Brainstorm: What's wrong with Shadowclone? How do you fix it?

[Own]

Shadowclone is the single most skill-less skill in Story Mode, which is funny because by contrast it's the one that requires the most skill in Arcade Mode.

In Story Mode you can rush right up to any any, scream #YOLO and pummel them down as fast as your finger can mash the button. If you take some damage it's usually fine. This teaches people that shielding is unnecessary and that death has no consequences, so #YOLO away.

In Arcade Mode, every single point of HP is precious. Getting near enemies unless you absolutely know how every one of them will behave isn't advised. #YOLOing an elite mob will likely kill you, or if you #YOLO a boss you're going to limp into the next level at 5% of your max HP and die shortly after. Generally in Arcade Mode you never want to have to attack enemies directly, but Skill/Spell them down for safety reasons.

So it's difficult to nerf or buff it in one mode without destroying it in the other. So, the problems of Shadowclone as I see it:

1. It's always on and it applies itself to every single attack as a constant damage boost. Cloud and Snowman both have this too, but they attack far less often.

2. The EP reduction doesn't matter because you have no reason to care about EP. Shadowclone is your most damage efficient skill for #YOLOing. You could make it take up 100% of the EP bar and people still wouldn't care.

3. Outside of boss battles, #YOLOing enemies is rewarded because you can kill them far faster than they can kill you, and one of them is going to drop a health orb when you dip down too low.

4. You never, ever have to stop. Every other skill you have to wait for your EP to regenerate before charging back in, giving the enemies or boss time to counterattack you, forcing you to defend and try not to take hits.

Based on that, I can think of a few ways to balance it, none I can say for sure are definitively better or worse than the other - assuming anyone thinks Shadowclone needs balancing at all. Maybe someone else can come up with something better?

1. Fatigue. Secret of Mana balanced Magic vs Combat by making it so you couldn't constantly melee attack without wearing yourself down, reducing the damage you dealt to enemies. Magic was powerful, but limited and expensive. Skills were powerful but slow and didn't fatigue you any more than a normal attack did. Maybe with Shadowclone on (or for basic attacks in general), you have a Fatigue meter of 100%. Every hit removes 5%(?) from it, and if you attack beyond that your attacks do 1 or no damage. You have to wait for it to recharge back up to 100% before you can resume #YOLOing.

2. Like 1, but as the 100% Fatigue bar lowers, your attack damage steadily declines. So you would likely lose 1-3% per swing instead of 5%, but your damage would steadily drop while bombarding enemies.

3. The DEF penalty. This idea was brought up a while back, but adding a DEF penalty doesn't fix Shadowclone because there is no damage or death penalty in Storymode. People will just get better gear and /respec into better talents to let them kill an enemy quicker. Reducing defense just turns it into even more of a race: "I bet I can damage them quicker than they can damage me."

4. Making Shadowclone a buff. It only sticks around for # seconds, giving you a window of time to charge in and burst the enemy with, then retreat and charge it back up. This one kind of interests me. It wouldn't be horrible, even if it had a slow charge time.

5. Changing the mechanics of Shadowclone. You charge Shadowclone, it's on and you can't toggle it off. It's locked off 20 of your EP? That stays locked off. Every swing of your sword with Shadowclone on removes 1 of that EP blockage. When the Shadowclone EP block is gone, Shadowclone toggles off. You can reapply / recharge it and get that number of Shadowclone swings back. I kinda like this one too. It slows people down, and slowing them down / forcing them to find a safe spot to recharge Shadowclone gives enemies a chance to counterattack.

6. Like 5, but Shadowclone doesn't block off set amounts of EP. You can charge it up as long as you like to gradually block off more and more EP. You want to run with Shadowclone for as long as possible? Build yourself up with +EP items and charge Shadowclone until you have a 0/150 EP bar, giving yourself 150 swings of it. I'm... not 100% sure about this one, since you can probably kill any boss in even 100 swings? It would slow down grinding, but if you're grinding in an area it means it's not a challenge to you to begin with. You can grind Pillar Mountains to a point where even Pumpkin Woods won't bother you.

I do think it's just about perfect in Arcade Mode, so any change would make me sad. But Shadowclone is the MVP of Story Mode. Maybe there would be a way to nerf it in Story without Arcade Mode, like Snowbuddy has an Arcade-specific nerf.

So, how about you guys? How do you think SC could be better balanced?

