And what arguments have been made from the other side? Other than, “Ugh, you are wrong”? Nothing, that’s what. I won’t stop people from playing shade, but acting like you, immature as all hell with “git gud” as your only argument for a class being extremely underpowered and not a valid option for a group is pathetic.
You have not brought anything to the conversation, a class having to rely on a randomly spawning potion to actually being put to good use in a group, against less than 10% of the total enemies on a map is a wasted spot. Give me one, ONE reason why I should ever have a shade in my group other than any other class. She can’t do anything well compared to Waystalker or even Handmaiden. It all falls back to “She kills bosses”. Yeah, and so does Bountyhunter, Kruber, Waystalker, Pyromancer. And they don’t have to go into melee to be able to do what they do well.
We have put forward arguments, like her amazing boss removal strenght, or how easy she can kill armoured and get behind ennemy lines to deal with a nasty positionned special/an alone ally.
We play Shade a lot.
I’m still unsure of how much you played Shade, but if you didn’t, and don’t want Shade in your team, well just go as you wish, but don’t ask for changes to a character you don’t play.
If you play her, then what you complain about is irrelevant, because we all play Shade and repeat that the way you see Shade isn’t what she is. It’s like asking to add Sniper weapon to Slayer Bardin, or Shields to Pyromancer, it’s just not their role
Well to be fair @brandter has a point. Shade is underperforming, of course she has her spot in certain teamcompositions and she excels in niche situations (that happen quite often). She is far from useless, she is a player-skill dependant career, the player needs to know what to do with a shade in difficulty spike situations. She can be high rewarding in boss melting, dealing with patrols, saving whole runs with aggroresets, oneshotting the random CW in close quarters without wasting time / risking a teammate to take a hit.
As soon as the difficulty rises though, nearly all of her tasks need an experienced player, who knows how to handle such situations and most random shade players dont have that experience. If I read things like they stealth and kill 1 CW IN A HORDE and get killed afterwards, then i’m not surprised there is such a controversy about her being useless. Shade is underperforming because her playstyle is nothing for someone playing her carelessly and people tend to misunderstand her viability.
This results in the problem shade players have sometimes, people dont want a shade in their team because they dont know the class well enough or had bad experiences with random shade kamikazes.
Btw i have 0 clue how to make her more beginner-friendly without ruining the careers identity, and im not sure if thats needed in the first place. She is and will most certainly always be a niche pick.
Being content with playing a weak character doesn’t make it a good character. I like playing classes like Slayer and I’m well aware that he in most situations is a very bad choice, just because I like playing him, doesn’t make it a good choice if I want to succed with my group. And no, you have not presented any arguments for shade other than “She kills bosses” wich in most cases is false since she very rarely have the opertunity to get close to bosses since they move around as much as they do. Even now when Bardins taunt (kind of) works shade still lacks any use compared to other classes. And people bringing up her crossbow is just a weak argument since the bows blows the crossbow out of the water in both ammunition and overall damage (sure crossbow has an extrem damage per bolt but so does longbow when bringing up specials).
Having a class in a game that has a single purpose, not a single game I’ve played would have been saved by the most skilled shade player in the world. Many games has however been ruined thanks to the class lack of versitality.
As @danciccoalex just said, she’s just a high skill class. You just NEED to know what you do when you’re playing Shade, just like Slayer.
Being hard to play doesn’t mean it’s weak. There is just more chance of getting a weak Shade in your quickplay group cause you can’t always goes with a Shade main.
But eh, I’m gonna stop answering you, you keep on bringing non-argument (can’t get close to bosses ? What the actual fluff ?). Shade got her job, and she’s good at it. The team is supposed to be versatile, not each career. That’s why it’s a coop game. If a class is versatile on it’s own, it encourage going alone and being selfish. Career complement themselves, they’re not supposed to take on the map by themselves.
