The shadow is a design disaster

Lets talk about the shadow...

The shadow is a character that sells the fantasy of a badass assassin that may or may not use some magic, the tree and the art work tells us that you use melee weapons or traps to kill your opponents, it also tells us that you use life evasion and energy shield. Poisons also fit the theme and what the tree tells you to build. The trickster art work also show you dual wielding, the whole tree and art work sell you this cool fantasy of this ninja/assassin character with tons of damage.

So tell me GGG why the hell is the assassin just a god damned glorified witch/archer, take a look at poe.ninja, no one is playing the fantasy of the character that you are selling NO ONE!!!!! You a AAA company cant design a tree that makes what you are selling viable? does it not bother you as company as game designers that what you offering is so bad that no one is playing the character as you intended them to play? the shadow tree is in such a sorry state that it became a glorified witch with some archer builds here in there.

Lets take a look at the design disaster that is the shadow:

-The shadow tree bottom half screams melee with hybrid ES/EV, its unplayable because you give no sustain to ES, leech is terrible for melee so you are forced to play witch/ranger.

-Ok es/ev is trash lets make an assassin with life, you are force to path all the way to the other side of the tree to have enough life to survive anything if you dont you just die, its better to just make a duelist and not have to deal with the hassle.

-Traps, they are just spell casts on a delay really, and if anything good comes out of traps its just gonna be nerfed to the ground anyways.



Everything that you tell me to build, every fantasy that you sell me with the shadow character is absolute garbage or you have to spend a ton of currency to make it work.

Im not gonna a make a league starter just to play what i enjoy i assure i wont, i will just not play the game if the shadow tree is not viable the way it is meant to be played.

Poe lets you build a lot of things as long as they are META, i honestly could not careless about your fancy new league mechanic, your streamer opinions and and 999 projectile based spells that you have in this game, i want to play the fantasy of a ninja/assassin because that is what you promised me with all the artwork and your skill tree and if that is not available to me from the moment i start playing to the end of the game i will simply not play the game.

The last time i put money in this game was when you reworked melee and it gonna continue that way until you take a good hard look at the sorry state some parts of this game are in.

Nice trolling bait.

Joined somewhere 2012 and literally every character I can view on your profile is a Shadow, one of them reached level 88. So if you have just figured out that the game is a mass massacre instead of a deadly silent assassin or that dual wielding isn't really specific to shadow then...

Eh, the Shadow has struggled for identity that meshes with PoE ever since his introduction. Believe it or not, it's probably better now than it's been for most of the game's history thanks to Ascendancies and other factors. At least now he has caster and trapper options.

But you are correct. That little spinning animation he does, the knives, his *very name*...none of it fits PoE. EV/ES is easier than ever to make work now but it's still inefficient compared to life, and yeah, I'd always have to path down to Ranger and through to Duelist for that. The only reason I didn't make a Duelist most of the time was I hate his boofhead hairstyle and the Shadow has cooler voice lines.

So you have two options: ignore the image of the Shadow that GGG want to believe is even vaguely viable and build him the way the game demands (again, most of which is handled better by other starting classes) OR play a game that is less hellbent on being the world's clunkiest bullet hell shooter.

That said, I have never played an ARPG where the assassin/stealth style really works for long. It's always one vs many, and the path of least resistance there is of course attacks and skills that kill many at once. I feel Warhammer Inquisitor Martyr's assassin probably comes the closest: you trigger your stealth suit, dash into a group to quickly murder their leader/buffer/psyker, then fuck off and switch to a gun to mow down the stragglers. If you'd just started with the gun, chances are your damage wouldn't be enough to cut through the mob before the big bad can summon more. But even that is more for style -- just as easy to nuke em with the mage class or whip out a flamethrower and flambé the fuckers.

So I suppose whenever we see this assassin archetype in the selection screen of an ARPG, we just read that as stealth being a big fat maybe but probably not and even if so it'll be situational at best.