 

[Sekibanki]

Of these 5 sounds the best to me, alternatively Shadowclone could deactivate after you take X number of hits. Something I've thought about for a while is if it locked out a percentage of your max HP as well or instead.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Reducing Max HP would be more scary than removing DEF. Imagine if you get hit 3 times and die vs any boss. You would have to use the shield and play more careful like you do when you play 2h. I'm currently trying Hard with Spin2win and as I feared... I'm stuck on the Sentry boss... The RNG involved in that fight is ridiculous. Anyways, requiring the player to take less hits from enemies is probably what you have to do to stop the OPness of SC. SC is one of the best skills for killing single targets so forcing the player to not take any damage at all during boss fights would maybe make it more balanced since you don't get health orbs. I also like @Sekibanki 's suggestion. If the skill deactivated after you've taken 2 hits you would have to use the shield more and try to find room to cast it again if you ever got hit. I'd love to see someone speedrun the game with SC without having to recast the skill even once.

 

[Own]

A combination of 5 and @Sekibanki's idea could work, too.

You cast Shadowclone. You have 15 swings and 15 EP blocked. You Charge it? 20. Silver charge? 30. Maybe each point added raises the cap by 1, too.

You swing? It goes down by 1. You take a hit? It goes down by 5-10.

Other potential modifications:

1. It doesn't reduce EP / give you swings based on a set number, it does it by a % of EP. So if you had 100 EP, 20% is filled up, 20 swings. 200 EP, 20% is filled up, 40 swings. This would make +EP gear viable with a Shadowclone build.

2. It doesn't just block some of your EP bar like the summons do. Shadowclone fills up a purple chunk of your EP bar, locking that off. You have 20 swings and swing a bunch of times? The purple in that bar drains but remains remains the same size still at 20 EP blocked until all Shadowclone-allotted EP are spent. You get hit? That purple bar drains by 5. You perfect guard while Shadowclone is enabled? The purple Shadowclone bar is filled by 5-10 points, making perfect guarding actually useful in Shadowclone builds.

 

[Teddy]

We briefly discussed Shadow Clone as a tangent here a while back (for those that wasn't there).

I honestly feel Shadow Clone is fundamentally broken in nearly every aspect. We made it too stronk, and now people are addicted to the crazy damage. In addition to Own's points, I've got a few more:

It's a basic attack, so it's shield cancelable from frame 0, has no startup and it has a wide hitbox.

Its inherent advantages are so heavily stacked its just disgusting. I almost feel the same way about this skill that I feel about making the bow a primary weapon, and most of you know how much I like that idea

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the suggestions:

Set number of charges: Funnily enough overlaps what we've got in mind for the replacement of Wind Slash! I personally like the trait of Shadow Clone being a persistent skill, but that's super subjective. The issue here, in my opinion, would be to balance the number of hits. If it's supposed to be as strong as it is now, I think it would need to be something like 5 hits to be balanced. 20 hits? That's a battle already won most of the time, except for a handful endurance fights with tons of waves, and the bosses.

Have it cancel from taking damage: I think this is my favorite idea in this thread, honestly. Might be a bit harsh on new players though, and the mechanic can probably screw you over pretty badly in certain situations if you rely on landing Shadow Clone hits as your primary damage.

You die (i.e. take much more damage): This would certainly help some in terms of risk/reward but it's very brute forced (which granted doesn't equate to bad).

Something I currently dislike about Shadow Clone is that it requires a very narrow skill set to use. You need to be good at auto attacking enemies. This certainly does require some skill, but compare it to using other short range skills (like blade flurry or pre-silver flamethrower) where you have to mind your positioning, think about charge time, have to weigh shield canceling against losing out on DPS/EP ratio etc, and you'll find Shadow Clone is actually a comparatively very easy skill to use and yet it does more damage. It just irks me having a skill that's so objectively dominant and easy to use that it makes every other similar skill irrelevant. I acknowledge that some skills will always be at the top, but does it really have to be a damn basic attack?

The more I think about Shadow Clone, the more I lean towards making it more utility focused. Less EP block, a useful but not ridiculous damage boost, and the addition of every hit applying basic attack procs. So, if you have Burning Weapon and Silver charge clones, you'd have three chances of applying the burn damage, as well as recovering EP for Second Wind three times.

I'd love to hear some arguments around that idea, because I feel we're a bit stuck in the mindset that Shadow Clone must keep being the absolute king of DPS.

 

[Own]

Set number of charges: Funnily enough overlaps what we've got in mind for the replacement of Wind Slash! I personally like the trait of Shadow Clone being a persistent skill, but that's super subjective. The issue here, in my opinion, would be to balance the number of hits. If it's supposed to be as strong as it is now, I think it would need to be something like 5 hits to be balanced. 20 hits? That's a battle already won most of the time, except for a handful endurance fights with tons of waves, and the bosses.

I wasn't necessarily suggesting hits so much as swings. With Shadowclone people like to rush forward swinging like crazy, not caring if they actually hit something with their first swing since the shadows will probably hit.

You could further penalize missed player-swings (not shadowclone swings) by having missed swings deduct 5 Shadowclone swings, whereas a successful hit only deducts 1. That makes you take great care to ensure that if you're going to swing at something, it's going to connect. It's harder to #YOLO that way.