Never said anything about taking on the map themselves, that’s what you said. Projecting much? And to be honest, no, Shade is not hard to play, far from it. No class in V2 is hard to play, the problem is that the problems with Shade makes her seem harder than she should be, she’s a niche, gimmick class that doesn’t bring anything usefull to a group. Especially after the legend nerf that we got in the latest patch, legend has never been this easy, it’s almost boring on how easy it is atm. Running through it with all grims and tomes without breaking a sweat is not rewarding. So yeah, maybe Slayer and Shade is the best option to handicap a group and making it a lot harder than it should be.
The only problem of Shade class is that she requires more player skill to be effective in game.
Maybe FS will give her some “buff” to help casual player to enjoy that class.
Then all treads that was " shade is useless" will become " shade is OP"
Stats:
20% Chaos Power
20% Armour Power
10% Crit
10% Attack Speed
Talents:
5% Attack Speed
15% Power on Grim
Backstab Angle or Increased Damage On Backstab
Temp HP on kill (lets you keep swingin’)
Infiltrate Not Broken On Shooting
Weapons:
Glaive
Hagbane/Xbow (AoE clear VS boss/special kill, depends on group setup and map)
This is the build I’m running on Legend as an all round melee clear. Works perfectly fine and has the bonus of doing more damage than Waywatcher on bosses. Attack speed and stagger from all of the Power is huge. I may even drop 5% Crit on weapon and switch it to Chaos/Armour Power + Attack Speed. This build is arguably better than Waywatcher in melee because of the stagger. Would recommend your team having more special kill, unless you run Xbow with Ammo on Crit. The only issue so far is landing 2nd charged attack from stealth (as it does higher damage).
My build with daggers contains more Crit/Attack Speed and Monster Power. It works fine too, but you need your team to have really good melee clear. During hordes you need to go for spam headshots, pushing inbetween 2-3 hits. On lower difficulties daggers will be better because you can top damage, as you can tank more damage and mow everything down with headshots. Also on Legend with daggers sometimes it’s best to not attack at all during some situations and just dodge towards your team while blocking to avoid damage, I’ve spend multiple hordes not even fighting.
Shade is really about playstyle and sacrificing damage vs certain enemies for higher damage vs others.
The only issues with Shade are:
-Survivability for less skilled players, gives the sense of it being ‘useless’
-Dual weapons do more damage than 2h/1h in ult
-Highly relies on teams melee clear for certain builds (Dual Daggers)
-Being focused by everything is irritating and doesn’t let you do your job! My biggest suggestion would be to give Shade a passive which makes enemies less likely to go for her
Really? That’s a ridiculous statement. One of Shade’s most powerful features is preventing / salvaging wipes, even in the event of total RNG nightmare… Problem is, Shade IS challenging to play WELL. This means a lot of players are trying to play Shade and not good at it yet, so they’re not much of an asset to the team. Can be kind of a bummer but come on, there’s a learning curve, doesn’t hurt to give these players some constructive criticism and help them learn.
People that obsess over meta and bash everyone who doesn’t play the “perfect” career and gear loadout are easily my least favorite part about this game community.
It’s not a ridiculous statement, the only way they could have helped would have been to bail way before the wipe occurred instead of trying to fight, as seen by chaos patrol spawns right on the party, or 3 or more disablers at the same time (which still happens even after the patch, just today we had 2 gutter runners, 2 leach, and a hook rat in the same special spawn). Having a party member who, instead of trying to help and protect grims, runs and hides is not something I want in my party. In those cases a Handmaiden is a lot more help. And again, shade is not a hard class to play, that’s something that shade players tell them selfs. They are as hard as any melee oriented class. And if you are good at playing melee, why would you pick something that weak, that hinders the party more than it helps? Makes perfect sense to me.
You’re clearly missing my point, “run and hide” is the last resort when things have already gone to s*** and a wipe is imminent.
Chaos patrol spawns right of party: Shade goes into stealth and takes a few steps back out of the mayhem, uses volleybow to mow down non-CW in the patrol and then starts taking out the CW. She’s good against CW and can either kill them or kite them for others to kill. If the patrol spawn was in a terrible spot or there’s a boss or horde going on and it’s too much for everyone, Shade can use stealth to escape and rescue the team further ahead.
