Scout and Assassin

The TL;DR of this thread is that as far as I can tell, scout is a more flexible, longer-lasting, and unblockable assassin with more utility at little to no cost.

By making use of the Elite that was given to me for getting a map into rotation (which was very helpful, by the way), I was able to play a good deal of scout.
After taking the time to learn the class, I've come to the conclusion that the class is very intuitive due in part to its similarity to assassin, and upon further analysis, I've come to the conclusion that scout is often better than current assassin.

I don't really have patience to make much more of an intro, so I'll get right into it.

Let's first consider that scout is very similar to assassin:

• Both scout and assassin have relatively low armor and relatively low sustain
• Both scout and assassin have a single-use powerful mobility ability
• Both scout and assassin have an incredibly deadly single-use offense ability
• Both scout and assassin occupy the same single-target recovery niche

With this in mind, it is relatively easy to think of scout as a "different" assassin.
Keeping this idea in mind, these are the key differences between the two:

• Scout has better armor than assassin and a better sword than assassin
• Scout has two steak and assassin does not, but assassin also has healing on every kill and currently receives extra health for any assassinate kills
• Assassin's speed boost is incredibly powerful in a vacuum, while scout's swap is just as powerful for mobility while also being able to (conditionally) disrupt enemy position
• Assassinate instantly kills, which is objectively superior to increasing the damage a target takes, but assassinate can be blocked, which is objectively inferior to an unblockable ability that occupies a very similar role

Now we can start addressing and interpreting these differences:

• Scout having better armor and a better sword means that in those regards it is better than assassin.
• Scout has steak that it can use at just about any time and (probably more importantly) during PvP engagements to heal four hearts. Assassin needs kills to heal itself for two and a half, which is to say that scout's healing is superior in the moment when it occurs, and it can heal itself without needing to secure a kill.
  • Assassin has more sustainable healing, but that healing is dependent on securing kills, which is almost the opposite of sustain.
    • Scout gets its steak restored from a medic heal, while assassin regains consumables that were going to regenerate anyway; so in the presence of a medic, scout has better sustain.
  • Assassin also receives extra hearts from assassinations, but those extra hearts are temporary, which means they contribute very little to long-term sustain
• Assassin's speed boost is powerful in a vacuum, but isn't incredible in practice. Most flag carriers will see you coming regardless of the extra speed, and you can easily get pushed backwards if someone in front of you turns around and hits you. Conversely, while scout's swap seems very conditional, a scout will always be playing in a situation with other players and so there will always be a source of players with whom to swap. The ability provides a unique source of disruption and can lead to huge setbacks if used correctly.
• Assassinate is an instant kill that is often inferior to archer's sniping mechanic due to the range of the latter. On top of that poor comparison, it (unlike a snipe) can be stopped entirely by holding right click. While an instant kill is absolute, so is blocking, and as a result, assassinate compares poorly to death tag. Death tag cannot be blocked, and will still almost always lead to a death on a carrier when combined with a swap and many combinations of other defensive classes. In other words, death tag is an ability that requires actual team play in a team game.

As a smaller point, I'd like to discuss boosting.
I am one to always complain about ninjas who act before they think who push flag carriers forward. Albeit less frequently, this also occurs with pyros, mages, and bulk defense classes.
As an assassin one-trick, it irritates me to no end when I miss an easy instakill that a carrier wouldn't have noticed just because someone on my team pushes them past me. In many cases, it feels as though I would have recovered more often if those individuals hadn't been on my team.
With scout, though, if a carrier is boosted, I can swap with them and mitigate the damage done by my teammates. In fact, swap is so powerful that if a carrier gets boosted further, I actually end up getting more room to set up a death tag when running backwards. I never get that opportunity with assassin.


Long story short, I have a point to make here.
In many ways, I see scout as a better assassin. As an assassin one-trick, I don't appreciate that.
But I do really like scout. It's fun, it's satisfying, and it's effective. It's designed in such a great way that I don't want it to receive any significant changes beyond balance changes.
On the other hand, assassin is so simple that it could receive a relatively significant change without actually straying too far from its identity.
My request is to have an assassin change that pulls it away from the niche shared by the two classes. As it turns out, the extra health tweak doesn't really do enough for assassin's play (sorry Miskey), but the idea of rewarding multikills is a good idea, seeing as it allows scout to be the class that focuses more on single-target attacks.
I have a few vague ideas, but this isn't an idea thread. This is the thread that's meant to allow others to come up with ideas, using this analysis and interpretation as a difference.

As a last note, people are free to disagree with me. I'm very open to discussion. Go ahead and change my mind, if it's what you set out to do!