I don't actually mind Shadowclone giving large damage, I just like it giving large damage in controlled bursts. Do you charge up, do a burst of damage and retreat to charge it back up while the enemy does their attack. A back-and-forth is kind of nice.

The more I think about Shadow Clone, the more I lean towards making it more utility focused. Less EP block, a useful but not ridiculous damage boost, and the addition of every hit applying basic attack procs. So, if you have Burning Weapon and Silver charge clones, you'd have three chances of applying the burn damage, as well as recovering EP for Second Wind three times.

I... guess that would be useful if you put a bunch of points into Burning Weapon and Chilling Touch, along with Insult To Injury, but it would probably see less significantly less use if for Shadowclone to be even remotely useful, you had to construct an entire build and devote a ridiculous number of talent points into things to make it viable.

This would effectively kill Shadowclone in the Arcade, where you can't construct a gear around a skill and don't have 10-15 talent points to make on-proc hits with. I absolutely love Shadowclone in Arcade as it is specifically because it's all about knowing when to attack, when to run and when to shield. It's hard but fair and so much more fun than the easier Spike+Insect or Whirl+Protect skills, it would be a shame to lose it, but I'd be happy to give it up if it meant people cheesed Story Mode less.

In any case, 5 hits seems like way too few for fighting enemies, but I don't know what it would mean for bosses. How much % of Gigaslime, Phaseman, Gundam, Hydra or Winter's HP bar can you take off with 5 swings of the sword with an average build? it seems like 3-5% in my mind.

Edit Out of curiousity, though, what is your Windslash rebuild like? Being able to fire out a # of magical windslashes at a distance from your weapon swings, like a full HP master sword? That'd be fairly cool!

 

[Teddy]

I... guess that would be useful if you put a bunch of points into Burning Weapon and Chilling Touch, along with Insult To Injury, but it would probably see less significantly less use if for Shadowclone to be even remotely useful, you had to construct an entire build and devote a ridiculous number of talent points into things to make it viable.

I simply disagree. I don't think a skill which empowers every single one of your basic attacks is anything even close to useless. Nothing is hindering you from using other skills until your EP runs out. On the flip side, the current Shadow Clone does hinder you from using other skills, because doing so would be really, really stupid.

This would effectively kill Shadowclone in the Arcade

Again, I don't believe this would be the case. I don't consider the cloud useless in Arcade, far from it. It's one of the most useful spells in the game, and yet you would probably never make a build where all you do is let Mr. Cloud zap things.

Out of curiousity, though, what is your Windslash rebuild like? Being able to fire out a # of magical windslashes at a distance from your weapon swings, like a full HP master sword? That'd be fairly cool!

That would be pretty cool, and maybe we'll do that if what we've got in mind doesn't work out

We're going to make it a hybrid friendly affair, where you charge up your weapon with a # of charges which are triggered by physical damage. Every time a charge is triggered, you deal % MATK bonus damage to the target hit.

 

[Teddy]

Giving players ~20 swings wouldn't truly change things, in my opinion. You'd just add an artificial nuisance to the skill. Basically, it would become a support spell like Protect, but with the description: "for a while, all spells are removed from the game but your basic attacks become stronger than any of them"!

You could further penalize missed player-swings (not shadowclone swings) by having missed swings deduct 5 Shadowclone swings, whereas a successful hit only deducts 1. That makes you take great care to ensure that if you're going to swing at something, it's going to connect. It's harder to #YOLO that way.

This would be a good step towards balance. A bit difficult to communicate to the player, though, and almost DOTA-style arbitrary.

 

[Own]

When you said 'less damage' I was envisioning something like, say, down from the current damage to +1-2 damage but with the added benefit of being able to lay On-Hit Procs very easily. I probably misread exactly how far you meant.

That new Windslash reminds me of an Elemental Enchantment buff from many RPGs and something every Secret of Mana spell had, yeah?

That sounds useful, but... for a proper main skill it sounds lackluster compared to your other options. It sounds like something I'd see under a Support tree, 'Imbue your weapon with the element of the last elemental spell cast, dealing +MATK and extra magic damage for the # of skillpoints you have in that element'. Unless it's more complicated than that at Silver and Gold Charge, straight up +Damage without anything fancy doesn't seem exciting like summoning meteors or spewing out insects does.

A combination of +MATK on the enemy you hit and also launching a Windslash behind them would add some spice to it, buuut I'll reserve actual judgement until I can play with it. If it has a cool animation that can make up for a less complicated mechanic.

While you're tinkering around in Air magic, though, do you think it would imbalance Chain Lightning to let it bounce off of the player if nothing else is around? There's a lot of times in the game when you're fighting one enemy and it's a very weak attack there. With two enemies and 4 jumps it could go E1 -> E2 -> E1 -> E2, but with Vilya it just gives one zap and it's done. Going Vilya -> Bounce off caster -> Vilya -> Ends on caster would at least allow for multiple hits, though not as much as if you were fighting a crowd.

