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Shadow Strike, Only Slightly OP
tkane707th
Posts: 14 Arc User
I'm only at level 11, and I've one shotted every boss I've come across while leaving his/her henchmen alone. I even went and made a video where I one shot Zoe Loft, in front of her henchmen, and NONE of them even thought to raise a hand to me. If Shadow Strike's damage scales as I level, that means that I could theoretically one shot almost every boss, or at least bring them to less then half health. Cause right now, I'm easily doing twice as much damage as the boss's Max HP.
Note, this is on Normal Challenge Level, with Night Master passive at Rank 3. I suppose if I upped it to Elite I'd have different outcomes...
Note, this is on Normal Challenge Level, with Night Master passive at Rank 3. I suppose if I upped it to Elite I'd have different outcomes...
Post edited by tkane707th on
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They'll find and bring out the NERF BAT!
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IOU one (1) fancier Sig, maybe.
IGN: @TKane39K
Sadly, this goes beyond mere Grab Bags and Grinding.
This goes right to the core of their highest priority.
It is a cool power with a kind of cool unintended consequence that many people like.
If you look through CrypticWorld history you will see that this is the one single thing that THEY MUST NEVER LET STAND.
Trust me, they are just waiting for enough people to level enough characters to high enough a level that they will not simply abandon them. Then they will nerf it into oblivion and back and wait for the Retcon purchases to roll into the Z-Store.......
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'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' Terry Pratchet The Thief Of Time
Given the persistance of Devour Essence you will pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
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The one who can't shut up formerly known as 4rksakes
About the @handle - it's a long story.
Profound quote.. "I'm not a complete idiot - several parts are missing."
I dont think shadow strike is OP at all, and I don't even use it. Even if you hit for what? Say 20k, it has a 30 second cd, and my tk blades can do much more then that in 30 seconds. I did try it out for a while and found it hugely entertaining to play as :biggrin:
But later in the game you would have to be doing 150,000 ~ 200,000 damage to one shot even the weakest boss's, let alone the stronger ones. And don't forget that with most boss fights comes AoE, so you wont be able to use shadow strike again.
No, I think the worst they will do is make it to where using powers like sleep would bring you out of stealth.
I hope anyway :rolleyes:
Meaning you have the same dps as others PLUS the huge alpha of shadow strike at the start.
In other words it turns x dps into x dps + y. No downside only big upside.
Except the weak passive you have to take. I would love to meet someone was has that passive and beats my dps. Dps = x + y or not :biggrin:
I really hope before blindly swinging the nerf bat around, *insert ppl in charge of nerfing* think about what sacrafices some people go through to pull off a decent one...
I am not crying about the fact that it could be nerfed I just feel that this good power shouldnt be nerfed. Finally they have made a power which fits a theme appropriately and is not OP....it is labelled Assassin Strike for a reason. An assassin would just break a neck of his/her mark, not just twist is half way then punch them in the stomach repeatedly..
So I dont think it needs a nerf..besides there are plenty of ways you can botch up a shadow strike in PvP/E, get hit...and your amazing 9k strike goes to 75 dmg >_>.
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If this hadn't completely replaced the old Sneak, I'd shrug my shoulders and ignore the debate. Just because not everyone used Sneak, doesn't mean some of us couldn't put it to good use... I probably should be thankful, because it is fun to "sneak" using distance, line-of-sight obstructions, and the occasional smoke grenade, but I can't help feeling like I'm gimping myself compared to other stealth-based characters.
comparing using that passive to an offensive one no (but youll be more squishy) comparing it to another defensive passive youll be better.
But how about using the stealth passive doing shadowstrike then changing build to whatever passive you would be using normally with whatever attacks you would use.
In other words you just use 2 of your power selections (which most builds have spare for utility anyway) to add shadowstrike and stealth passive so you can use that then switch builds to your default.
So you get the same dps you would have without it PLUS the shadowstrike alpha (turning x dps into x dps + y like i said - same dps with a shadowstrike bonus)
I believe it is an offensive passive, and you get shadow strike automatically when you take the passive.
This is actually exactly what I did when I tested it with my level 40 toon (because of how easy it was), and it was great fun. However I decided a different power to compliment my current build helped me out more in the long run. Could be good for some people, just not for me.
As for being squishy, my Tk blader that I run with has just a hair over 9k health, and 114% crit sev, so im not thaaaat squishy.
Not quite the same DPS. Those 4 advatage points and one power selection could have gone into ways of improving the DPS for your main build. Not to say that it isn't viable but it feels like a waste when you can get another Active, some clickies, or a threat wipe.
