The shadow is a design disaster
|
people clear kitava on a 2link with white gear in Ruthless..
i do not get why you bring it up - it is a mechanical fight where dps actually matters far more than defences if you want to re-live shadow fantasy - be prepared to dodge hits, not facetank them and yes, in a game about gear and stats having level appropriate gear actually matters. your current gear is worse than what you can farm from Dominus, act 4. im not going to fix your char, but if you want to claim ES/EV does not work, at least make something passable. picking all the wrong nodes while also having no gear would ruin ANY character archetype |
|
|
^precisely the points I was trying to make a few pages ago. It is actually REALLY easy to make ANY type of character you want that can succeed in the acts and quite possibly up to yellow or red maps. The only hard part is the passive tree, but that has been a staple of this game since day 1.
If there are difficulties being encountered, then it is player issue, or poor pathing in the passive tree. Noobs learn this within the first week of playing the game. There is no issue running EV/ES melee dagger/claw shadows if that's what you want to do. It does not require "softcore" or "standard items", it just requires the bare minimum of thought and planning. Halfway decent tree plus updated EV/ES hybrid gear slapped with ES or life essences with capped resistances should get you through basically anything the game throws at you before maps, with minimal effort. Once again, "viable" comes into play: OP wants a shadow build that performs at the same level of a screen-deleting spellcaster. To paraphrase all the comments: "If it isn't immortal, or just as powerful as any other build then it isn't "viable" and thus cannot be done." Ascendancies losing their identity in the form of unique passives is an entirely separate issue that I think the game has (and especially Assassin), but this has little to do with successfully sticking to a "theme" when creating a character. Last edited by jsuslak313#7615 on Dec 23, 2022, 9:01:20 PM
|
|
" its an 11 node journey the way he did it, and its 11 nodes the way i did it, but mine goes through and past a buffet of amazing other things he needs for his build and his goes through a wasteland that will leave his build extremely inefficient. even if another path takes 2 more nodes, if its gonna leave you on top of 6 really good clusters vs the shorter path leaving you on top of none you take the longer path right? because where do you go next? if you are not right on top of a load of good stuff then you have to start pathing again, and now youre spending way more than 2 extra nodes to get stuff. " no you wouldnt, youd be playing a shadow who has wicked ward, a node very close to him on the tree. its literally 3 nodes for you to get wicked ward from your current tree, ghost reaver took you 2. " i didnt link you a level 100 build, i linked you a far more competent pathing for your build, and then highlighted all the good nodes along that path by selecting them and specifically said you cant get all these nodes, but theyre all here so you can chose which ones u need. the problem is you are not playing the game in a completely competent fashion, theres parts of your setup that are weaker than they could be. " its always been a viable playstyle, even when the vp + gr crutch was there you could make this playstyle viable without it. if thats the only time and the only way youve been able to make this viable then you need to stop being defensive and reread my last post, but this time recognise im trying to help you, im not trying to flame you, and actually i might have 5x your play hours and understand a lot more about how to put this sort of character together and make it viable. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
|
|
" I would claim pretty much the game entirely based on the skill being used. I've been trying out Storm Rain with only 30 LoH that translates to around 1k/s with 10 beams which it gets far more than 10 on bigger bosses (end game bosses). I kinda wish I made this character a Trickster but I'm looking to try out Disolution of Flesh, PB, Dodge cap with Wind Ward to try and save it. Since Wind Ward only drops from hits. ________________________________ Far as the class fantasy. The RP in RPG doesn't mean role as in class. Your "class" can influence it but you're playing the role of a character first and foremost. Just like a play or a movie. Skyrim doesn't have classes but if I use a shield, mace, spec in melee and Resto. What am I? The game didn't tell me I had to play that specific way. It gave me the option to do so. Hence my earlier I mentioned D&D. It's a class system but in the end everyone multi-classes because they want to make their own thing. I say it's the player who defines their RP fantasy style. Devs are just supposed to give you a nice big toolbox so you can do that. "Never trust floating women." -Officer Kirac
|
|
|
Shadow, mainly assassin, should be all about doing absurd amount of danger to high value targets... rare, unique and bosses.
"Ambush and Assassinate" and "Opportunistic" exist but the first should be about rare and unique and the the latter should bump the damage to, at least, 50% and drop the "at most", and eliminate the line from the reduced damage taken. It's an ascendancy that should "struggle" more against packs and excel in single targets. |
|
|
Once again you are coming at this from a softcore perspective, everything works in softcore you just have to die enough times. Talking about this if you dont play hardcore leagues is useless because ur perspective is always going to be biased.
