She turns invisible and then one shots elites and does a ton of monster damage. Same thing she’s always done. You could say she sneaks around and deleted high priority targets. Almost like assassin or something.
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She kills 1 elite/special, maybe 2, every 60 seconds with that ability of hers, i am not amazed, any sniper/ranged career gets more done on that front.
Ton of monster damage? She does 500-700…huntsman with longbow does anything from 1500 up to 4000 his cards are stacked. Then there´s others like Hagbane WS, DOT BW, WHC, GK, slayer.
Sure she has this once per fight burst trick but any of the above do more than her in the end, heck, GK i am fairly sure does more damage than she does on his double stab while also staggering the monster and he´s got 20 seconds lower cooldown too.
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No reality is that she isnt an amazing elite killer, nor is she particularly good on bosses either, there are careers/builds that do everything she does but way better except the whole “run away while invisible in a pinch”.
A pinch that might never had existed if one had any other career doing their thing there.
What? You realize you can kill stuff in melee even if you’re not invisible right?
No. Huntsman isn’t doing 4K monster damage. And again, she does that damage with one Ult. Again, you can attack even if you’re not ulting.
You’re also failing to remember that elf has, hands down, the best melee Arsenal in the game. That’s why shade doesn’t get the steroid talents that a slayer or GK gets. Also, she has a ranged weapon. However, dealing a lot of damage in melee requires good melee mechanics if you can’t be invisible the whole time.
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They’re the same cooldown in the mod. Grail Knight’s ult cooldown was increased to 60 seconds.
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More like every 30 seconds at least.
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Of course one can do so, but, so can waystalker or handmaiden too, what´s unique about Shade? A trick that lets her smoothly kill 1-2 elites every minute? Deal a bit of burst damage to a monster? The ability to run away freely when cornered?
What does she notably bring to the team?
As i wrote, with his cards stacked, and yes he does.
Hitting 4000 isnt reasonably doable every time or even every run at all, but the potential exists, and 2000 is perfectly doable for someone who know´s what they are doing. And that´s still far more than Shade.
Twitch Mino 3 shot clip
Best melee arsenal? How exactly? The only outstanding melee option she has is the sword&dagger. Nothing else is particularly outstanding…and sure, she doesnt have any weapon that is almost comically bad like pickaxe(1handed axe?) is on average but that´s a good thing.
That´s not the reason she didnt get that, she doesnt get melee fighting steroids because she isnt supposed to be a fighter, she´s an assassin. So she got the backstabb package which doesnt work without heavy cheese. ¨
Note the heavy similarity between her passives and WHC passives, instant kills on crits attacked to X condition with some manner of extra bonus here or there…but the difference here is that her backstabs are unreliable and just do less damage than a headshot if not critting.
Headshotting is faster and more reliable, and that reliability, the power from it, is plainly visible with WHC.
So does most careers in the game but their talents work upfront without a gimmick like needing an ironbreaker to taunt enemies away or semi permanent invisibility to enable it.
lol
Cloak of pain shade gets one big hit for free then she gets aggro as much as anyone else while having worse monster DPS than most unless she´s packing dual daggers which come with a whole set of difficulties on their own.
Remember, headshots do more damage than backstabs, even for her.
And if you have an ironbreaker taunting for you(enabling cloak of mist damage) then other careers really do a metric ton more than she does.
Then i guess he just does more damage and has the stagger trick but she has the short invis x)
Depends on weapon and teamcomp…and how many hits you take i suppose x)
However, yes, something like dual swords builds meter fast but you kinda have to suffer pains in other areas for that.
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She isnt bad from my perspective, just bland and mediocre with nothing that is outstanding, i could play her and do well sure, but i could just as easily play either of the other two base elf careers and do better.
