Game Mechanics Vanish Improvements

This is honestly a pretty simple suggestion, based on this thread: remove the cooldown on vanish. Instead have a cooldown on the damage buff from surprise strike. Silent killer can then reduce/remove the cooldown on the damage bonus instead. This will help lower-damage assassins (or assassins fighting a strong enemy such as a boss) move into and out of combat, which is what the rest of the archetype seems balanced around. As it is, if you cannot kill an enemy in one combo you cannot back out of combat, leaving you stuck in the fight. This runs completely counter to the "dash in, dash out" nature of the rest of shadestepper.

 

Leaning heavily towards no.

You said it yourself. Dash out.

 

That was poor wording on my part. Dash doesn't really take you out of combat effectively. It's too short range to put meaningful distance between yourself an enemy. It also doesn't allow for careful repositioning, which is the main focus of shadestepper.

 

You want to jump into and out of combat quickly? Play Acrobat. That’s the whole point of Acrobat. Shadestepper is about massive damage. That’s the main focus. Yes, it has some speed (primarily in the form of Shadow Travel), and that is all that I need for Shadestepper’s repositioning. Shadestepper and Acrobat are on opposite sides of the tree because Shadestepper is high damage and Acrobat is not. Giving Shadestepper an Acrobat’s attack evasion abilities would be rather broken.
Have you considered how broken constant invisibility is? Without Vanish constantly draining mana, the cooldown is the only thing a weathered user from being effectively invincible for almost the entirety of a fight. If you can’t survive for five seconds of combat, that’s either you standing still in front of the enemy or your build being so utterly glassy I’m a bit surprised you even made it to the boss fight.

 

That is fair. My main issue is that vanish feels like its only purpose is to set up attacks on an enemy and it has no real utility beyond that. It can't be used to make a glass cannon viable, or travel quickly, or otherwise have a purpose beyond that one thing. In addition, shadestepper as a whole is very underwhelming in the damage bonus front, with the exception of vanish itself, so when vanish is on cooldown it essentially feels like you're waiting to be able to play. You do less damage and have less mobility than other archetypes, so it basically feels like 5 seconds of action and then 5 seconds of waiting for your chance to do the fun thing again.

 

That's completely wrong though. Need I explain why?

 

Apparently so. It doesn't have any other obvious use as it is right now that I can see.

 

Walk speed, invisibility AKA effective EHP.

 

If you used vanish to set up an attack though, you can't use it for those things until after the cooldown is up. If you don't use it as your opening you lose a ton of damage, since burst damage is the main thing shadestepper has going for it. You then have to switch to fighting normally for five seconds to wait for the cooldown, which is pretty counter to the idea of a massive burst-damage assassin hitting from the shadows.
This discourages a hit-and-run playstyle, because if you can't get a kill you're stuck fighting until the cooldown is up. In that case, it makes more sense to just use an acrobat build which will do more damage anyway, and gets bonuses to that sort of thing. It's not a matter of it not being possible, it's just a matter of the entire thing being a worse version of another archetype.

 

It's not burst if you do it constantly...

 

Exactly. You shouldn't be incentivized to stick around and fight, and you shouldn't be able to spam the vanish damage bonus. It should be one quick hit or combo and then ducking out for a moment.

 

but that's the problem. Shadestepper doesn't do "massive damage". In fact it doesn't even do decent damage. A cata build with crafted items and full mythic tomes can't even hit 1m boosted backstabs with every single buff active unless you go pure etw, and that has a 20, t w e n t y second cd and only activates if the enemy has 70% hp or more. Good luck "one shotting" greg's 22m hp with that. If shadestepper wants to live up to its name of truly one shotting, i expect glass cata builds with full mythic tomes to hit at the very least 10m boosted backstabs with every single buff active.

 

Another necro post heck'th

 

Ummm...I don't know what build you're using, but I recently made a shadestepper build that can deal 5-6 mil damage per hit and had decent EHP using only the buffs available on wynnbuilder, without using any crafteds, foods, scrolls, potions, or raid buffs. With every buff possible, and a hyperoptimised build, I could see a shadestepper dealing 10 mil damage in a single hit, which is absolutely insane, especially since that is almost 3 times as much damage as the Eye has health.

 

show me the build. (also when I say every buff active i only mean self buffs, so no buffs from other classes nor other major IDs)

 

Then you should've said all self buffs. All buffs means that you have buffs from other classes, and sometimes even means that you have other people putting curse and wind prison on the enemy. Without all of that, the build can get ~1 mil damage per hit tops.

 

My assassin dosen’t have tome but like

This is weathered mind you, not etw either(just twa)