The shadow is a design disaster

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jsuslak313 wrote:

damn sonic. YOU ARE the one constantly complaining about gear and being unable to function in the game. When others point out your novice flaws, you jump down their throats?!

They DO NOT COST a lot of currency! In your own playthrough alone you can craft better gear than what you are wearing with NO COST.

https://www.pathofexile.com/trade/search/Hardcore%20Sanctum/vDBmnJBCE

There's your link. Literally 1000%+ better rings for an alch. Not even 1000%, INCALCULABLY better rings.

You fail to understand that even if i spent all my currency on new gear it wouldnt make a diference, even if i had more 500 es and 10k more EV it woulnt make a diference because the ES sustain would still be absolute garbage and i would still die to random stuff if my ES didnt insta regen.

Im not a anyones neck im trying to explain something to players that play a game that is different than mine, a ring is not gonna make a diference, an helmet is not gonna a make a diference, even if i 1 or 2 divines in the build for top tier yellows it would still not make a diference and i know i doesnt make a diference BECAUSE IVE DONE THAT BEFORE!!!!!!!!! its not a build issue its a ES/EV being garbage with melee and melee being garbage in general, its also a lack of skills and options and not having the luxury of dieing.

Sure its ok'ish in mobs, but in bosses it feels like garbage.

Again stop trying to fix my build, thats not even the point of the thread, the point of the thread is the design of the shadow not working as intended.

Also dude come one , you have 1 trickster and it has a hammer... thats exactly the issue people have been pointing in this thread.

So, where are we at in the end? Is melee shadow utterly dysfunctional design, or just 'challenging to build in HC'? If it's the latter, the situation isn't ideal, but we're also far from foul territory. A lot of things aren't suitable for HC, just as a lot of things aren't functional in SSF, some would even say it's a good thing and that it's the job of a 'challenge player' to know riff from raff.

I'll also point out the elephant in the room, which I hate to do because elephants have their own reasons for being there, but it should be fine this once. There isn't a single line in the entire shadow area that says 'melee', unlike the marauder, duelist, templar and even ranger areas. So, in a way, you're playing something that isn't officially supported, artwork be damned :)

If you remember those hybrids I mentioned a few pages ago, there are passives, items and mechanics that were designed for a pointless playstyle that doesn't work. In a way, a battlemage is more official than a melee shadow, as strange as it may sound.

don't try to judge me on my characters in my account lol. I have made 100s or 1000s of builds that have since been deleted. I don't play standard. Once my characters go there they get gutted or deleted or I give all my items away. Most characters on my account are there only because I haven't gotten around to deleting them yet. I have made every kind of shadow you can name, it used to be one of my favorite character classes. Any character that I have now is made out of the crappy gear I did NOT give away because I didn't want to play 3.19 league past the first week or so and needed SOMETHING to do. Hell, even that trickster you mentioned in my profile has the crappiest possible gear, yet he was able to get to 76 and performed pretty well. I only made him because of the trickster rework that I wanted to try out. And because out of all the builds I have made over the years, I NEVER made a Mjolner build and decided that would be my "theme" if you will.

When you talk about characters being viable or not, and start an entire thread dedicated to saying a particular class or style doesn't work (Unequivocally), you are just ASKING for someone to point out WHY it hasn't worked for you personally. Multiple extreme veterans have pointed out areas that your builds are SEVERELY lacking and you brush them off as "they don't work". Well, news for you, they DO work. You just don't want to do them for some reason and keep hiding behind this fictional "cost" or "GGG-based direction". Your inflexibility is entirely your own, and whenever anyone gives you constructive advice on how to actually solve the problems you think are unsolvable, you attack them. I'm done with this.

Raics makes an excellent point in his last post: there are things that are HARDER in HC, and require more experience or more optimal gear/tree pathing. If you are uninterested in that than you'll find that many things you WANT to do are a "design disaster" when its actually just a "player disaster".

Are things unbalanced in PoE? Absolutely. Does everything work in HC? Probably not. If it did, we would have a really really really crappy game. But the issues brought up in this thread are NOT GGG's fault. At least not entirely.

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raics wrote:

So, where are we at in the end? Is melee shadow utterly dysfunctional design, or just 'challenging to build in HC'? If it's the latter, the situation isn't ideal, but we're also far from foul territory. A lot of things aren't suitable for HC, just as a lot of things aren't functional in SSF, some would even say it's a good thing and that it's the job of a 'challenge player' to know riff from raff.

