Any changes to Trickster coming soon?
His rework was good, however the panic nerfs he got from PTB have plagued him with issues
- EXTREMELY add on reliant, almost as reliant as knight (memento blades, main event duration)
- Even more map dependant than before
- Throw rate too slow base kit
- Lullaby still exists, when he is harmless past 10m, and only encourages W keying
Buff throw rate to PTB 0.25s (instead of the current 0.3s), increase blade count to 50, remove lullaby and/or reduce TR to 24m. Easy fixes.
Comments
How can he be more map dependant now? He is a 4.6 m/s killer now... Given that he is 4.6m/s now I think the 32m terror radius is fine, and unless people use the visual heartbeat the lullyby is really low volume anyway...
I think one of the goals of the rework aside from trickster himself has also failed majorly, they wanted to make playing against him more engaging and that did not happen at all... So that should at least be addressed as well.
The main problem for Trickster right now is the contradiction in vision for what he should be.
Trickster mains want him to be about skill expression via being rewarded for accurately throwing and hitting his knives. They want his whole gameplay to revolve entirely around his knives, rather than using them to zone and score a free m1.
This however makes him unappealing for the casual player, his skill floor was very high, and his skill ceiling only went so high, as you needed to reach the high level of precision it took to play him passably well... so instead he's been reworked into being a knife spamming machine, which reduces his skill expression, but makes him more accessible.
As a result he's in this weird place where he now has a lower skill floor, but without those nerfs he would have an insanely high skill ceiling for a sufficiently skilled player that absolutely must be reigned in... so his high level play got gutted.
This has resulted in Trickster being dumbed down a lot, someone you can easily pick up and do alright with as a new player but with limited ability to really shine as a strong killer at higher levels of play...
It's kinda hard to think of a way to alter his power so he has a high skill ceiling, but also a low skill floor, just by the nature of how the power works...
Throw speed ramping up on each successful hit would be a start, but you have to watch it carefully, and Main Event needs to be looked at with great care to be somewhere between useful but not busted... chewing through health states during trades being a shining example of a problem to worry about.
I don't think his skill floor was very high at all... Most killers don't have a high skill floor, because you can just pick them up and play them as m1 killers and just occasionally use the power. Throwing the knives was not that hard, an example for a high skill floor would be Nurse, because if you are not able to use the blink you are useless...
But throwing knives and by seeing where they land and adjust immediately is super easy to do, it is not like huntress where the one throw you get at a time needs to be precise... And even Huntress does not have a high skill floor, you can just hit hatchets while people are in animation lock. Even Billy or Blight who tend to be hard killers to master have a rather low skill floor, you can just use their power for mobility and play them as an m1 killer from there... Or use only 2 rushes to get someone in a corridor, same for the saw or a backrev. The point is neither of those or trickster has a high skill floor.
If you disagree then I guess we have different definition of skill floor and I would like to hear yours. I would define the skill floor as the minimum requirement you need to get something done with the killer, which tends to be m1 killer gameplay for most 4.6 killers.
Ok dude, you might say old Trickster was low skill floor... I disagree but fine... however you can't say old Trickster is a lower skill floor than modern Trickster... that's just not true.
Old Trickster was a 4.4 killer, and any Trickster main will tell you the secret of old Trickster was knowing when you could and could not pull up your knives. If you pulled up at the wrong time, the scaling throw speed on each throw wouldn't matter, cause the survivor breaks line of sight; and if you miss often, those windows are few and far between on certain maps.
Like yeah at the bog basic levels of play against Bambi's he was alright, but against decent survivors old Trickster became quite hard to play well if you werent accurate with knives, especially for console where most of casual player base is.
Main Event usually came too early, or too late to be any use for players not carefully tracking/planning for it, and if you couldn't hit knives well, then tough crap, you're a 4.4 killer, good luck walking people down. This is why a lot of Rookie Tricksters resorted to proxy camping hooks and chewing through health states on trades instead of risking prolonged chases.
Nowadays modern Trickster doesn't share these same problems. He is 4.6 and can play normal mind games if he needs to, main event comes up often and can be thrown at any half dead zone without worry, and this also means missing knives doesn't really matter.
His problem is he doesn't get better with accuracy, spamming is just as effective with the exception you might run out of knives at the wrong time. As such there is far less reward for high level play compared to old Trickster.
Edit: My definition of skill floor is simply how much skill you need to have to be effective.
Old Trickster couldn't easily fall back on 4.6 m1 killer playstyles, so had to play well/be accurate with his knives, which had recoil to account for, a slow startup and required knowledge of when you could and couldn't use them. Main Event wasn't a crutch you could rely on if you lacked these things, so his baseline required skill was actually reasonably high to my mind.
I didn't differ between old and new trickster, both have a low skill floor, just like most killers.
All those things you mentioned are advanced knowledge and not stuff you need to immediately know when going into the match, that is what skill floor means... Skill floor does not mean what you need to know to play against good players who already know how the killer works... It means if you play this killer for the first time, how hard is it to play the killer at the most basic level. Use knives only when at low height loops, otherwise just play m1 when there are constant line of sight blockers... That kind of basic is what skill floor means.
As for the accuracy... Did it matter if you hit or not? As far as I am aware your throwing speed just got faster over time, no matter if you hit something or not?
My edit I think covered what you were looking for, sorry.
Accuracy did matter, because yes at low walls you didn't have to care, but at high walls and structures like shack you really did need to think about what you were doing, as you'd lose sight quickly, so every miss counts, and you'd also lose distance.
I don't believe skill floor reflects the most basic levels of play against the lowest of level players. Bambis do not represent the skill floor. To my mind, skill floor represents the basic requirements of the killer to be effective for an average level of play.
