User talk:The Sins We Die By/Balancing Shadow Steps

It sounds like you're too Hero Battle oriented in your changes. The most abusive uses of shadow stepping are

1: When warriors/dervishes do it, thus eliminating half of their disadvantages.

2: When gankers do it, thus making them completely untouchable. (the HB thing kinda falls in this one)

Blacking out on offensive shadow stepping would be fine, but there's still the ganking issue. The best I could come up with is that the offensive shadow steps need to have a set duration so you can't control exactly when you leave, but even then, it can be abused.

Why don't you like defensive shadow steps? Like return, death's retreat, etc? ~Shard (talk) 03:00, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

4 man arena abuse honestly. When you're trying to run a melee type on a team there return really kills the offense. You're forced to retarget the next priority in line, b/c usually the return monks are damn good at using it to avoid melee, also killing the use of snares on them. And interrupts have to happen through great anticipation b/c of healer's boon, glimmer of light, contemplation of purity, and patient spirit. The most reliable thing to use on return monks is energy denial, b/c most of their spells end up being 1/2 cast and better, and daze hardly does anything due to the quick casts. I've not been watching any GvG these past two weeks, but even though b4 I didn't tend to see it as a problem there it's abused in 4 man arenas.

Regarding offensive steps, I really am not calling for a blackout in my ideas anymore, more of a true aftercast like you see from ranger interrupt skills. Also, Yes, I'm sure you will still see ganking, but honestly defense is fairly simple to pull off when you aren't dealing with surprise or shutdown so that's why I'm really just suggestion a delay in how effective ganking would be to make it possible to prot against it when shadow stepping is used. If you think about it 3/4 of a second on an aftercast before a skill can be used gives players with good reaction times a window to cast a 1 second skill before an attack, a bull's strike, an iron palm, or a shock would hit. It would also force players to have to think more when they would use a shadow step, because they can't just insta gank with the delay. It would almost have to be used the same way as an interrupt to use efficiently, but given a 1 second cast it would require anticipation to pull off. If a distinct sound is added people have reasonable time to know it's coming, assuming it takes time to register in one's head that's probably 1 1/3 of a second to do something b4 worrying about another skill even being activated from that person. I have wondered whether a 1 second aftercast would be better suited, but I think you'd really have to implement it and see how people fair with it all first. I tried to think it through so that it could still be effective, but at least fair. ~>Sins WDB 04:30, 10 April 2008 (UTC)