The shadow is a design disaster
" Thank you for your response. Quality as always. Dual strike is and always has been the pinnacle of single target attacks in my experience. It was the first to be featured by build of the week with Dashgalaxy86's monster, and remains probably my favourite 'fuck you eat this' attack in the game. A true mainstay of the PoE that was. A few points of contention however: 1) Dual Strike was a Duelist's main skill, not Shadow's -- and I'm fairly sure to this day Duelist gets the bulk of the dual wield nodes in his starting area. And you'd better believe I had problems with that back when I really cared about the Shadow's starting area/core identity early on. So again we see the Shadow having to 'emulate' a different class/archetype. No assassin is going to do a dual-dagger stab when one suffices. It's unwieldy and flashy -- so I tend to file dual wield anything under 'all that flashy sword-swinging when all you need is one good stab'. 2) Dual strike isn't really a stab -- it's a dual downward slice much better suited to swords or even axes. Does the Shadow even do it with a backhand grip? I don't recall. But I suspect when the shadow says 'one good stab', he really means the sort of thing assassins are apt to do: a forehand grip quick in and out aiming at vitals. Of course, this brings into play the question of where non-humanoid enemies might have their vitals and that in turn brings us back to where the fuck does an assassin (presumably of 'people') fit into a world mostly populated with hostile monsters of the non-human variety. And as you said re: dual wielding, it's...impractical. The Shadow in the character selection is wielding one dagger. His offhand is free, presumably to cast spells or just give him more versatility once the deed is done. OTOH the Duelist isn't dual-wielding either so maybe GGG really should have figured out a way to reward people who choose to keep their offhand empty. Would have made designing my swords simulating a fucktonne easier, that's for sure. " I would disagree that qualifies as a 'works' and read it more as 'you can make it work with effort and specific items'. For an archetype, that just isn't good enough -- that's usually for off-class build styles. 'Use the tools given' is technically true but it's like saying 'you need to use the tools given' when half the tools are mislabelled, half are hidden in the garage, and the thing you're trying to fix/construct usually uses different tools. I appreciate that you are an Exile through and through and that your perspective works for other Exiles, but I think in order to assess PoE's archetype design success/failure, we need to look at this from a wider perspective, otherwise you're coming to the table with certain biases and things taken for granted that nullify the success/failure judgment. All in all, I don't consider the 'one good stab' condition fully appeased here. And I'm going easy on GGG by sticking to that -- I could really go hard and point out that the other truly 'classic' aspect of playing an assassin, stealth, is *fucking useless* in PoE. Again, I tried. So many times. I even wanted to make a unique taking advantage of low light radius. That idea was scrapped in the email phase because it became extremely clear that GGG only have light radius in the because, lol big surprise here, Diablo had it. And ironically, Diablo 1 used it *so* well, which is why Gotterdamerung's supposed drawback could be used as a great advantage to manage the horde: they actually reacted to light radius. Last I checked, POE mobs absolutely do not. You cannot reduce your light radius to effectively zero and be almost invisible. That is how it should work, but it is not how it can work in PoE. Besides, why bother with all that when you can just obliterate a whole minor army with a single spell? ...And we're back to PoE's biggest failure imo (and yet another related but tangential topic not worth discussing at this late hour): power has no appropriate cost in POE. The game would stop being such a silly shooter if they had just stuck to what works for pretty much every other game, ever: the stronger than attack, the more it costs. One way or another. And I mean an absolute cost that cannot be bypassed. I do wonder at which point the devs realised they'd lost that balance and just went fuck it, we's shooting game devs now. And that's related, of course, because this thread was doomed from the start because of it: there is no incentive to play an assassin type in a game made with aoe nukers in mind, and anyone apt to play that style has already fucked off to games that do it far better. And they said *I* was bad at PoE. At least I made it out of act 1 and know how to use the /dnd function. El oh fucking el.
