Rather than repost my old commentary on the cold side of shadow strike I’ll just be linking it here Cold shadow strike? and restating relevant thoughts old and new.
- Mobility runes have changed the gamescape such that the mobility on shadow strike is no longer a heavy upside and it should be rebalanced accordingly.
- Sources of +skill to shadow strike itself and derivative are hard to come by in a meaningful and useful way for cold builds when scaling on the skill fails to match general bonuses, or in the case of nightfall is dead last in terms of scaling.
As a cooldown based single target nuke skill that cannot stack itself with WPS (nightfall currently does negligible damage) there are two directions for improvement, single target prowess and AoE prowess.
- Improvements to its single target damage per cast would need to be of such great magnitude that it becomes something just shy of a “click to delete” skill if the design intent is for shadow strike to remain single target focused. The cooldown drastically limits its contribution to overall kill potential, especially when compared to auto attacking builds that are stacking WPS and consistently hitting with both hands.
- improvements to the skill’s cooldown will be much more beneficial than the single target damage buffs we are likely to see. Frequently shadow strike is responsible for massive overkill on a single target, even more so when it rolls its chance to strike with both hands. Instead of having one utterly massive spike of damage spread over the time it takes for so many autos we would see better performance with more frequent attacks.
- improvements to nightfall could give the skill meaningful AoE and actually give us a reason to invest in it instead of the current state where you want literally anything else.
Look back a patch and nobody was talking about shadow strike in the absence of the new gearing options. We don’t need a slew of modifiers on sets to prop the skill up, the base skill itself needs buffs.
If one of the two acid shadow strike sets is going to change why not make it the lesser of the two, dunefiend? Shift the bonuses to ring of steel and you have an all the more thematic “things spin” acid set, to say nothing of the stat holes it currently has.