I'll also point out the elephant in the room, which I hate to do because elephants have their own reasons for being there, but it should be fine this once. There isn't a single line in the entire shadow area that says 'melee', unlike the marauder, duelist, templar and even ranger areas. So, in a way, you're playing something that isn't officially supported, artwork be damned :)

If you remember those hybrids I mentioned a few pages ago, there are passives, items and mechanics that were designed for a pointless playstyle that doesn't work. In a way, a battlemage is more official than a melee shadow, as strange as it may sound.

I would say it becomes completely dysfunctional for end game and its a manageable until until the first kitava if you are new and manageable to act 9 if you have some experience with the game, after those limits it just becomes a chore to play. SC its not even in the equation, you can smash ur face on the keyboard and clear the game in SC. It's not very suitable for HC BUT it should be, or else they should change the default build to something else, you shouldnt simply tell your players to follow a certain path and at the end of the path thers a cliff.

On the melee part im going to have to disagree, they give you viper strike which is a dual wielding melee spell, theres 2 big wheels of nodes for melee in the shadow right area, claws and daggers, the first nodes the shadow can pick give either ES and more dmg or increased physical dmg with chaos and HP.

Not only that u have a bunch of melee stuff in the shadow tree but you could argue that u have that in the whole tree.

The shadow archtype should also be built with chaos in mind since thats almost exclusively present in the shadow area.

Also i dont think its fair to disregard the artwork the voice lines for that matter, the only reason i only comeback to poe is the hope that the shadow fantasy is going to be fulfilled and its important to be immersed in a fantasy while playing, gaming is escapism after all.

Recently i feel like poe has become too "arcade" and less "ARPG", splash a new mechanic, do it until you get bored then wait for the new league, instead of being this immersive dark world, i honestly dont like this direction, i like immersion not zoom zoom kill everything and you cant have immersion without characters and you cant have characters without a character identity.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

You just don't want to do them for some reason and keep hiding behind this fictional "cost" or "GGG-based direction". Your inflexibility is entirely your own, and whenever anyone gives you constructive advice on how to actually solve the problems you think are unsolvable, you attack them. I'm done with this.

Its not inflexibility for no reason, u dont understand the point of the thread, its inflexibility because i am trying to follow the archetype of the shadow to the best of my abilities and making it work.

Having people point out that i need this and that when those things go out of the archetype of the shadow in a starter build context defeats the whole point of trying to make a pure shadow work.

Can you understand the most important point of the thread?
A pure shadow archetype with a starter build context!

Heck i even compromised on that by reaching for gladiators perseverance.

The thread is for discussing a pure shadow design, its not shadow with a splash of witch, its not shadow with some ranger, its not start on the shadow and go somewhere else on the tree, its the shadow design that the game leads a player to.

Is the build shit? yes it probably is
Do i care? NO
Is it trying to follow the shadow archetype as much as possible? yes
Is buying better gear help with bosses and mobs? NO

NOW CAN WE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DISCUSS THE SHADOW DESIGN!!!!!!!!!!

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sonicphi wrote:

On the melee part im going to have to disagree, they give you viper strike which is a dual wielding melee spell, theres 2 big wheels of nodes for melee in the shadow right area, claws and daggers, the first nodes the shadow can pick give either ES and more dmg or increased physical dmg with chaos and HP.

Not only that u have a bunch of melee stuff in the shadow tree but you could argue that u have that in the whole tree.

The shadow archtype should also be built with chaos in mind since thats almost exclusively present in the shadow area.

Also i dont think its fair to disregard the artwork the voice lines for that matter, the only reason i only comeback to poe is the hope that the shadow fantasy is going to be fulfilled and its important to be immersed in a fantasy while playing, gaming is escapism after all.

Recently i feel like poe has become too "arcade" and less "ARPG", splash a new mechanic, do it until you get bored then wait for the new league, instead of being this immersive dark world, i honestly dont like this direction, i like immersion not zoom zoom kill everything and you cant have immersion without characters and you cant have characters without a character identity.

Ah, but those are weapon nodes, they work on anything, and it's probably no coincidence they've been adding more ranged skills for daggers and claws lately. For all we know, they probably threw the poor sod off that ship with a dagger and a melee skill out of pure spite. Those that play gauntlet events will even swear on that.

