I’m not sure if that playstyle could be fair and balanced.
Alternative theatrical gameplay could be possible but would probably require a Shade rework.
This has got me thinking. I imagine this would be extremely hard to program, but what could be neat is a talent or even passive that reduces her aggro priority for enemies. That would give her a better likelihood of singling out enemies or groups targeting allies to “assassinate”, without the pitfalls of stealth. Also makes her inherently a bit more of a team player, without becoming a standard frontliner.
This is probably the sort of thing that is so big it would need to be directly implemented by FS though.
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I think it can be made more reasonable if it´s made conditional in some manner, i think there´s a lot of potential for timed blocks or even dodges to come into play for such a thing. Like the Sekiro combat style of breaking enemy stances before landing combo´s or even fatal blows off that.
For instance, enemy stormvermin does an overhead, shade parries or dodges it within a certain timeframe and gets say a damage boost to the next hit and a short stealth if the boosted attack kills the target.
etc.
Of course that is a concern, but i do think it should be possible to make it so she gets suitably encouraged to focus hard on elites, like say the counters &subsequent rewards not working so well on normal mobs.
And of course there would have to be a significant cooldown on monsters + limit of which attacks it would be possible to do it on.
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yeah that’s the other thing, there’s a lot of awesome stuff that would be fun to mess with but we’re quite limited in what we can realistically go for
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There is one tiny problem with CoP. Aiming for a boss’s head for example does significantly more damage than backstabbing it so there is literally zero reason for me go around backstabbing bosses.
Of course. At some point the actual developers really need to step in to fix the problems they’ve created. At this point this is more general shade thoughts than mod feedback, to be clear.
Yeah I get what you mean and on paper it’d be cool but idk if that’d fly so well in-game. Kinda like riposte tbh, love the concept (especially since I did fencing irl) but in gameplay it’s just kinda ‘off’ in a way that makes it hard to sell
Yeah I agree, would be cool to fix that at some point
Oh that’s more like a duelist… though a stealth reward sounds infuriating for allies.
Dropping aggro on allies just feels dirty for me and bad for them.
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I mean bosses are one enemy amongst many to use CoP on. It’s not like the cooldown is so long you need to sit on it till a boss shows up.
From memory her backstab damage bonus doesn’t actually apply during her standard ult. If I’m remembering that correctly, that probably ought to be changed.
You think? I actually love the bretty sword mechanics exactly for it.
Yeah^^
Sekiro’s combat revolves around the idea that the significant enemies are too skilled to just let you hit them, so you have to block/parry/dodge their attack and even sneak in some lighter strikes to break their stances before you can do anything big.
And as a trained assassin, Sekiro makes most of his “big” moves very fatal, which also happens to feel quite satisfying to pull off.
So to translate this to shade, give her a counter based style too but with rewards adapter for her upon successful counter, like invis, boost to damage weak spots or something else even. Heck, it just hit me that Ezio in the assassins creed games also had a heavily counter based style.
Yoooooooo me too. Another Aussie fencer on these forums. What are the chances lol.
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oh I meant WHC riposte lmao, love the bret sword
BRUH
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I’d honestly love more parry stuff but feels kinda sucky right now
with the games pacing, stagger, ping etc etc feels like it would fit better in V1…
or in scenes where telegraphed attacks don’t get lost in a messy meat wall
edit: I have tried WHC riposte in DWONS before, it did proc more frequently than official and felt less frustrating. mainly due to the lack of stagger & bloated health pools… but it felt more like luck with the messy meatwalls and crit fishing is just outright quicker
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Ah i was on a different track…like seeing how one ends up getting the block up before any heavy is dealt it´s normal to then end up blocking an attack or two when dealing with several opponents before delivering the attack rapidly before they can recover just like an actual riposte/counter.
As for WHC´s riposte, well yes, something like that kinda but not a “your next light attack will kill enemy elites if it´s a headshot”.
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I mean, your whole concept of assassin is basically revolving around being invisible. There is no invisibility playstyle that isn’t inherently cheesy. Shade worked without perma invis for 3 years before the com/vanish build. Calling that a playstyle is like calling lingering/famished battle wizard a play style. Being invulnerable and dealing infinite damage is definitely a good playstyle but it shouldn’t be in the game.
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Couldn’t that be fixable by tweaking the finesse curve on cop? As in, upping the crit power and lowering the headshot damage. I don’t think it would have any effect on anything other than monsters since you already one shot elites in the body.
The main problem is that Shade is neither a proper “assassin” nor a proper frontliner.
The backstabs outside of invis just don’t really work in Vermintide’s gameplay loop.
They somewhat kinda awkwardly work but only when you’re fighting very few enemies, there is no proper way you will get many opportunities during a full horde/intense situation (which is exactly when you’d want your passives&talents to matter), especially not on modded difficulties.
As a result, the uptime on all backstab related talents/passives is just not that high.
Besides, headshot damage > backstab damage as has been said before, even more so in the mod where the Assassing stagger talent does not work on body crits anymore => headshots or bust with Shade atm.
So not only is the uptime on backstab passives&talents low, their payout is also not quite worth it.
Ideally, you’d pick 1 role for her: either a proper backstab focused assassin or a proper melee dps frontliner.
In the current state, she’s neither the former nor the latter.
Backstab assassin: backstabbing does not work without cheesy invis spam => The backstab passive just does not work => so you want to play her as a frontline melee dps class right?
Fronline melee dps: no, because almost all her talents and passives revolve around backstabbing => Shade has got very little going on for frontline fighting, the class is not really built for it.
That’s where Cloak of Mist applies a bandaid fix.
CoM alone lets her somewhat fill the frontline dps role but it’s a poor attempt at hiding that the rest of her kit is not meant for that.
Basically just hide this lack of talents that would complement either the backstab or the frontline playstyle by giving her a strong ult.
Imo, it be the best idea to rework her into a melee dps frontline class; Kerillian does not really have one in the same way that e.g. Gk is the dedicated melee dps class for Kruber. Icelator’s mod goes more into that direction afaik.
The backstab playstyle only works with invis. And for invis+damage to be balanced, it needs a high(ish) cooldown like Rv or Huntsman.
Cloak of Pain works for that backstab playstyle (it should still get the guaranteed crit on the 2nd charge back though) but it’s overall too little uptime to support a proper backstab assassin playstyle.
This class is meant to backstab far more frequently than once per ~60 secs.
Otherwise the entire passive is near useles.
It’s an outdated design that should be reworked/discarded if possible.
I am aware that this is not the intented aim of this mod however. If/when there is a more general rebalance mod in the works, that could get addressed maybe.
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It would be nice if this change was applied to Shadowstep too. You are looking at a sizeable increase to crit power though. Currently the headshot does about double the backstab’s damage, on bosses. I know it’s not that simple, but I’d really like it if these were the other way around.
And yes, elites get deleted anyway so it doesn’t matter how much Shade’d end up overkilling them with an Ult.
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Yeah obviously. Just the base ult in general.
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Would it make sense to add a general base crit power increase as a passive independent from ults, similar to how Whc has a base +25% hs bonus?