Ideas for Living Shadow

I think we can all agree that living shadow could be something really cool but right now it's implementation is rather boring. The animation and contribution to the identity of the job is cool but it's lacking synergy with other abilities.

It seems to me that SE must have more planned for it as it's timer integrates into the job gauge so it can't just be an OGCD DOT. I've seen some good ideas in various posts so I wanted to start a dedicated discussion on it here.

Personally I like the idea of the shadow mirroring your attacks and feeding you MP and blood to power your burst window. I think this would be a relatively easy change from where they are now. I wish they would add haste back to blood weapon and work that into the burst window as well so there was more strategic use of blood weapon.

What do you guys want to see?

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Originally Posted by Cirdan-Faust

is cool but it's lacking synergy with other abilities.

It seems to me that SE must have more planned for it as it's timer integrates into the job gauge

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wait... what?
Just a super flashy return of Scourge, if you ask me.

Living Shadow:
Conjure a simulacrum of your darkness to fight alongside you. Reduces the recast time of all weaponskills and spells to 1 second. Grants Inner Darkness upon execution of a weaponskill or spell.
Durations 24s
Inner Darkness effect: Orders simulacrum to execute the next weaponskill or spell. Effect ends upon use.

Basically I want to create a skill that gives you full control of the Living Shadow, alternating hits with your shadow. Combo actions would proc off of your shadow. So essentially you would do what you normally do but at twice the rate. A combo would look like this and occur over 3s, the Dark Knight Having 2s between each weaponskill. DRK: hard slash LS: syphon strike DRK: Souleater Visually I think this would look really cool. There would be an issue with clipping but you could spend all of your oGCDs before triggering Living shadow. Since their wouldn't be time to weave an EoS, this could also be a good way to build MP back quickly.

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Originally Posted by Cirdan-Faust

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I initially found the timer and delay on Living Shadow a bit of a mess, but the more that I looked at it the more it seemed that the time and delay were intentional.

Let's first look at the times present in the ability. 24s duration, approximately a ~8s delay, which leaves about a ~16s active time.
Now if you look at those times, they seem to be very closely synced to rotation times in the ratio of ~ 1 combo rotation during the delay and ~ 2 rotations while it is active. The ~2 rotations of active time makes sense, it generally lines up with raid buff durations and is easy to plan a burst rotation to fit within that time-frame.

So what about the ~8s delay? At first it seemed excessive and just a burden, but then it dawned on me that it is potentially beneficial, acting as a sort of "pre-cast" window. Basically the delay creates a window between when you spend the 50 blood to activate it and when the shadow starts attacking, which under the right conditions allows you to then regain the blood spent and then sync up greater burst potential while the shadow is attacking.

Blood Weapon also synergizes with Living Shadow because their recast timers line up and if you look at the amount of potential blood gained from Blood Weapon during the delay period of Living Shadow, it is 50-60 blood by doing your Soul Eater combo plus maybe an extra weaponskill.
So if you go into Living Shadow with 90-100 blood, then dropping to 40-50 blood from LS usage and pop Blood Weapon to regain 50-60 blood, it will take you back up to 90-100 blood which makes it then possible to get an extra Bloodspiller in during the time the shadow is doing it's thing thus increasing the burst damage for that period which will be an even greater dps gain when synced to raid dps buffs.

So yes, Living Shadow is functionally a fancy DoT, but one that has very specific times built into it for the player to work with and around to maximize their output.

In regards to the Living Shadow timer, and the Darkside one as well, being integrated into the job gauge; I feel that is just a QoL thing to make it potentially easier to parse at a glance than an icon in the buff/debuff list so you can always know where you are at.

I honestly don't think I'd want Living Shadow to give resources, at least not Blood, because that would potentially lessen the synergy with Blood Weapon making the regain of resources too easy during Living Shadow usage.

