Game Mechanics Vanish change/rework

(main suggestions are in bold if you don't like reading)

Hello, forum dwellers. In my opinion, Shadestepper, mostly spellshade, still has some issues even after 2.1's aspects and abilities, and a lot of them stem from Vanish. On its own, the 5s cooldown isn’t that bad, but it becomes an issue when playing as Shadestepper, since you have to rely heavily on Vanish for most of your mobility, damage, and abilities. Because Vanish is locked behind a 5 second cooldown, this means that if you want to utilize any of these, you can’t do anything else that relies on Vanish for up to 5 seconds. i.e.

• nightcloak
• surprise strike
• mobility from shadow travel
• using dash for any reason
• engaging or disengaging from combat

All locked behind a 5 second cooldown. There are many examples of when it becomes annoying, but for me, I especially hate using Dash to dodge and then having to wait 5 seconds to do anything else, or having to go seek out a mob to kill, which just feels bad. Shadow Siphon and Silent Killer definitely help this, but they don’t solve the core issue, which is that a 5 second cooldown just doesn’t work well for how Shadestepper is designed, having multiple abilities relying upon Vanish to be triggered. Removing the cooldown altogether has been stated to be too overpowered many times by CT, and is pretty much guaranteed not to happen. But I think there is a way to balance removing the cooldown, so here’s my suggestion:

There would be no cooldown to using Vanish, but the max duration would have to “recharge” by being out of Vanish, with a 5 second cap. So if you leave Vanish and then immediately use it again a second later, it would have a maximum duration of 1 second.
Hopefully, this would be dynamic, so if you have 4 seconds of Vanish duration saved up and you enter Vanish for 1 second, it would only set you back one second and not reset it entirely.

This would effectively let you use Vanish for anything, whenever you want, and you wouldn’t be locking yourself out of 5 seconds of more interesting gameplay, but it would still be balanced as you wouldn’t be able to infinitely be invisible and sneak past mobs, or anything like that. You would still be able to use your abilities consistently without the invisibility being too overpowered, and it would reduce a lot of the forced downtime that the Vanish cooldown adds.

There are some issues with this, though:

• It would be hard to track the duration of Vanish if it worked like this, but a solution to that could be adding a bossbar for it, similar to Lightbender or Paladin, so that you can track how much time you have left in Vanish at a glance. Even if the main suggestion isn’t added, this probably should be anyway, just for convenience lol.

• Surprise Strike and other abilities balanced around Vanish would be much more accessible, which could be a balance problem, hard to tell without trying it in-game. But if it is, maybe a system could be added where Surprise Strike only works if you have 2+ seconds of Vanish duration, so it isn't spammable. And if there is a bossbar, it would be very easy to see how much Vanish duration you have. But I think that this specific solution should be used sparingly, since removing the waiting time is the point of removing the Vanish cooldown in the first place. If you have to wait to do everything else anyway, it kind of becomes pointless. I think it would work for surprise strike, though, and maybe Death Magnet too.

• Silent Killer and Shadow Siphon affect the Vanish cooldown, so how would they change? For those abilities, I imagine that instead of directly reducing the cooldown, they would reset or add some time to Vanish’s duration. Silent Killer would just reset the duration to 5s on a kill, and Shadow Siphon would add 1.5s duration on a successful backstab.

• With no Vanish cooldown and the ability now being a resource of sorts, it would be important to be able to use regular Dash also, which you wouldn't be able to do if Vanish has no cooldown. You could just melee right out of Vanish if you want to save up your Vanish duration, but that could get tedious, so I suggest making shift + dash proc Vanish instead of overriding regular dash.

• Aspects! There are a lot, one of which affects the Vanish cooldown. There are probably many ways to change the aspect, but I think the simplest solution is just to make it increase the maximum Vanish duration. Not going to get too far into that since it's out of the scope of this post, but I definitely think there are possibilities.

Overall, these changes would turn Vanish into more of a resource that you can use however and whenever you want, so it wouldn’t lock any abilities behind meaningless waiting time. Even though there wouldn’t be a cooldown, it would (hopefully) still be balanced, and lead to an overall more enjoyable experience playing Shadestepper. Thanks for reading, make sure to vote in the poll, and I hope you have a nice day/night :)

 

Instead, make Shift+Dash activate vanish (if you do the opposite, shifting makes you slower so normal dash would be weaker). solves most issues i see written here (except the powerlevel of the archetype being bad)

 

I feel like people would use Vanish more often than regular dash tho. With how much of a centerpiece Vanish is to Shadestepper, I think it’s fair that it would be easier to use. People probably would use regular dash less often so I don’t think it would be good to put extra effort into using Vanish instead of regular dash.
Additionally, if you jump before dashing you get more momentum than without IIRC. And if you shift midair and immediately cast, you won’t lose much momentum. I’ll have to test it but I think that’s the case.

Edit: I tested it. By jumping and quickly shifting while casting Dash, I barely lose momentum, if any at all. I think it would be fine if shift + dash was regular dash tbh, but it's hard to tell for sure without testing it in-game lol

 

Yooo assassin suggestion yeahhh
You’ll always see me respond to new suggestions lol

I will say though, I feel that I would honestly use this vanish mechanic with Hmelle because it’s not cooldown reliant allowing me to more safely chain powders since it’ll naturally build up for me while I’m fighting and like 2 seconds with speed sis enough to disengage and pot up without worrying about vanish cooldown for another escape (if you event need it, I skill issue so)

 

Best vanish suggestion I’ve heard, idk how this would play out ingame but if it’s too good it can always get nerfed

 

Shift cast to Vanish seems like the best solution to me

I like your idea about a recharge metre

 

The more I think about it the more sense it makes tbh. Shift dash to vanish probably wouldn't be nearly as annoying as I think it would be once you get used to it.

 

Bumping this

 

90+% approval hell yeh

 

edited the post so shift + dash is vanish instead of the other way around. it just makes more sense tbh lol