After finishing the story of Outriders (analysis here) I decided it was time to try out another class. As I've mentioned before I chose the Pyromancer for my first playthrough. For the second round I decided to go with the Trickster. When making the choice the first time I was split 50/50 between the Trickster and the Pyromancer. It was only fair I gave it a go.
The Trickster is good fun! I've really been enjoying the first 10 levels with this class. The game play is entirely different from the Pyromancer. Where the Pyromancer focuses on staying at medium range and wreaking havoc with flames the Trickster is up close and personal, utilizing shields and time manipulation as his favored weapons. Let's take a look at how it works.
Outlining the Trickster
As mentioned the Trickster is a manipulator of time and space. He can use his powers to teleport up behind his enemies and assassinate them at close range. I guess he would be the typical rogue of other games. Where the Pyromancers skills are mainly focused on fire and burning the Trickster focuses on slows. Slowing the enemies to control them and make them deal less damage.
Something unique about the Trickster that no other class has is the shield. The shield is generated by killing enemies and basically acts as more health. This makes it easier to stay alive longer especially when you're up close to enemies. There's a lot of incoming damage during this period due to there being little cover in the middle og a group of enemies. Without the shield the Trickster would be toast. Well, he still is.
As with every class in Outriders the Trickster has three branches to choose from in his class tree. There's the Assassin which focuses on dealing damage up close and skills focused around deception, like teleporting behind enemies. There's the Harbinger class which focuses on survivability like increasing your HP and giving you more shield. Then there's the Reaver which focuses of increasing your skill damage.
My strategy
I'm currently going down the Assassination branch and focusing on dealing close range damage. Teleporting up behind enemies, slowing them with my melee ability, using the temporal blade ability to paralyze and deal damage to them, activate twisted rounds and then start blasting them with a shotgun. It's loads of fun. It makes the game play of the Trickster really action filled and fast paced which is in contrast to the Pyromancer.
What's a little bit of a shame is that while I can deal a lot of damage, basically taking down elites in seconds, I can't deal a lot of sustained damage. Once I'm out of twisted rounds and also waiting for other cooldowns I'm basically a walking target that needs to sit back until my cooldowns are back up. I can still deal damage of course but it's nowhere close to the numbers I'm dealing with my cooldowns up. This basically means there's a lot of action for about 20 seconds before I need to run and hide for 20 seconds.
Since there's no way to teleport away from enemies, at least not as I've unlocked yet, it's quite easy to die when my skills end. If I can't deal enough damage to generate shield I'm toast. I've been dying a lot more with the Trickster than I have with the Pyromancer. It's a real glass cannon class.
It's still tons of fun though. If I play smart I can take down all enemies in sight during a round of cooldowns. If I manage to get a good chain of kills going I'm nearly invincible due to the shield and I turn into a killing machine. Time it right with the twisted rounds and elites are smelted away. If I do any of these wrong I'm dead.
Assessment
The Trickster is a lot of fun but not without it's issues. I've been encountering more bugs with this class than I have with the Pyromancer. Teleporting behind enemies from behind cover can be a pain. The animation plays but you don't always teleport. You just exit cover and stand there like an asshole ready to be blasted by any enemy in sight. This is especially annoying if you activate all your cooldowns at the same time and don't get to utilize them to their full potential. That means I need to just sit behind cover and wait for my cooldowns to finish and try again.
Right now I'm having a lot of fun but I need to reassess my strategy a bit since I keep on dying rather often. This could be entirely my fault for just being plain bad or playing the class wrong. I hope I eventually unlock some mods to help with survivability. Or maybe I should start hybrid-specing into the Harbinger branch as well for some more health and shield. I'll have to play around with it for a bit to find something that works.
I'm still wearing some green gear pieces and I've only found a few pieces of modded gear so far. As I've talked about before mods has the potential to be game-changing in this game, at least for the Pyromancer, so I hope that's true for the Trickster as well.
The Trickster has the potential to be something really badass but at the moment I have a finger on the Pyromancer still being my favorite class.
I'm about to head back in for some expeditions on my Pyromancer. Feel free to join my stream for some live action or check out the VOD when I'm done. I'm playing tennis in about an hour so it'll be a short one today.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.