This node feels just… awful. trading any and all attack speed scaling for only 30% more damage feels pretty bad on its own, then the fact that this node is gatekeeping a cool throwing dagger build, makes it feel really bad. Not only that but one of the nodes behind it expressly works based on stacking of a debuff, which is counter intuitive to the awfulness that is giving up all your attack speed scaling.
Additionally hurricane of blades seems fiiiiiiine but the mana cost is insane especially given the relatively awful mana management of the Thief I don’t know how this node would interact with Fight in the shadows, gloomstalker and onslaught, but it seems like probably not too great given it’s a channel.
Also, can we have Dance of Daggers properly add the Throwing tag to shadow cascade? It doesn’t seem these daggers scale with throwing modifiers at all.
I don’t generally spec into skills that I don’t plan on using. There’s some benefit to doing so with skills that can be reliably procced via other skills like acid flask and shift/decoy and fireball for spellblades. But then that means there’s a skill on my bar that I won’t have a skill tree for. And for rogue I dunno that the utility of a free shadow cascade on shift would be great. mostly because shift itself has a cooldown that’s already a bit longer than I’d like, doesn’t appear to have a capacity for a 2nd charge anywhere, and generally works ok enough to dash in or out but not frequent use. I mean yeah if you’re building that way sure it’s a great node 30% more damage for nothing, but for pretty much everything else it feels like a solid loss for the skill. If it’s going to be supporting a sort of proc build maybe it shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for other builds.
this is very disappointing… i have been leveling a throwing rogue, and saved shadow cascade for my 5th skill slot… finally unlocked it and spec’d straight into the throwing attack nodes, expecting it to gain the throwing tag and scale as a throwing skill. seems unintended, since nodes like this for other skills tend to change the tags.
Do you think I should report it as a bug? If other skills normally have that functionality at the very least it’s probably unintended or an oversight during the patch/dev process?
The shadow dagger debuff you mention, is considered a melee hit. So its an anti synergy with a full conversion to throwing. This is something I was going to make a post about (and probably still will) after i’ve put more time in.
Ahhh. It seems like the tree for Shadow cascade is laid out poorly then. I’d probably consider moving the shadow dagger and the crushing darkness node away from the dagger dance section of the tree.
Yes, but it depends how they’ve coded the channel to work, it might not scale with attack speed anyway as a channel. Most channels don’t though the melee channels do (Flurry, Warpath).
oh yeah no I don’t want the channel at all. The channel node is not at all in any of my builds it sounds awful. I want to be able to jump in and press the button 2 or 3 times for AOE throwing based stuff. (I’ve got shuriken with the line for ST).
You misunderstand the value of channel conversions. They always result in a much faster rate of fire for the skill. The way you describe your intended use you’d get about double the throughput.
I don’t misunderstand that. I do understand it will cost literally my entire mana bar to channel for 1 second. leaving me holding my dick for 10 seconds. Popping in, throwing 2 out and moving on to other skills is basically the plan. It’s an AOE skill generally I don’t need to cast it more than 2 times to weed out the chaff I’m using it for. That’s 30 mana as current (though it should be 24 if it properly scaled with throwing tags). Basically, throw acid flask, dash in, spam that out for something like 6-7 stacks of poison per cast to everything nearby. Poisons tick down the trash easily, any elite/bosses focus fire with Shuriken. Bada bing bada boom. So far it works pretty great even using just 1 cast of Shadow cascade but I’d like to have a 2nd one be reasonable within a smaller time frame, it’s clunky to do without any speed scaling.
for mana management, you can make shuriken a 0 cost skill (-mana cost on rings and -mana cost node in the skill tree) and with the node that refunds up to 10 mana when you use a 0 cost skill, it becomes a generator. you can also spec shift into the nodes that create shadows and auto-use cascade, as well as spec’ing cascade into the mana refunded per shadow nodes and shadow on kill nodes. your screen will be absolutely filled with projectiles and mana will not be an issue unless you manually spam cascade with no shadows active.