Theres only so much you can do with that though and you have 14 powers.
1 good single target attack and aoe is all you need, then a passive, energy unlock 2-4 active offence/defence a heal, a threat wipe, block still leaves 3-5 powers and not much else you can use to boost offence
As I'm currently running a 40 FF Nightwarrior on McKayla, I can tell you its far from OP. It simply works like a rogue would in your typical fantasy game, though admittedly I do miss the rogue combo system wow had when I used to play years ago.
Hitting hard is great - but what about everything in between? If you want to see first hand just how limited Shadow Strike is, join alerts and see how often you're able to make use of said attack. My dedicated DPS setups may not hit as hard, but can easily surpass the damage dealt given a timed scenario.
I don't understand your point. In many alerts, which are often quite short, even if you only managed to use SS 3 times, that is still over 60k with no setting up multiple buffs such as would be required for similar spike damage. Since SS is basically a free power, you could then still use your favourite combos after. The only difference would be the choice of passive and although I haven't tried running stealth vs an offensive passive, I am not convinced the difference would offset the damage of stealthed SSs, especially as you can quickly re-stealth when the CD is down and use it again. If you take the appropriate skills and have INT superstatted, then this would reduce the CD even more, allowing you to spam SS quite regularly.
Have you actually done comparisons with say stealth as a passive and ego form, spamming SS as often as possible and using the regular ego blade the rest of the time compared to a straight ego blade build? If so, I would love to see the results.
You're actually helping to make my point. You'd be using other powers regardless in between cd. So to call it even slightly OP is farfetched when you'll be relying primarily on OTHER powers.
I went into a grav once just to get credit for McKayla since I finally had her out of the PH. An offensive melee, I wasn't planning on doing more than one successful knowing how ill suited an offensive melee is for her. Using only Shadow Strike, I was basically getting 1 hit every 20 seconds or so. In the time it took for 2 hits, I would have done far more damage on any other 40 I have save my AT healers and behemoth.
Sustained damage is a big deal - remember, in order for you to hit that strike, you cannot attack for 4 seconds. That is where you lost damage. Get tagged by an aoe that isn't even targeted at you, there goes the cd again and you're waiting longer.
It becomes highly situational, especially in team play. Considering how often alerts are lacking a tank, or a tank that can actually hold threat, a single shadow strike will generate so much threat that you might as well just tank the rest of the fight using other powers for sustained damage.
The other thing to consider is hitting for 16-45k+ is nice, but if most of that damage exceeds the target's total hp, it's going to waste. Why setup a big hit if the same target would go down in about the same time using another attack?
until that get fixed.
Just asking because i remember that in EQ2 we could first use objects in stealth, and later
it was changed so that we lost our stealth.
Interaction breaks stealth yep. There is a better farm than freon these days for q boxes tho, especially now considering you don't have to reset instances anymore.
1 energy builder
1 single target
1 aoe
1 energy unlock
1 passive
1 form
1 block
1 heal
1 threat wipe
4 actives
That's 13 out of 14 already. Some builds need more than 2 attacks for debuffs, melee needs a lunge.
It should be a crime to tease something like that and not tell what it is.
I think you missed my point. I am not saying it is OP. I am saying it is not as bad as you think. If I can start with an alpha strike of over 20k and not use any buff etc and then carry on the same as I would do normally, I see no issue. Unless, the stealth passive is so much worse than others, that the normal DPS loses out more than 20k in the time it takes for SS to be available again. Equally, if your normal, not buffed damage, is less than 5k a second, then waiting for 4 secs to activate stealth is worth it. I know that it is easy to do more than 5k a sec, but that often involves using multiple buffs, many which have cooldowns. Thus, if you have no offensive buffs ready, then waiting 4 secs to do 20+ k damage is no biggie IMHO.
Never said it was bad, only pointing out it's got plenty of weaknesses to balance out the big hit damage. If it were horrid, I wouldn't use it at all
Nightwarrior offers limited benefit, and other passives can be better suited depending on your desires/needs. A 16k plus spike is nice, but sometimes a def passive for better mitigation or quarry or aopm for the sheer stat boost can offer more bang for your buck.
Oh I agree. I love quarry and have to stop myself taking it on all my dps toons
A threat wipe and lunge both fall into the catagory of utility and are not essential, and neither are 4 actives so as i said its easy to fit in the 2 powers to add shadowstrike which increases any builds dps by the alpha amount with no downside to damage output.
