Shadow Veil Improvement
Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:39 am
So I wanted firstly to say that I think the Shadowblade class has been evolving quite nicely over the course of the beta. I think their rather underrated or at least underplayed, as the Shadow Magic/Ambush trees are both well developed, and very fun and effective when used well.
One exception though is Shadow Veil. It's not even necessarily underpowered, but the implementation seems off. Right now, you jump once a turn at a random enemy in sight and make an attack. Even with the big defence boost that it grants, in most parts of the game this is far too dangerous as its very easy to bounce into a room full of ranged attackers and get quickly cut down. The only way this can be somewhat mitigated is by a high speed. Because the jumps happen every turn, when your speed is high, you can take some actions (i.e. healing) between the jumps. However, this mostly isn't very fun, as the gameplay isn't smooth. You have to constantly resituate where your character is after every jump, figuring out where you've ended up and how you should use your free turn to protect yourself, and mostly this healing between jumps business doesn't fit with the theme of 'giving yourself into the shadow'. As such, in order for the ability to be effective you need to have high speed, but using high speed with Shadow Veil is a bit boring and tedious and doesn't really fit with the skill's theme,
I think the best way to keep the skill balanced and fun would be i) have the blink happen right after every attack, so that higher speeds simply speed up the whole skill leaving no between jump actions, and ii) allow the player to select which enemy to target at every step, with the restriction that the character *must* attack an enemy as long as one is in range. This way, speed blends naturally into the skill, the exceeding danger of bouncing into a group of ranged enemies is mitigated, but the player is still forced to make 5-10 attacks in a row, which they must evaluate carefully before they use this still dangerous ability.
One exception though is Shadow Veil. It's not even necessarily underpowered, but the implementation seems off. Right now, you jump once a turn at a random enemy in sight and make an attack. Even with the big defence boost that it grants, in most parts of the game this is far too dangerous as its very easy to bounce into a room full of ranged attackers and get quickly cut down. The only way this can be somewhat mitigated is by a high speed. Because the jumps happen every turn, when your speed is high, you can take some actions (i.e. healing) between the jumps. However, this mostly isn't very fun, as the gameplay isn't smooth. You have to constantly resituate where your character is after every jump, figuring out where you've ended up and how you should use your free turn to protect yourself, and mostly this healing between jumps business doesn't fit with the theme of 'giving yourself into the shadow'. As such, in order for the ability to be effective you need to have high speed, but using high speed with Shadow Veil is a bit boring and tedious and doesn't really fit with the skill's theme,
I think the best way to keep the skill balanced and fun would be i) have the blink happen right after every attack, so that higher speeds simply speed up the whole skill leaving no between jump actions, and ii) allow the player to select which enemy to target at every step, with the restriction that the character *must* attack an enemy as long as one is in range. This way, speed blends naturally into the skill, the exceeding danger of bouncing into a group of ranged enemies is mitigated, but the player is still forced to make 5-10 attacks in a row, which they must evaluate carefully before they use this still dangerous ability.