New Rogue Skills and Class Updates | Coming to Last Epoch March 26

[Llama8]

@qqI12pewpew

in my book, it’s still out of place as mage subclass

How so?

[qqI12pewpew]

1. Spellblade skills are attacks, so they scale with attack damage and speed. Everything else in Mage are spells (except Mana Strike, but that skill doesn’t really scale with attack damage either). The mid-campaign transition is very rough because of this — you need to replace your previous spellcasting gear with fighter one. Surprisingly, the lack of campaign difficulty makes this less painful.
2. Spellblade is extremely limited in terms of which passives from other subclasses it can benefit from, while spell-based Sorcerer and Runemaster can make deep dips into each other’s trees.
3. At some point, Spellblade can again benefit from some other class skills, but those interactions are artificial and limited to what the developers allow. Even then, you either scale the proc (secondary spell damage) or the main attack damage.
4. It cannot benefit from some late-game Mage uniques around which the class is “balanced” — notably Twisted Heart.

[Solonina_Avik]

Agreed))
I also remembered that there’s a dagger that has a chance to trigger a lightning bolt when using Frost Claw. However, it doesn’t specify that it needs to be used directly. There’s also a belt for summoning a meteor.
I can’t even imagine how much mana would be required if the entire chain of these abilities worked.
Meteors can’t summon meteors, but they can be summoned by other meteor-based abilities. This is purely theoretical. We need to test everything in practice. If this really works, then with a little luck, you can take off a boss’s HP with a single cast.

[EHG_DerrickG]

@Shathor

I’m confused about Shadow Rend. The base skill’s tooltip says that it imitates your next direct use of Shadow Cascade, Shurikens, Umbral Blades, Explosive Trap or Acid Flask.

1. Shadow Rend by default imitates some other Rouge base skills and also 1 skill from Blade Dancer (Shadow Cascade) and 1 from Falconer (Explosive Trap). But none from Marksman? Why?

Shadow Rend’s second paragraph in its base description describes the base behavior of shadows, which is that they imitate certain skills you use. Shadows are by design most supported for Bladedancer, but we offer some ways for bow skills to utilize shadows.

@Shathor

2. The node Shadow Massacre says that it imitates Shadow Cascade and Multishot.
   a) Shadow Cascade is already imitated without the node. Why is it mentioned here again?

Shadow Massacre is describing a unique functionality granted by the node. Normally shadows will only repeat a skill when you use that specific skill, but Shadow Massacre causes shadows to use Shadow Cascade or Multishot when you directly use Shadow Rend.

@Shathor

b) Here’s Multishot from Marksman. Why do Marksman explicitly need to spend an additional skill point to get an imitation for a Marksman skill?

To be clear, Shadow Massacre isn’t causing shadows to add Multishot the pool of skills they will imitate when you use them. It causes your shadows to imitate either Shadow Cascade or Multishot when you directly use Shadow Rend.

In general, Marksman skills have less support for shadows as the mechanic is primarily supported for Bladedancers.

Credit to JustinC with the details for my answers

[ZuckerZusatZ]

I think you meant “directly use shadow REND” not shadow cascade

[Llama8]

@EHG_DerrickG

It causes your shadows to imitate either Shadow Cascade or Multishot when you directly use Shadow Cascade.

But you can’t directly use Shadow Cascade with a bow (requires DW) & you can’t use Multishot with a melee weapon. So how would your described behaviour work?

@ZuckerZusatZ

I think you meant “directly use shadow REND” not shadow cascade

Would make more sense.

[Shathor]

Thanks @EHG_DerrickG for the clarifications. With the Zusatz / correction from @ZuckerZusatZ it makes sense .

[EHG_DerrickG]

Corrected, thanks!

[Rawen1]

I know I’ll likely be the ONLY person caring about this, but I’d like to ask for some support for shields and two-handed swords to Rogue, or at least specifically to Bladedancer. One very cool and gameplay-altering unique for Lethal Mirage is Black Blade of Chaos (a two-handed sword), and one of her sets features a shield (namely the Corsair set, a helmet and shield). I obviously don’t know **** about game design, programming, animations, or anything relevant here, so please spare me, but to me it looks relatively simple to solve. There are 2 Blademaster dual-wield exclusive skills, which could be made usable with two-handed swords and an offhand shield (separately, of course). Shadow Cascade’s animation is already transferable enough to just allow it to be directly castable with an offhand shield, and the two-hand version may use static and sped-up Warpath animation from Sentinel. Dancing Strikes are a bit more of an issue, their animations are very much untransferable, on top of “dancing” with heavy weapons/shields is rather unbelievable (however it sounds in such a game). So I think it would be the easiest to make a new heavier moveset (single lunges and sweeps instead of a series of kicks and strikes), shared for two-handed swords and offhand shields (Rogue may simply grip the weapon with two hands regardless of whether she uses something with a shield or a two-handed sword, make a step forward and swing). As for the skill tree, there are several nodes granting bonuses for dual-wielding; they can just include two-handed swords and offhand shields as potential prerequisites. The Twin Fangs grant different bonus depending on weapon combination, though I guess it would suffice if off-hand shields simply granted increased block effectiveness, regardless of the main weapon (it doesn’t exist anywhere on any Rogue’s tree so it would be in high demand for a shield user), while two handed swords may give armor shred chance (other combos don’t have it and it’s a general damage boost, which Rogue is known for). And largely speaking, that would be it. Though a parry to have some active skill for shields would be nice as well.
I just realised how long my comment is going to be, so thanks to everybody who bothered to read. I’m very much aware devs have tons of better problems to solve, but one can wish.