I was playing Season 1 a little bit and came back two weeks ago to see how things changed and honestly I feel like there are no changes. It’s either deal damage with investment in most of your cooldowns or you just heal opponents. I am enjoying complexity of class, doing 13 buttons dynamic combo wombo openers, but this playstyle of cd burst with huge amount of stacking multipliers is annoying to play with and play against. why am I forced to go make a coffee when Shadow Dance and Shadow Blades aren’t ready…
I mean why -
Shadow Blades - 20% dmg as shadow
Dark Shadow - 30% dmgi while Shadow Dance
Night Stalker - 10% dmgi while Shadow Dance or Stealth is active
It would be nice if Subtlety has more base damage and Dance with Blades give you access to stealth abilities and cp management without additional damage bonuses on paper.
New Shadow Blades are also overkill for cp gain. Having instead passive that says something like “Your attacks that generate combo points generate an additional combo point when striking from behind.” would be more satisfying.
Outside of Dance and Blades, Shadow Strike 45k non-crit, Backstab 15k non-crit with full PvP gear where everyone is sitting on 1.5m hp.
Some talents like Shrouded in Darkness and Stillshroud only block path because you cannot use Shroud of Concealment in Arenas and Blitz, Cheat Death sometime doesn’t work and Subterfuge is still messy.
The Rotten, Shadowcraft, Danse Macabre and Goremaw’s Bite are really cool giving you something unique in action, but why Dark Brew? Dark Brew only says “increase your damage by X%” and most builds are forced to run it.
And same goes for energy sustain where 100 energy poll is starving as hell. On the other side Vigor + Thistle Tea results in 200 energy poll, 10% increased energy regen and Tea /w 3 charges you can slurp outside of GCD.
I am wondering how are devs testing these builds nowadays. Probably multiple hours a day in office going for static and dynamic rotations of all kind, reading and comparing results from combat metrics and yet here we are.