Feedback Upcoming Shadower updates and plans

Multiclient lends to a ton of other things, like lower man run, boss solos, etc. which are forms of progression, too.

IMO, the base game is always going to be boring and I don't think any type of rework can fix that.
You could try making the game more interesting by having it be more engaging, but then you'll have players complaining about the increased difficulty or tediousness. Look at anniversary bucc reworks and how that went :V

You could design a fight that's tedious like Auf, but then people will complain about how it's not worth doing.

A good fight design is something like DKT boss where it's high intensity but short and repeatable so failure feels less bad, and it needs to be worth doing. I don't think anyone was muling DKT boss fights to avoid doing it - instead it was muled because of the difficulty of actually finding parties to complete it.

 

Agreed on the "base game is boring" part, disagreed on the bucc anni rework part. Since i played that and enjoyed it a lot, i think its a shame that dev team gave up under pressure and reverted the changes.
I (and i cant stress this point enough) HATE the super transform where you hold down one button for 2 minutes straight in a row. And yes, my DPM was objectively reduced after the revert.
To the point i considered making a new character altogheter.

But i dont want to make the thread offtopic by talking about bucc.
I do understand there SHOULD absolutely be different job designs, more straightforward ones and more complex ones.
And yes, boss design itself is HUGE part of why some things are just incredibly numb and boring.

I just think people behind Legends are absolutely capable of making stuff more interesting. Its just met with instant disapproval from seemingly very loud minority of players.

 

Yes, my point is not about the change itself but the reaction to the change.

 

Shadowers are definetely overtuned as of right now, and I think a lot of what makes it so is the characters "effective stance", which is the resistance to knockbacks it experiences.

Prior to anniversary, we had 0.5 avoid per luk, and 40% shifter. Post anniversary we had 0.4 avoid per luk, 0% shifter and 75% shield mastery. Post balance we are expecting 0.4 avoid per luk, 30% shifter , and 40% shield mastery.

I want to compare the 3 to see how much shadower will be tuned. The key metric we want to look at will be the "effective stance", which will be the probability that a shadower gets knocked back given an interaction with an enemy attack.

Please take a look at the shadower below, which has decent gear in every slot - and is a shadower i believe every single shadower player can eventually achieve or exceed.


The only thing that should look odd about the above shadower is the use of an "avoid" shoe over a stat shoe. I have done this to be overly generous in my calculations - so that if there is any significant difference in effective stance, it is exceedingly clear.

Anyways, this shadower has about 580 avoid with 0.4 avoid per luk, and 682 avoid with 0.5 avoid per luk. The most common boss accuracy is 250, so I will be using this as the benchmark. With 250 accuract we have the below dodge rates for our budget shadower.



Now, lets apply shifter and shield mastery stance to get the final values for effective stance between our 3 different shadower versions:



To summarize, compared to our old shadower, our current shadower has over 11% more touch damage stance, and over 8% more magic damage stance at the mid tier for shadower.

After the proposed balance change of 40% shield and 30% shifter, our to be shadower will have 4.4% less touch stance and 3.5% less magic stance than the old shadower.

Although these numbers may seem small, I predict that in gameplay it will feel extremely terrible for shadower players. For end game shadowers (high level and good gear) the touch gap is grows to over 5% and the magic gap decreases to just over 3%.

Personally, I would like to see a solution that ends up reverting the touch and magic stance to something similar to what shadowers had prior to anniversary, back when shadowers had 0.5 luk per avoid and 40% shifter. As it stands with the proposed changes, shadowers will end up eating a significant nerf over what they use to have pre-anniversary.

 

I like having a good avoid stat. It's a godly mechanic in the first place. Seeing that little 'miss' text when I know I've made a big mistake makes my heart pound and makes me giggle.

 

Just to emphasize this, going from 90%->79% stance vs magic, and 88%>72% stance vs melee means getting hit more than twice as often.

 

It's pretty interesting that what we have right now is basically 90% stance, I thought it was more than that

 

Does this not circle back to the point that we need tools to deal with knockbacks, rather than just more unga-bunga time? Even a return to form at this point is going to feel like a massive nerf as this additionally implies shad currently 'stance fails' almost half as often (82->90 and 76->88) as before all this went down. And theres also the current opportunity to scale effective stance by virtue of a lower base avoid score.

And lets face the facts- even if the stance chances are tweaked to be just the same as before, all it effectively does is make pet fail slightly more noticeable and create a modicum of danger during sed/sed muling. Would that even be enough?

 

In the anniversary balance change notes I believe that staff was trying to make it so shadowers were not unkillable. Pet fail more noticable and more danger during sed/muling seems to accomplish what they wanted.

 

Never mind about this post, my numbers in my calculation were done incorrectly, I did not consider shifter and shield as indepedant events.



This should be the updated table, and it seems that even after this balance, shadower will still have more effective stance than before by about 2-3% on both touch and magic. This is assuming that shifter, shield, and base dodge are all independant events and knockback will only occur if all 3 fail.

So shadower post balance will actually have more stance than pre-anniversary, the main difference being that you will actually take damage and potentially be killable due to a pet fail / seduce compared to before.