3 or more disablers spawn at the same time: Shade uses stealth, fires volley crossbow while staying in stealth, kills all disablers. Waystalker would have been pounced or grabbed and become toast.
I’ll have to try and do it through Twitch vods (Kittencleave). Not sure if I’m allowed to post links. Tomorrow I’ll give it a go! I’d like to add some captions too, so I’m just wondering if I can get it on Youtube. Would make more sense that way.
@Lancellot I didn’t mean it as an insult. I was trying to be as constructive as possible and people having more or less skill directly impacts how they play and the builds they pick. Sorry if I caused offense.
The build is pretty good, but obviously there’s better things. After rereading I don’t think I gave the impression of it being the best. Give the build a go and see what you think.
The ultimate cd reduction allow you to pick the ability to fire under ultimate instead of the CD reduction, this change is really good.
I played her during the 1.5 beta on legend without her buff and she was way more viable than on 1.4
Even more now with dodge range and ultimate buff.
Clearly the xbow is underrated by ever1. It is one if not the best ranged ammo weapon in the game imo. The main downside is the low ammo count, but with shade high crit chance and the ammo recovery on crit + backstabbing ammo recovery, I can spam it for horde or elites pack and bosses most of the time. And now I can spam it safely under ultimate, this is really strong. Doing better backstabbing dmg is not worth the lost of spamming your xbow imho ( solo CW becomes ammo crate with this and DnD ), this thing is OP, and with 1.5 dmg nerf I kill special as good as longbow if not better. DnD is here to gives you ammo back more than anything else, big boss dmg is secondary and situational.
I take all pots trinket so any pots can allow me to do 2 ultimate (post buff, almost 3 now ) and a big movement speed boost, which make all the difference. This is a must have for a lot of situation and pretty good on bosses. Ok con pot with 50% more duration is OP for bosses but so situational and you need a con pot…
For me the only thing that you need to train hard is to be able to handle horde with DnD, you have to learn how to dodge in horde and position yourself the right way, once you do you can shine with her. She has as good special killing than waystalker ( without taking her ult into account ), better range horde clear since 1.5 xbow better than bow now for horde. And way better boss dmg.
Imo waystalker is just easier to play while shade is a bit harder but bring way more dmg on the table and better horde clear ( since 1.5, before waystalker was simply better at horde clear and more dmg was not really needed ).
That is just my own opinion on shade in legend, the only buff i could see is help her to do backstabbing a bit more easily and safely with less aggro generation or something.
i think fatshark should give the shade passive 10% movement speed while in stealth/ult mode so the shade can get to her targets sooner instead of wasting time not helping her team out and than also add when the shades uses her ult or attacks out of stealth she gains 10% movement speed for 5secs so the shade player can choose to either stay or retreat making it situational and also making the shade player have more of a choice.
so 10% in stealth mode and 10% after stealth mode but only 10% movement bonous.
So we’ve got a class that “excelles” at doing boss damage. Better than any other class, right? Wrong.
Kruber huntsman does more damage, from a safe distance. Sienna does equal damage, from a distance. Just examples, but true ones. And they both excel and other parts of the map, where shade is close to useless. So what’s the point of Shade?
Backstabs? In a game where if you manage to get behind some enemies, other enemies get behind you and as the enemies you tried to circle turns on you, you find yourself circled, unable to escape, and dead within half a second?
I’ve been playing the Shade career for 100+ hours, and I friggin love it. I’m a stubborn guy, either I play shade, or I don’t play at all. That’s my problem. But as much as I like this game, I am close to quitting. At least for now. Because Shade is weak, and anyone saying contrary has not played Legend with her without getting carried. In Veteran and Champion you can easily carry with decent gear, but so can anyone and this says nothing. Legend is where it matters, and in Legend she is a liability to the team. Often people leave or kick you simply because you’re shade, without even having played with you.
If you’re kicked simply for playing a class, said class is not in a good spot. Period.