Dunno if the whole immersion thing has ever been different, PoE has always been a bit flimsy on that side, you can pick up some nice lore here and there but the story and immersion isn't its strong suit. Sure, it's better than the story of jack, beanstalk and a cement truck, that we usually see in looter games, but I'd never recommend it on those merits.
In the end, it's only a vehicle for the grinding machine and there's nothing wrong with that, it's that kind of a game and it's hard enough to make a good looter even without wasting time on less pressing matters. We'll see if that changes with PoE2, but, yeah... between you, me and everyone else in this thread, I'll be an albino rhoa if it does.

but none of the solutions offered go out of the shadow archetype...you keep saying that but there is absolutely nothing to defend that. The shadow archetype is the playstyle and the skill choice, it has nothing to do with the passive tree. Want to go EV/ES? then you need an EV/ES tree. Want to go hybrid life? Then you path to life nodes. This has NO EFFECT on the "archetype" you are designing.

You are assigning an "archetype" based on tree positioning, when that has no, and never has had any, bearing on the class. It gives you starting ideas but that's it. LIterally in the tutorial of the game and the original promo materials released pre-1.0 showed passive tree pathing far away from the original starting points.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

but none of the solutions offered go out of the shadow archetype...you keep saying that but there is absolutely nothing to defend that. The shadow archetype is the playstyle and the skill choice, it has nothing to do with the passive tree. Want to go EV/ES? then you need an EV/ES tree. Want to go hybrid life? Then you path to life nodes. This has NO EFFECT on the "archetype" you are designing.

You are assigning an "archetype" based on tree positioning, when that has no, and never has had any, bearing on the class. It gives you starting ideas but that's it. LIterally in the tutorial of the game and the original promo materials released pre-1.0 showed passive tree pathing far away from the original starting points.

You have to consider that some people do not see the game the same way as you do, you may see a starting point others may see a way to play the game.

If the shadow archetype was reduced to a play style and skill choices you wouldnt have starting points in the tree or artwork depicting hooded assassins with claws and daggers.

Its not much to ask that for new AND old players that the way GGG depicts a class be comfortable to play.

Even if the old promo material shows big spread out trees thats now what the game visual design leads you to at the moment, theres clear defined lines in the tree between the classes and the visual art depicts very specific things in conjuction to the skills offered when you complete quests and that fantasy is not being fulfilled.

Im not saying its not being fulfilled because im bad at the game or because my build is bad or whatever, im basing this the numbers of poe.ninja.

If you take a look at the trickster and assassin they are mostly being played like witches and archers the trickster being worse than the assassin(the saboteur is fine).

This shouldnt be the case, the case should be, most people play the shadow like a shadow, with some sort of melee dagger/claw build with elemental/chaos stuff with most nodes coming from the shadow area.

When you have a class that in conceptualy diferente from a witch and an archer but it ends up being played like a witch and a archer you have a design issue... because you design it to be something and it ended up being something else.

'i cant build shadow but let us ignore that and discuss shadow'? are you for real?

you make basic build mistakes that would break any build regardless of archetype, ignore hints that might actually make them work and continue to beat the 'archetype is bad' theory

you complain ES sustain yet you simply do not understand how it should be used

you say that 1000 ES and 10000 EV would made no difference when in fact it would made INCREDIBLE difference - at this level 10K EV more means that you actually can ignore 90% of all attacks and doubling your buffer means your leech is double effective

unless you understand these basic rules of this game - and you cannot bend and twist them, they are what makes this game this game - your opinions on shadow class well.. come from uninformed source

new players actually read up on how things works before going on a crusade that game is a design disaster

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sidtherat wrote:

'i cant build shadow but let us ignore that and discuss shadow'? are you for real?

you make basic build mistakes that would break any build regardless of archetype, ignore hints that might actually make them work and continue to beat the 'archetype is bad' theory

you complain ES sustain yet you simply do not understand how it should be used

you say that 1000 ES and 10000 EV would made no difference when in fact it would made INCREDIBLE difference - at this level 10K EV more means that you actually can ignore 90% of all attacks and doubling your buffer means your leech is double effective

unless you understand these basic rules of this game - and you cannot bend and twist them, they are what makes this game this game - your opinions on shadow class well.. come from uninformed source

new players actually read up on how things works before going on a crusade that game is a design disaster

Guess what, i already have those numbers and it makes no difference, dont believe me? you can just check my profile, what made a difference was "supreme decadence", that makes a hell of a difference.

Unfortunately "Supreme decadence" isnt part of the base archetype and so it doesnt follow the thread, its ok because i gave up on the character already. I will play a bit more until i die and come back next league if they do any meaningfull changes.

Let me tell you this tho sidtherat, no one is gonna take you seriously if you dont show what you are talking about, i could private my profile and tell you i found a build that would can 1 shot sirius with a basic attack.

Put ur money where your mouth is and show us the character until then your posts are worth as much as my 1 shot with basics sirius build.