For a build to work in melee it must be able to keep the health pool toped at all times or else you are going to die to random stuff and death is a no no to people that want to play the game properly. Snorkle, the built you posted sucks and i say this because i've done very similar things, that build can reach yellow maps maybe if you go pure HP and you get lucky, if it doesnt work in hardcore its trash, also its not even a shadow build, its a ranger build with extra steps... Also for the people that mentioned gear, trading in hardcore sucks right now, you cant find triple res items with decent defensive values, either because they are too expensive or simply because no one is selling them, i dont know if its because of the changes GGG made but trying to get items right now sucks, i would know because i spent quite a lot of time trying to buy decent stuff yesterday. The cheapest end game unique claw right now costs 1.5 divine and the cheapest alternatives are non existent in the market right now. So not only is the default build garbage you cant itemize properly for it. Some one mentioned dodging which honestly i fully agree, the shadow is a nimble character it should be able to dodge and you should have to dodge sometimes. GGG gives you a tool for this, its called whirling blades, so why on earth does whirling blades target mobs sometimes sending u straight into a pack of mobs for you to die, it makes no sense, why did they remove the movement skill buffs from the trickster tree? if movement is important for the shadow why are the movement options garbage? Why dont we have something with phase run, it has a "100% increased stealth" effect, i dont think theres any effect that screams more shadow than that. All in all the shadow is poor thoght out mess that relies on other classes to make it work, thats why no one plays shadow the way the promotional art depicts him. Im 100% convinced that there isnt a soul in GGG's office that plays shadows(or melee), every league you get 10 ranged spells, you know how many dual wielding skills you have in the game after 10 years? 3!!!!!!! Dont come and tell me that the issue lies on the build when GGG clearly abandoned the archetype, they dont and the shadow is design disaster because of it. Last edited by sonicphi#6276 on Dec 24, 2022, 2:19:33 PM
|
|
|
As usual, most of you are arguing at cross-purposes because you *didn't read and think about the OP's actual post*. You just see the headline and fly into defensive mode.
There is no disagreeing with some of what the OP said because there is no way to play the assassin archetype in PoE. None. Fuck all. Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch. And that's *fine* because it's just not that sort of game. What can you can do is use the 'assassin' ascendancy to make some incredible builds. For sure. And Trickster. And Saboteur. Especially Saboteur. But you won't be building EV/ES because life is much more important and EV/ES is, by its erratice nature, an inferior primary source of EHP compared to good old life (but a perfectly decent secondary), and for that you need to path down to Ranger and/or Duelist in which case, why aren't you just playing one of those? Here is the part of the OP that should be bolded, highlighted, and put into flashing lights: " And the answer is simple: because that's most of the builds in this game. It's not that the 'assassin' is a glorified witch/archer; it's that the game is a glorified shooter. We have known this for fucking *years*. Anytime someone plays apologist with the game's idea of melee, we're already accepting that 'melee' in this game is not sticking your dagger into an enemy from behind for obscene amounts of crit damage or wading into throngs of enemies with your sword swinging and shield blocking. You are doing *at best* ranged attacks with AoE around your character -- in a shoot-em-up format, this would be like a short-to-mid range wave shot or aura blast. And I say again: that is fine. That is entirely what the game WANTS to be. But (and wow am I tired of repeating this, so yknow, you only have to tolerate it one more time) there is no room inside what PoE wants to be for an assassin of any type. Not the dictionary definition, not the accepted 'rpg' definition, not even the fucking Ubisoft definition that almost dominates what players think when they see the word 'assassin' in gaming. And on that front, the OP is unassailably correct: the Shadow is a design disaster. But can you make one work with the game? Of fucking course. That is also unassailable. Again, so much of this would have been avoided (and the thread a lot shorter) if people would actually do the mature thing and respond to the argument presented by the one making the fucking argument instead of using it to get on a soapbox and you know what folks THIS IS ME SAYING THAT. One of the most notorious soappugilists on this whole damn forum. A thread is not an excuse for you or anyone to just go off on a rant. It's only courteous to look at what the poster is saying and respond to that -- unless said poster has an incomprehensible point in which case eh, talk amongst yourselves or something. This OP had a cogent, reasonable point and compelling evidence to back it up. On the other hand, if we all agreed they were right (with some qualifications), then as I said, it'd be a much shorter thread and would have fallen off the front page a while back. And that's why clickbait titles exist in the first place -- because we don't trust GGG to notice these things unless we are *arguing about them*. And that's fucked in and of itself, because surely there are some problems with the game that we can agree on, and surely one of them is that the presented archetypes, some of them, simply don't work in the PoE that is. The Shadow is portrayed as a nimble dude who can do untold damage with his dagger utilising precision and expertise. "One good stab" is a lie. Even if it's just a suggestion, it's a lie. Even if it's an archetype you choose not to follow because you've made the Shadow work in your own way (or far more