Mosaic for beginners

It doesn't feel like anything else I dare say so yes.

Essentially, MA assassins used to be "balanced" (in theory...never really up to snuff) around the fact that you would use their

Charge-up skills to build up to 3 charges of said skill and then use the finishers to use up those charges, in turn massively buffing the finisher via said

Charge. As charges were used up by finishers, you had to re-build them with the

Charge-up skill again. Additionally, charges expire on their own when not used or refreshed.

Mosaic took that whole concept and basically removed the downside all but entirely. You now get your charges up same as before but your finisher then not only doesn't use up those charges anymore (while still receiving the full benefit) but even more so, it refreshes them, meaning they don't even expire on their own anymore. The combination of those two means that not only is each

Charge significantly stronger than ever before (since the rebuilding of them is dropped) but you can stack basically every single

Charge-up skill at full charges on top of one another as you can refresh everything with a single finisher hit. That part wasn't realistically possible before, due to the expiration of charges.

So basically, MA assassin went from "

Charge,

Charge,

Charge, finisher,

Charge, finisher,

Charge, finisher, ...." to "

Charge everything on first trash pack -> nothing but finisher (1-shot), finisher (1-shot), finisher (1-shot), finisher (1-shot), finisher (1-shot), ... for the remainder of the game" and in doing so went from somewhat underpowered to just blatantly insane and utterly OP.

Still plays very different though because if you wait too long between finishers, your charges still expire so you're basically looking at the only class that has a time factor to it, forcing you to move on quick enough to not fall back to having to re-

Charge everything. Given, theoretically e.g.

Frenzy has that as well but for

Frenzy you just keep using the same attack and hardly notice the re-stacking (except on run speed if next pack is too far) whereas for a Mosaic sin, it really is night and day and actually costs you time, survivability and all that jazz.

Charge up all of your

Charge skills on first mob or two. spam finisher all game. done.

2x Mosaic = finisher never uses charges and always refreshes the duration of existing charges.

the only "challenge" to Mosaic play is to keep going fast enough from pack to pack so you never run into the

Charge expiration timer. i.e. no breaks allowed. :p

If you take too long building charges initially, you can just build 3, hit a finisher to refresh duration, build another 3, finisher, build another 3 and so on..

ShadowHeart wrote: 2 years ago

...
And that is why I don't play Mosaic much since the first season. I mean, it's OP AF and a boatload of fun and all that, but it sure can be a bit stressful to constantly need to be on the move. I like taking my time with sorting through loot, especially considering the items-on-screen-limit.
...

I actually kind of enjoyed the "chain-kill, no breaks!" part of it. Though despite that, I still prefer the trapper playstyle overall.