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Musings on the State of Shadowers

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Gurk, Dec 2, 2021.

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  1. Gurk
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    Gurk Skelegon

    939
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    Mar 9, 2020
    Male
    4:36 PM
    Gxrk
    Hero, Paladin, Bishop, Marksman, Night Lord, Shadower, Buccaneer, Corsair
    10
    Shads are cleavers.
    Paladins are not considered cleavers.
    Shad 3-target cleave is worse than Paladin 3-target cleave (by 10-15%).

    Heroes and DKs are cleavers.
    Shad 3-target cleave is over 40% weaker than Hero/DK 3-target cleave.
    Shad 4-target cleave is about 25% weaker than Hero/DK 3-target cleave.
    Shad 4-target cleave is about the same as Hero/DK 2-target cleave.

    Sairs, NLs, and archers are single target attackers.
    Sair(with 65% free fire)/NL/archer 3-target cleave is 35-40% weaker than shad 3-target cleave.
    MM 3-target pierce damage is 15-20% weaker than shad-3 target cleave.

    In other words, shad cleave damage is vastly closer to the cleave damage of single target attackers than they are to other cleavers. However, they receive zero compensation in the area of single target damage to make up for it, still doing less single target damage than other cleavers.

    So what do shads get in exchange for its poor performance in both single target and cleave relative to other cleavers?

    1. Lower pot costs
    2. High survivability
    3. Smokescreen

    We can mull over these points to get an idea as to whether shads are getting a fair shake.

    no.

    1. Lower Pot Costs
    Do the lower pot costs justify the lower damage output? The average end game shad uses roughly 100 honsters per HT run and then incurs an additional 200-300k in meso guard costs. Let's ballpark that total at 500k mesos.

    A typical 30k HP hero/pally uses roughly 300 honsters per HT run, which is 840k mesos. A 15k HP bucc uses 200-300 honsters per HT run, which we'll also just ballpark at 840k mesos (a 30k HP bucc uses as low as 100 honsters). Would anyone in their right mind give up significant damage to save 300-400k in mesos (~2% of average 6-man HT splits)?

    We could also look at the pot costs of ranged characters, but that of course varies too greatly with the amount of washing done. As a reference point, my 16k HP 19x MM also uses roughly 300 honsters per run. And it doesn't really need to be mentioned that NLs use barely more pots than shads.

    2. High Survivability
    What does higher survivability mean in a 2003 mushroom game? The higher avoid and shifter means shads don't get hit by all that much, but the rate at which one gets hit merely reflects how often one needs to press the pot button, or rather how often they need to deal with auto pot failures, which falls under the purview of player "skill". Dying because one doesn't pot in time is a player skill issue.

    So what about situations where you can't pot, i.e. when you're seduced in HT and PB? Meso guard halves "1/1s", which in conjunction with their high avoid and shifter means they have a very high chance of surviving a sed. This is where we will focus our attention with regards to "high survivability".

    With the current state and meta of HT, one is only ever truly in danger to sed if they are the sed target as mass sed pretty much never happens until all heads are down, i.e. when there is no danger remaining. Naturally, shads make the perfect choice for sed target. I ask this though: can we really count the high survivability of shads as a plus for the class here when they wouldn't have a real place in HT outside of fulfilling the role of sed duty? That is to say, shads have high survivability out of necessity to be relevant or they would be thoroughly outclassed by heroes and DKs.

    As for PB- just kidding, shads aren't brought to PB.
    OnionMuha

    Okay, fine. There are like 1-2 shads doing PB but sed during statues is almost entirely moot in current PB (#EndRightBirdAggroAbuse) except in rare freak accidents, and during body phase all melee characters can just tank touch or duck under platform to avoid sed anyways.

    In short, it doesn't seem fair to award points to shads for their higher survivability in the current meta as it doesn't win them anything extra outside of a bit of comfort. The game would have to feature mass sed or random seds more prominently for it to be meaningful (HT rework?).

    3. Smokescreen
    Smokescreen, the defining skill that separates shads from the rest of the pack. And yet also a bit on the mediocre side even after it was already buffed. It is because of this skill alone that shads are pigeonholed to the role of support. Does smokescreen redeem the class and does it do enough supporting? As much as I'd like to simply and cheekily answer that with the question "are shads brought to PB, NT or CWK", I shall exercise some restraint.

