs (backstab damage increase, having some of the strongest aspects, stacking knives) and new techs (backstab chaining, frontstabbing being easier due to aspects) that actually make it... quite good. Shadestepper is extremely powerful in many settings, and is a great choice for solo content.

However, assassin has two other archetypes: trickster and acrobat. Full trickster is alright at best, but has great synergy with shadestepper and acrobat (though with acrobat it's pretty much just pirouette and flow state). But if you've been keeping up with suggestions on changes to archetypes, the new "shadestepper" is acrobat. Why is full acrobat so bad now? Just a few months ago it was considered the best assassin playstyle behind trickobat (which died, and then is making a comeback). What changed?

Let's look at acrobat as a whole. One of its main unique features is being able to fly. If you didn't know, if you time lacerate and hop well, you can gain a lot of height very quickly, and cycling this with dash allows for infinite flight.

Now, from a quality of life perspective, that is pretty nice. But let's focus on combat advantages. Flight allows you to stay out of the range of enemy attacks, which combos well with acrobats many ranged attacks, like smoke bomb, jasmine bloom, and, uh, shurikens, and... and what else... oh, right. That's pretty much all the long ranged attacks acrobat has. Smoke bomb and jasmine bloom barely do any damage too, with shurikens coming out too slowly to aim properly and land all of them. To get the most damage out of acrobat you should be sweeping in with lacerate and multihit, playing at a close to medium distance. Not to mention that blade fury drags enemies along with you, meaning to not get out-damaged by paladin, you'll be playing at close range.

Well, that kinda defeats the purpose of flying to stay away from your enemies if they're constantly strapped to you like you're some kind of suicide bomber. Ok, then don't spam multihit? Well, did you know that most ranged mobs (specifically burst and rapid) pretty much just shred acrobat? Do you know why? It's because acrobat is AS SLOW AS MY GRANDMA. Seriously, for an archetype tied specifically to mobility, acrobat is shockingly slow compared to mage or warrior, or even archer.

So, maybe flight isn't as great as it seems. Sure if you play from really far away I guess you won't be in risk of dying, but your enemies will literally regen health faster than you deal it (maybe not actually, but your damage will be negligible). But does acrobat have anything else going for it? It turns out...

Spoiler

no

.

Even if you're going full ETW and cycling multihit and lacerate, acrobat probably peaks at 200k DPS. That may sound like a lot, but mind you that's ETW. Something more common like ETA or TWA is definitely not getting that high.

Besides being able to fly, acrobat has nothing going for it when it comes to survivability. No defense buffs, no healing, and no, Parry doesn't count. That node is useless.

For speed, acrobat is rather slow still. Ranged attacks are more of an add on to acrobats main damage sources. And on top of all of that, acrobat is rather difficult, high CPS spell cycles and knowing just when to time your hop.

But let's talk about the final nail in the coffin for acrobat. Its always had these problems since its release, it only stood out as the best choice since the other archetypes, to put it plainly, sucked. But now that trickster and shadestepper have been buffed, acrobat is easily overshadowed.

However acrobat had something the others didn't: mana sustain. Weightless was one of acrobats most powerful nodes. Combined with smoke bomb, jasmine bloom, and large crowds, weightless is basically built in mana sustain. However, someone saw this low DPS, rather subpar archetype, and thought, "Let's nerf the one node that makes most acrobat builds sustain!" Bing bam boom. Guess, what? Weightless has a cooldown. Sure it gives more mana, but it's nothing compared to its former glory.

TL;DR: Acrobat sacrifices everything for flight. And slow flight at that. It has nothing to sustain high CPS, no survivability, mid range, is slow, and is still one of the hardest playstyles to master.

 

i voted play acro, but this is basically on-point
that weightless nerf also killed everything outside of the meta, including my beloved mr-less acro that used juggle for sustain

 

They NERFED WEIGLES NO