ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've been thinking that shadowblades could use some work. Their defining category is mostly useless and they generally end up getting played as dual-wielding fighters with lots of speed talents.

My goal with the new set up is to give players an option to be either more magically oriented, using lots of activated abilities and having a pretty dynamic blue bar, or focusing more on sustains and being more of a stamina-endurance class that has magic or stealth based "oh sh*t!" abilities.

["spell/temporal"]={false, 0},
["spell/divination"]={false, 0},
["spell/conveyance"]={true, 0},
["technique/dualweapon-attack"]={true, 0.2},
["technique/dualweapon-training"]={true, 0.2},
["technique/combat-techniques-active"]={true, 0.3},
["technique/combat-training"]={true, 0.2},
["cunning/stealth"]={false, 0.3},
["cunning/survival"]={true, 0.1},
["cunning/lethality"]={true, 0.3},
["cunning/dirty"]={true, 0.3},
["cunning/shadow-combat"]={true, 0},
["cunning/shadow-essence"]={true, 0},


SHADOW COMBAT

Shadow combat - activated, moderate stamina cost, about 50% uptime, regenerates mana on each successful strike and adds darkness damage based on magic stat. (Fade - removes mana regeneration but adds an attack speed buff)

Shards of Darkness - activated, low mana cost, relatively short range beam attack. Deals physical damage based on attack power and darkness damage based on magic stat. (Fade - increased mana cost, becomes a ball centered on the player.)

Expansive Darkness - activated, long cooldown, think tidal wave of darkness. Magical darkness expands from the player blinding and dealing damage to enemies. (Fade - Becomes a darkness storm, think ice storm but darkness damage and a blind effect instead of freeze. Also leaves magical darkness everywhere it touches.)

Shadowstep - largely unchanged but with a slightly higher cooldown and a mana cost instead of stamina. (Fade - increases the range and changes the strike from a normal 2 hit attack to a six hit "Frenzy" type attack


SHADOW ESSENCE

Midnight's Mantle - Passive, reduces cunning and magic by your character's light radius (not infravision). increases blindness and confusion resistance and boosts physical save. (I wanted to give shadowblades a reason to like the "sneakthief" super-ego. The wintertide phial will actually be useful!

Fade - sustained, Increases movement speed, darkness resistance, reduces light resistance and changes the way Shadow Combat spells function. Drains mana every turn. Very short cooldown.

Essence of Shadow - sustained, increases dex, cun and infravision. Effect scales with magic stat (approx 12/12 at 60 magic, infravision doesnt scale with magic, should max at 10ish)

Achluophobia (fear of the dark) - activated, long cooldown. while active any darkness damage dealt by the player has a chance to confuse and slow. (this one might be tricky to code.)

Phantasm and Combat Veteran have been removed. Phantasm because illuminate doesn't make much sense IMO to a shadowblade and blur sight+dualweapon defense can push defense excessively high, and Combat Veteran because too much stamina regeneration could result in waaaay too much uptime for Momentum and Shadow Combat.

If these get a positive reaction I'll start coding them.

What about removing Survival and add Combat Veteran back? Or else it'll have stamina problem, that's for sure...and help distinguish Rogue from Shadowblade by making Shadowblade much more combat-oriented than Rogue...oh and there's a probability that Manasurge rune might become useless to the class...so try change Shadow Combat to sustain?

Dual-wielding knife fighters with a lots of speed still a great category. I suggest not removing it, but instead split shadowblade in "new" shadowblade and "old" shadowblade which could be renamed to "spell knife" or something like that. To make division more distinguishing for "old" shadowblade cunning schools/dependency could be removed and replaced with more magic or combat-support.

Postman wrote:Dual-wielding knife fighters with a lots of speed still a great category. I suggest not removing it, but instead split shadowblade in "new" shadowblade and "old" shadowblade which could be renamed to "spell knife" or something like that. To make division more distinguishing for "old" shadowblade cunning schools/dependency could be removed and replaced with more magic or combat-support.

Thats basically what I'm trying to do but without splitting it into 2 different classes. I'm just trying to give shadowblades some new tricks and give them a couple build options that feel less like 'fast but not as stealthy rogue' and 'fast but not as durable berserker'. I want the magic stat to be useful for more than just getting level 5 essence of speed. Most of the other original classes have been updated and I think shadowblades could use some attention too.