Penumbral Ambush needs some work

[deteego]

After trying out Penumbral Ambush (the node on the Puncture skill for Rogue which allows you to do a triple attack in a line at the cost of 15 mana) on a Marksman I have come to the conclusion that the skill is underwhelming for quite a few reasons

• The 15 mana cost is incredibly steep for an auto attack skill, especially for a class that has very few mana regeneration options apart from Sapping Strikes/Ethereal Arrows on Flurry and while this may theoretically work, the design of Puncture emphasizes you using it constantly to stack blood and/or poison which leaves little time Flurry to regain mana (ontop of this, using both Flurry and Puncture in a build is likely to be lacking in damage and/or utility). The Bladedancer class has some mechanics to deal with mana management (i.e. getting mana whenever a shadow is created/used) however Penumbral Ambush creates a Mirage, not a Shadow so it doesn’t count (see next point)
• The mirage mechanic is seems like a missed opportunity for synergies. For all intents and purposes it acts like a Shadow but it doesn’t count as one for any of the Shadow nodes for Bladedancer. Hence all the skill does is allow you to sheet 3 equally spaced arrows in a line and thats it…
• The spacing for the extra arrows is in an impractical middle ground. They are too far apart to do any reliable shotgunning (i.e. trying to hit an enemy with multiple arrows in a single shot) against anything apart from bosses with really massive hitboxes which is a shame since one of the main points of puncture is bleed/poison and so increasing your bleed and/or poison by up to 3x due to shotgunning would be an obvious synergy with the node (if this was possible then the 15 mana cost would be justified). On the other hand, the spacing for the arrows is too small to give the skill good aoe, its outclassed a lot of other skills in this regard (Hail of Arrows, Dancing Strike, Shadow Cascade etc etc).

As an interesting alternative that I just came up with (which is just a suggestion), I would make the skill summon Shadows instead of Mirages. Initially the Shadows would do the exact same thing as current mirages but there would be two extra nodes behind Penumbral Ambush (in addition to Scalebane

• One node which prevents the mirages from attacking, in effect this allows the skill to create 2 extra shadows which can be used by other skills (specifically from Bladedancer)
• Another node that drastically reduces the mana cost of the skill but only works with bows so it can actually be usable for a Marskman. This is done for Marksman specifically since as mentioned before the Marksman has no real decent mana management when going down this route. If this is too broken one can always do something like “-10 mana cost but reduces damage by 40%” which can give the skill a nice niche when it comes to DoT builds

While it can be argued that converting the Mirages to Shadows can make puncture op for Bladeadancer since the Bladedancer has HP/Mana recovery options for Shadow creation/usage, if Bladedancer is using Puncture then its going to be a melee only skill. If its still OP then a damage reduction can be added to the node.

[Llama8]

Yes, the node is unreasonably expensive, but it doesn’t/shouldn’t shotgun. In general, if projectiles are released at the same time they don’t shotgun, it they are released in sequence they can all hit the same target.

[deteego]

@Llama8

Yes, the node is unreasonably expensive, but it doesn’t/shouldn’t shotgun.

Sure, the idea was to just give something unique to Penumbral Ambush that could justify its unreasonably expensive cost. I mean you can argue that technically speaking you don’t have multiple projectiles from the same unit but rather 1 project from multiple units so there is no reason why it shouldn’t shotgun (for the same reason that you can get hit by multiple projectiles from enemies as long as its one projectile per unit).

I mean using the Bladedancer as an example, Synchronized Strike along with Shadow Cascade also shotguns since each Shadow is making its own Shadow Cascade so this would be the same idea.

[Llama8]

Yeah, IMO it would make sense as an exception to justify the current cost, I just wasn’t sure if you thought that would happen currently.

[deteego]

I was under the impression that currently shotgunning would work (for the same reasons Shadow usage in general shotguns) I just haven’t noticed/tried due to how impractical it is for the reasons stated earlier and I didn’t bother testing it (i.e. due to how small the dummy is its not even physically possible to make multiple arrows hit it).

Thanks for clarifying though, this makes the skill even worse then I thought. Not only does the spacing need to be adjusted (i.e. made smaller) so that shotgunning is physically possible but it also needs to be coded so it can shotgun in the first place (i.e. each projectile is treated separately) if we go down that route of fixing it.