Welcome to the third day of Hype Week. Following Omen Windows and the Rune of Corruption and Idol Altars, we are excited to share with you a preview of class adjustments. We are introducing two new Rogue skills and we are refining some older skills and nodes. Let’s dig in!
Rogue Skills
Let’s start by looking at the Rogue updates! First off, let’s look at Shadow Rend.
Shadow Rend
Shadow Rend is an all-new Rogue skill designed to introduce more dramatic, higher-cost options, particularly for melee builds, where we felt her choices were limited. It delivers a powerful, delayed strike. This allows her to stay mobile while maintaining control on the battlefield.
When the shadow performs its attack, it is affected by modifiers such as increased damage for skills used by shadows, and its behavior changes depending on having a melee or ranged weapon equipped.
Melee
When a melee weapon is equipped, the Rogue performs a short dash, leaving a shadow at her previous location. After a brief delay, the shadow unleashes a sweeping attack, striking where you once stood.
Bow
If you have a bow equipped, the shadow will release a powerful piercing shot that rips through enemies.
Throughout the passive tree, you can improve damage and area modifiers, reduce mana cost, access conversion nodes, alter skill movement, and more. Here are some of the nodes you will see for Shadow Rend.
Ghost Blades
This node allows you to obtain stacks of Ghost Blades. When these stacks are consumed, Ghost Blades are thrown at nearby enemies. Ghost Blade is a throwing attack that has 100% chance to inflict Shadow Daggers.
Dusklight
Dusklight allows you to convert Shadow Rend’s damage type to lightning.
Night’s Approach
Night’s Approach removes Shadow Rend’s movement component and instead sends your shadow forward in the target direction.
This all-new skill opens up even more shadow-focused gameplay for the Rogue, with additional ways to manifest and utilize shadows.
Shadow Massacre
Shadow Rend also introduces new ways to consume shadows through a node called Shadow Massacre. It causes shadows to imitate Multishot or Shadow Cascade, depending on your equipped weapon.
Unending Twilight
Unending Twilight grants a chance for shadows consumed by Shadow Massacre to persist, allowing them to be reused.
With careful positioning, your shadows can be reused multiple times before disappearing.
Hidden Strength
Hidden Strength is an alternative for Shadow Massacre for players who prefer to empower Shadow Rend itself. This node consumes all shadows to restore mana and grant more damage and melee area for Shadow Rend, enabling exceptionally large and powerful attacks depending on how many shadows you generate.
Shadow Rend’s introduction should inspire new Rogue builds and ideas, and we’re excited to see what players create with it. However, this isn’t the only new addition to the Rogue skills.
We’ve given Bladestorm a facelift by pulling it out of Umbral Blades, giving it its own dedicated skill tree.
Bladestorm
Bladestorm has consistently been the most popular way to play Umbral Blades, so we wanted to flesh it out and create more ways to play with it.
With it being its own skill now, Bladestorm has its very own set of nodes to customize and tailor to your playstyle. Let’s check out some of these!
Blade Detonation
Blade Detonation is an upgrade to the Explosive Blades node you may remember from Umbral Blades. Since Bladestorm is more expensive to use, their explosions are significantly more powerful as well: they have twice the area of your Bladestorm and 500% damage effectiveness.
Lingering Fragments
There are some fun and chaotic nodes to follow Blade Detonation. One of them is called Lingering Fragments that grants you the ability to create Caltrops in an area.
Imagine a loot explosion but with Caltrops for enemies!
Magnetic Grip
We’ve moved the Magnetic Grip into Bladestorm’s tree as well, but have improved it. They now move at a base speed of 3 meters per second (from 2), enabling homing Bladestorms that turn into automatic killing machines that slowly seek out enemies.
Alloy Animation
Alloy Animation significantly empowers the ability for your Bladestorms to seek out and destroy enemies on their own, gaining more movement speed and the ability for each of your Bladestorms to hit the same target simultaneously (also known as shotgunning).
Shuriken Storm
Now imagine if you could spawn Shurikens from Bladestorm attacks. No need to because we added a node for that, too. We’re excited to have another source of Shurikens.
Shattering
Shattering is a node for our Acid Flask enthusiasts. With this, Acid Flasks that explode inside a Bladestorm will have a larger radius. A treat for those who wish to control or master covering wider area of attacks.
