GW:EN Sneak Peak: Sins Still Suck

From my brief excursions into PvP, I see that Shadow Prison Sins are still the order of the day. They rule the field in the Hero Battles, for one, but that one elite is still being used to the exclusion of every other one. And that template of Sin is still being played to the detriment of the game itself.

What surprises me is how little they've changed in the months I've been away – I quit playing some time in March, maybe May?, and there have been at least a few rebalancing attempts since then. BoA having been nerfed into oblivion, Tiger's Stance seems to be the order of the day. Nerf that and it'll become Flurry (Which, if I remember correctly, only affects the base damage of an attack, not the bonus damage. Which means with those wimpy 7~17 daggers that it does absolutely nothing while letting you go ginsu.), maybe. Nerf that and something else will be found to power out those attacks. No, the heart of the Shadow Prison template is pernicious and it's two-fold.

The first is Shadow Prison itself which is a comb enabling snare and a prot-foiling teleport. You don't have to run to your target, giving the defenders a chance to outguess you, only click a button and you're there ready to deal damage. And the snare means your target won't be able to kite away while you uncan your combo. An IAS like BoA or Tiger's Stance just helps them crack open that window of opportunity.

Second, is the sick synergy with a skill like Black Lotus Strike. Which is worse than Golden Lotus ever was. At least with Lotus you weren't feeding off of debuffing the enemy and making your job easier. But Lotus Strike not only allows you to skip right to the duals and off-hands you really want to lay down, it gives you all the energy you need to do so. Assassins, more than any other class, are limited by their maximum energy. For most characters what you care about is your recharge or your regeneration but for Sins it's all about spending their store in one, fantastic burst – they always have enough energy it's just a question of when they have it which is important in a class that revolves around timing and precision so much. And the energy gain from a Lotus skill lets them ignore that restriction. Using Black Lotus they throw not one, but two limiting mechanics out the window. Both the chaining of their combos and the peculiar shape of their energy pool.

The sick thing about this is how degenerative it becomes. Early Sin builds focused on compressing those chains to the absolute minimum to pack in some utility. The cool stuff, the interesting skills from Shadows and Deadly which allowed you to get off that shortened chain and broadened the game's horizons, that was the focus. These days? Lotus Strike means you can chain together four, five attacks easily. And the design fight is to squeeze those few bits of utility on your bar that fuel your mega-combo. What should be a class of skill, of clock-work certainty, and rewarding to play has become about mashing your buttons best.

Then, of course, you throw in things like Expose Defenses and the IASes which superpower those effects and you have a beast. Able to split, able to withstand punishment, able to dish it out. And one that crowds out every other way of playing the Assassin. Competitively, anyway.

But it all comes back to Shadow Prison and Black Lotus Strike. Those are what you need to fix in order to fix the archetype. It doesn't have to cease being viable, it just has to cease being the only way to play. And, guess what? In all the time I've been away they hardly been touched. A minor tweak to the duration on Prison, mostly, it seems, to dissuade its use in secondaries. But Black Lotus? What I'd argue is the root cause of much of this silliness (I mean, I'd set SP to 15en and give it a 33% snare but that's only because I want it out of the damn game. If you want it playable, then it's pretty fine where it is. Strong, but acceptable.)? As far as I can tell, hasn't been changed at all.

Instead, we get improvements to lead attacks and new off-hands seemingly designed to lure players into using them. As I said in during my liveblogging, bluntly, it's not going to work. It doesn't matter how good the lead attacks are. Not when the duals are the class of the line. As long as players can skip straight to the duals whether it's through Black, Golden, Fallen, or anything else, then they're going to ignore those off-hands that require a lead in favor of those that don't. They need to make the most of that small, limited window of opportunity they have to deal damage. They need to get as much use out of every skill slot as they can. Dinking around with lead attacks when you could be hitting harder, with more impressive effects, is not as desirable, not as effective. Not when there are ways around that speed bump.