Feedback: Still no shadows in the invasion top 100, despite buffs

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reboticon wrote:

Shadow lacks any resists except in evasion/ES clusters thats pretty big in invasion since starting even in normal you need good resists all around.

There were some shadows in the top 100, they just died and no one rerolled shadow.

This is factually incorrect. I've made multiple posts chronicling the progress of shadows in the invasion top 100 and they never exceeded 6 during my posts. I'm sure it's possible they exceeded 6 at one random point or another but during every check I've seen 6 or lower, meaning they always returned to their initial balance shortly after every surge, if they ever did surge at all.

Also, they never had less than 2 of those (6 or less) shadows being dead. Meaning there was never lower than 33% mortality rate at top 100 levels for shadows.

Just some madden stats for you from a guy who has been monitoring shadows in the invasion top 100 since invasion started.

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Now, as to why that is, many people have stated it's the lack of nearby life nodes. This could be the case, shadow has the hardest time reaching the scion life circle of all the classes, so that could be one reason.

Others have stated it's the terrible transition from shadow tree to the outer nodes. I can attest to this as there isn't any clear path for reaching the outside nodes. Most of the paths are bad. However buffs to the starter tree alleviate this and there has been no change in shadow numbers.

After seeing a starting buff to the starting tree and seeing exactly no gain in shadows a month later, I'm inclined to believe my initial thought was correct. My initial thought was: The keystones surrounding the shadow area in general are crap.

I'll elaborate. Marauders and duelists have easy access to some very good keystones in totems, RT, US, and so forth. All of these are very good keystones which in many builds have 0 drawback. This implies that if you build your character a certain way, the drawback is nullified completely. By completely I mean your build choice is not affected by that drawback in any reasonable, non-infinitesimal way.

I'll give some keystone examples:
Resolute Technique: If you aren't crit, you don't lose any drawback. Because 5% crit chance ends up being 0% after evasion checks on a non-RT character with inevitably less than 100% chance to hit.
Unwavering Stance: If you aren't evasion, you don't lose any drawback. Because the base evasion which is probably 3% or lower for a non-dex build, won't ever evade anything due to the entropy system resetting after a certain amount of combat-less time. If this weren't the case, your added 3%ehp against physical attacks wouldn't apply in over 50% of the attacks used in this game (spells) and against monsters with accurate hits, etc etc etc. Making your ehp loss less than 1% and nullified to rounding or infinitesimal returns on such low evasion.
Ancestral Bond: Losing damage from your main character isn't a loss in a totems build, since your character would inevitably do less damage than your totem anyways. You can still cast curses and so forth, so while you do lose "something" potentially, realistically you'll never use what you lost.

There are others like (debatably) Minion instability or Hex Master+whispers of doom, etc.

There are no such keystones for shadows. I'll list them:
CI: Status effects. Even if you're fully CI/ES, you will be affected by this and to a lesser degree, the loss of ~600 unbuffed life. Even if you have 27k ES, this affects you.
EB: Loses ES and by proxy, armor/evasion/ehp that could have been there instead of the traded ES. This affects every EB character, even when you gain other bonuses, and is nullified by no skill, build, or gear choice.
PA: Requires your character to be "low life", which is, at best, a fair trade for the damage and at worse a crippling build requirement costing many passive points and gear checks in a one-shot heavy game.
GR: Only good for ES characters, which only adds another point requirement to ES/CI realistically and retains the same drawbacks.
Acro: The closest thing to "no drawback", evasion builds literally don't get a difference. However, due to the fact that physical spells exist in POE (among other issues such as accurate monsters, curses, etc), it has "built-in" drawbacks in the form of a broken evasion system, which actually matter in HC compared to say, a totems build, which won't notice the difference in HC.

I could go on, but the issue at hand in my opinion is the lack of no-brainer keystones that don't require massive investment and retain drawbacks as the main culprit. Every other class has one, or at least has closer proximity to the "bullshit keystones" portion of the tree.

Not a certain direct cause, but I think at least this plays a big role.

EB can be used as a crutch, but that's it's weakest form

you're supposed to use it with things like AA or MoM (harharhar, heard you like traversing the skill tree).

not saying EB works overly well, or that it isn't pretty shit in the current meta, just that it's not supposed to merely fix your mana problem, but rather turn mana into a more generalized tool useful for more powerful defensive options.

but yeah.........

theory and practice don't often line up in this game

EB has always felt shit to build around.

i don't know why people bother

your character ends up feeling thin and stretched out, both on the passive tree and with gear

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

I see most of these have a bunch of boring +10 nodes early on. So here's my question to you: how many of these build are self-found/non-twinked? Because that's what I care about. Of course if you twink you can do just fine. Twinking means early levels blur by, and you don't care about a string of +10 level ups.

But when you play from scratch, every single level counts.

I also note you've an interesting love affair with Critical Mass. For most early Shadow players, that's sort of useless unless you got PCoC, which seems a bit railroaded to me.

The fact is, Carl himself isn't happy with the Shadow starting area. So...nice try? Cool.

- Any build has +10 nodes. This is not exclusive to shadows. Could you please give an example of a build that you think is different than from my examples? (can be any class)

- I would also argue that shadow area is way better than templar area for most spell builds. (especially crit obviously). Travelling TO (or away from) the templar area is just so inefficient.

- I pick critical mass as soon as I start using PCOC gem. Which is usually around level 40-50.

