In the Design of Everyday Things, there’s this idea that a button should perform an action when pressed that is known to the user and that has a reliable output.
Finishers are supposed to consume your combo points to perform an action. Ace up your sleeve makes it so that between the eyes does not function as a finisher 4 percent of the time. It’s like flipping the lights on in your kitchen and having the microwave start, set to popcorn. Sometimes, this even results in your killing someone extremely fast- and it’s not rewarding in the least. The proc killed that player, not an action by the user, and thus it feels like you get denied any sense of victory.
The classes have been pared down and many of the abilities, in this case Marked for Death, have been reintroduced as random effects that the user has no control over. I suspect that this was supposed to “feel” like more engaging play because you have to react to your character’s gameplay changing (randomly faster energy regen, randomly faster combo point regen, random abilities activated).
Instead, it just feels like the game is button mashing things that you, the user, should have control over. Energy generation should be a certain pace. It should be 10 energy a second unless you, the user, decide to increase it with an ability (like AR). Combo point generation should happen when you use a combo point generator, not randomly after a finisher or randomly because you crit or randomly because someone else crit. Finishers should consume combo points, not give combo points.
There should be 1 to 1 relationships between player actions and game outputs. Otherwise it’s just a cluster frack of randomness that sometimes works out really well for you and other times you have a string of bad luck, and that undermines player’s sense of agency.