Playing dual wield Shade with Crit/Attack speed and the restealth after a backstab kill Talent feels extremely overtuned right now. It’s able to easily dispatch of Beastman hordes on Cataclysm, and removes a lot of the difficulty.
On the BETA, Hordes and roamers seemed a lot more dense, so DD didn’t feel like it was in the best place, but now with the live changes, they feel too strong. You’re able to off Hordes with minimal effort, while other melees are forced to dodge, push and take damage. Being able to spam left click until the cows go home doesn’t really seem balanced.
I understand that this will be hard to balance for, but maybe making backstab one-shots only occur every ‘x’ seconds would be a start.
Unlike Saltspyre’s one-shot mechanic, it requires less skill and is actually safer than most of the other normal melee options to stand behind big targets spamming.
That would feel absolutely awful. You have to be lucky with crits(which is RNG) to begin with and hit the back. I don’t see how Saltzpyre’s passive takes more skill when you can stand in front of enemies with your team and fish for crits to one shot enemies in the head. He doesn’t have to put himself behind enemies and risk being surrounded or hit from all sides, a 180 attack from an enemy, or anything of that nature. If a bunch of enemies aggro on him, he can actually still fish for his one shots whereas Shade wouldn’t be able to fish for hers. If you’re using Vanish, then that luck will run out at some point and the enemies will turn around. He also can use the active talent to get guaranteed crits and just mow through enemies.
For clarity, the stealth talent you’re talking about is Vanish or Cloak of Pain?
Looking at the patch note:
Dual Dagger
Light attack bleeds now stack up to 3 times, with 2s duration and 0.75s-ish time between ticks (random between 0.5625s and 0.9375s so 2-3 ticks each). Was a 5s with 1s between before.
Improved default attack speed (from 0.9 to 0.95), improved dodge (from 1.25 to 1.35), reduced min block time (from 0.25 to 0.2s), fixed wield chain window from push followup (was 1.0s in, now 0.4s in) while moving block chain window on same attack to 0.3s (was 0.45s).
Increased heavy stab damage to 0.24 (from 0.2), increased vs armor multiplier to 0.8 (from 0.6)
Bumped dagger bleed tick damage to 0.12 (from 0.1)
What do you think really made the difference between pre-launch and now?
I’ve played both, and my conclusion led me to making this thread. Elf is my main, and I found it extremely easy to survive behind hordes while spamming light hits with dual wield crit/as, for one-shots.
So the hordes being denser on beta made it harder? If you’re stealthing after spamming LMB then why would a concentrated horde be any different than now? There are still tons of enemies.
When I asked what really made the difference, you said “they feel too strong”. What specifically makes them feel so much stronger? “The hordes and roamers seemed a lot more dense” doesn’t explain that.
So it crits too much? It does too much damage? It’s too fast? It dodges too far? Hyperdensity? Lack of hyperdensity? Enemies have less hp?
I would assume for the way you’re playing it doesn’t really matter what your team is doing, so whether it’s quickplay or a premade team, you still achieve this result.
It was harder to push to the back of Hordes, because of getting sandwiched by roamers/horde, and there’s a higher risk of getting Specials on you while sandwiched, leaving it almost impossible for your team to save you. Higher risk for the playstyle. Lesser Hordes and roamers leaves you with a much more forgiving playstyle positioning-wise.
You’re able to run a full attack speed/crit build and spam one-shot backstabs while being invisible, trivializing Cataclysm.
Good point. I didn’t play with Ironbreaker, but that would be the only situation in which there would be some team play- on taunts.
I see. So what’s really powerful is using DD, positioning yourself behind hordes and such, and just mashing LMB because Vanish will proc continuously. I imagine it crits frequently enough so that you still get the one shots on elites here and there. I see why you suggested cooldown on backstab one-shots as an approach. If Vanish is also what is enabling this so intensely, what if Vanish had a brief cooldown instead? Or make it so Vanish can’t be reapplied until it has fully expired, meaning you can’t chain Vanish instantly into another Vanish.
I imagine increasing the roamers would be an odd approach to addressing one career. I don’t know how many people really cared that there was more though.
It’s doable with all of the dual wield weapons rn, it’s just that DD can get the most abuse out of it.
Cooldown on the auto stealth would be the preferable option here, yeah. The reason I suggested a backstab cooldown was because it may also be replicable with the Ultimate cooldown Talent, at the loss of Boss damage, but you could always make up for it with Hag.
Don’t forget the unlimited crits for 2 seconds after you hit the first target. I take the 50% crit power talent and stack crit power on charm/weapon. This translates to longbow damage on light swings of the DD. With SV patrols, you can stealth, heavy two targets and then when the secondary invisibility from the lvl 30 ULT talent kicks in, just spam light DD strikes. Run through and 1 shot 4-6 SV.