    I remember my time as a late 140-150s shad when no zak group would even want to take me; I would get ghosted time after time or be passed over for some int lord. Later, that mold would come to fit CWK as well all the way into my 180s. It's the origin story of how I came to create my own bossing server: if no one was going to take a shad, I decided I would just host my own runs. But enough of anecdotes. Everyone loves smoke but just how much do players value it? Does anyone ever take a shad over another class expressly because of it or is it simply a luxury?

    To first answer that in a more cursory manner, I will point out that every useful skill under the sun, i.e. HS, HB, SI, SE, TL, and HH, has been muled heavily to the moon and back. And yet there was never any prominent movement where smoke saw any significant muling. Surely smoke mules would have gained traction at some point if it was actually useful enough. Now sed mules on the other hand... but I digress.

    Smoke lasts 45 seconds and has a CD of 5 minutes (rip the days of badly needed pee breaks with 1 min smoke :p). This means it has a max uptime of 15% (lower in practice when factoring cancels, smoke not going off immediately off CD, etc). For it to be a truly significant asset, it would have to have a tremendous effect on the DPM of a character during that small window to make up for the "liability" of bringing a shad in the first place. For non-DK warriors, smoke has almost no impact on DPM because of stance except during statue phase in PB because of the stuns (which can be largely mitigated by jumping into statue), and for DKs the impact is still marginal (outside of PB) in the hands of a skilled DK. The impact on DPM for shads and NLs, needless to say, is also relatively non-existent. Buccs spend 2/3rds of their time enjoying iframes with demo spam, which means they see only minor gains if smokes are sync'd with their ST uptime, and off ST they still at least have partial stance, meaning they only see significant gains when smoke is up while they're both off ST and don't have charge. That's not to dismiss the gains entirely but they're still relatively minor. In any case, they're usually on the opposite side in HT. That leaves just sairs and archers, the largest beneficiaries of smoke.

    In a relentless fight such as HT, sairs and archers peak with about a 65% damage efficiency/free fire ratio. This means during smoke they essentially do roughly 50% more damage during that 45 second interval, which translates to at most a ~8% increase in their overall DPM across the fight. For an archer with 11m dummy dpm, this reflects about a 500k increase in DPM, and for a sair with 14m dummy dpm, a 700k increase in DPM.

    These gains are of course overstated however as it ignores possibilities such as party members not being in position for the smoke, usefulness of smoke being cut short due to a cancel or dispel, the shad not smoking immediately off CD, and parts of the fight where smoke does little to help (i.e. preheads/arms/wings). Realistically, the gains are probably at best closer to half of the above numbers, i.e. 200-300k. In a average 6-man squad that features something like a bish, bucc, archer, DK and two NLs, the DPM gain a squad might see would be somewhere in the ballpark of 1 mil.

    Assuming a sed mule is already present so that bringing a shad is not necessary, is it beneficial to bring a shad for smoke over another warrior or ranged attacker when both a hero/DK or NL/sair would do significantly more damage than a shad? Unlikely unless the squad is an outlier and is comprised entirely of sairs and/or archers. Furthermore, the above example highlights a fight where characters are bombarded with attacks and have to reposition the most in the game. That is to say that it is here that the gains of smoke are most favorably portrayed. Elsewhere, they are infinitely lower.

    DPM considerations aside, there is also the benefit in being able to safely secure resses, though I would say this upside is rather niche. It is relevant only for mages and other shads (imagine bringing more than one), buying a bit of time for buyers in scuffed AFK runs, and in PB when someone who can't tank dies on top of body (pushing the bean aside wastes a bit of time and DPM).

    Altogether, I would not say that the benefits of smoke are to a degree that bringing a shad over another attacker would be seen as desirable, outside of replacing a hero or pally in PB, which is a rather moot point as neither class is seen as desirable in PB in the first place, and nor should it hold back the class from seeing other buffs when both buccs and DKs possess superior support utility while still doing more damage.

    So what could be changed...?

    There are 4 general ways I see to improve shads: buffing single target damage, buffing cleave damage, buffing pickpocket utility, and buffing smoke.