I feel like GGG could make it viable in the blink of an eye if they wanted, we already have stuff like flicker strike which fits the assassin/trickster theme very nicely, except the optimal weapon for the fastest attack in the game is a heavy 2H weapon, how does this even make sense when the 2H weapon part of the tree is on the left side when flicker is a right side spell? its like they just threw the spell out there without even thinking about it?


ES/EV is another one that could be fixed in 2 seconds if they weren't so stubborn, just give ES on hit based on ur evasion rating, how is that so hard? some might say that ES on hit is broken or that it doesn't fit the theme of ES but guess what, WE ALREADY HAVE IT, the only difference is that it is gated behind a few exalts, the design makes no sense what so ever.

i've played this game since closed beta, expansion after expansion ive seen them release countless spells for anything but dual wielding for example, ive reached the conclusion that they simply do not have people in the office that care about the shadow tree, there is no diversity of ideas as the same players keep getting new toys. Heck just look at melee, it became shit again.

The only way i can vote is with my wallet and that is what i will do, maybe they will actually do something decent for poe2 i dont know i can only hope.

Eh, bless your optimism.

Flicker Strike was initially a Duelist skill, and when they added the frenzy charge limitation, it became much more of a Ranger skill too. I know it's tempting to conflate 'assassin' with 'anime teleporting sword shit', but I wouldn't advise it with PoE.

And yeah, you've sort of touched on a MUCH bigger issue: 2h weapons often don't fit their visual and traditional identity either. For a laugh, check out the Witch's two handed sword animation. It's actually brilliant (or was last time I looked). Meanwhile the others wield it with the finesse of an executioner.

Ahanyway, the Shadow's signature skill upon release was Whirling Blades. Not Flicker Strike. And even that belied what he was SUPPOSED to be good at. Consider his voice line when defeating the game's original Duelist npc, Kraityn:

"All that fancy sword swinging when all you need is one good stab."

That right there is the Shadow's failure of an identity in one very well written line. At no point in PoE is one good stab *ever* going to beat fancy sword swinging. Trust me, I tried. For. Fucking. Years.

Now if we're talking Shadow less as true assassin (who, to be fair, don't belong on a battlefield anyway) and more just melee/caster hybrid, then sure. There are fixes.

But there's no reconciling the Shadow's image with any viable way of playing it in PoE. It would rely far too much on stealth, guaranteed instant kill melee attacks, and more interesting venoms and poisons than merely 'DoT yawn'. And given skill gems are universal, there's almost no way of doing that without making it broken for a better class. Ascendancies? Maybe, but they're already stretched thin across 'Assassin' (crits -- but for spells too), Trickster (?!?!?EV/ES!?!) and Saboteur (traps -- only a Shadow because it doesn't fit any other class but no true Assassin would be pleased to be called a 'saboteur', and vice versa).

Finally, please disavow yourself of this 'voting with your wallet' fallacy. I put in more than pretty much anyone, and I am well aware of how little that was compared to how much they make from the masses pulled in and retained by streamers and habitual supporters who still, perhaps rightfully, believe this game being free when so many trashier games ask for money, or just straight up go p2w, is a minor crime. They support what they love and let no one take that away from them.

But no, you don't get to 'vote with your wallet'. You just choose to enhance something you get for free but in a very barebones fashion, or you don't. It's your money; do with it what you will. It'd only be 'voting with your wallet' if GGG were somehow relying on your vote. They are not. Maybe if you started a movement it'd mean something, which is why voting movements exist in the first place: the individual vote almost never counts.

I've seen people try financial blackmail/'you just lost my support' countless times to get what they want from GGG (usually from people who haven't supported much at all anyway) and to quote a certain tv show's moment of grim revelation: Nobody's Listening.

Im not looking for fixes or workarounds tbh, what i really want is for GGG to make viable what they are selling, or else just rework the characters identity and be done with it.

Touching on the broken part, so what if it gets broken, POE is essentially a single player game with trading, its ok for things to be a bit broken as long as they are fun, its certainly not gonna ruin the game, summoner was broken for years and people loved it and still do, so why cant we have a broken thing or two in the shadow tree?