There are other fun nodes for Bladestorm that you’ll find out more about once the Season 4 patch notes drop.
Umbral Blades
The removal of Bladestorm allowed the team to provide better options for Umbral Blades, as well as buffing some existing nodes. The team has also adjusted the base targeting behavior so that it throws to your target position! Meaning you no longer have to allocate Precision Cuts to get this effect. Now the Precision Cuts node allows you to use the old targeting behavior.
Another new option you can expect to see for Umbral Blades is Calling Card, a node that gives a chance for recalled blades to create a shadow at their position.
In addition to the new Rogue skills and node updates, we’ve made some Mage class adjustments too.
Mage Class Adjustments
Mages, we have something for you as well. We’ve adjusted some of your skills and nodes to feel better with the way you play Mage.
Firebrand will see a new node, Excitation, following its Lightning conversion option that causes Lightning Blast to consume stacks of Firebrand to chain 2 additional times per stack consumed.
Mana Strike
Several Mana Strike nodes have also been adjusted or changed.
Star Guide has been reworked. It now grants a 15% chance to cast Static Orb when you directly use Mana Strike and hit at least one enemy. It is doubled if you are above 80% mana. This has a limit of 3 times per 2 seconds. It also consumes 120% of Static Orb’s mana cost. If Mana Strike has a cooldown, this effect is guaranteed.
With the change of Star Guide, Teleporting Strikes will now grant the auto-targeting effect that was previously on Star Guide.
Shocking Force, a new node, has been added to Arcanist’s Blade’s old position. It grants 8% more damage per point and +10% shock chance per point.
The Essence of Control node has been replaced with Power Surge. This provides 12% more damage and 20% increased Mana Arc mana consumption per point.
We’ve also clarified mana related behaviors in the tree by explicitly stating whether they affect the mana orbs that restore mana, or provide instant restoration of mana. For example, Transfusion now converts 25% of mana from mana orbs into twice as much ward.
Shatter Strike
Shatter Strike is another skill that is receiving some updated nodes in Season 4.
Frozen Shrapnel now fires 8 Ice Spikes on direct cast and half as many with indirect casts. The Ice Spikes themselves now have 300% effectiveness of added damage and 60 base damage. They no longer gain +1 spell damage per 3 added melee damage.
For those who choose to utilize Frozen Shrapnel, Unrelenting Winter has been reworked. Ice Spikes now have a 5% chance on hit per point to create a random Glacier explosion, consuming 25% of Glacier’s mana cost.
Instead of knocking enemies back, Arctic Blast will now pull enemies to a point in front of you. This can help set up other combos as the enemies remain within closer reach.
Previously, Winter’s Boon would grant mana if the killed enemy was frozen. Now, Winter’s Boon will grant 1 mana gained on kill, and double if the enemy was frozen.
If you wish to tap into the storms of nature another way, you can now pick up the Lightning conversion node, Clash of Lightning.
Volcanic Orb
Volcanic Orb has also received some improvements. Its mana cost has been lowered from 70 to 50, its base damage and damage effectiveness have been raised, and we’ve condensed several of the large point costs throughout the tree. For example, Eruption now grants 20% more shrapnel damage per point (from 12%), and it has a max of 5 points (from 8).
The Frozen Orb node also converts Ignite from all sources to Frostbite Chance for Volcanic Orb. This will allow you play with Frostbite more in your build, leaning into the true Frozen Orb fantasy.
Black Hole
Black Hole can now have its cooldown reduced more than was possible before, and it can gain an additional charge.
We’ve changed Recurrence and it now grants up to 60% cooldown reduction (from increased cooldown recovery speed) and the new Pocket Dimension node adds a charge.
Meteor
How about some more Meteor fun with Heat Flux? Check it out below.
Spellblade Changes
We’ve updated some nodes in Spellblade as well including Blade Conduit, Flame Drinker, and Incinerating Aura.
Closing
As always, these are only some of the changes to expect when Season 4 goes live on March 26th. As we wrap up today’s Hype Week segment, we invite you to review the previous posts regarding Omen Windows and Runes of Corruption. Tomorrow, we will take a look at some new Unique and Set items, animation updates, and Quality of Life changes coming to Last Epoch in Season 4.
We look forward to seeing you then!
the Rogue !!!