New Class Idea: Shadow

I’ve been working on a melee class, trying to find something that would allow for melee viability in every type of fight and I think I have something workable here. There are very clear pve and pvp talents available, and some overlap with creative talent tree ideas. I’d be happy to hear suggestions from anyone who endeavors to read through the wall of text below. I give you all, the Shadow class.

Shadow

Weapon: Double Daggers + 3 throwing knives

Armor: Leather

Playstyle: Throw a knife at an enemy to launch your Shadow Clone to that location, an ethereal form of the enemy will appear in front of your player so you can attack freely at range. Enemies that have targeted you for aggro will target the Shadow Clone instead, killing it with a few hits and putting it on cooldown for 8 seconds. Throwing follow up knives will deal a large amount of damage and reset your shadow’s duration. Shadow Clone will automatically be placed behind a target when it appears. Switch between true melee and ranged melee depending on the fight and positioning requirements.

Passives:

Stealth - Remaining out of combat for 3 seconds will give your character lesser stealth toward npc’s, letting you walk through them without being attacked.

Ambush - If you break stealth by attacking an enemy, you will guarantee a crit.

Combo Strikes - Each time you swing your daggers one after the other you add combo points to your enemy that can be expended by special abilities. (Maximum 6 combo points) There is a limit to how quickly you can generate combo points.

Shadow Blade - You hold only one dagger and can effectively use it that way, activating combo strikes by swinging in alternating arcs, but if you grab your dagger with your other hand, you will pull a shadow version out of the weapon to dual wield. Pushing the grip button again will cause you to drop the shadow dagger, giving you access to other skills such as smoke bomb and throwing knives.

Skills:

Shadow Clone: Throw one of your three daggers at an enemy to make a shadow version of your player appear behind the enemy. An ethereal version of the enemy will appear in front of your real character to be attacked as normal at range. The Shadow Clone only lasts 15 seconds and will stay attached to the enemy keeping the ethereal form in range for the duration. Throwing another knife at the enemy will reset the duration of the shadow clone and relocate it to the back side of the enemy again. The shadow clone can be targeted by single target attacks. If the shadow clone is destroyed, you will incur an 8 second cooldown before you can reapply shadow clone to any target. During this time your throwing knives will be unavailable.

Backstab - Bring both daggers down in an overhead swing against an enemy to deal a large amount of damage, scaling based on how much health the enemy has lost( lower hp means more bonus damage ). This attack will deal a critical strike if you are behind the target. Cooldown 4 seconds. Backstab will interrupt enemies.

Eviscerate - hold both triggers and swing both weapons at an enemy in a horizontal arc to use all of your combo points to deal heavy damage to the enemy. Damage scales up based on combo points on the target.

Arterial blow - Hold the trigger on one of your daggers and perform two horizontal strikes in either direction to consume combo points and add a bleed over time effect to the enemy. Refreshing the bleed will not stack the damage, and instead overwrites any current Arterial blow bleed effect on the target.

Smoke bomb - Throw a smoke bomb on the floor to lower your aggro against any current enemies and instantly activate lesser stealth, taking you out of combat with non boss enemies.

Special Ability: Leeching blades - For the duration of your super you will gain a damage boost and every combo point consuming skill will heal you for the damage dealt.

Talents:

Tier 1:

Poison daggers - all attacks apply a poison damage over time effect to the enemy, stacking up to three times, refreshing the effect removes the lowest duration poison and applies a fresh poison stack. Enemies are slowed based on how many stacks they currently have on them.

Serrated blades - breaking stealth with an attack from behind will add a damage over time effect to your target which can be refreshed by using Arterial Blow. When applying Serrated Blades from stealth your target will be stunned. Refreshing the duration does not stun the target again.

Tier 2:

True Stealth - Activate true stealth by throwing a smoke bomb on the floor, giving you complete invisibility for up to 15 seconds or until you enter combat. 30 second cooldown. Breaks combat with enemies. This skill retains the ability to reduce your aggro.

Poison bomb - Your Smoke Bomb now becomes a poison bomb which will put a wide pool of AOE on the floor which deals damage over time to anyone inside the pool. This will remove the effect of smoke bomb taking you out of combat, but will retain the reduced aggro effect.

Tier 3:

True Assassin - Killing an enemy will instantly put you into true stealth for 15 seconds and resets the cooldown of backstab. If you are still in combat after killing the enemy, you will instead just reset the cooldown of backstab.

Garrote - Your Eviscerate will reset the duration of Arterial blow, extending the same DOT based on how many combo points were used in the original Arterial Blow. Resetting the cooldown of Arterial Blow in this way also resets the duration of Serrated blades in the same way using Arterial Blow would have.

Tier 4:

Shadow Step - Pull the trigger on either hand while not holding a weapon to teleport to where your Shadow Clone stands and have it switch places with you, standing idle. Repeat this within the shadow clone’s duration to switch back to your previous location, causing the Shadow Clone to go back into combat and your ethereal target to reappear. Cooldown 30 seconds after the Shadow Clone fades or after your second teleport.

Adrenaline rush - pull the trigger on either hand while not holding a weapon to activate adrenaline rush. This will allow you to move at normal speed even in combat for a 10 second duration. Cooldown 30 seconds.

Tier 5:

One More Time - Activate this skill by pulling your main hand trigger and holding your dagger out to the sides. This will reset all of your cooldowns including your talent cooldowns aside from One More Time. 1 minute cooldown.

Combo Breaker - Activate this skill by pulling your main hand trigger and holding your dagger out to the sides. The blades will glow and for the next 10 seconds your eviscerate and arterial blow will not consume combo points and instead they will have a 1 second cooldown, allowing you to repeat the attack as many times during the duration as possible.