The highlighted portion of the quote is the sticking point, and is incorrect.
Some builds...definitely. Many builds perhaps. Any build ? No.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Im willing to accept theres the odd exception that cant benefit from it but have yet to see anyone post details of one...
But either way clearly the majority of builds can use this to improve their dps, making it a no brainer for most min/max builds, and hence overpowered or at least a serious cause for concern.
EDIT: Also most builds will need 3 actives for the best up time. A threat wipe is an indirect DPS increase so I wouldn't just lump it into utility. The same can be said about lunge powers but there's not that many bossess that move around.
You try taking out flying enemies while playing a melee toon, without lunge.
I use VIPER Laser Rifle devices from Aftershock for that.
IOU one (1) fancier Sig, maybe.
IGN: @TKane39K
That is limited in charges after all, versus just using a lunge.
*Faceplam*
Well it's not like they're super rare. I can get something like 5 per run in Aftershock. Even more if I go in with a team, and I get my teammates to give me the ones they get. Obviously this would be difficult with PUGs, but going in with guildmates ought do the trick. You can easily do Aftershock Part One once and get between 30 and 40 VIPER rifles.
IOU one (1) fancier Sig, maybe.
IGN: @TKane39K
Keeping Night Warrior as passive => too low dps or defensive value compared to other passives in the long run.
Too long charge, and too long CD to be effective and on top you have be stealthed.
In order to stealth you waste dps, even when switching passives the time in between means a loss of dps.
20k damage? Thats not much. The problem with 1 shotting most normal mission bosses is that you can one shot or two shot them with any of the better charge up powers, Shadow Strike is not alone in that department, neither does it scale up very well with leveling up at all.
At lvl 40 with decent equip you will do about 15k damage through resistances of some enemies .. compare that to other attacks like telekinetic assault with 2k dps every 0.5 seconds and the charge time alone it takes you to charge it (not even counting the time it takes to stealth if you intend to use it again) will make up for it all.
For an alpha strike power the damage of Shadow Strike is way too low to be effective, with all the fuss it takes to prepare it and all the powers wasted on stealth stuff.
For an infight power the damage is too low to make up for stealthing and switching passives, you easily get the same damage with other charge up powers 15k spikes are not unheard of with force cascade builds or the like and getting a decent enough crit rate isn't hard anymore.
Overall if the passive would be better it would be interesting, but as the strike is tied to the passive I will not use it except for RP purposes.
For minions henchmen and master villains as a side remark here ... seriously .. you want to wait over a half minute for it to recharge every time you attack a group? Probably not ..
So the only real use would be bosses .. and I start thinking about bosses with Elite and stronger mobs, because the average time a normal super villain boss survives with a decent dps build is below 10 seconds ..
At least test it on alert bosses .. while not exactly tough either they give you a more realistic idea of its usefulness.
If it were a clicky instead of a charge I might consider it, but right now the damage is comparable with other charge up powers, but it has a cooldown and stalth requirements that other powers have not .. no benefit here.
Most stealthing toons do rather well at the moment because many of the other normal gadget powers are rather nice ... but that is not related to Shadow Strike.
The only use I see for Shadow Strike might be PvP for its high spiking potential ... but as I'm not doing a lot of PvP because I thinks its currently in such an unbalanced state, I don't worry about that section of the game and elave it to others.
I'm having fun with it, honestly. It's rather refreshing to be able to just waltz past everything to the boss of the area and just give zero carps about anything else besides him/her/it.
I suppose there's the diehard "kill everything for maximum XP per second ratio" out there raging right now, but I honestly couldn't care less. I just finished Infiltrating Project Awakening in a little over three minutes. Most instances that are "Defeat Named Enemy" are over in between one and four minutes.
IOU one (1) fancier Sig, maybe.
IGN: @TKane39K
If you don't enjoy doing all the content or doing simply the bosses you can do it that way .. it's not like you need stealth in order to do that ..
I'm running most missions with friends if I run any at all for the fun of it .. if its just about leveling then I do alerts one way or the other.
I'm not talking about how FUN Shadow Strike or the passive with stealth is .. I'm using it myself on some chars, but thats unrelated to the 'it is overpowered QQ'
In fact, skimming over thread before I post this, it seems to be that everyone is saying "It's not bad, but it's not good either." The biggest supporter for SS even says "I am not saying it is OP. I am saying it is not as bad as you think."