I truly feel like the shadow could be fixed but that the devs dont want or dont care, i mean u dont need to one shot everything in the game and even if you did need to do that, plenty of builds do that with trash mobs so i dont see what is the problem with for example creating a new skill that lets you do a lot of dmg fully converts to chaos and only lets you use one 1h weapon, that would fit the assassin theme.

Speaking of 1h weapons, why doesnt the shadow tree have nodes that give "more dmg while not using an offhand" or something like that, that would be a cool identity and it would fit the theme, the fast assassin or trickster, i dont know man it just feels so easy and the ideas to fix this mess just flow so effortlessly into my head that i have no idea how GGG didnt manage to fix the mess that is the shadow in all these years.

Heck we had abyssal cry that made monsters into chaos damage before, why isnt that somewhere in the shadow tree, it would completely fix the need to use melee splash or anoint tribal fury on the other side of the tree.


If i dont vote with my wallet and my time well, theres nothing i cant do but pray right, that or apply to work at GGG since im a dev my self but they are not accepting people outside of new Zealand unfortunately.

For quite a while Assassin was the caster next to Inquisitor.

Sadly after Assassin's rework years back it's been hit with many nerfs due to that.
Just checked and literally every ascendancy passive was hit with a nerf.

Between enemy power creep and nerfs, GGG made Assassin bad. I played two of them after the rework and it felt good. Very fast with Elusive dodge cap making you feel like a ghost.

Far as the passive tree. I think it's bad outside Marauder, Templar and Duelist. I've hated it since the Fortify changes. Not even sure if Witch / Shadow can melee anymore.

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sonicphi wrote:

Speaking of 1h weapons, why doesnt the shadow tree have nodes that give "more dmg while not using an offhand" or something like that, that would be a cool identity and it would fit the theme

Funny story about that. Here's something I wrote back in 2013 on that very matter. For context, someone was asking about a one handed sword style, with a free off hand.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

The original roped bundles used to give you increased attack speed.

They were glorious.

When I found out GGG was changing their function, I designed my first unique around the concept of a 1 handed sword that had the properties of the original Roped Bundle inherit to it.

Thus:

my sword.

I don't believe that there will ever be actual changes to the game at a level that supports 1 handed sword style minus a shield, and I'll tell you that block chance is incredibly important, but please know you're not the only one who wanted a proper 'fencing' style of play.

I have plans to make an upgraded version of that item, and a few 'armguards' based off the roped bundle/spiked shield base items that serve as 'off-hand gloves' more than anything.

I did go on to make three upgraded versions of that item, but the 'armguard' idea fell by the wayside.

I always love it when I encounter a game that gives you inherent bonuses for leaving the off-hand free. In real melee, a free off-hand can be incredibly useful, which is part of why knife fighting is so fucking scary.

And I was right. They never did make any changes to the game to support a 1 handed sword style minus a shield. Why do that when some sap is willing to spend thousands of dollars to try to do it for them?

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sonicphi wrote:

Poe lets you build a lot of things as long as they are META

poe just lets you build a lot of things. the meta at any given time probably consists of less than 1% of the viable options you have to succeed in the game.




ev/es works, daggers and claws work, you can make melee shadows with trickster or assassin using a dagger or claw with es+ev as your defence and faceroll the entire endgame map system.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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sonicphi wrote:

Poe lets you build a lot of things as long as they are META

poe just lets you build a lot of things. the meta at any given time probably consists of less than 1% of the viable options you have to succeed in the game.




ev/es works, daggers and claws work, you can make melee shadows with trickster or assassin using a dagger or claw with es+ev as your defence and faceroll the entire endgame map system.

You only say that because you play standard leagues which require absolutely no skill and you can just stack damage nodes ad nauseum.

Everything works in standard literally anything, u just have to play enough to buy good enough gear, you missed the point entirely.