Escape Artist trait breakdown: How to unlock & what it does

As reported on earlier today, the Escape Artist trait is now available in Battlefront.

This new trait, which boosts speed and melee strikes, can provide an extra element to your game. So how do you unlock it?

First, head on over to Hutt Contracts and purchase the “Escape” contract for 8,500 credits. Once you’ve purchased the contract, you can then unlock Escape Artist by meleeing five enemies and scoring 10 uplink defended events.

Because Walker Assault is the only mode with uplinks, I played through a pair of Walker Assault matches in order to unlock the trait. Both criteria can also be worked on simultaneously.

For getting five melees, I used the personal shield coupled with the jump pack. This allows you to jump into a thick of enemies and strike down one or two before they pop your shield.

Getting the 10 uplink defended events is a bit trickier. Things to note:

• You need to kill enemies while standing close to an uplink. It doesn’t matter where your opponents are when you kill them; all that matters is your position in relation to the uplink.
• Uplink defend events only register when the uplink is in your team’s favor (so off when playing as Imperials; on when playing as Rebels).
• How good your team is can really affect how quickly you rack up uplink defended events. My first match I only got two uplinks defended because my team rarely had control over the uplink. My second match went much smoother and I wound up with 11 total uplinks defended, thanks to the fact that my Imperial teammates had the uplinks turned off for basically the entire match.
• Heroes don’t score uplink defended events. I learned this in the second match while playing as Greedo and hanging around the uplinks.
• Jump pack is also helpful here; it allows you to get to those uplinks quickly.

Once you get the Escape Artist trait, what does it do exactly?

At level one, it gives you a small speed boost (seems to be around 25-percent over the base speed). Upon reaching level two (scoring three kills in one life), it grants you a high speed boost (plus-50-percent sprint speed). After getting to level three (six kills), your melee hits instantly kill, in addition to the high speed boost.

As someone who spends a lot of time playing Drop Zone, this trait is hugely beneficial. Drop Zone is all about getting to the pods as fast as possible, and this trait really helps enable that objective play. My first full match with Escape Artist, while not the best match I’ve ever had, was still definitely successful in my book:

However, unlike my earlier hopes, I see this trait as more of a supplement to the jump pack rather than a full-out replacement—at least on Drop Zone. Perhaps on some of the bigger, more wide-open maps, like Outpost Beta on Hoth or Jakku’s Graveyard of Giants, I’ll try dropping the jump pack in favor of a more damaging weapon.

The third level of Escape Artist also really benefits from the jump pack, as you can fly in close to the enemy and one-hit-melee them.

Overall, I really like the trait. One of my favorite hero characters is Greedo and I enjoy the quickness he provides. Escape Artist enables a similar quickness on the battlefront and—at least for now—I’ll be running with this trait instead of Scout.

What are your thoughts on Escape Artist? Has it added something extra to your playstyle? Give your comments below or let us know on Twitter or Facebook.