Giving players ~20 swings wouldn't truly change things, in my opinion. You'd just add an artificial nuisance to the skill. Basically, it would become a support spell like Protect, but with the description: "for a while, all spells are removed from the game but your basic attacks become stronger than any of them"!

That's true, now that I think about it. It's just so broken in so many ways it's hard to find one single, solid way to smack it down with the rest of the skills.

 

[Teddy]

While you're tinkering around in Air magic, though, do you think it would imbalance Chain Lightning to let it bounce off of the player if nothing else is around? There's a lot of times in the game when you're fighting one enemy and it's a very weak attack there. With two enemies and 4 jumps it could go E1 -> E2 -> E1 -> E2, but with Vilya it just gives one zap and it's done. Going Vilya -> Bounce off caster -> Vilya -> Ends on caster would at least allow for multiple hits, though not as much as if you were fighting a crowd.

Yeah, this is a great suggestion we're definitely going to implement!

We've got it written down since you first posted it, even. It'll probably come with the first batch of Gold Charges when we're done with Steam Leaderboards and Achievements

EDIT: To clarify, the self-bounce is not the gold charge effect, but I'll add the change it at the same time!

 

[Teddy]

That sounds useful, but... for a proper main skill it sounds lackluster compared to your other options. It sounds like something I'd see under a Support tree, 'Imbue your weapon with the element of the last elemental spell cast, dealing +MATK and extra magic damage for the # of skillpoints you have in that element'. Unless it's more complicated than that at Silver and Gold Charge, straight up +Damage without anything fancy doesn't seem exciting like summoning meteors or spewing out insects does.

This is one of our fears as well, and as you mentioned it might be on the graphics to add enough visual flair to make new players go "aw HECK yeah" and not "whaaaaat, I just wasted skillpoints on this"?

I'd like to try it out, in either case, because I do like the idea of spells interacting with each other.

 

[UTech]

We briefly discussed Shadow Clone as a tangent here a while back (for those that wasn't there).

I honestly feel Shadow Clone is fundamentally broken in nearly every aspect. We made it too stronk, and now people are addicted to the crazy damage. In addition to Own's points, I've got a few more:

It's a basic attack, so it's shield cancelable from frame 0, has no startup and it has a wide hitbox.

Its inherent advantages are so heavily stacked its just disgusting. I almost feel the same way about this skill that I feel about making the bow a primary weapon, and most of you know how much I like that idea

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the suggestions:

Set number of charges: Funnily enough overlaps what we've got in mind for the replacement of Wind Slash! I personally like the trait of Shadow Clone being a persistent skill, but that's super subjective. The issue here, in my opinion, would be to balance the number of hits. If it's supposed to be as strong as it is now, I think it would need to be something like 5 hits to be balanced. 20 hits? That's a battle already won most of the time, except for a handful endurance fights with tons of waves, and the bosses.

Have it cancel from taking damage: I think this is my favorite idea in this thread, honestly. Might be a bit harsh on new players though, and the mechanic can probably screw you over pretty badly in certain situations if you rely on landing Shadow Clone hits as your primary damage.

You die (i.e. take much more damage): This would certainly help some in terms of risk/reward but it's very brute forced (which granted doesn't equate to bad).

Something I currently dislike about Shadow Clone is that it requires a very narrow skill set to use. You need to be good at auto attacking enemies. This certainly does require some skill, but compare it to using other short range skills (like blade flurry or pre-silver flamethrower) where you have to mind your positioning, think about charge time, have to weigh shield canceling against losing out on DPS/EP ratio etc, and you'll find Shadow Clone is actually a comparatively very easy skill to use and yet it does more damage. It just irks me having a skill that's so objectively dominant and easy to use that it makes every other similar skill irrelevant. I acknowledge that some skills will always be at the top, but does it really have to be a damn basic attack?

The more I think about Shadow Clone, the more I lean towards making it more utility focused. Less EP block, a useful but not ridiculous damage boost, and the addition of every hit applying basic attack procs. So, if you have Burning Weapon and Silver charge clones, you'd have three chances of applying the burn damage, as well as recovering EP for Second Wind three times.

I'd love to hear some arguments around that idea, because I feel we're a bit stuck in the mindset that Shadow Clone must keep being the absolute king of DPS.

Ever thought of having shadow clone greatly reduce your atk and cast spd? So anyone actually thinking about a strategy would use shadow clone and haste while wearing a lot of spd items, along with perfect gaurd talent etc. That way shadow clone on it's own doesn't make you COMPLETELY op due to the fact you don't need anything else for it to be effective. Just a thought