Looking at the Nightwarrior passive on my lvl 23 FF, I notice that it's Rank 3 damage boost is only slightly bigger then Quarry's rank 1 damage boost. I think the only thing going for it, besides the free Stealth power and SS, is the ignore 10% of target's damage redux, which I believe you can't get outside of PvP gear, and I seem to remember someone saying that the damage redux ignoring effects on those gears only work against players. But that's fifth hand hearsay, so feel free to disregard. I don't PvP so it's a realm that's beyond and outside my understanding.
Though I could be misinterpreting your posts. If so, again I apologize.
IOU one (1) fancier Sig, maybe.
IGN: @TKane39K
Again I think you missed my point. 20k damage is what I got on a non optimized toon I was retconning and I simply took the passive to see how good it was. With proper optimization it would do a lot more.
Several of you seem to imply that it requires other powers to work, it doesn't. Nightwarrior gives SS as a free power so you do not have to sacrifice any other power. It only affects your choice of passive. I would counter it saves powers, as the stealthing means you may need less defensive buffs.
I see no downside in using SS as an opener and then using your regular sequence of attacks. I seriously doubt the loss of any dps through taking NW over a more usual offensive passive is significant and certainly the ss opener would make up for it over short fights. On longer boss fights you could stealth whist waiting for your active offences to refresh and then after a SS, rinse and repeat your usual combos. Remember, to achieve similar alpha strike damage, usually requires the use of buffs, which SS doesn't need, so you can use them for the next attack after SS.
However, if some guru could run the numbers, I would love to see how an SS initiated attack compares to a similar one without using SS and using another passive.
Not really, as you can only budget so much as you need as many powers as you can fit during your cd. I can add an extra 20k or so, but to buff for that hit I'm lookin at a long cd in between.
While the ignore resistance is beneficial - there are limitations I've discovered with ignore resistance, something that becomes far more apparent when you factor in the Int spec.
For ranged, quarry is still tough to beat considering the audacity stack buffs can provide up to 90 int/ 90ego. And one can't forget AoPM, there's no other way to get that many stats otherwise on a single build.
The most irritating factor I've found is getting in to land a shadow strike when you're fighting tough rank mobs that have the perception and actually see you, requiring your target needing to be distracted. And it's specially frustrating to start that charge attack only for your stealth to be broken before the attack lands and you hit for less than 200 damage.
That's why it's called Shadow Strike. ^_~
I am not understanding your first point. You do not need to buff SS at all to do over 20k. The only requirement is to be stealthed. As I have said before, after your SS alpha strike, you can then use any and all buffs for you next attack sequence. However, when your buffs are on cooldown, you could then go back into stealth to repeat the cycle of SS then buffs then normal attack sequence.
Truthfully I haven't tested SS vs tough mobs, so I do not know how well they see through stealth, but I know stealth's strength is based on DEX. Maybe your stealth is too low?
Where you gettin your numbers from, in brawler with just Superstats at expected levels it hits around 25k before mitigation. In any other its around 16-17k.
Tough can see through teleport. They're set that way to prevent teleporting through lairs and such. It's always why it can be a pain setting up in an alert, as the mobs are "tough" rank. Stealth is barely a third or so as strong as teleport. Dex doesn't affect stealth the way you think it does. But just to give you an idea, dex was a secondary.
I'm running two Nightwarriors, a brawler and an avenger. Both have significant investment in dex, not for the shadowstrike, but for the other attacks while its on cd. While grinding the last one, I spent most of the time tanking and dealing extensive damage so rotating back into a shadow strike was rarely effective, even with threat wipe and all that jazz.
I stated over 20k and you yourself have achieved around 25k. Not sure why you question me when in fact your own evidence confirms my findings. I achieved 20k on a non optimized bestial/pet toon using crappy pre-alert gear and no specializations vs dummies in the PH.
What you haven't proven to me is if taking Nightwarrior instead of another passive would result in significant less dps, even if I couldn't use SS because the mobs could see through stealth. Does the DPS of a NW passive toon equal that of a toon with identical powers except they took quarry or a similar offensive passive? Unless there is a significant drop in DPS, I maintain NW isn't as bad as many of you seem to imply.
I actually want to see how big a difference there is. At a quick glance, it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that Quarry is better but with the way math works in this game, it's not really that simple. Gravitar would have been a great one to parse if Smoke Grenade was still working.
Speaking of which how accurate is that parser made by one of the devs anyway? On one Gravitar where everyone DC'd and I had to solo her with Smoke Grenade, I was doing 4.7k DPS on my PA.