Oh, the post is coming… I’m at work right now so I can’t deal with it right away, but the post is coming…
The irony was not lost on me that as soon as a non-necromancer class had an issue, the lead dev shows up with his rationale and a warm glass of milk for players to drink while he assures them that everything is going to be okay… but the post did give me insight into exactly why they hate the necromancer: multiplayer.
You should relax a bit, have some cold drink or i don’t know what else, but quit one moment, think to or do something else before becoming the wandering spirit yourself. Really.
I’ve seen too many times this kind of reply “DEVS HATE MY CLASS !!!” in 20+ years on the internet to not guess how this is going to end, and it quickly gets old and boring.
Just discuss of your problems or feeling without assuming everydoby’s hypothetical hidden will.
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You’re clearly new here, so I won’t yell at you.
But I’ve been discussing the problems with my class for over a year now, and they only managed to get worse. In my 20+ years of living on the internet, this is evidence that the class isn’t favored.
This was an amazing and well thought out response, thank you so much. While I will maintain my concern regarding “heavy handed” nerfs it’s very apparent that this skill still has your attention and hasn’t been put on the back burner, and that’s a relief honestly. Too often I’ve seen skills destroyed and ignored for literally years and I just don’t want to see that happen here; your words make me feel like it won’t, and I can’t complain any further.
Llama, when I was more active here roughly 8-12 months ago, I saw eye to eye with you on most things. Your response today was just childish and you are SO much better than that, I’ve seen it. I’m sorry if I caught you at a bad time. I know the devs are VERY responsive, and they APPRECIATE feedback. I tried to give mine with some thought AND feelings behind it because I really love this game. Stop crapping on my opinion.
EDIT: I Just realized Llama was responding to someone else. Oof. I’ll leave my OP intact to avoid confusion.
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As for this reply I can’t be mad, I know this is often a fair response to a post like mine. BUT…
I’m not “threatening” anything (like leaving the game), I’m sharing feedback and the feelings it gives me at the time of my experience. I already own the game, I’ve given more than just the purchase price.
These guys at EHG read and use our feedback and I gave mine. I’m glad there’s folks who don’t want them mistreated, but I did nothing of the sort. I felt strongly and spoke as such, trying to demean my feelings on the subject doesn’t do anyone any good unless it made you feel good.
If it’s any consolation, it didn’t make me feel great either, but appreciate the accidental defense.
Well, that’s the whole basics of communication, you never should yell at someone, no matters if they’re new or not. And if you keep doing so, do not complain losing people’s attention.
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1:wandering spirits change didn’t effect the fundamental issue with the skill, if it was a decent damage skill right now people would still put in on autocast even with the cooldown and cast time because of the very nature of how it operates - being a cast and forget spell.
because they took the easy option with wandering spirits they only ended up changeing it from a spell people autocast to a spell nobody will use at all.
2:shadow daggers is a skill that requires 4 stacks to do its full damage, making it harder and harder to add those stacks just makes it inconsistant. If they really want shadow dagger to be a skill that takes some time to deal its full damage and don’t want people to use builds to apply as many stacks as possible in the shortest time (such as the idol bug from a while back) then they should instead have it proc the damage when it wears off and prevent further stacks. Making the skill clunky and unfun to play by dropping its proc rate to 20% is not a solution.
3:WB EQ, adding the mana cost to that unique makes it essentially useless, there is no benefit to casting a skill on dodge that has no cooldown and costs a ton of mana when you can cost it at any other time. If it made the proc’d earthquake weaker with less aoe but free, then it would create a scenario where the dash isn’t allways the best option. But this nerf is just removing the playstyle from the game entirely, something I do not approve of.
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Ok, I’m gonna ask then. What scale are you using to judge the power of a build? Arena or Corruption Monoliths? Because I don’t think you are using both.
Shadow Daggers can still push very high arena due its mobility, but is an absolute turd in Monoliths and if you are using only one piece of endgame content to judge a build’s power, you end up doing changes that make it unplayable in half of the game. I understand arena has ladder as is “The competative mode”, but it’s only a fraction of the game and shouldn’t be the be all, end all scale of a build’s power. Hell, if that’s the case, and you want a “competative” mode make a ladder for corruption levels, the same as arena waves.
The logical change would have been to reduce the damage of Shadow Dagger and force people out of Smoke Weavers (because the mobility is the reason to push hundreds of waves), rather than heavily reduce the proc rate and completely break the Monolith experience.
There are actually 3 Shadow Daggers builds, and only one was nerfed this patch.
#1 - Puncture SD - buffed, from 100% to 200% chance of applying SD.
#2 - Cascade SD / Sync. Strike Cascade - using Daggers Dance with Porcupine’s Wrath - nerfed this patch, but even before this patch it wasnt meta due to SD effect affix changes. This one was Arena pusher and before SD effect change was stupidly strong, it felt like cheating while playing this build 
#3 - Sync. Strike SD / Crit Cascade - this build is SD Mono meta now, huge Ward generation, area, damage, you need some SS mana eff. and over 22 mana regen to get it work.
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Oh, don’t worry, it was totally childish & I am better than that, but so is Zarono (better than how some of his posts are coming across at the moment, just for clarity).
And yes, I was a bit pissed off/frustrated/etc at the time.
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Yes, because of the double Smoke Weaver. Force Smoke Weaver. out Fix that instead of gutting the entire build. Force people out of it by nerfing the item, if you don’t want to harm the other 2 builds.