Lastly, having Living Shadow mimic the abilities the player uses would then make the ability potentially problematic as it greatly increases the gap of performance between non-optimal, which let's be honest most players will be doing, and optimal use. Having the shadow copy the player's action means that if the player screws up and for example only does combo actions, that is what the shadow will do and therefore doing way less damage than it potentially could. On the other end of the spectrum, if the player syncs up Living Shadow with a perfectly executed burst window, it could be such a large amount of damage that it is simply imbalanced. The devs setting up predetermined combinations of abilities/potencies for the shadow to use allows them to set the damage the shadow does, making it a fairly consistent known value which makes it easier to balance and avoids the disparity of performance that I outlined. While not having the shadow mimic the player may aesthetically not be the greatest, from a design standpoint it makes sense.

All in all I feel that many players are being a bit quick on the trigger and are jumping to conclusions of how bad and simplistic Living Shadow, and tbh prospective 5.0 DRK as a whole, is while only really taking the time to gain a very surface-level understanding of how the abilities fit into the kit as a whole.

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

Lastly, while having Living Shadow mimic the abilities the player uses, that then makes the ability potentially problematic as it greatly increases the gap of performance between in-optimal, which let's be honest most players will be doing, and optimal use. Having the shadow copy the player's action means that if the player screws up and for example only does combo actions, that is what the shadow will do and therefore doing way less damage than it potentially could. On the other end of the spectrum, if the player syncs up Living Shadow with a perfectly executed burst window, it could be such a large amount of damage that it is simply imbalanced. The devs setting up predetermined combinations of abilities for the shadow to use allows them to set the damage the shadow does, making it a fairly consistent known value which makes it easier to balance and avoids the disparity of performance that I outlined. While not having the shadow mimic the player may aesthetically not be the greatest, from a design standpoint it makes sense.

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Another factor is the possibility of Pet Glamour changing what your Living Shadow does and looks like. Having the Living Shadow do a set amount of attacks with a set amount of potency allows them to easily replace the rotation without changing damage done if they were to allow you to glamour a non-Dark Knight character into your Living Shadow.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

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My above post was more speaking to the way things function.
Aesthetic things like this or making the shadow look more like your character, as long as there are no actual changes to functionality, I'm fine with as it is entirely separate and is more just about look and feel.
Although, I also don't think it's a super high priority thing that the devs must address now or let the riots begin.

I think that part of the reason why people aren't overly impressed by Living Shadow is because its set rotation doesn't really make a lot of sense. It would be one thing if it charged in and performed a single target burst window with Delirium and Bloodspillers, but this thing uses AoE moves even in single target. It's just a random series of moves.

I'd almost argue that it would come across as more competent if it always behaved as if it were in single target. It seems like a confused AI sidekick, and players tend to be suspicious of confused AI sidekicks. Especially when they have the potential to go wandering off if you don't babysit them.

There's also the question of why the shadow needs to function like a pet at all. It would be one thing if it could, say, tank for a limited period of time (perhaps sharing HP with you). In the absence of that, it really just needs to be a well-animated, hard hitting oGCD dot. You could even condense the whole thing down and make the shadow attack much faster for effect.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

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How actually random the attacks it uses is yet to be determined and I have only heard one streamer in one video specifically say that it appeared random and used different abilities different times that they used Living Shadow.
Having seen the exact same combination and order of abilities in multiple videos leads me to believe that at most it randomly selects from a small pool of potential curated combinations of abilities that while they look different have the same ratio of single target attacks to AoE attacks and the same potencies.