To me it looks like you want the careers to be more arcadey, unique & offer particular playstyles
maybe more gimmick/ability focused like I dunno, paladins??
also, resident Huntsman, a few things to note:
dealing 4000 damage is possible but there’s a few elements
- you might get shafted by Makin’ it look easy crit chance
(the biggest factor of Huntsman bossing imo ^^) - requires a potion + concotion and shrapnel bomb ideally
- perfect aim & visible weakspot (holding aggro, giving up concealed strikes)
- A hunter manbow build
that 3 shot mino kill is probably a max crit power & chance build and had a WHC tag debuff + wild fervour (not trying to downplay his kill just saying he hit all the checkboxes)
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The joy of Huntsman. Somehow finding space and time to unload a couple of full charge headshots into a monsters head and still dont do damage since makin it look easy hates you.
That change hurts alot more than it seems. Those extra seconds remove the ability to use concoction to refill the whole bar, which kind of nerfs his monster damage by alot.
He still does his job, and I kind off like how much more stable he is when you get gifted with a bunch of skaven waves, thanks to the THP Talent changes.
…I confess i am not sure what arcadey means, but as for the rest, yeah i do want each career to have something that plainly differentiates them from other careers. I think the base dwarf careers are actually particularly good in this regard that they are plainly distinct from each other. Although the DLC engineer and ranger now overlap a bit with both liking their bombs and pistol.
Sienna also has some overlap problems with pyro and BW but UC, despite sharing the whole fire thing, seems distinct and good still. Saltz? All his careers play differently and such is well.
Krubs? He has some overlap here or there but all the careers still bring something different and play things differently.
But keri? Waystalker, handmaiden are good, they have clear cut differences and play differently even outside ability uses, SoT kinda dips into both territoriers of ranged and melee but she does magic as her schtick so it ends up feeling different.
Shade however? What does Shade do? An assassin with bonuses for backstabs…but she does more damage with a headshot and if its a crit then a headshot would probably kill the target anyway unless its a monster or a chaos warrior. Against whom a critical headshot is better anyway…
But still inferior to WHC who has the best melee critical headshots…ahh really, Shade should have had that passive about more damage against damaged targets if anything x)
So just to clarify, You’re saying shade is the worst class in the game, the most boring class in the game, or just the only class without a unique playstyle?
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Ah, to be clear i do not think she isnt viable, she does undeniably work.
But indeed, i do think she is worse at the work than pretty much all the others and she lacks a distinct but working style outside cloak of mist + vanish…which is not a good style at all for various reasons.
On that note, Cloak of Pain is fine in the sense that it´s balanced and does allow a sneaky kill but, when 9 out of 10 kills are just walking up to enemies and slashing them anyway… then its hard to not compare her to handmaiden or WHC who does that too but better.
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But back on the topic of Cloak of mist, the fact that such a “style” had to be made for the sake of enabling her passives to be in spot where they saw clear use is from my perspective a pretty solid indication that she needs other passives with a different level 20 row.
You might want to clarify that statement a bit. It sounds like you’re saying she’s the weakest melee class in the mod but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean to say.
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What do we define as melee careers though? I´d state them as : Merc, FK, GK, WHC, Zealot, Handmaiden, slayer, IB, UC and BW.
FK and IB´s are melee´s not really focused on outright murder so comparing doesnt end up quite right. But then as for the rest…isnt Shade actually weaker than them? She doesnt certainly beat any of them in horde killing, or elite killing, and she isnt even significantly better at monster killing either or at all without cloak of pain + a conc pot.
She isnt the best at anything, she doesnt bring anything special to the team…and her best damage steroids requires specific teamcomps to enable it. From a career perspective i´d actually call her the weakest.
If she happens to have weapons that let her perform strongly despite that then it´s on those rather than the career. Means the person doing it could just play handmaiden and do the same thing.
I really need to see you play Shade. There must be something wrong with your playstyle.
Apparently, you cant use five seconds of Invis for anything, have a hard time vs monsters, cant keep up with the elite killing power of an FK, and need an IB to get value from Infiltrate.
