Ideas for Living Shadow

[TouchandFeel]

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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.