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  1. #9
    Player
    TouchandFeel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2013
    Posts
    1,835
    Character
    Vespereaux Vaillantes
    World
    Exodus
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 91
    Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
    snip
    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.
    (1)
    Last edited by TouchandFeel; 06-11-2019 at 07:36 AM.