You don’t need any mana regen for it at all, it’s QoL to have it. The build functions perfectly fine with the inet mana regen from Shift and Cascade. However, simple Crit Cascade without Shadow Dagger is far easier to assemble, because you don’t spread your gear so thin and functions just as well, if not better (I’m currently at 400 corruption with a simple crit cascade build). You only need to stack 3 stats: mele attack speed/crit multi and phys damage instead of like 5. In comparison I have t7 shadow dagger effect chest and t6 helm and I haven’t put up the items in order to get to that point. I’m currently stuck at around 300 corruption with it.
As to cascade Shadow Dagger, I can still do high corruption, the issue is, nothing dies on my way to the objective. I have to stop, start spining around and eventually take 3-4 times longer to clear a monolith, compared to a crit cascade build.
I really want to try the puncture SD, but I haven’t gotten to it yet and I don’t even know how to supliment the lack of aoe with it. I don’t know where to begin xD. What’s out there, as builds is simply not on par to how I want it to perform in that part.
All that said, you have a point and I neglected the other builds that a SD damage nerf would have effect on.
The devs didn’t intend for Shadow Dagger effectiveness to reduce the number of hits required to proc damage, that was what was fixed, then they doubled the damage to make part of the loss up & make it significantly more powerful at the low end.
Thats not true, you probably missuderstood me and you are speaking about different build.
#3 build what i mentioned is Sync. Strike SD / Crit Cascade.
In #3 build from my list (SD Mono meta build) you activate shadows with Sync. Strike, not with Cascade or Shift (Dancing Shadows). You spend 5 mana per 1 shadow (SS → Wave of Darkness), you dont want to activate shadows by using Cascade or Shift (SS → Umbral Assassination, SS → Shadow Infusion), so you activate shadows by second Sync. Strike = 40 more mana cost (4x shadow from SS, 5 mana each, x2) which you have to regen if you want to spam Sync. Strike more frequently.
My issue is the nerf was so bad, that the build plumits in comparison to already existing rogue builds, when it was just slightly better, as far as dps is conserned. Now I agree, the mobility is completely broken and that’s my argument. Nerfing the DPS in order to bring back the build in check was dumb, because the part that made it broken is still broken.
Maybe I’m mistaken. I’m currently doing 400 corruption on Sync Strike, Crit Cascade and I have only the 20% mana regen from the talent tree.
Ah, so we are playing very similar builds, we just use different activation for Cascade, but our damage scaling is the same. I tried it and I very quickly realized I need mana regen for it xD .
I wouldnt say, that those builds are very similar. They look similar at first sigh, cause both builds use similar skills, but in different way, also playstyle is different.
At first i was playing pure Sync. Strike / Crit Cascade / Shifter, then i saw damage numbers of second build + ward generation, i had to relevel skills, completely change gear, change passives.
Sync. Strike / Crit cascade, damage relies mainly from Cascade, gear is specialized around melee damage and damage from shadows. You use Sync. Strike and Shift away to proc Cascade - dont have to be all the time on melee range. Needs Shift reduced cooldown - probably using 2 Smoke Weavers.
Sync. Strike Shadow Dagger / Crit cascade, damage relies mainly from Sync. Strike Shadow Daggers and Damage from Cascade, gear is specialized around mana regen, damage from shadows, Sync. Strike mana eff. You use only Sync. Strike and have to be on melee range. Doesnt need Shift reduced cooldown - rare weapons, no Smoke Weaver, cause this build doesnt use Shift to activate shadows.
Anyway, good luck hunting!
I would like to see your build planner, if possible. 
I don’t use Smoke Weavers though, the dps is too low with them. Instead I have a t6 attack speed/t5 mele phys damage Obsidian daggers and I manually cast Cascade after Sync Strike for the 100% more damage with 4 shadows (using shift makes more shadows than requiered and the effect doesn’t take place). Also my main scaling is Attack speed, through 0.6% more damage per point, crit multi and phys damage with +3 and +2 to Cascade on my chest/helm (still can’t use the helm, because I have too much crit chance on it and I don’t know where to compensate for the loss). However I’m using the idols, you probably thought off. Although I drop deffence and mobility, the damage is so bonkers, I’m only in danger of getting offscreened by Crystal Elementals. I have a planner on my home PC, if you are interested.
Im using modified version of this build:
FYI, i was testing Cascade (Careful Assault) and it works even with Shift 5th shadow, it seems that it counts 4 shadows from Sync. Strike and ignores 5th shadow from Shift cause its spawned after activating those 4 shadows. Without that skill node i was doing 20-30k crits after shifting, with that node 40-60k. Maybe it isnt intended this way, but it works.
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@OP:
If you leave some blatant stuff untouched the remaining 99% other builds will look abysmally shit. Now I don’t know how much “dead” the nerfed builds are, my guess is that it’s hyperbole and they now are probably just like the 99% other builds.
This is something that will keep happening past LE, we get tunnel visioned into 2 builds thinking they are “norm” and ignore the issue of 1928471057 other builds that are neutered by those 2
WB EQ doesn’t function anymore. It’s dead dead. The other 2 builds can still “function”, but they are heavily outperformed by archetypes within their own specializations. The effective damage nerfs are within in the 70% for both.
The explanation we got was:
I feel there is an internal issue with how a build’s performance is deemed overpowered, due to tunnel visioning on the arena ladder.
Yeah, I’ve also noticed that the damage buff is kept for an additional cascade cast, after the initial 4 shadow one. It does seem like a bug though.