    1. Buffing Single Target Damage
    Frankly, this one is my least favorite and the one that would probably least affect the class's position in the meta. Sure, we could buff nate damage to be higher or comparable to that of heroes and DKs, and it'd be a welcome change to be sure, but it doesn't exactly help carve out a niche for shads. In any single target situation, buccs, pallies and ranged attackers would be preferred and in cleaving situations heroes, DKs and pallies would still be superior. I suppose if shad single target damage was higher than heroes and DKs, the "jAcK oF aLl TrAdEs" meme would at least be lent more legitimacy, for better or worse :unsure:. That being said, buffing nate would increase the effectiveness of shads as pinners at bosses such as nameless, dunas and scar/targa.

    2. Buffing Cleave Damage
    If shad single target damage is to remain low, it seems to me that a significant cleave damage buff should very much be in order. It's a bit crazy that a so-called cleaver can do less cleave dpm than a non-cleaver (pally) and also have their 4-target cleave damage only be as good as the 2-target cleave damage of heroes and DKs. I think it seems reasonable to expect that shad 4-target cleave should do at least as much damage as hero/DK 3-target cleave, if not slightly more. That would however require about a 40% damage buff to bstep, which seems a bit bonkers at first glance. Would that really break anything though? What are the implications of such a large change?

    Well, for starters it would mean shads would be better at grinding early on, which doesn't seem too crazy. After all, shads were originally known to be the fastest grinders after mages before the taunt nerf. It wouldn't make much of a difference for grinding at late game as shads and warriors can already clear out everything on their respective sides before the next respawn kicks in.

    It would also mean shads would be better at farming earlier on, whether that be at ML5 or at CWK doing the exchange (a scam unless you can run sku.exe). Again, it wouldn't change anything at late game as strong shads can already 1-shot chief memory guardians and nightshadows.

    As for the bossing implications, it would mean shads would still be able to deal solid damage to the heads at HT while cleaving 4 parts, which would likely make them desirable enough to bring even with an already existing sed mule. At present, though the overall damage from a cleaving shad that isn't sed target isn't too shabby, the damage dealt to the heads, the most important parts, leaves something to be desired (for reference, bstep dummy dpm on a single target for an end game shad with perf gear is around 4.5-5m). And at CWK, while they would of course still be outputting less damage on cleave than their hero and DK counterparts (but finally more than pallies), they would at least be able to achieve over 20m DPM, which is respectable enough that shads wouldn't be treated as second-class citizens for cleave picks. Moving further down the line, it would also mean shads would be just as good as hero and DK cleavers at zak arms.

    A 40% damage buff to bstep also has pinning implications. In conjunction with nate, shads might finally be able to pin well enough to fill the high demand role of nameless pinner, a job which usually belongs to pallies and sometimes IL mages and buccs, as nate pin by itself is bit wonky with how slow it is and doesn't always KB. It would also, somewhat inadvertently, buff shad single target damage a bit as it would result in nate-bstep once again being higher DPM than pure nate. Nate-bstep being the new go-to for single target damage also allows shads to lean further into their class identity of being untouchable as it would increase their effective avoidability through more iframes, and also allows them to benefit to a degree from SE and pickpocket in single target scenarios.

    An alternative and more fun way to tackle the cleave damage disparity might be through a combination of changes to both pickpocket and meso explosion. When neckson first introduced these two skills into the chief bandit tool kit, it seemed like they expected players to actually make use of meso explosion while grinding with PP, especially since PP mesos originally could not be looted by pets. However, doing so was just awful. But what if we could make exploding PP mesos practical?

    At present, exploding wads of 200 mesos (the cap for PP) yields a DPM of only ~1.5m on a single target, i.e. 4.5m for 3-target cleave at CWK. For this to actually yield a significant increase in DPM over a run, this damage would likely have to be increased tenfold (since you obviously wouldn't be bombing the entire time but rather once every ~3 minutes). This could potentially be done by rescaling meso explosion so that lower amounts of mesos would do higher damage while not necessarily increasing the top end, and/or increasing the amount of stacks consumed per use. PP could also be tweaked, which ties into the next section.

    The issue with this meso explosion approach however is that it would only affect cleave damage at CWK and scarga as PP mesos don't drop anywhere useful in HT or zak. It would however help with grinding in 3rd job without having to spend big bucks bombing your way to 4th job, and in early 4th job.

