Yeah I guess I’m not exactly going that far, just saying I think it’s in a pretty good spot right now. On the hardest base game difficulty I find it to be extremely reliable.
Your experience on cataclysm is valid. It’s the same problem every stealth character runs into in every elder scrolls game at high difficulty. Backstab sleeping peasant => “Help help I’m being repressed”. I see that crits + muderous prowess are your only gateway there.
I really don’t like the idea of internal cooldowns on invis but I think I see what you’re aiming for. The thing that seems kinda cheesy to me is the light attack crit slaying on ult. You can just delete so much with 4 seconds of guaranteed crit. When I used it I kind of intuitively did power attacks which was probably suboptimal. It also highly favors attack speed which is just weird for backstabs.
I feel like changing four seconds of crits on ult end to something like 5 guaranteed crits on ult start could work. That way you need to be judicious about where you swing but have more time to do it.
The other thing I want to say is I like the idea of not relying on vanish at all, making a high flank sapper build with cloak of mists, but the other talents on that row are basically useless because of how hard backstabs are without vanish. There’s some potential to shift the meta away from vanish to give CoM some interesting new identity as well.
Well shade did have some pretty broken builds before the patch into becoming super OP.
What they changed though made shade pretty broken in the other direction, since now not just your killing power did go down, your survivability dropped.
Personally I feel that these kind of characters generally suck in every game. Either they are way too strong which makes them survive but be too OP. The other option is they are too weak and don’t generally survive very well. The last thing can also end up being a skill curve that is higher than the average character in most games, but the result is the same. People wanna play the class yet they keep on dying cause the survivability is too low or too difficult.
I do not see an easy solution though for any assassin melee kind of class. They always get the same qualities like high backstab damage (which really doesn’t fit this game at all), and some kind of invisibility based survivability. In some games it can work, but defo not in a horde slaying set-up like this.
Though in the end you can definitely make it work, but if you ask me with all the elite killing power on many of the other classes, I see no real use for shade players unless they are EXCEPTIONALLY skilled at what they do. They are out there, but more often than not you will find a liability for the team rather than that skilled shade player that actually makes things easier for the team.
PS: Anyone running some sort of cloak of mist setup before the patch had an easy time of course so you can hardly count that as a great shade player. It also makes sense that it got nerfed, just the nerf kinda scewed the elf over in terms of survivability as well. Doing something about the damage output would be better, instead of making a squishy character have more trouble surviving.
In my case I never liked playing shade (or anything like it) much anyway, not in other games and specially not in this one, but I am interested to see where they go from here
(Bumping old thread in light of new developments related to the topic).
@Aqshy said in a recent Developer Stream that Shade will be given a rework (and not a rebalance). I’m wondering if it will be towards fixing these talents to get their guaranteed crits back.
The removal of guaranteed crits is not well received as per multiple feedback :
Personally I’m hoping they go so far as to rework some of her core “backstab” identity. It just doesn’t work terribly well in a game like V2, especially when head shots can be more desirable and mutually exclusive to backstabs in a lot of instances. I’ll be surprised if they go that far with the rework though.
They removed those things in the first place because it was not supposed to be there and both builds were to varying degrees overpowered, and heck, she is still overpowered albeit a bit less than before.
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Personally i have advocated for the fact that the backstab niche just doesnt work well in this game and she needs something else, her passives, her level 20 row and to a degree the 30 talents are all impossible to balance.
They can only ever be UP or OP.
So lets hope she gets something different, just like we can hope that SoT also gets redone from scratch.
Well its going to be interesting to see what this “rework” really means. Hopefully it will be something more significant than changing just few talents and numbers, but I will reserve speculation/judgement until I actually see some patch notes around this.
You missed a bit on the Shade changes in that mod.
lvl 25:
Vanish: Has a 3 second cooldown.
lvl 30:
Cloak of Mist: Remove cdr and extend to 6 seconds of crits.
That revert you mentioned above was allowed in light of these rather comparatively big nerfs.
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And really, should it matter if a few vocal people want her ult to be more powerful if the reason she got nerfed is because the majority of the community thought she was too damn OP?
Many still feels that she is, which is probably part of why she is also getting a rework, because her current kit can only be OP or UP.
Source? I don’t recall Fatshark mentioning community feedback being the reason for removal of the guaranteed crits. I don’t know where this “majority of the community” is coming from.
The official reason is:
not because of community feedback. (The original post talks about why that reason is flawed and inconsistent.) Most community feedback I’ve linked above and in this thread itself are not in favor of the removal of the guaranteed crits.
I didn’t miss it, I just didn’t quote it as I’m specifically only talking about the removal of the guaranteed crits (like in the original post), to keep my post on-topic. I think those are actually reasonable nerfs in exchange for adding the guaranteed crits back. Either the mod’s changes or pre-Chaos Wastes behavior is better than the Shade we currently have.
Nerf - previously worked on any critical backstabs, even non-charged ones.
Perk 2: Blur : Parrying an attack and quickly dodging grants Kerillian stealth for a short duration.
Buff. This is a new perk.
Perk 3: Dagger in the Dark : Melee attacks from stealth are always critical.
Buff - this essentially adds back the guaranteed crit strikes which were removed in the Chaos Wastes patch (4.3).
NEW & UPDATED TALENTS:
[…]
Talent 6-1 Cloak of Mist replaced with: Shimmer Strike - Leaving Infiltrate grants Kerillian Stealth for 3 seconds. Killing an elite or a special enemy extends this effect by 1 second.
Some parts buffed, mostly nerfed, but for the better. No more cooldown reduction like in the Tournament Balance mod. No more 100% crit chance. Regains the ult damage bonus. I think this makes the talent more challenging and fun to play, especially since guaranteed critical strikes from stealth are now back.
