ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I noticed that Ambuscade now is nerfed hard. Is it still worth category point, or I'm better with Temporal?

Temporal. Your shadow can no longer Teleport or Phase door, two of the features which made ambuscade OP from older posts. My first rogue post update ran ambuscade, at level 34 with 3 points in it, but unless you had LOS to the targets, the spell would time out as you ran around looking for stuff to kill.

My last two Shadowblades have ignored it and gone temporal.

If you could get both (perhaps by skipping the Stamina regen tree) then maybe it is worth it? But I'm not sure how you can skip stam regen.

Just my 2 cents though.

I can't help but feel that forbidding teleports and killing it when its out of LoS was a bit overkill. I'm not really sure what the point of the spell is anymore. Maybe if it also made your enemies target the shadow instead of your real self, it'd be useful.

Maybe it should stealth you, and not the shadow clone.

Or both you and the clone, I guess.

I have yet to play a Shadowblade, but both of those restrictions seem very redundant; I'd remove the latter restriction, so that you can't clear the dungeon via teleports, and because I feel that if your shadow clone can't leave your LoS, the ability has no significant defensive utility, which is important for the squishy Shadowblade.

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The LoS part is so that you can't Shadowstep into vaults, without opening the doors, with your Ambuscade. That strategy allowed you to do the vault with no risk.

Shadowstep is not considered a teleport for vault purposes, so that a crucial ability doesn't become instantly useless in vaults.

It's not a great fix, but there's a good reason for it.

I still think it'd be a good ability if it provided some defense for your helpless body. It doesn't have to be perfect defense, just... enough to make the fact that Ambuscade is a free set of cooldowns and a free mana bar useful.

I thought Shadowstep was already changed so that you need LoS to do it in a vault. Regardless, the LoS restrictions on Ambushscade mean you can only use your Shadow to draw enemies towards you, which is really situational. If you use it when enemies are already in your LoS, then those enemies have likely targeted you already, and will therefore ignore your shadow and rip apart your squishy real body.

That's why I suggested the forced retargeting. That would give the skill a defensive boost to mitigate its severe downsides. It'd also open up a few creative possibilities: You could, for instance, use your shadow to distract the enemy for a few crucial rounds while the real you recovers. It also thematically fits the image of a sneaky ninja distracting enemies with his shadow powers.

I feel like it's completely neutered but it has a niche use with vaults and stuff.

It seems the out of line of sight is listed as 3 turns, however you lose control after 2 turns once the debuff actually appears. However if you use shadow veil while it's in your line of sight, and your shadow veiled ambuscade goes out of line if it will keep attacking until the veil is complete and then the LoS debuff will appear.

Unfortunately the timer of how long your ambuscade can be up still ticks while shadow veiled, so you have to be kind of close to get that to work and if anything skips past your ambuscade and starts wailing on you it feels very risky.

Shadowstep is so incredibly powerful though it's hard to gripe about it.

I'm just not clear on what to do with a 4 turn, line of sight, shadow copy that leaves my nearby body unprotected. I'm in this tree for the silence, personally.

edit: Shadow Veil, however, is really really yummy!

In my opinion, the shadow is still usefull :
- Weaken a target (stun + shadowstep + flurry), and then do the same thing with your own self
- Works also quite well againt curruptors : weaken the bone shield with your shadow, then leave the shadow and attack the poor unprotected and silenced corruptor with your main hand-to-hand damages.
- Use silence, twice (first the shadow, then you)
- Explore and possibly kill a target if it is weak or if your body is very well hidden (Probability Travel is your friend). This is very useful in Celia crypt as your shadow can PT through a wall, open the coffin and then you can decide to stay hidden, flee or attack

However, it does not deserve more than 2-3 points of investment to work.

And I just used (pop rune of reflect + time shield) ->Abuscade ->Shadow Veil ->Shadow Veil and it was great.

Edit: I could be wrong, but it seems Essence of Speed and Shadow Veil work together to give me as many jumps as I have actions. I only say this because I don't see my guy waiting around, he just jumps a whole bunch. I'd say more than the 8 times the tooltip says.

Right, because the LoS check is treated as a debuff. Shadow Veil makes you immune to debuffs. So as long as you don't have the LoS debuff and hit veil, your clone will continue to veil. However each step under shadow veil still takes time so it counts against your overall clone duration. Basically you have to be pretty close to still make it work, so if something decides to ignore your clone while it's shadow veiling and goes at you instead, you're probably going to die as it takes like 4-5 turns beating on you while your clone is still veiling.

It has its uses, but it's a very risky ability in its current state. Its best use is probably for messing with vaults in my opinion.

And yeah speed stuff works with shadow veil as expected.

Has anybody already tested the Timeless Shalore racial when the shadow is out of LoS ?