So I gave cloak of mists a try and I liked it. I felt like losing the ability to effortlessly one shot high health targets was a balanced tradeoff to being able to cloak twice as much and still chain crit backstabs.
The point of contention seems clear: You can’t guarantee a crit on the first backstab so you lose reliability on procuring vanish out of cloak of mists.
During my play session (Legend) I found the following:
-
Invisibility allows you to walk through enemies, making it possible to headshot backstab stormvermin by standing somewhat inside them which is a kill without crit. Even with their horrid posture. Spring heeled assassin and move speed buffs make this somewhat easier.
-
In higher pressure situations I found it useful to start a backstab chain with a trash mob rather than a high priority target to procure the guaranteed crits and vanish. Then it was easy cheese to kill everything else in reach.
-
The double uptime on cloak made it possible to clutch revive an entire team as a sole survivor and get great distance between myself and enemies when needed. (With some sweat - of course). With cloak of pain this is much harder or even impossible.
-
I was able to cloak flank basically every horde with impunity since I got my ult back so fast. In non mixed hordes this made me a friendly fire liability but in mixed hordes it was wonderful.
So I liked it. I feel like I might even like it better than cloak of pain even though not being able to one shot a chaos warrior was a little sad. I would say cloak of mists gives higher survivability than cloak of pain as long as you pick the right targets to break cloak the first time and/or reliably land headshot backstabs. The double uptime is really great for flanking and you can do enough damage to trash to trigger vanish and start your crit chain.