Game Mechanics Making Acrobat More Coherent (Acrobat Mini Revamp)

For once I beat ChrisWildfire.

Warning: Images are kinda rough around the edges at the moment. When I learn how to make them better, I will. For now:
It's here.
The goal of this suggestion is to make shurikens and other abilities more useful for acrobats. Currently, it's not very versatile at all.

The Main Problem

Spoiler: Main Problem

Acrobats love staying in the air, which encourages a passive playstyle of just spamming Lacerate-Dash. Over and over again. Even when acro has some awesome Multihit and Smoke Bomb upgrades, it's still usually a better option to stay in the air.

The Smaller Problems

Spoiler: Smaller Problems

Acrobat is pretty incoherent. Different abilities tell you to do different things. That's not always a problem. But when one of these abilities is always superior, well, that's a problem. This one:

Spoiler: Jasmine Bloom

This post isn't about that ability, though.

Spoiler: Shuriken & Blade Fury

It's about these two.
Here's what I think: Acrobats including myself probably aren't going to use shurikens a lot. They're pretty powerful mid-game, until you reach Jasmine Bloom. Suddenly it becomes more worth it infinitely spell cycle to stay in the air rather than actively participate in combat. For one, they're small and hard to aim, especially mid-flight. It's also hard to throw them mid-flight anyway, seeing as you're in a spell cycle. What I want to do isn't just "buff shurikens damage." That doesn't fix them. I want them to be more versatile. If it's useful in more situations, this makes acrobat more coherent.
Then there's Blade Fury. It locks three of acro's most useful abilities: Jasmine Bloom, Better Weightless, and Ricochets.

Spoiler: Ricochets

It makes Multihit inviable by nature because it causes enemies being multihitted to move in the direction you're looking. (Why doesn't the parasite have CCI?) They tend to melee you. I could just move it below Jasmine Bloom and change more tree stuff, but I believe there is a better way.

The Solutions

Spoiler: What the post is about:

Here's one:

Spoiler: Sky Fury

How does it work?
Sky Fury would cause shurikens within 5 blocks of a Multihit-locked enemy to fly toward it. It would move to the closest one. Other players' shurikens would not travel towards enemies you locked with Multihit. Likewise, your shurikens would not fly towards enemies other players locked with Multihit.

How does this solve anything?
By allowing acrobats to quickly throw shurikens and keep flying, it would allow and encourage a more active playstyle for those who like to fly around away from danger.
And keep in mind, they have to get close to redirect.
This would also better incorporate shurikens into Multihit and Pirouette based strategies, as well as make those strategies more viable.

Next:

Spoiler: New Blade Fury

How does it work?
It's the same as before, except it doesn't cause enemies to move in the direction you're looking if you are holding shift. Otherwise, Acrobats can use this ability to launch enemies into the air like before to make the most of their DPS.

How does this solve anything?
Acrobats can finally use Multihit safely again! By making it so that you can control when you bring enemies up into the air, Blade Fury can become the DPS boosting fun node without murdering me when I cast multihit causing Acrobats to fall into danger just by using a powerful spell.

Spoiler: Old Locations on the Tree

Spoiler: New locations on the Tree

You have assigned 1 extra AP to Acrobat, you buffoon!
Just make wall-jump one AP. I honestly do not see any issue with this.

Until my next wall of text.
For once that statement is truthful.

 

I'm all for Acrobat changes, but I don't know if this is the right way to go about them.

Shurikens can be very powerful. They can be hard to hit, but they are well worth the skill needed to hit enemies with them, as they deal 360% of your DPS combined. They easily boost my DPS by 50k at the least. For me, they aren't very hard to use while spell cycling as I just use them as part of the spell cycle.
It can definitely be hard to hit enemies with them, but I don't think their impact on Acrobat's damage and overall performance should ever be underestimated.

