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shadower-remaster

Shadower Remaster

I’m a level 271 Shadower in MapleSEA. Been playing this class since I fell in love with it in RED, and the remaster is a significant event that’s going to affect us for years to come. So I’d like to share my thoughts on the remaster while I can, whether or not it sways the decisions behind these changes.

2022-01-12: New KMST changes to the remaster. Added more comments at the bottom.

6th January: First Remaster patch

Convenience changes

These are the most uninteresting changes, so I’ll quickly get them over with.

Flip the Coin Toggle

Flip is now a toggle. Crit rate from 10% per stack to 5% per stack. Stacks are gained by landing critical hits while the toggle is on, and will stay indefinitely until toggled off or the buff is removed.

Crit rate difference is made up for in 2nd job passive, which now gives 25% crit and 5% crit damage (the average of 0% to 10% of Prima Critical at 4th job, which is now removed).

Meso Guard, Dagger Booster, Haste, Shadower Instinct Passive

Meso Guard is now a passive 60% damage reduction in Shield Mastery. Booster is renamed to Dagger Acceleration and is now passive. Haste is now completely passive.

While I appreciate having one less thing to put on pet buff, Booster being passive now makes it harder to lab and test attack speed-related mechanics.

Shadower Instinct passively gives the maximum of 70 ATT.

Minor Skill changes / removals

Double Stab (and Lucky Seven) mobbing

Double Stab now hits 5 targets in a small area.

Dark Flare redesign

Dark Flare now hits 3 targets, up from 1. Damage reflection functionality removed. Attack interval from 900ms to 930ms.

Time from install to first attack reduced.

Forward range reduced by 1px, backward range increased by 1px.

Savage Blow adjustment

Animation sped up by 30ms. Damage increased from 192% to 210%. Downward range increased by 35px, backward range increased by 10px, forward range reduced by 10px.

Edge Carnival mobbing skill

8 targets in a decent area. Vertical range larger than current Boomerang Stab. Damage adjusted from 160%x7 to 190%x4. Cast delay reduced from 840ms to 750ms.

Muspelheim speedup

By 30ms.

Smokescreen

Size increased: +40px upward range, +40px downward range, +80px forward range. Cast delay reduced from 900ms to 810ms. Superstance while casting.

Smoke no longer breaks Dark Sight when used.

Eviscerate

Invincibility time has been increased to 2 seconds. Wound stacks now prioritise highest HP target of Assassinate.

Major Skill changes / removals

Thief Agility - Up Jump

2nd job now adds a passive that enables up jump. Can be used with Up + Jump keys, Up + flash jump hotkey. Compared to Cygnus Knights’ up jump, is slightly weaker, but is ok.

However, the jump cannot be mixed-and-matched like NW/Kinesis Up jump/Flash jumps. If you use an up jump, you can’t flash jump after. If you flash jump, you can’t up jump after.

Steal Toggle

Steal is now a toggle that applies to all attacks. Its proc rate was reduced from 49% to 10% as a result. Mobs will drop potions that heal full HP/MP when looted. If the target stolen from is tagged as a Boss monster, the potion will give 30 ATT for 3 minutes on top of healing.

Steal still will only affect each target once ever, so it’s not free sustain on a single-target boss. But if the boss has a lot of summons, it will produce potions everywhere for your pets to loot to heal and bypass potion cooldown, vastly improving self-suatain in fights like Lucid P1. In fact, it might just be ridiculously overpowered compared to other class’ self-sustain which usually only heals up to 10% of their HP on a cooldown.

For farming purposes it’s basically a free 10% Auto-steal line.

Boomerang Stab - Cruel Stab

Skill renamed. Upward range increased by 45px, downward range increased by 35px. Damage adjusted from 375%x4 to 250%x6.

I don’t understand why they keep reducing this skill’s damage. First it was 742%x2, then 375%x4, now 250%x6. At first glance it’s an easy tradeoff to get more lines. But with the Boomerang Stab - Bonus Attack, it went from 742%x3 = 2226%, to 375%x5 = 1875%, and then 250%x7 = 1750%. Please stop making it harder to one-shot at Hotel Arcs.