    3. Buffing Pickpocket

    We could alternatively choose to forgo damage buffs entirely, accept our fate of forever being at the bottom of the barrel, and instead choose to foray into money-making with mesos per hour being our metric of interest as opposed to DPM. Maybe instead of incentivizing people to bring shads on runs with damage buffs, we could have pickpocket meso generation as the main motivator. At present, having a single shad with PP on while cleaving at CWK or HT puts something like 500k into everyone's pockets by the end of the run. That's not too shabby; it covers almost half of most people's pot costs and increases the average splits from a 6-man HT run by ~3.3%. But we could certainly do better. We could increase it twofold or even threefold by removing the 200 meso cap on PP.

    There is a small issue however in that some people report experiencing lag from either the quick generation of mesos or the looting of it, which often discourages shads from using PP in bossing. This could be easily addressed by reducing the proc rate (currently 60%) and increasing the amount of mesos generated by the same proportion, i.e. we could halve proc rate to 30% and then have PP generate mesos equal to damage divided by 50 instead of 100 (with the cap removal). This change could potentially also tie into making exploding PP mesos worthwhile.

    Buffing PP alone however would limit this meso generation in bossing primarily to just HT and CWK however as PP does not work with nate for whatever reason, i.e. no gains would be seen in single target bossing. To expand the utility of PP in bossing outside of just these two, PP could be made to work with nate (and while we're at it, #MakeSEWorkWithNate). This would allow us to keep the money printer going brrr at NT and PB.

    4. Buffing Smoke
    This was an approach that I was originally against because I feared it would only lead to smoke muling and degenerate perma smoke shenanigans but I've since changed my mind on it after some more thought. As some might be aware, there has already been an attempt at making use of several smoke mules in HT and the general consensus was that it was simply not worth the effort. It would require one to routinely move a char to the top on the side while making sure not to fall on their attacker, or to keep it on top at all times and frequently reposition it, in addition to having to accept and leave party or send invites and expel regularly and would likely incur some downtime or suboptimal play. It might not be so difficult if playing on an NL but NLs don't need smoke in the first place.

    I also can't see muling a bunch of smoke mules in PB being any more practical either. If you kept them on the right side, they'd most likely end up dying without extreme supervision, something that would prove very difficult when already trying not to die on your main character, and keeping them on the left side would mean you would have to traverse a great distance before being able to get into position to smoke, which again would incur significant downtime. Furthermore, trying to ensure some sort of pseudo perma smoke would require dedicating 5-6 mule slots and would service just one of the 3-5 parties. It would be silly and you would be better off just using those slots for more bucc and bish mules instead. NT runs are already restricted to 6 characters so it wouldn't be feasible there either, not that smoke really benefits attackers all that much in NT.

    So just where could one abuse smoke mules if they were hellbent on doing so? Zak? To save pots on CWK cleave? To cut out the archer and avoid dealing with sharks from pirate? Would anyone even care if someone was sweaty enough to bother in such content? You could do AFK runs with purely smoke but that's already possible now and no one does it. And is there any content where having 5-6 real shad players in one party perma-smoking each other that would be unfair or broken? PB is already extremely AFK for shads; they don't need perma smoke. I've also already participated in both a two-party all-shad HT run and a 5-shad 6-man HT run, as well as a 6-shad toad, and I can tell you that, as fun and memey as it was, the smoke was pretty useless for us and we would have been much better off including other attackers instead.

    Now that we've largely ruled out the threat of potential smoke abuse, we can actually talk about buffing smoke. As mentioned earlier, smoke lasts 45 seconds and has a 5 min CD, meaning it has a 15% uptime. Though it was already buffed previously (from 1 min duration with 10 min CD, i.e. 10% uptime), I'm asking that we entertain further increasing the uptime to 20%, i.e. bringing back the 1 min duration (pee breaks back on the menu, boys). This would further enhance the gains in squad DPM, and hopefully to the point where smoke might be seen as desirable enough to bring shads to runs instead of just being an occasional luxury. On top of that, smoke could perhaps be changed to act as a holy shield of sorts as currently debuffs and stuns from some bosses can still go through smoke, such as zombify at PB and the whole seal/weakness/darkness shebang at HT. If we wanted to go further, we could even have smoke protect against DR damage and have shads be best friends with BMs, though that might end up trivializing PB if every party ended up having a shad.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    And that basically sums up my thoughts on the current state of shads and my ideas on how they could be buffed into relevancy. If you've actually made it all the way here without skipping to the bottom, go touch some grass. I'll meet you there.
     
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