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I’m not gonna purposely ignore weapons when they make up a big part of a build. The strength of a build is a combination of factors and weapons is definitely a major consideration in that. Acting otherwise is so hypothetical it’s just silly. And this is coming from someone who loves to theory craft and do paper math for most of the games I play.
I guess I’m not very qualified to give an opinion here since I practically never use Shade. I will say this though. I literally can’t remember a time in the game’s history when Shade wasn’t widely considered at least a top 5 class in the whole game, including long before CoM existed. I don’t see anything in the mod that would knock her down far at all, definitely not from her pre CoM self. There’s been a lot of power creep overall but I can’t fathom her not being a top performer in practice frankly.
Guess I’ll run some Cata with her using the mod with both a CoM and CoP build and see what I think. Every time I’ve tried her in the past TBH she’s felt disgustingly easy. Again on paper I can’t see how that would have changed much but I guess I’ll report back after giving her modded version a good try.
TBF that’s a pretty gross misrepresentation of what they’ve said. @Frostysir specifically discounted FK and IB from comparison as they are not DPS classes, which suggests they very much do think Shade outkills FK without any problem. They also said you need an IB to get good value out of her passive/level 20 row, not infiltrate like you’ve said. Regarding monsters the point was not that she is bad but that there are numerous classes that now outcompete her in that niche.
To be clear, at this point I’m also questioning their playstyle, but you could at least be accurate if you’re gonna try to “burn” someone.
All I’ll ask is feedback come from having actually playtested the mod along with keeping the purpose of it in mind
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Yeah that was the other thing I wanted to say. The purpose of the mod is clearly largely to level the playing field a bit for the sake of diversity specifically in the context of the onslaught tourney. Fully reworking characters to make a more holistic, unique, as well as balanced kit is…uhhhh yeah, a bit much to ask of unpaid modders.
Also sorry for the part I’ve played in derailing this thread from what the mod is actually about.
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it’s no worries, we may or may not still pivot into a more general balance mod (depending on motivation and time because we’re all busy, and frankly exhausted, beans) but even that would be limited in what we can and can’t do just because of technical limits and our own limits as code monkeys.
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Are we talking modded play like C3DWONS or just normal cata?
With respect to the exception, I have no idea who is talking about what difficulty. I can guess of course, but I am no telepath.
Shade is good as WHC? On Cata(and below) qp I suppose you can get similar numbers but on C3DWONS and C3DWONS+? Not even close.
A few reasons for this come to mind. One of them is because elites have hp that’s low enough for shade to 1-crit headshot on C1. Second, is that hordes are easy to manage as they aren’t full of infantry units; leading to relatively simple backstabs, hence you do not see how WHC’s horde and, more importantly, elite dps scales with an increase to density far better than Shade’s.
In modded, getting backstabs on elites in DWONS is a fair bit more difficult due to the massive increase in density(elites front, metric fook ton of trash coming from behind the elites and WILL surround the elites when they get to you) so uncloaking in the middle of a wave of enemies, simply because you wanted backstab some elite, will get you killed in no time.
Even weaves(80+) are a somewhat good indicator of this but the lack of a scoreboard makes it near enough impossible to notice and I haven’t had anybody mention this to me so quite probably the difference remains rather obscure. The weaves’ atrocious popularity of course doesn’t help.
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Fair question. I was talking about base Cata because that’s all I have experience with. Admittedly that isn’t terribly relevant to the specific purpose of this mod. I try to keep my opinions to what I have experience with where possible though. I can certainly see how insanely well WHC could scale into modded difficulties.
Which does raise another question for me. @Incandescent have WHC nerfs been discussed at any point? Rather curious just because everyone seems to agree he’s very strong. Was a little surprised to not at least see a flense nerf thrown in there by way of a lower stack limit or the like, though I would hazard a guess killing shot is what would be most likely to get problematic in modded difficulties. Again though I have no experience with that so this is just curiosity really.