6 Likes

A lot of good stuff in there @Lavawhale !

Only things i can see being problematic is:

  • smoke bomb:
    lower agro+lesser invis+out of combat with non boss. In effect you probably can’t get out of combat unless your agro is 0 with all mobs (normal and boss)

  • moves and combinations:
    There are many of them and could perhaps be a little too complex. But who knows, maybe not :slight_smile: In the end it will be up to the devs if they want to add a class like this.

Regardless though, as far as i’m concerned overall it sounds like a solid base for a rogue class, especially the creative solution with melee at range!

2 Likes

Hey Onde,

Just to follow up with your comments, I do think it might be a bit complicated but considering your attacks can’t miss if you are keeping your shadow clone on the enemy, I figured I had to think of a way to complicate the rotation to make it fair to have a class that had 100% uptime on their target since every other class can simply miss their shots. You may be right though and that is something I am concerned about.

As for the smoke bomb, I figure it’s like the warrior horn, long cooldown and just a Hail Mary in certain situations, if you’re about to die to mobs you can smoke bomb to get out of combat and reset them, the rest of the time it will just be a useful way to control your aggro in boss fights. I figure it would operate much like clicking the stuck combat button but it would send mobs back like when you leash them. Also most likely no Shadow would be using a regular smoke bomb since the true stealth and poison bomb are the other options once the talent is unlocked, and poison bomb is by far the better choice for dps purposes, true stealth is almost exclusively a pvp or utility option.

Thanks for the comments and compliments! :smiley: I’ve been a long time advocate for adding a real dps melee to this game and figured it was time I tossed my ideas in with everyone else’s. I really like the concept of being able to farm mobs in open world with a stun lock type combo, open with a backstab and serrated blades and build up combo points to finish them off with a quick eviscerate and let true assassin throw you into stealth to line up the next kill. It would make pvp very interesting too.

2 Likes

Pretty cool although I feel like knife throw defeats the point of it being melee.

The main problem in Orbus regarding melee, is that players block eachothers shots/spells, which makes less room for melee (or could make them undesirable).

Lava’s idea with using daggers to spawn ethereal clones (aka spells/shots passing through) at the target, but still having the class using melee at the copy at the player position solves this problem.

The only other way i see to get around this issue for any upcoming melee-non-tank classes with having them in actual melee, would be to have friendly spells/shots pass through them in some other way (which is generally the case in conventional mmorpgs).

1 Like

Amateur Sauce here, I am loving the idea I was just curious as too Tile Set aspects of it. Such as if the Shadow Clones are just meant to be a dummy for enemies to hit or does it have a basic melee attack it does while active? If so does it’s hit count towards hits per second within a Tile Set to make it proc? I noticed nothing said anything about attacking but I wanted to ask.

Basically, the shadow clones don’t attack themselves. They are like a copy of you. Here’s some primitive ascii art:

P = player
-> throwing knife
c = clone of player
C = clone of target hit by throwing knife
B = boss (or other monster)
T = tank
_ = spacing (or floor) :smiley:

P__________TB

P____->____TB

P________T->B

PC_________TBc

So, the shadow throws his knife at the boss which spawns a clone behind it of the shadow. At the same time, a clone of the boss appears at the shadow, which the shadow can melee (and the player clone mimics at the boss position).

@Lavawhale can correct me if it’s wrong :slight_smile:

Regarding tiles, there’s plenty of different moves that could proc many different tiles

2 Likes

Awesome and love the depictions btw. I think I got the basic understanding of how that would work and I’ll definitely be following this thread along. Thanks for taking the time to respond to that

2 Likes

Hahaha that description was spot on and the visual was perfect xD, that’s exactly right.

2 Likes

This is the first reasonable short ranged melee class I have seen.

A couple of notes.

  1. I would worry that the out of combat stealth would be exploited by low level players to be able to go to high level zones without being agroed. I think it should be fine as long as it lowers agro range rather than eliminating it and has a diminishing returns relative to enemy difficulty relative to you.

  2. I have a couple of changes for the smoke bomb. I worry that giving new players something to instantly leave combat could make the overworld feel less scary and therefore disincentive feeling like they need to group up. Additionally new players who are spamming their cooldowns would become very frustrated as enemies keep running away and healing back to full. For late game dungeoning I worry that being able to significantly drop your agro would trivialize a very major and important interaction between the tank and dps.
    How I would fix it: make it reduce your agro by a percentage on all enemies (but not leave combat). Give it some minor benefit or stat buff aside from reducing agro. Make the class as a whole generate proportionally more agro per damage done than the other dps classes.
    By making the class otherwise predisposed to pulling agro you turn the smokebomb from an easy way to make mistakes and not get punished for them into a unique class mechanic. This would give the class flavor and would give it a unique and interesting challenge to overcome. I think you should give the smoke some extra small benefit for the same reason paladin agro book gives int and str. You want it to feel like it does something when you first start the game before you really care about agro and you want to teach new players to use it frequently. Also it would give it some minor relevance toward pvp where agro doesn’t matter.

I haven’t really delved very deep into your talents but I feel like you could split a couple of the talents between further reducing agro and doing more damage to force players to really weigh the value of survivability vs raw dps output. I think this would lead to a lot of very creative tactics and problem solving to allow for the the picking of the greedier more damage oriented talents.

2 Likes

Good points i think, and solutions already tested to work well in many other mmorpgs :+1:

2 Likes

I think that this is a great idea. With most rpg’s I play, I am a ranger or a stealthy rogue like this.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 20 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.