I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. |
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" 25c is a lot when you dont have them, you cant do maps if you cant reach them for farming and if you think that farming anything but maps before you even reach end game is a good alternative you are sorely mistaken, if your players have to repeat content just to be able to progress that is the definition of bad design and incompetence. I dont want to complete red maps with bad gear, i want to build the shadow the way it is being sold to me and i want it to AT LEAST be decent. Its funny how you dont address the fact that EV is not even how the shadow is supposed to be built, you only focus on the money LOL. How about you start addressing the topic of the thread instead of focusing on whatever it is i am building? or maybe if you are so good why don't you unprivate your profile and show me all those hardcore shadow characters you have that follow the fantasy and archetype and are so efficient? Its easy to say its "git gud" issues when you haven't even tried to do what people are discussing on the thread. |
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" It felt close as you could get in an ARPG of today's standards when it was first reworked. I was slinging poison daggers, running through opposition like a ghost then tapping Withering Step killing everything around me very quickly. Including bosses. Pestilent Strike also did a decent job a pretending single target was a thing. The main reason the "Silent one-tap killer" style can never work in a modern ARPG is because they all think hordes of enemies is normal. You play pre-Diablo 2 ARPGs and you can see it wasn't. Even Diablo 1 you rarely fought more than 10 enemies at a time. I've been preaching "Enemy Density" as a root of many problems for years now. "Never trust floating women." -Officer Kirac
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" Yes. I really liked Pestilent Strike as a Shadow-centric skill. And yes re Enemy Density. But why can't we go back to that? Or is that already satisfied by the post-Diablo Soulslike 'ARPG' genre, where every enemy can be a threat and you have to tactically deal with them? (I'm being rhetorical, of course: I think it is). Although I think, and this is deeply ironic, the 'hordes are normal' thing was more of a Diablo 3 thing before PoE became more Diablo-3 like -- after taking in so many Diablo 3 refugees. And maybe it was just a tech limitation to begin with. Maybe Diablo 1 and so many other RPGs of the day would have had more enemies at once if the tech allowed it. Possibly a curious example of tech limitations resulting in better gameplay. Which makes me wonder: is there some possible threshold of 'number of enemies actively targeting/attacking the character at the same time' that once crossed pushes an ARPG into musou/shooter territory? Ten might be a good place to start. For example, I think Inquisitor Martyr is almost equal parts shooter and ARPG by design, not just because it's got actual hi tech guns but because it has a (largely useless) cover system and clearly differentiates between horde monsters (to be slain en masse per attack) and anything else (will take more than one hit, might take dozens). It's such a typically 40k approach to the situation, clearly dividing those who matter and those who do not. I can't call it elegant but it works. (See, we can bump this thread without needlessly disagreeing!) And they said *I* was bad at PoE. At least I made it out of act 1 and know how to use the /dnd function. El oh fucking el. I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. Last edited by Foreverhappychan#4626 on Dec 24, 2022, 8:03:00 PM
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" I don't know, I want it back. In some cases there might have been tech limitations for games. Some like Revenant were very much designed to fight few but very strong enemies since it had a combo attack system and finishers. It was also design to use WASD to move with mouse to aim and fully polygon models, this was before Diablo 2. Certainly concepts ahead of their time but Diablo 2 quickly set standards while other ARPGs before were still exploring how the genre could be played. It's hard to say with Diablo 3 since it wasn't made by the original devs. You can notice an increase in enemy density with each version of the game but Diablo 3 obviously put it over the top. Normalized movement speed goes a long way in creating danger too. I still go back and play D1 every couple years. I hide behind corners, zig zag to gap close enemies, strafe shot other archers. I actually interact with advantages the map environment can give me because I don't move at comet speeds. People only do that in PoE when forced by a mechanic. There's a certain elegance in the simplicity of Diablo 1 that favors better game play. Most certainly it would favor the Assassin play style OP is looking for. "Never trust floating women." -Officer Kirac Last edited by Xzorn#7046 on Dec 24, 2022, 8:28:49 PM
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Diablo 1 was indeed great, i do think mob numbers are a bit ridiculous right now, maybe we could fix that with the atlas tree with some modifiers like "10% less mobs %10 more mob rarity" and people could specialize in bosses. That said, it is going a bit off topic.
