Class of the Week (ending 30/01/11)

[madmonk]

Hi

The chosen class is: Shadowblade

Can everyone try running a Shadowblade and posting feedback here on how you found running one. I would be particularly interested in the Schools, and Talents and how you found them, but also in any other problems and issues.

[Postman]

I con not figure how to post char dump in readable way, and can't find the post how to do it, so just link
http://te4.org/characters/1281/tome/179 ... 1cc000edf0
That was lvl 36 Normal, last life lost in Far East by finger on trackpad sliding.
Most of the lives lost in fire run(which I lost too), before I figured out how to do it, and in Sher Tul fighting invincible 500% resist all tentacled thing.

Talents:

Dual Wielding - DS and flurry maxed, swipe attacks I found useless in previous builds
Precise Strikes - wasting of stamina
Rush - near maxed - found it very useful
The rest of Combat - found cost/effect ratio not worth it.

Proposed changes: Make area attacks doing more damage then unmodified, not less, or add some useful effects - bleed, stun etc. Otherwise they will be ignored
Remove Precise Strikes completely.
Remove Perfect Strike completely

Dirty Fighting - useful, but good enough with 1 pnt. I usually dispatch enemy or run in less then 6 turns
Shadow Magic section - found it useless, no points
Cunning / Survival - Heightened Senses useful, the rest is too expensive
Spell/Temporal all but Time Shield is great
Spell / Phantasm - didn't had chance to estimate effectiveness. Was keep forgetting to blind with Illuminate.

Proposed changes: Remove Time Shield, it only useful by cheating with time prison.

Spell /Conveyance:
PD -not very useful, and with lvl 4-5 it become actually harmful
Teleport - controlled teleport is great, completely worth maxing. Using it on the enemy is problematic though - usually dangerous enemy are not alone.


Proposed changes:
PD will be fixed in the v19, but still I suggest - make minimal radius for PD and make it more precise.
Displacement shield should be made more useful(applied to all nearby opponents for example) or removed.

Build: not enough of everything. Not enough stats, not enough class points, not enough generic points, not enough category points, This class have to support not only dex, magic, con and will(for mana and stamina), but also cunning. On the positive side - there are many paths for build.
If no heavy armor option exercised at least one category pnt should be put to healing.

Damage is marginally acceptable, no ranged attack and low mobility create problems.
On the positive side, it seems the daggers are most common weapon drop in the game. Way to many hostile rogues.
Damage output - I was not able to kill the Master, luckily he died by his minions or by himself. I was able to lower him below 10% once, but was not able to finish.
Generally it seems to me SB is inherently weak comparing with Arcane Blade, Reaver, Cursed and other magic-fighter hybrids.

Proposed changes: merge this class with Arcane Blade, lock some Schools and give category points to choose.

May be the problems were from the fact that this build was not proper - I didn't use stealth at all.

[edge2054]

Damage is marginally acceptable, no ranged attack and low mobility create problems.

I don't understand the low mobility comment. Between Rush, Shadowstep, and the Conveyance tree aren't shadowblades one of the most mobile classes in the game?

[Postman]

May be I should have stressed that this my personal impression. I didn't try shadowstep, may be it was a mistake. Conveyance - PD was not of much use, and teleport is common for all classes in the rune or school form. Rush is also common for most fighter and hybrid classes. Controlled teleport is advantage of cause, but SB feel less mobile then Cursed, which have neither Rush, nor controlled teleport. Formally SB has the same mobility as Arcane blade and Reaver, but both AB and R have ranged attack. Without ranged attack SB should have better mobility, which he/she lack. May be Stealth can provide it, but again, I didn't try Stealth.

[edge2054]

May be I should have stressed that this my personal impression. I didn't try shadowstep, may be it was a mistake. Conveyance - PD was not of much use, and teleport is common for all classes in the rune or school form. Rush is also common for most fighter and hybrid classes. Controlled teleport is advantage of cause, but SB feel less mobile then Cursed, which have neither Rush, nor controlled teleport. Formally SB has the same mobility as Arcane blade and Reaver, but both AB and R have ranged attack. Without ranged attack SB should have better mobility, which he/she lack. May be Stealth can provide it, but again, I didn't try Stealth.