As to the shadow's rotation being a combination of AoE and single-target moves, I don't see that as a problem.
There is really no way to have the ability determine the intent of the player and what the player would want the attacks to be, AoE or single-target, without basically making the one ability two separate ones, a single-target version and an AoE one. That may seem like a great way to make things appear to make more sense, but why separate it out when it can be done in just one ability as they are doing it.
Since it seems they are setting the number of what kind of attacks and the potencies for those attacks, they can actually determine quite accurately what kind of damage the shadow will do in either situation.
Based on what I have seen it is always 7 attacks over ~15-16s, with a ratio of 3 AoE attacks and 4 single-target. Now if they set the AoE attacks to be a specific potency, say 120pot and the single-target to 180pot, that equates to 1080pot worth of single-target damage to the selected target and 360pot worth of damage to all other targets in range. That is approximately equivalent to 2 Quietuses and 2 Bloodspillers in a single ability and for the resource cost of only one of those.
Now let's say they wanted to tweak the single-target damage, they could just alter the potency on the single-target attacks used and leave the AoE potencies untouched. If they wanted to tweak the AoE damage they could tweak the damage of the AoE abilities and then adjust the single-target potencies down a bit to compensate. If they wanted to tweak both, they just tweak both.
While it may seem "stupid" when you first look at it, the way it is setup is actually very clever from a design standpoint, making the ability function in both single-target and AoE situations while being easy to determine and balance values for . That of course is all based on the assumption that the attacks of the ability aren't completely random, but based on what I have seen they don't appear to actually be.

Living Shadow does appear like functionally it will act like a hard-hitting DoT that does a set amount of single-target damage to the primary target and a set amount of damage to other enemies in range over an ~15s period. If it were made faster or had the delay removed or shortened it would potentially disrupt the timing synergy that I went over in my first post on this thread.

I get that people look at this ability and think that it appears underwhelming and a mess, I did too at first. However when I started to look closer and see what lay beneath the initial perception of the ability, I started to see that there appeared to be quite a bit more going on that made the ability much better than it seemed at first.
I mean, yes it is entirely possible that the ability actually ends up being more of a stinking mess than the diaper of a baby with explosive diarrhea, but we as a whole should probably be a little more measured and look more closely at prospective abilities and kits before passing potentially harsh judgment.

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Originally Posted by TouchandFeel

Lastly, having Living Shadow mimic the abilities the player uses would then make the ability potentially problematic as it greatly increases the gap of performance between non-optimal, which let's be honest most players will be doing, and optimal use. Having the shadow copy the player's action means that if the player screws up and for example only does combo actions, that is what the shadow will do and therefore doing way less damage than it potentially could. On the other end of the spectrum, if the player syncs up Living Shadow with a perfectly executed burst window, it could be such a large amount of damage that it is simply imbalanced. The devs setting up predetermined combinations of abilities/potencies for the shadow to use allows them to set the damage the shadow does, making it a fairly consistent known value which makes it easier to balance and avoids the disparity of performance that I outlined. While not having the shadow mimic the player may aesthetically not be the greatest, from a design standpoint it makes sense.

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In regards to increasing skill gap by making living shadow copy the player, I was thinking they could actually design it with a relatively easy implementation that would just make the whole thing more interesting. And if they setup other abilities around it, it will make it optimized by using certain abilities in the window (i.e multiple bloodspillers) so they can balance it with that known condition.

Here is a bit more on how I could see it coming together:

Have the living shadow copy the player as a means to create the bloodspiller burst window instead of the current implementation of Delirium. Have the living shadow copy the player and have delirium do more of what infuriate does for warriors by filling up the blood gauge so they can spam bloodspillers in unison with their living shadow for longer. This would accomplish the same thing as current delirium but do it in a distinctly DRK style so there is less of a feeling of copying warrior inner release. You would obviously have to adjust potency as now there wouldn't be a separate delirium burst window.

The other alternative might be to leave the delirium burst window alone as the "Blood" burst window and add more synergy with blood weapon and living shadow to create a separate "Magic" burst window. Maybe living shadow takes all your blood gauge to summon but will copy your MP based abilities so you are supposed to gain and spend MP on EoS/FoS as fast as possible in the living shadow burst window.

As an aside, I wish DRK got more dark magic spells like PLD has holy spells. That would be a good way to differentiate them from warrior and have them as the anti-PLD. You could honestly copy PLD and making everything the DRK version and people would be less mad as at least its thematic. Copying WAR just seems lazy.

It is a 1000 potency oGCD dot for a tank, what else do you want?

Remember that oGCD potency is more valuable than GCD potency.