I think the shadow needs a rework overall in both the tree and ascendencies, trickster needs a clear focus instead of just being a "get some es/ev with some random ideas splashed in", also it needs consistency, i think stuff like "heartstopper" have the right idea its just that the idea of having a node that is only useful half of the time you are playing doesn't feel great. The same thing with mistwalker, it makes no sense that fortify is good all the time in the duelist and yet the shadow has skills that are either bad half of the time or that get worse over time and then u have to refresh them. "ambush and assassinate" make sense but they are only good for mobs, for bosses it becomes useless. The whole "On kill" thing also suffers from what i said above, its only good for mobs, its useless for bosses and you cant play the game killing mobs alone... If ES is to be viable with melee it needs to be on hit, or else there is simply no way to sustain it without uniques and if you need uniques to make a base aspect of the game work then it shouldt be a base aspect at all, uniques should be for cool powerfull builds. We already have ES on hit, its just that u need too much currency to buy a watchers eye, so i dont quite get why GGG doesnt implement it in a way that is a bit easier to get, apparently cool stuff is only for streamers and softcore. We could even have "Supreme decadence" in the tree as a keystone, "lethe shade" for me makes no sense since most people run anti ailments on flasks anyways... |
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ed: ignore, stupid
Last edited by jsuslak313#7615 on Dec 24, 2022, 10:39:43 PM
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sid is essentially right in what hes saying guys
" i didnt post a build, i posted an alternative pathing to get to the attack mastery node you pathed to, a better pathing, and then selected all the nodes along that line that could be taken with a crit claw chaos dot life, ev, es spell suppression shadow in order to show you why pathing past all those nodes was better than the pathing you took, which didnt really leave you on top of any great nodes at all for your build. its a better way of building than how you were building. given you had ghost reaver, discipline, melee phys damage, bad tree pathing and you openly admit you cant make a viable melee shadow, im kind of suspect about your insistence that you can look at a passive tree and make a call about what sort of maps it can and cant clear etc. thats totally aside from the fact i didnt even post you a passive build. its not a ranger, its a shadow, at no point does ggg suggest you stick to the starting nodes of your class, there are very few builds in the game that stick to their class starting zone, that is not the intended design. " people acknowledged that the shadow is not played the way it is depicted and agreed that was a problem, but then disagreed with the insistence that it wasnt viable to play the shadow in such a way. his post was read, understood and responded to in its entirety. " thats not actually true. people play ev/es shadows, they even play ci ev/es shadows with 1 life and dont path down to the ranger/duelist. these builds can be incredibly powerful defensively. i play ev/es ci witches, its straight up better than plain es in a lot of cases, more cases than not imo. if im playing a shadow or a witch my default mindset will be to take ci and use es+ev, if i use something different its because something about the build has presented an unusual opportunity cost in the planning stage that has moved me away from that default setup for an endgame mapping character. the truth is the reason most people would pick life isnt because its more tanky, its the opposite, theyre playing softcore glass cannons that want to deathzerg content so they get 3-4k life and throw everything else into damage. they do not want to invest in defenses that will provide more of a deathless play style at the expense of having less deeps. thats not to say you cant build life tanky, some people have really tanky life setups that also will invest in defenses. but if everyone played hardcore youd see more es/ev ci builds than we currently do. most ranger builds are crit and path to the shadow area, most shadow builds are life and path into the ranger area. most builds path to their neighbours for things, if you go make 20 decent builds it would be usual for 19 of them to path into their neighbours, most builds cover 2-3 zones. first char i ever made in 2013 was a duelist, dual wield, stuck to only the duelist zone, cleave + dual strike phys crit swords, 2k life, 2k damage, 2k armour, absolutely garbage, still got to maps but was hard. i looked at what nugi was doing, he had 4k life... da fuk? i dug out his forum profile, checked his build, he pathed from the ranger through the middle of the tree and took nodes from marauder and templar zones. ohhhhhh, oh.... oooooo, ok, you can do that hu? changed my understanding of what you can do with the passive tree and then i stopped making garbage builds like my duelist. i have since played over 15,000 hours of this game almost exclusively making my own builds for everything and have never made a character that struggled with mapping again. the tree is there to be used, its all joined together for a reason. what i didnt do was say duelist isnt viable and blame the game, i recognised other people