For the Blade Fury changes, I understand it as hitting the enemy with your Multihit will lock them in place so they can't move. I'm not really sure how I feel about this, both gameplay-wise and thematically. Multihit becoming a freeze ray feels a bit weird to me, honestly. It's a good idea, but I think Blade Fury would be better off giving locked enemies some sort of blindness, as pulling them into the air can be quite useful while trying to hit the enemy with Lacerate or Shurikens.

Sky Fury is really neat, although it wouldn't be as useful if Blade Fury still pulled enemies towards you. However, with your changes to that ability, I think they would synchronize really well.

I do not think that the biggest issue with Acrobat is Shurikens and Multihit. Blade Fury could use some changes, but Lacerate having almost no vertical range is a bigger problem IMO. Just a shrimple range increase could up Acrobat's game by a ton.

Overall, some nice changes! Personally, I would rather keep Blade Fury as it is and make it give locked enemies blindness, or just remove the pulling part altogether (instead of freezing enemies in place), as the latter would synchronize with Sky Fury. I think that these abilities are really well designed nonetheless.

 

hey hey you missed the thing that says "can be aimed in all directions," thats useful

i like blade fury pull but other than that, good post!

 

Thank you so much for the feedback!

(*cries in pirouette)

Yea, looking back what I said, I didn't express what I meant very clearly.

That's what it did pre-2.0 though. Personally, I would rather live to kill the monster rather than let the monster mid-air murder me. I can see your point, although in my experience, they tend to be behind me.

I wasn't trying to say that the biggest problems are shurikens and multihit, however, I wanted to provide a way for Acrobat to have a more active and coherent playstyle.

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Isn't the "can be aimed in all directions" bit the one that pulls enemies.

 

no is not, it means you can use multihit downward, upward, whatever diagnolly

 

ohhhh

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changes incoming

 

Multihit without Blade Fury still locks enemies, actually. So it still exists in game!

And yeah, I didn’t read that right, I assumed you were talking about Blade Fury being a bigger issue, sorry lol

 

Wait what? What's that whole line about then? Is that just the line that makes enemies move? Changes may need to be made...

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This thread shows how little I know about Blade Fury's wording.

 

Nono, i mean Multihit before you unlock Blade Fury holds enemies in place. They don’t follow your vision, they are just frozen in place.

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I actually forgot about this too, so in my original reply when I said that multihit becoming a freeze ray would be weird to me, that was wrong because it already exists lol. Sorry about that!

 

Wait, so does this line make them move: "While using multihit on an enemy, lock them in their position in front of you."?

 

Yep, that’s it!

 

I disagree. I find Shurikens very useful everywhere I go. Players who use Pirouette should use Shurikens for higher DPS and it's fun

 

lmao


Cool post, man! Shurikens adds a bit of melee to the archetype which is great, but it gets messy to use with Blade Fury when fighting non-cci mobs, so I'm a fan of Sky Fury!

I will say though, Blade Fury's enemy drag, despite it's uhh polarizing design, does help acrobat by making Lacerate's dps more reliable. It's one of, if not, the most fun part of acrobat's kit. However I also agree that it jeopardizes acrobat a lot. Blade Fury's enemy drag is also really frustrating to work with as an acrobat's teammate, which leads to a frustrating and limiting experience for everyone involved.

I hope there's a way to keep this fun mechanic and also fix these issues. I personally can't think of one at the moment, but I think the idea of Blade Fury freezing enemies in place is a really good start!

Anyway, congrats on getting this post out, man! I see you figured out making ability tree stuff on your own!

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oh also, the ability tree's background is made of four golden shovels with different durabilities, placed on the player's inventory.

 

*cough*

 

LMAOOOO

look at this point I'm just stating a fact and not just throwing shade at you

 

i probably killed it faster than y’all combined muahaha (jk)

this is uhh
off topic though

 

True, true, I just find them annoying to use mid-spell cycle.

I actually had an idea while formulating a response to this:

Also ty for the golden shovel tip.

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My reasoning for this is that, if you are using righting reflex, you probably want to stay lower when you cast multihit vs not dragging them up.

 

A true bump