Ideas for Living Shadow

[Cirdan-Faust]

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.

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.