just a personnal idea for sienna fourth class based on a shadow mage:
the idea:
olesya used her ability to send people into their memories to have sienna study the shadow magic as her when she was a child. Due to this shadow sienna lines will speak of things she now understand about olesya but in a cryptic way and about moment she doesn’t know who she is exactly.
Visually she will mostly be a shadow wizard (grey cloth, low profil) but with sparks of flame as she hasn’t completly forgot her way.
passif and perk: evasion: sienna get 10% additional move speed and her doge can go through human sized ennemies. blur:10% damage resistance to ranged and AoE attacks
ult: shadow gate: sienna can target a zone (the same way the pyro choose her dash destination) and create a portal there and at her feet for ten seconds. any player can hold E for 1.5s in the portal to be teleported to the other gate.
(since the portal will have to be set the same way the dash work, it wont be usable to climb on unaccessible positions but will provide greats ways to join separate groups or evade a dire situation or sete fire teams).
level 30 talents:
Pit of shade: the teleportation gates are replaced by a column of shadow on the destination that last 6s, deal small DoT and stagger the ennemies every seconds.
Smoke and mirrors: after being teleported player get invisible for 3s or until attacking, and get 10% move speed.
blind spot: players in the portal zone are now instantly teleported upon casting it and can now us it by holding E for 0.5s (1.5s between two use of the teleportation).
new weapons:
Okkam razor blade: a shadow imbued sword with sub efficient damages (mostly hord related) by default (like the sword with 20% less damages), the special attack use 20% overcharge to give the weapon 20sec of increased damage with high perforation.
staff of smog: the staf throw small cloud of shadow in a right line dealing medium damage with good perforation, the cloud can travers any number of target but will disapear by itself after some time so no use at long range. the right clic create stati version of the smog working as poison wind glob.
staff of the pendulum: left click: throw small crescent in front of the wizard, they have a travel time and damage similar to the throwing axe. right click: a large crescent is thrown in the front arc of the wizard with hight penetration damage.
light crossbow: a crossbow similar to the ones the dawi/salty use. The damages are lower but reload time is faster with bleeding.
shadow sienna will also be able to use conflagration (ideally with a shadow skin on it), fireball, and all the mele weapons but the fire sword. other siennas will be able to use the crossbow and maybe a fire skin of the sword.
The caracter idea is to give sienna an option with high team utilities and good penetration option as well as offering concept that haven’t be seen in Vtide yet (mele overcharge, ammo weapon for sienna, groupe tp/invisibility…).
She would be on the lower hand of the siennas option when it come to raw range damages but would compensate with great penetration and damage avoidance and good horde control.
There is a difference between what happen in Back in Ubersreik and what you’re asking
First of, it would be a totally different character, lore wise and mechanic wise (As it would require all new set of weapon (Though they have done that for WP for some reason), new Voice lines…
Second of, Shadow magic can’t change that much of someone psyche without making them mad (even slight memory change is supposed to be hard)
Third of, it was an illusion cast by a ritual that we invaded:
Upon the heroes discovering an Ubersreik Lodestone, Olesya - the resident spy-master and grey wizard - sends the heroes into an illusion of Ubersreik
Well, this is one of the more creative approaches I have seen, to circumvent the lore restriction. However, I still think it will not work like this. While we did that memory dive in Back to Ubersreik, I think Olesya stated multiple times that the heroes will remember nothing of it after leaving the illusions. So the same technique wouldn’t work. We also have never received any information about timeframe like if time in illusions equals time in reality. Which may hinder this further. I also think that Shadow Mages can block memories and maybe slightly alter them but anything large might cause issues.
Creative but if implementing memories like this without head explosions would be possible than Shadow Mages would be the strongest winds by giving armies hundreds of years of combat experience.
In order to have at least some feedback not concerning lore.
Fitting if you solely base it on being shadow magic, also not to strong (lots of class suggestion blow completely away any sense of balance). Would find it fun if the character is actually shown blurry for maximum headache
1.5 seconds for a portal is a long time. I also don’t see much potential use of gates in combat situations since many people constantly rush. And I fear it would mainly be used for glitching and exploiting and other unfun game-breaking stuff. Most level 30 talents don’t change much in that regard. The most useful one would be smoke and mirrors which depending on career cooldown could have serious game balance issues.
This one I find actually very interesting because the idea could be used for any new Sienna weapon, especially if we get something associated to Myrmidia which could be more melee centric. Numbers would have to adjusted finely though.
You mentioned this before I think. You have a high emphasis on high cleave weapons which seems to tend towards crowd control. However, high cleave (or even unlimited cleave) is hard to balance. Several weapons like Coruscation Staff, the old Bloodrazaor Thicket or Fire Sword H1 are overpowered because of their combination of damage and high cleave and in some cases even absurd stagger on top. So this has to be balanced very well. It is possible as Conflagration Staff and Greatsword show.
