Okay, i’ll admit to being new to the game, so I lack any context with regards to comparing my character to others.
Regardless, i was around level 25 (my first char) with my rogue/ bladedancer when i decided to try out Umbral Blades with Sword Thrower, Cacophony of Steel and lethal darkness. Additionally i had flow, disembowel, shadow flourish, smoke blades and critical opening. Equipment was nothing special, except perhaps 2 daggers each with over 100% crit dmg.
The damage was so absurd that by level 30 i was critting (guaranteed) multiple times per second for like 10k with Sword Thrower/eternal darkness alone, over 30k if i did my due diligence with flow, smoke blades and shadow flourish
Completely untwinked i decided to try a level 58 echo, and absolutely murdered everything at level 30. The boss survived around 3-5 seconds or so. Got like 3 levels from one echo, and instantly regretted it since i had now overleveled for the main questline. Which, as you can imagine, felt a bit analogous to a horde of senior citizens vs one-punch-man.
Sooo i dont know. Did i stumble across a powerhouse anomaly by accident, or is this normal?
To be honest, you probably have more experience with the game than I do at this point, and i dont think i left out anything important out of the original post. I’ll try to elaborate a bit more:
Stack crit dmg, prioritize sword thrower/cacophany of steel/lethal darkness, as well as precision cuts, steel torrent, twilight assault and loathing. Get smoke bomb with smoke blades and umbral assault for more damage and more swords. Get shadow cascade with dagger dance and porcupines wrath to trigger shadow flourish reliably for even more damage, and critical opening (shift)apparently guarantees that every single tick of sword throw is a guaranteed crit (bonkers interaction imo), so definitely get that one even if it has no effect on your main source of dps, shadow daggers. Finally, and as a cherry on top get shift with dancing shadows for even more daggers.
Support that setup passively with flow and lethal cadence as a priority.
Do I know if this is the most optimal damage setup or if some of these mechanics dont stack? No clue. But that is 90% my build.
Unfortunately its normal since it uses shadow daggers and those are busted in general since it has guaranteed crit and uses both melee and throwing so you can scale both of these to get lots of flat damage and if i recall correctly it has 450% effectiveness too.
The build is not what it used to be but its still destroys the game completely
Coincidently, this is how I started this “season” as well. It’s effective, fast, and fun, but tricky to scale. By empowered monoliths, you pretty much gotta focus solely on the shadow daggers for damage.
Welcome to the real last epoch gameplay loop, finding skills that completely destroy everything in the game, using them for a while, getting bored, finding the next one.
My point is the auto crits from umbral are great for leveling, but dont scale that well in empowered, forcing you to rely more on shadow daggers, thus changing the build around to compensate.
Well, this has all been very informative. I do actually hope that it gets nerfed, and some it shadow daggers power redistributed elsewhere. Blade Dancer, especially with her dancing ability, seems quite diverse and well designed otherwise, but that’s just my first impressions.
Depends, Rogue was always overpowered when I played them but havent for a long time
Certain classes get massive damage spikes, Necromancer gets Dreadshade at maybe 41?, once you unlock and specialize into it and run a solo minion ie Bone Golem they get 6-9x the damage almost instantly from all the damage multi/100% free crit chance etc, you actually never get a power spike again like that in the entire existence of the character. you could probably clear Empowered content when you unlock Dreadshade on a Necro its that broken
I also got lucky and got Twisted Heart on my first Dragon kill which meant by level 80 I had 2.6k HP and able to stack 4k ward by spamming Rip Blood which triggers Golems Nova based on cast speed, was killing every Timeline/Orobyss early in about 10 seconds
I am now rolling a Shaman Spriggan to abuse Freeze Multi/ward/Frostbite/cold pen etc (worst class in the game) but should pop off at 80 when I get Shackles and co going
Should also point out theres a few skills like Rebuke and using Gamblers Fallacy can get 20k crits at level 24 at the Temple of Eterra as theres so much density hitting you, Rebuke scales off being hit, Gamblers gives 100% crit, so you do massive damage to packs early game
There’s a number of heavy hitting abilities to have fun with while leveling when coupled with auto crits. I’m currently leveling a mage, and one shotting stuff with static of all things. Got the gamblers fallacy, run around for 4 seconds, one shot 5 targets around me, including most bosses, fill in with mana strike.
Uup, I’d forgotten about that, but that’s once ever 3ish seconds which, for me, 6 really tenable for a skill thays meant to be spammed (especially given the rejigging of where the mana cost sits).