Not to be nitpicky here but Arcane Blades have exactly one less move ability then Shadow Blades and I don't recall Reavers having a single mobility talent (unless you count bone grab or whatever it's called.)

Cursed have great mobility, I can't argue that. I'd say them and shadow blades are the two most mobile classes in the game. So again I really don't understand where the lack of mobility idea is coming from.

As to the 'well everyone can have runes' argument, that's true. But Shadowblades can have a controlled phase door rune & teleport and phase door and probability travel plus Rush and Shadow Step and still have plenty of slots left over to cover healing or whatever. Not to mention Blinding Speed and Essence of Speed, though not really mobility talents they probably should hold some weight in this discussion.

[Sirrocco]

Personally, I look at Shadowblades and immediately start thinking about the fact that they're a melee class with Essence of Speed, but I have yet to actually get that to work properly. I may try again. I suspect that Shadowblades (with their massive Multi-Attribute Dependency and *wide* range of desirable skills) really require more planning than almost any other class.

[madmonk]

I suspect that Shadowblades (with their massive Multi-Attribute Dependency and *wide* range of desirable skills) really require more planning than almost any other class.

Has anyone had a winning Shadowblade recently? If so it would be very interesting to see the build.

[darkgod]

Character's vault comes to the rescue !
http://te4.org/characters/1805/tome/28c ... 1cc000edf0

Did not win, but did die in the endgame fight, so still worth something

[greycat]

Full respect for the player getting that far, but having looked at that build... that's definitely not at all the way I'd go. He didn't even put a single point in Flurry!

[marchewka]

First impression - something's wong.
Something that might be a bug - when "r"esting, it only rests until health and stamina are full. Even if i still have mana bar not filled up (e.g. 75/100), when trying to rest it tells me "all resources and life at maximum")

[marchewka]

Ahh, ok

As for another thing - there seems to be a HUGE discrapancy on low levels regarding usefulness of dirty combat vs dual strike. Namely - dual strike sucks bigtime in comparison (at least at first levels).

[marchewka]

After killing one hardcore cornac shadowblade on laby boss:
on early levels the character felt pathetic, for some reason even more pathetic than low level rogue. The illumination failed more often than worked (spell level issue?), the thinning of stats does require more planning and devotes the class of the "oomph" feel.

Ok, so this was first impression. Definitely will try it more

[shwqa]

I manged to get a Level 16 shadowblade. My problem with shadowblades is they need a lot of ability that require many different stat to be useful. This makes their beginning game incredibly hard. First off you need 2 onxy type ring ASAP; the plus +6 to all stats really help with armor and skills.

Useful Class Skills:
Dual Strike
Furry
Precision (I been told armor penetration is awesome so I got it)
The whole stealth tree
Dirty Fighting
Shadow Step
Maybe Shadow Cunning (I'm not sure what it make level is but if it got to the 40-50% range it would be awesome)
Time Prison
Essence of Time
Illuminate

Which is a lot of skills so you really need to budget them (75 class points to get all of them to level 5 with shadow cunning or 71 without). That also take 3 category points. This also means you need to raise your Dex, Cunning, and Magic to use these ability well. This is the problem with Shadowblade is that it requires so much to be useful. I haven't gotten my shadowblade to a useful level, so I don't know how well a high level shadowblade work.


Edit:
Skills to Avoid:
Lethality -Adds about 2% crit chance per class skill. It is just not worth it when you have so little class points.
Deadly Strike- you have a passive armor penetration skill why get an activate one?
Shadow Combat- Haven't leveled it up but it looks to peak around 13 damage even with dual strike that doesn't seem helpful against enemy with 1k+ health.
Shadow Feed- Level 1 give 0.09 mana a turn. That is over 10 turns for 1 mana.

[madmonk]

I must stop dying...

My characters have a suicidal bent as everyone of them dies - very fast! Oh, well it's a learning curve! Onward.

[Sirrocco]

Shadow feed is useful if you're spending most of your manabar on sustains, and only keeping a few points back for emergency use. At that point, it doesn't refresh your mana all that quickly, but it does refresh your mana, meaning that spending a few skill points on it can save you the inscription slot you'd otherwise spend on the manasurge rune, which in turn could be something like wild/regen/heal/shield that might save your life. Once you're committed to spending the slot on the manasurge rune, however, it's true that there's just not all that much point to it.