Shads have mediocre damage and utility. We need more love.

[Change My View] Don't make a shad if you want to do damage or provide party utility.

Assassinate is a terrible, terrible skill in terms of being your main bossing ability:

• Range is too short compared to other melee classes' bossing skills
• The Dash is a gimmick that needs to be reworked, crit damage on dash is currently bugged (?)
• Has a longer cast time than other Powerblast, Spear Crusher, and Brandish. You are more "afk" when you use Nate.
• Cannot be used mid-air like the other former 3 mentioned; only if you jump and cast nate at the same time. This is why you'll see Heros doing cardio at 7F (fast cast time on brandish + mid-air usage) while Shads jerk off on the 3rd shelf on the left hand side with the occasional assaulter here and there.
• Simply less DPS ; Shit range, shit cast time, shit damage. All in one package.

Party Utility : Smokescreen is might as well not exist

• 45 seconds of party invincibility every 5 minutes. It's not a necessary skill for parties to have, it's a luxury.
• So let's see, a party "buff" that:
  • Only has a 15% uptime compared to almost every other party buff in the game that has virtually a 100% uptime.
  • Doesn't give extra damage, nor attack speed, nor defensive stats that actually allow your party to do pog damage.
  • Probably only saves your party like 15 pots per smoke, which isn't even that meaningful.

Hands down the worst supportive skill in the game. At this point might as well make it last 3 minutes, remove the invincibility, and give everyone inside smoke 500 avoid instead. At least then you'll actually have a buff that allows your ranged crew to deal constant DPS without interruption for a longer period of time.

Oh, and shad's legit don't benefit from any other party buffs either. Maybe SE on the final dash of nate, but it's hardly used unless u wanna do some extra damage on Zak or something while tanking its body. But seriously, left Shads benefit from SI down to speed 1 or some shit. Let SE affect all lines of nate.

Meso Guard : A skill that is holding shadowers back





Other things off the top of my head:

• Your cleave damage at CWKPQ is laughable (I'm doing 9.2mil at lvl 17x meanwhile a hero that is 10 lvls under me is hitting 16mil???).
• Then when you wanna have fun at HT and finally do as much damage as the rest of your crew because of how pog shads are at afk cleaving? Nah, you get slapped onto being SED for the next hour to hour an a half. You don't get dpm bragging rights. You're just a class that will be used and abused like a rag doll. Don't even get me started when you gotta move to heads, even if you're not sed your dpm falls dramatically because of nate's poor damage.
• Everything about class doesn't make sense. You have the shittiest 1st and 2nd job, then proceed onto a short lived 3rd job that relies on gimmicky skill that scales horribly and is hardly used ever again. When you FINALLY hit 4th job, only then do you find out staff describes shad as a "support class" in one of their balance updates not too long ago when they buffed smokescreen. But ironically, as stated before, shads are not as supportive as other attacking classes that also have more damage.
• High avoidability and I-frames (high survivability) -- perks that people love to tout about shads -- won't matter a few years from now when you'll have NLs and BMs with 20k clean hp swarming the server like locusts. Only then, hopefully, will shads will receive the very past-overdue rework they deserve.

Of course, I'm not a pro shad, but this is my opinion about the class.

Maybe I'm wrong, someone please correct me.