2014-07-10, 11:19 PM
Phoenix Wright Wrote:After reading over the skill changes I'm kinda sad that Marksmen weren't touched upon at all.
It's not their damage that I'm worried about - I just find that mine feels very clunky and awkward compared to other classes. Also it'd be cool if all of their castable buffs had the same duration..
Many classes wish that and only a few ones have it. We don't have it so bad, though.
One thing I find awkward about Marksmen is the Hookshot skill, since it's very inconsistent in appearing like it should be. I've also noticed that the handle part of the skill which is shown in extractions is never shown in-game, at least in GMS. Not that the chain or grapple appears half the time, anyway. And the fact that it has an animation cut off at the bottom to indicate ground in the form of dust, which is extra bad since it's used a lot in the air (oh and it's even coloured blue since the animators were too lazy to exclude the dust from hue change apparently). It's a lot more noticeable compared to some of our universal buffs (MW/EA) and our non-golden attacking skills (not Pierce/Snipe). Aggressive Resistance is also a bit too plain if you ask me, especially since it's only you pretty much 100% of the time while you're in battle. Compare it to Angelic Buster's or the Bishop's, for example.
I would also prefer it if we got some visual indicators for our distance skills like Rangefinder and Last Man Standing. It just feels odd for them to just be boring passives in this age of MapleStory. If it were a newly released class, I'm certain they would have gotten animations. Alas, it was only a large-scale revamp.
I do see some clunkiness in Arrow Illusion, Net Toss and Dragon's Breath in descending order. Arrow Illusion is too slow to cast and it's hard to call its contrasting colours pretty. Not to mention it's just a very strange concept to begin with. The two rings feel tacked-on. Net Toss just feels out of place and it's strange that they'd add such a skill after removing Arrow Eruption (though of course they may have removed it for other reasons). Dragon's Breath has the same problem as the old Wind Archer skill Wind Shot, only that it pierces so it won't ever look as awkward as Wind Shot did when it was fired at an angle. Still, the resulting single hit (instead of triple) is also weird as hell (more so considering it hit multiple times before they changed the animation, albeit four and not three).
Perhaps a better flow between Hookshot and your attacks would also reduce the clunkiness. As of right now, we only have a small window of time to use an attack after you finish casting the skill and before you reach your destination. The fact that you can cast Hookshot again before you finish moving, overriding the previous move command and either resulting in slowly sliding across the floor or lagily descending from the air, is awkward. They should add a dynamic delay after the skill which ends after you reach your destination (and perhaps before you start sliding, or before your iframes end).
Speaking of Hookshot, it seems like the Fighter's Combo Force became something similar.