Kliff doesn’t have the easiest time climbing long cliff faces in Crimson Desert. There are a lot of points where you’ll desperately look for the slightest bump as a resting point so you don’t fully run out of stamina. To combat this navigation problem, players discovered a trick very early on: you can use the Aerial Stab Skill upgrade to leap incredibly high.
It was technically a bug, and so I was afraid Pearl Abyss will remove the option to chain Aerial Stabs in this manner eventually. Instead of removing it, though, the devs turned into a feature. It’s no longer as good for flying through the air at mach-5 speed, though.
Crimson Desert’s new Aerial Stab movement tech feels better than ever, if a bit weaker
If you unlock Aerial Stab, it’s supposed to let you fine-aim at a target on the ground from up on high. In effect, this Skill has a much longer range than the regular Stab to allow for some freedom of movement.
It turns out, though, it doubles as an omnidirectional dash. If you aim at the sky, you can even spring yourself into the air, and keep chaining it to get ever-higher. And it will get you there faster than you can say “Forcing Palm”. Chain-stabbing the air was one of the earliest exploration tips we found in Crimson Desert, and it was a game-changer.
So what changed? Well, instead of completely removing this interaction, Pearl Abyss added an animation to it. After you update to patch 1.01, Kliff will do a variety of flips in the air after the Aerial Stab animation has ended, giving you a handy window to further chain into more Stabs.
The tradeoff is that consequent Aerial Stabs will now have incremental Stamina cost after the first one. With 260 Stamina on my current build, I could chain it four times before it was all depeleted.
The Skill also underwent a series of bugfixes, like for example you can now do it when dual-wielding without having to swap to your two-hander.
One of these bugfixes is technically a big nerf. If you angle it right, the old Aerial Stab before today’s patch would essentially slide Kliff on terrain inclines, sending him flying much further away. For those who were using this movement tech to cover large distances, this Skill will no longer do that for you.
This reminds me of bullet-jumping in Warframe. Originally an exploit to propel Warframes by chaining slides and rolls, now it’s one of the staple mechanics (and probably the most-spammed one at that) of Warframe’s movement.
The vaulting animations mid-swing are slick to boot, and add a lot of flavor to using it as a proper movement tool. You can still use to navigate through regions with a lot of mountainous barriers (like Serpent Marsh),
Sure, some of Aerial Stab’s raw power to bypass nearly any climb in the game has been reduced, but canonizing what is otherwise an exploit is a sign that the developers know their playerbase.
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Edited by Sambit Pal