Huntress has a low skill floor. Her power is easy to understand, and a new player can be effective with her at an average level of play without a lot of time invested. If you guess a survivor position amd have halfway decent accuracy, you can pre throw and get a wound.
Trickster is not the same. He takes a lot more effort to understand how to play effectively at an average level of play. You can't just guess a survivor once and score a wound, you have to understand how many knives you can realistically get off at this juncture, be sure you hit them, and correctly predict the survivor movement to get another angle in time to maintain the pressure. This takes far more map and power mechanic knowledge that Huntress or Deathslinger or Pyrid Head and alike.
At least that's how I see it.
Well I guess that just comes down to how you define it, I would say the definition I go by is more accurate, considering there is a reason the phrases are called floor and ceiling... Like the highest and the lowest thing... So saying skill floor is somewhere in the middle is a bit off ^^
I'm not arguing that trickster was a bad killer and getting good results needed some commitment to learning him, but that was not the topic.
The skill floor is just the bare minimum you need to play the character... For an ego shooter it would be to point the cross hair at the enemy and press m1, based on some quick searches I would assume that to be the general definition.
Well I suppose I make that distinction because I define a skill floor as a starting point of actually attempting to develop your skill on the character.
I wouldn't for example say Eddie Gordo in Tekken has a low skill floor because you can mindlessly bash buttons and accidently win. That to my mind isn't a skill floor 😅
I'm of the opinion the skill floor is where you start from at a baseline of actually trying to get good at a character, and playing against a halfway competant opponent is a vital part of that process, as you aren't developing any skill if you beatvup on someone who doesn't have a clue what they're doing... if that makes sense?
Yeah sure makes sense, but why is it the floor then? ^^ For me the floor is where you start of when you try something... The skill floor for chess is being able to move chess pieces and know where you can place which piece. It is the bare minimum, for fighting games I would not even go that far into character specifics... Just knowing which button does what is basically already the floor, maybe knowing what special attacks are available and such, but not much more... So for example for Unknown it would be that you have a projectile and a teleport and that only an indirect hits can damage, but not necessarily that you can hit through walls or how to do advanced stuff, like putting a clone at a specific spot, by tapping the m2 to prevent a spawn of a clone at a position you don't want it to spawn.
It's a fair argument, although I suppose I would have to ask if the term skill floor has a purpose if its literally just referring to the basic controls of a killer?
Like even Hillbilly has a low skill floor if we're just counting the difficulty of throwing out his ability and bambi survivors being silly/running in straight line from him... and technically we could say his skill floor is low just because he can use the chainsaw to run around and otherwise just be an m1 killer...
Nothing wrong with defining skill floor like this, but it doesn't really give much to talk about as a metric of the difficulty of playing/learning a killer.
Personally I'd say skill floor is a more useful discussion point when referring to how much time you need to put in to understanding the basic functionality of a character at an average level of play.
For Hillbilly this is the basics of curving, developing accuracy and building tile knowledge of where you can and cants realistically turn.
For old Trickster this is the basics of developing accuracy, knowing at which points you can pull up knives to land consistent hits at a variety of tiles, and being aware of your available ammunition and main event progress.
Huntress skill floor is similar points to Trickster... but I'd argue her variations of this are far easier to learn than Trickster 😁
Like I said before and this is also why I used Billy as an example, it is really this basic level. You don't even have to walk into the saw, it is only mobility.
Ofc it does not give anything in that department, but that is also not what the term is used for? The skill floor says how hard or easy it is to pick up a killer, the skill ceiling tells you how hard it is to master the killer, and anything in between is up for debate anyway because you don't have a metric for the middle part. We could just say how hard the killer is to learn/play properly, because there are no set borders here like if you say you know Billy to 40%,like what does that mean? That's way too subjective, but setting floor and ceiling is very clear in the sense of what it means: the bare basics and mastery of the character.
I would say huntress has less of a margin of error, because trickster missing a knife is not a big deal, there are 40 more to come, but huntress not only loses distance but also a rather limited Ressource... Debatable which one has the lower skill floor, but I don't think that is the topic ^^
Sure, and we can definitely agree on that... all of this is completely subjective anyway, so while this is an interesting conversation, everything will just come down to opinion at the end of the day regardless xD
Back to the OP
Returning to the OP, I do feel like Trickster has a bit of an identity crisis. Trickster mains from what I've read want focus and reward to being accurate with their knives.
When I read their reworks the general trend prioritises accuracy over spamming knives. Their reworks are far more in depth and awesome, but if I make small tweaks to current Trickster instead of doing a huge rework, my changes to him would be:
Thi should hopefully still keep relatively accessible, but give him some actual skill expression for accurate knife use.
The base issue with trickster is his similarity to Huntress, more accurate less spam will just gradually become huntress, the opposite direction will turn him into a machine gun where aim just does not matter because you are throwing too many projectiles to dodge anyway... The crisis of his concept is he will always be just a better or worse huntress and not have an identity of its own, sure his main event power up exists, something that huntress does not have but this does not suddenly give him an entire new identity.
And that leads to the issue with counterplay, because he throws so many knives so fast dodging one or two probably loses you more distance than you gain because he missed knives, his counterplay tends to revolve around bringing highwalls between you and the killer and not trying to dodge projectiles.
if you think the rework was good you should watch this video, it honestly almost couldn't have been worse
https://youtu.be/yKeT0sf4lAE?si=oLxmstrytvfpWrZYI'm not saying I don't agree with you or even agreeing. But whatever changes BHVR makes to Trickster, he's always going to be a Killer who players have quite mixed feedback and view on his power.