- It's probably a bad idea to do the CI builds untwinked, but this is the case with all CI builds... If you don't have any CI gear ready you should probably pick around 18 life nodes and then respec later. It would probably be good for GGG to up the ES values on early ES gear (level 1 to level 40). Also the discussion is around if the shadow passives are good, not whether you feel the need to twink

- The shadow lightning build I've been playing entirely self found but as a witch. She's level 83 now. I did use the conduit gloves as twink item though. Lvl 83 witch build:


If I had the MoM chest I could massively improve the build by unspeccing duelist and picking up life, mana resists, and damage in the templar tree.

- The shadow life based dagger build was played entirely self found. I did use items I found on a previous character though, but nothing crazy and again I didn't trade for any gear. The shadow is level 77.



Next up is the acrobatics wheel which should sort of complete the build at level 82.

- PCOC is in my opinion a must for any crit build. Especially phys crit builds, since you will freeze almost anything with hatred.

- These are all standard builds. HC type builds would need some adjustments but it's definitely doable. For instance, jmyers123 has been playing the phys dagger life shadow and Pulp has been playing the lightning build. Both in invasion and both with great success.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Also wanted to say the nodes shadow gets aren't sufficient to sustain it's mana, especially with shadow's starting area giving it unusually high attack speed.

With early access to Eldrich Battery and Soul Siphon? Come on, you wont have any mana problems after you get those.

The ONLY reason, why there are almost no shadows in Invasion, is LIFE. Shadow doesnt have access to as many life nodes as other classes do, and since Invasion is Hardcore league, life is №1 priority for everyone. Low life = dead character, so simple.

Just wanted to clarify a bit. I was referring to mana issues assuming the player is using eva/es gear as is, I know lol, and not converting that es to mana. Imo if having to destroy the identity of shadow's unique eva/es armour is what it takes to make mana viable then something among those variables needs a rebalance to provide the shadow with more play options.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

So: none.

There's my answer. Cheers. :)

You could easily do any of the life builds untwinked :)

Edit: also my initial point was that it is easy to escape the shadow area. And I think I did prove that point.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

Also wanted to say the nodes shadow gets aren't sufficient to sustain it's mana, especially with shadow's starting area giving it unusually high attack speed.

With early access to Eldrich Battery and Soul Siphon? Come on, you wont have any mana problems after you get those.

The ONLY reason, why there are almost no shadows in Invasion, is LIFE. Shadow doesnt have access to as many life nodes as other classes do, and since Invasion is Hardcore league, life is №1 priority for everyone. Low life = dead character, so simple.

Just wanted to clarify a bit. I was referring to mana issues assuming the player is using eva/es gear as is, I know lol, and not converting that es to mana. Imo if having to destroy the identity of shadow's unique eva/es armour is what it takes to make mana viable then something among those variables needs a rebalance to provide the shadow with more play options.

Yeah, the hybrid gear is noticeably shit. This isn't an issue specific to shadows, it's shit for templars and it's shit for duelists. Specializing is too good in POE due to keystones being too good. In the case of evasion/es, it's probably the worst gear combo in the game.

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I see most of these have a bunch of boring +10 nodes early on. So here's my question to you: how many of these build are self-found/non-twinked? Because that's what I care about. Of course if you twink you can do just fine. Twinking means early levels blur by, and you don't care about a string of +10 level ups.

What exactly are you debating here? Pretty much all competent endgame builds will have to travel to maximize their point efficiency.

I started Ambush as a shadow and even started invasion as a shadow. It's completely viable without any twink gear just like any other class. They actually have more life available to them than duelist/witch.

Leveling till level 60 or so is pretty much just a skill/knowledge check. Experienced players can reach that level with the worst items as long as they make use of vendor recipes. Invasion bosses are difficult and can destroy even an experienced player but the normal content is not that difficult unless you're blazing through them(like in a race).

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Legatus1982 wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

Shadow lacks any resists except in evasion/ES clusters thats pretty big in invasion since starting even in normal you need good resists all around.

There were some shadows in the top 100, they just died and no one rerolled shadow.

This is factually incorrect. I've made multiple posts chronicling the progress of shadows in the invasion top 100 and they never exceeded 6 during my posts. I'm sure it's possible they exceeded 6 at one random point or another but during every check I've seen 6 or lower, meaning they always returned to their initial balance shortly after every surge, if they ever did surge at all.

I'm not sure you know what the words factually or incorrect mean, bud. I said there were some shadows in the top 100, you reiterate that there were 6.

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reboticon wrote:

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Legatus1982 wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

Shadow lacks any resists except in evasion/ES clusters thats pretty big in invasion since starting even in normal you need good resists all around.

There were some shadows in the top 100, they just died and no one rerolled shadow.

This is factually incorrect. I've made multiple posts chronicling the progress of shadows in the invasion top 100 and they never exceeded 6 during my posts. I'm sure it's possible they exceeded 6 at one random point or another but during every check I've seen 6 or lower, meaning they always returned to their initial balance shortly after every surge, if they ever did surge at all.

I'm not sure you know what the words factually or incorrect mean, bud. I said there were some shadows in the top 100, you reiterate that there were 6.

Given the context your post implied that there used to be more than there are now. 3-6 area is where shadow has been since invasion started. You don't have to forgo context to make a non-existing point.

The OP wasn't about there not being "any", despite the title. The thread is about how few there are, as seen in the OP. Context.