were making viable characters and did my research. i didnt copy their builds, but i looked at them, looked at how much life they were investing into, how much damage, how they were pathing and took notes, learned lessons, applied it to how i went about building characters. the sooner you just humble yourself and recognise your character probably sucks the sooner you can actually start to learn how to play the game, my character sucked, that was obvious to me because other people were not having the same problems. i didnt resent those people and dismiss them i actively went looking for them and tried to study what they were doing any way i could. its just a game, its not a big deal if someone else has more knowledge about it, just learn from what theyre doing and be happy that you are improving in your hobby. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" There's this early access game I've been doofing about with called Alaloth you might like. I had it on my steam wishlist (it was, in fact, my steam wishlist) and when it popped I was like wtf is this and why did I wishlist it? What it is is a digital boardgame that plays like a mix of a Soulslike and a Baldur's Gate. The relevant point is when you 'zoom in' for combat, it's only a few enemies at a time, but isometric like a diablo game, and yet plays like a Souls game combat-wise. So it rewards parrying and tactical placement but without what I find hardest about souls-games: the behind the shoulder perspective. The rest of the game is, as I said, sort of a huge digital boardgame where you travel around, getting quests, gear, scooping up *oodles* of lore for your in-game encyclopedia, and playing a sort of power struggle with computer-controlled counteparts, all vying to get strong enough to challenge the big boss. It's the closest modern game I've found to the old 'few monsters at a time but will fuck you up if you fuck up' model in an isometric real-time format. You might want to give it a look. Only caveat is it plays *infinitely* better with controller, which is odd for a PC Early Access game but given the Souls inspiration, maybe not. As for D1: I don't think I've ever had a more immersive, awe-inspiring ARPG experience than D1. That's probably because I played it before I was allowed to have the internet (shut up kids, my folks were right -- the internet did ruin my life, after all here I am) and so all I did was *play* the damn game blind (literally, lol veil of steel) and it was honestly a masterpiece. Moreso than D2, which of course I played more than any other game ever invented but still never quite had the same perfection of D1 in terms of length, ambience, tactical challenge, memorable music (the best track in D2 is Tristram and you all know it), minimalist writing...balance...sound? Oh my god, the death scream of the succubi, the horned demon's charging noise, the *ping* of a ring dropping...unfuckingbeatable. ...And yet I'll never play it again because I don't have to. I fear wasting time bringing past into present when the present might contain the future. And PoE is, in a big way, all about stopping time. About demanding your time. About repeating it. It provides the temporal comfort of routine. Of an addiction. I read this book about addiction once called 'how to stop time' and it was kind of brilliant in the way it showed that addiction, to a point where it takes over routine and perception, defies the vicissitudes of the real world. To the addict, time is stopped. Routine is established and repeated, often until death or some other sort of death-like ruin. And anything that disrupts that routine is extremely aggravating, an intruder into an numb nirvana. I think that's part of why Exiles chuck so much of a shit when GGG try to change it too much. Which, again, is ironic given GGG chose this very model so they could change it as much as they wanted to keep players challenged and not-bored. What GGG later learned is no one gets addicted to change they can't control; self-destructive behaviour is all about testing one's level of control. They just realise later that a lack of control is the price of adhering to someone, or something else's demands. Exiles should never, ever forget Chris' almost tongue in cheek sentiment about them: once they're Mapping, GGG have them. GGG own their soul. I say almost because I also know the vast, vast majority of people who quit PoE do so before they ever reach a Map. Another thing I reckon most Exiles would find hard to believe, but it is true. It is that statistic that fuels the sentiment. Once you're Mapping, you're not just using -- you're being used. Also, the Shadow is a design disaster and I'm off to play something else. Season's Greetings to you all. And they said *I* was bad at PoE. At least I made it out of act 1 and know how to use the /dnd function. El oh fucking el.
I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. |
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I would also prefer that character classes would have had more identity to them, instead of same defense stacking everywhere. Didn't want to equip shields for fashion reasons - had to cope with squishy characters and painful leveling/bossing experience.
Spell dodge was the last truly alternative core mechanic, now anyone without spell block is doomed unless using some expensive damage type shifting gear. |
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