So, I’ve run about 10 runs with shade and something is wrong with her passive ability. About half way through my runs I changed her passive to regain arrows and bolts and I got about 20 arrows in total from 5 runs and all of them from her active ability. The backstab is a fun idea but it never works unless you use her active ability and for that to actually work it need a shorter cooldown, but I’m guessing that something is wrong.
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yea, with the way the aggro works it’s really hard for her do be useful except some bossdps. I think her ult needs to give her the ability to backstab everything independent of angle for a few seconds or make her invisible for a few seconds, which isn’t canceled by melee attacks. Something like that. Imho she should be able to sneak in, kill 2-3 armored and move back to the team, with a not so high cooldown. She doesnt provide anything for the team, so as a pure dps/burst she should feel like that. But the effort you need to make to let her be useful just isn’t worth it compared to other classes.
Maybe backstab should have lowered dmg but widened the angle by a lot (so hitting from side counts). This would make it useful,… but on the other hand, I dislike the idea that the shade is becoming the flanker then, although it should be handmaiden’s job.
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Also, a better notification that you actually got a backstab would be nice, now you actually have no idea if you got a backstab or not, I mean you should when standing behind an enemy but by using the ammo recovery I’ve noticed that the backstab don’t seem to work at all most of the time.
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One suggestion I had read elsewhere that sounds great would be to rework the entire ultimate to last much shorter durations but allow x2 or even x3 charges with lvl 25 talent so you can actually use it to backstab normal enemies on a more regular basis.
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how about some confirmation how backstab is supposed to work? because as it stands, it doesn’t, or at least not how the tooltip says. i’ll record some video later when friends feel like retesting it, but playing shade, getting the talent to increase the damage bonus to 100 and having the grimoire bonus yields in smacking a stormvermin, marauder, mauler etc in the back with a glaive taking the exact same amount of hits as it would as a waystalker from the front. i initially tried with daggers but thought that maybe they were just too weak and the damage wasn’t noticeable, but the glaive is the exact same. is it only supposed to apply on critical hits or the strike coming out of the stealth or something, or is it just broken?
the crossbows fun to use. kind of a letdown a headshot on a stormvermin won’t kill it on champion, but that thing generates ammo decently with the crit trait.
Thanks for your effort. Can’t wait for your proof =)
I absolutely do get arrows/bolts from non-active ability backstabs. It’s still somewhat rare and pretty useless though. Her primary gimmick of stabbing things from behind is not helpful in 99% of situations.
yeah that part seems fine, but the damage multiplier just doesn’t seem to exist or something. maybe the angle on it really is that small and certain weapon swing patterns just can’t pull it off
Yeah, as it stands, the only way to know is via the Bloodfetcher talent and seeing if you got ammo or not. Judging by how frequent you actually get ammo, it’s clear how difficult it is to proc her passive. I’ve tried brain-storming on how to make her work, but I don’t see how her current design fits into the Vermintide scene. The AI will 180 instantly on you. You can’t sneak up on them. The angle for backstabs isn’t clear and is exceedingly difficult to land. No indicator for hits. Her ammo count is atrocious for the repeater crossbow. Her active’s cooldown is enormous(a whopping 2 minutes). With the exception of “Ranged weapons don’t break stealth”, her lvl 25 talents aren’t really good. In fact, most of her talents don’t help augment her at all to do what the game suggests you should do.
I understand you’re not going to be behind enemies the entire match. Maybe not even half the match. But it’s pain-staking work to try and figure out how to get behind mobs and realistically, you’d probably just kill faster by not even trying. Just playing as normal without even acknowledging she has a passive would likely be more effective. Backstab is a cool concept, but I don’t see how it could be feasible with the way the game and AI functions in Vermintide. If it’s taking this much effort to try and figure out a character or how to make them really useful, then your average player is probably going to get almost zero use out of Shade and the design just wasn’t quite done well enough.
Conceptually awesome, but definitely needs something to make the dream a reality.
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If they lowered the cooldown on shade ult and gave it a few seconds of being undetectable after the big crit goes off that could make the ult a whole lot better and synergize more with the bolt regen talent and shade passive.
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