Iconic skill, nowadays best used as another movement option. Shadow Strike needs a lot of adjustments to work as a build enabling skill. Some words from @banana_peel
I fully agree with inconsistent leech being the biggest issue with SS and to solve this Nightfall needs to be improved and the cooldown reduction scaling of NJE increased. I think the best solution is to move Noctirn mod to NJE (-0.4 CD). Some CC protection during SS would do wonders.
Builds, presented in some kind of ranking
Noctirn Infiltrator
Pierce damage is in a good spot right now and supported by converted Blade Spirits its the one strong SS build in my opinion, therefore I think baking in Noctirn mod into NJE scaling would buff the other SS options and leave Noctirn untouched.
Morgoneth Vitality Reaper
An OK build after Nightblade got vitality RR. Even as a vitality build with Bat and Wendigo it suffers from SS leech inconsistency in combination with low DA and phys res. In no risk of breaking the game if SS baseline were to get buffed and the flat vit mod on Reaver’s Hunger could always be reduced in that case.
Custom Acid Dervish
Kills ravager pretty fast but then falls apart quickly in the real world. Bad passive defenses and patchy sustain. Need to sell off way too much to stabilize the build to the point where it loses all its appeal. Struggles vs resistant enemies and acid damage in general is pretty shitty outside of select few builds (DEE, Venomblade, RTA aegis). If baseline SS is buffed the flat mods on Rift Scourge Slicer can be decreased.
Custom Cold Spellbreaker The cold SS class combo in my opinion. I’ve tried different versions of SS Spellbreaker many times only to be disappointed. The gear support is severely lacking, this calc reaches 14.4k HP with 1x of vitality suffix and 1x vigorous prefix all while chaos res is missing proper overcap. Both OA & DA is hard to come by.
I Suggest Loxmere Daggers get some Arcanist mod for starters, perhaps some acid damage converted to cold to Star Pact or raw stats. NJE & Nightfall could be increased to +3. Night’s Embrace amulet could get +1 arcanist and even some CDR/HP. +2 Nightfall can be changed to +3 SS. Slithscale Legwraps could get some HP.
Will update with Morgoneth Cold Reaper but it was OK last time I tried it, would probably rank in behind vitality version. I have not tried Deathguard which most likely is very strong. Dunefiend Dervish was considered pretty good some time ago but I don’t think buffing SS would bring it over the top.
In order for shadow strike builds to have proper sustain considering the clunkiness and cd, nightfall should act like a siphon souls with leech on ticks per second and have duration instead of one hit with dots.
i recall someone posting a bunch of dope SS builds with billibilli vids, (i didn’t save tho), including lightning trickster and chaos and other mix variants
Personally i feel like my gdstashed double rare chaos SS is in a fine position - not that i’ll argue/pretend it’s going to speak for the entirety of SS lineup ofc
I’m also okay with dunefiend, tho again carried by greens, and probably EoR too, i don’t remember how “awful” WH felt tho/been a hot minute
Cold breaker/infil i’ve always kinda struggled with, it still has that “glass” sensation where maybe the game isn’t being so nice to glass builds these days as it used to
*i’m not quite sure i feel like sustain is the majority issue whenever i feel sweaty, but perhaps more like innate tankiness is lacking/falling behind normal builds. HP bar gets real low real fast, which happens even quicker if it’s starting out 5k hp lower than the rest
Yea double-rares can solve the insufficient gear support many SS builds struggle with, getting those extra stats and needed skill points to adjust the whole gear setup. And as mentioned, cold struggles the most with proper gear support.
I guess its a combination. The passive defences are low and the gaps between your SS hits stops you from sustaining properly, and sometimes the SS leech seems to vanish.
I disagree with quite a bit of this. You guys have picked a very useful location on the gear curve to produce builds for the greater community (1r/1m mi’s). SS does not excel on this part of the gear curve and never did. SS has always been one of the most expensive skills to gear in this game, and once you reach that gearing level it has generally (but not always, due to nerfs) been quite potent.
If it is relying on double rares then I would argue the skill is struggling. Care to show any grimtools or videos of these builds? In most (every) case you are probably better off changing your shadow strike investment to a full melee build and will have better results as shown by cold/vitality Morgoneth and Deathguard.
Its a quickly made calc to show the huge gaps in the gear support, the other calcs I spent some time on. Do you have any grimtools to share for properly assembled setups?
Base SS hit is pretty strong now if you can convert it so solo dmg is not an issue, all SS builds suffer more from AoE and sustain in big crowds.
Dunefiend was a competitor couple of years ago but since then has fallen behind.
As Witch Hunter it has too long of a cooldown and occupies too many important slots to have some meaningful dmg outside of SS. If you take Beronath strikes there, you can’t convert pierce, you can’t convert cold, you can’t convert chaos
Dervish suffers from extreme skillpoint shortage. You can’t take full NB mastery or Nightfall there together with EoR. Another problem is Dunefiend has this relic pierce dmg on it for a pierce Dunefiend build in some alternate universe, i guess. Because of that it doesn’t convert pierce and has no slots to enable this conversion. So SS tooltip ends up being underwhelming despite huge WD and tdm mods.
Morgo set has this strange two way support for SS which makes it annoying to build for both vitality and cold. Especially for cold, you are losing pierce conversion compared to custom build when you could take Alkamos rings and conversion gloves and get both your proper flat for SS and mostly converted Spirits to help out. Cold Morgo should still be strong as Reaper now but again pointless compared to just DW melee, even using this very set.
Deathguard is a stacked set that has huge amount of stats and all the important conversions, speeds, cdr, you name it. Again, should be a little stronger as DW melee, but this set is the most sense that SS makes right now alongside with Noctirn Infil. I’m yet to test this RoS+SS Dervish variant i had sketched, will report if i do.
Cold SS in any variant, whether it’s custom or Morgo, 2H or DW, has 1) no way of converting most flat on the mastery 2) always highlights the main problem of the skill, which is sustain. If i understand correctly, the skill was originally designed as having a sustain edge over regular melee due to CC on Nightfall and supposed advantage of moving fast to the target. Since then the game has changed a lot:
Moving around with SS provides almost no advantage in tank
Getting 1-2 sec downtimes of your leech to full is enough for endgame content to kill a melee character
The game at the top end of performance currently often involves fighting with 2+ bosses at a time. In these scenarios SS drastically falls off compared to melee/ranged with good WPS or good AoE casters
Some classes are just stronger for SS than other and that’s fine to me, i think the skill is in a good spot no need for any warrant buffs even more “less cooldown” that would be ludacris to me.
Yeah almost impossible to get those dagger rolls right now, you gonna either have to gdstash or wait for the expansion to try your lucky with the reroll system, Spellbreaker needs some love specially HP OA/DA , that’s for sure
I don’t think SS needs to be reworked. The Base skill has high weapon damage, Nidalla’s has crit and CDR, and Nightfall offers AOE and the best frostburn damage in the game. This thread screams “power creep” to me.
But I will say that itemization makes it hard to cap the SS skills (especially NJE). I think this was intentional design from the devs. However, most SS builds can benefit from capping all three skills and good luck with that.
The game has changed a lot and power creep has happened and is being balanced, not nerfed severely. Tha gates of what is acceptable performance have moved; like it or not.
Now whether or not SS needs buffs or rework, not sure haven’t played much around the skill. But these are valid points made in the op.
- not that i’ll argue/pretend it’s going to speak for the entirety of SS lineup ofc
very poorly builded, spellbreaker is still a strong
I guess it’s among the common affix pool for these items though