likely, in someone else's) -- still a lie. So either the Shadow himself is deluded OR GGG make the poor guy say cool things that just aren't fucking true. Either way, it's a failure of design. And no amount of 'but you can make the Shadow work if you just' type responses can change that. No 'git gud' can change that because no matter how 'gud' you 'git', you are NOT FUCKING GETTING ANYWHERE IN THIS GAME WITH ONE GOOD STAB. It's just a delusion GGG had early on that they'd be able to make an ARPG where that's possible. You could accuse them of buying into their own bullshit, except they never really committed to it themselves. It's just a throwaway line or two they're hoping people ignore or take for granted as they turn a character who is supposed to be an 'assassin' into, as the OP put it, a glorified witch/archer. Because that is how you win this game. Not by playing it the way it initially told you to, but by realising the devs themselves started to make one thing, but ended up making something else entirely. And they never even bothered to retcon it out over a decade. Because, and here's the only defence anyone can mount that holds any water, it doesn't fucking matter when your players don't care as long as they can make it work. Hell, some of them are jaded enough to probably see Shadow's archetype as a deliberate trap created by GGG to trick newbies into thinking this isn't the most incredibly deep, hardcore game ever made omg aren't GGG so clever. Meanwhile a less committed player of games might be inclined to look at what the Shadow character is supposed to be, supposed to do, its core identity, and look at what a functioning Shadow character actually is, actually does, its core functionality in Wraeclast and The Atlas, and say well that's a bunch of bullshit, he's just a fucking nuker now. Expectation: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad Reality: Elminster...or maybe R-Type. If I like a game, it'll either be amazing later or awful forever. There's no in-between. I am Path of Exile's biggest whale. Period. Last edited by Foreverhappychan#4626 on Dec 24, 2022, 5:39:26 PM
|
|
" excluding map bosses - you can do that and even these bosses might actually die from ONE HIT Dual Strike + all the bonuses to 'enemies on full life' (located - convenienty - around shadow) pretty much guarantee 100% crit chance, absurd crit multi and general 'more damage'. Ambush or Phase run -> Dual Strike there is no rare (and most map bosses fall into this category) in this game that can survive that. ive done that. it is amazing. sadly Dual Strike vs wounded enemies is an auto-attack and i do not play multi-skill builds. that also mean Sirus/Maven familia do not apply but rares? it is bloody murder same story for shadow - ES/EV hybrid work low, mid and high-end. but you wont get there with items that COMBINED have less ES and EV than The Vertex. you wont get there using Ghost Shroud having total 2000 EV. these are build mistakes, not archetype holes. GGG actually pre-made starting EV/ES set of uniques that carry this playstyle HARD: (these cost ~nothing even in HC Sanctum, just checked) add to that 2000 EV chest (2-10chaos in HC) + trickster (you can get if on Forbidden jewels now on Assassin, this is endgame thing) + Evasion mastery for double EV rating and you end up with 20000 EV pre-flask get a shield like this (end-game) or something with half these values you can get for 2c even in HC if you cannot get 3-res items - run Purity of Elements until you can. ailment immunity is fantastic way of spending your mana shadow fantasy as depicted by GGG works, but you actually have to use tools given to you instead of taking huge detour and avoid ES/EV hybrid nodes like a plague, use Act 3 gear and try to stack life on ES/EV build (Life/ES builds are a different thing ffs!) Last edited by sidtherat#1310 on Dec 24, 2022, 5:58:39 PM
|
|
|
If you use those 3 items at the same time you will simply die because you wont have enough resistances, using a shield is not an option when you want to build a shadow archetype, when was the last time you saw an assassin stab someone in the neck with a shield on the other hand???
You can use all the tools you want to "make it work" but it wont be working a shadow its gonna be something else. Another point is 2000EV chests are not cheap, cheapest one in hardcore right now with triple res is queen of the forest for 25c which is not even a ES/EV hybrid which is out of the shadow base design, the hybrid design that they tell you to use, you may argue, "oh but the trickster tells you to use a EV body armor" but what about the assassin? you just dont play it like its supposed to then... Last edited by sonicphi#6276 on Dec 24, 2022, 6:01:20 PM
|
|
|
so now you also oppose shields? they make more sense than dual wielding daggers.. anyone with ANY form of martial arts will tell you dual wielding is a movie/game thing (do not confuse with ambidexterity). but that is play on words not worth time discussing
other arguments are sadly from the 'git gut' category: 25c is a lot? do chaos recipe for 20 minutes, youll have 25c no resists? use Purity of Elements wanna use dual claws? Ive actually used Advancing Fortress for leveling (yet another pre-made ES/EV item). Viper Strike does not really care about your weapon stats that much for the content you aim for wanna hybrid chest? Restless Ward says hello.. in general you want to compete in red-maps using Act3 gear, weird tree that makes little to no sense and refuse to use tools available to you no wonder it doesnt work for you. sadly you make it look as if it is game's general problem. it isnt. what you want (im not questioning the sensibility of this choice!) can be done with tools available in game. you just decided to try doing it in the most inefficient way possible and youve lost the numbers game i think you should actually play some 'standard', get to red maps and get to know what is happening there instead of trying to do that on HC. POE is not compatible with HC and frankly - people just should stop pretending it is otherwise |
|
