Idea Assassin Inventory-Management/HUD Rework

Incoming Walls of Text:

This isn't a change to the actual skills of the Assassin class, rather a rework to the inventory management of the class to make it more intuitive to play. As it is, the class can be confusing for the player. Assassin starts off with Iron Sword in the 1st slot, Assassinate in the 2cd slot, and Speed Boost in the 3rd slot. If you use your Speed Boost twice, then use Assassinate, you'll have Speed Boost in the 1st slot, a Sword in the 2cd slot, and Redstone in the 3rd slot once everything regenerates.

Not only is this confusing for players, it can seriously screw over Assassins who get healed. It's not uncommon to try to initiate an Assassination but then get your items reset by a Medic, replacing your Redstone with a Sword at the worst possible moment. The Assassin inventory management is very backwards and adds artificial difficulty to the class (i.e. makes the class harder to play without actually affecting how the game works). I've created an inventory overhaul to make the Assassin HUD easier to understand and the inventory management less stupid.

Assassinate: When the Assassinate ability is activated, Redstone is replaced by an Iron Sword and your exp bar instantly depletes. The exp bar fills up to full over 2 seconds to indicate your Assassinate time. When the 2 seconds are up, the exp bar depletes over 2 seconds to indicate your vulnerability time. Then the bar slowly fills over 20 seconds (I'm honestly not sure how long the cooldown for Assassinate is) with the cooldown time counting down as a number using exp levels. When the countdown hits 0, the Iron Sword in the 2cd Inventory slot is replaced by Redstone, and the process begins again.

Speed Boost (The rework to the Speed Boost isn't really that important, if they cause lag or are annoying to code then they can be excluded): In the 4th and 5th slot are clocks (or some other stackable item). When the first Sugar is used, the 4th Clock slot starts counting down by adjusting the number of clocks stacked onto that slot. When the second Speed Boost is used, the 5th Clock slot does the same, except it counts the other Sugar's cooldown. When both Boosts are used, the Sugars are replaced with a placeholder like the ones the Engineer has.

So yeah, that's my suggestion for a tweak to the Assassin's inventory system. The regular Iron Sword stays in the 1st slot, the Redstone and the Sword it gives you stays in the second slot, and the Sugars/Placeholder stays in the 3rd slot. The Exp bar system and clocks also make it clearer to see cooldowns and ability timings of the class.

Overall, it makes the class more intuitive to use and prevents Medics from accidentally resetting Assassin inventories at bad times. I know this change may throw off Assassins for a little bit, but it's better for the class in the long run.

So what do you think?

 

It's technically 2 seconds of Assassination time that's overlapping 4 seconds of vulnerability