For lower-level hunting it’s an improvement because more lines = more coins. But please re-adjust the damage to keep the hyper in mind.

The vertical range increase is welcome, but compared to some other toys that other classes get for their mobbing - Raging Blow has 77px higher upward range, 45px more downward range, 30px more backward range but 84px less forward range, for example - this is more like a mobbing skill you’d see on a 2015 class than a 2022 class. Please consider being more generous on the AoE.

Assassinate

Nate 1 damage decreased from 275% to 270%, downward range increased by 30px. Cast delay sped up from 840ms to 690ms.

Nate 2 damage increased from 350% to 490%, forward range increased by 60px, downward range increased by 30px. Flesh Nate 2 (enhanced Nate 2 from meso-weaving, more on this later) hits 50px higher and 40px forward.

The old Killing Point system boosted both Nate 1 and Nate 2. Current system only boosts Nate 2 with 100% final damage. Assuming 100% KP rate for the old system (100% was basically impossible, so this is just an upper bound), old damage did (275% + 350%) x2 = 1250%x6 per 2 Nates while new Nate does 270% + 490%x2 = 1250%. So the current Assassinate combo, assuming full Flesh stacks, is tuned around having 100% KP.

Increasing the range of Nate 2 is meaningless. If you’re going to make Shadowers have two different versions of their bossing skill with forced alternation, it’s more than mildly annoying to have the two attacks have different ranges. I don’t need more horizontal range on Nate 1, if the class concept as a melee dagger-wielder getting up close and personal is too important to sacrifice. But do increase its vertical range to match Nate 2, because it produces situations where wound stacks hit things that you wouldn’t expect.

(The latter phenomenon isn’t as much of a problem anymore because Wound stacks now prioritise highest-HP targets, but it’s still fundamentally bad design to have the bossing skill involuntarily change AoE; the effective AoE is just going to be the smaller once.)

New Skills: Bloody Pocket, Bloody Explosion

Because of the removal of Prima Critical and Shadower Instinct, Bloody Pocket gets Prima Critical’s 20% crit damage passive and Shadower Instinct’s Killing Points has been replaced with a Murderous Intent buff, which is consumed to enhance the next Nate 2 to deal 100% increased final damage. The Murderous Intent buff is obtained when Bloody Explosion hits an enemy.

Bloody Pocket is the Shadower’s version of an Enrage bossing-type toggle. It replaces Pickpocket to drop red-coloured coins instead of gold ones, and replaces Meso Explosion with Bloody Explosion. While Meso Explosion is a skill that activates the coins around you to seek out enemies and home in on them, Bloody Explosion is a fixed attack with a well-defined hitbox in front of you that matches Nate 1. This attack does 240%x5 damage, and each line is increased by 10%p per red coin used. Bloody Explosion has a 0.7 second cooldown, and a 630ms cast delay (at 6as). Because it is a fixed attack, it is affected by Shadow Partner.

Meso Explosion does 100%x2 per coin, but this is increased by 20%p with the Greed passive at 3rd job, so it does 240% per coin. Bloody Explosion does 250%x5 * 1.7 = 2125% at one coin, but damage per coin increases only by 85% instead of 240%. At 13 coins, Meso Explosion would deal 3120% damage while Bloody Explosion would deal 3145% damage, and at any more coins Bloody Explosion actually does less damage than Meso Explosion.

So Bloody Explosion does less damage than Meso Explosion at 7+ coins, has a cooldown while Meso Explosion does not, and has a cast animation while Meso Explosion does not. At the 40% proc rate of Pickpocket, with 24 lines of damage from Nate 1 + Nate 2, there will be an average of 9.6 coins left. So using Bloody Explosion on average is a damage increase from Meso Explosion.

Sonic Blow adjustments

Sonic Blow had a 80 second cooldown that could be reduced further by attacking with Killing Points. It has been reduced to 45 seconds fixed because Killing Points have been removed. Sonic Blow now inflicts Wound Stacks on the highest HP enemy attacked and can be cancelled with Eviscerate. If cancelling with Eviscerate causes damage loss, then Sonic Blow’s cooldown is reduced by 2.5 seconds for each tick of damage lost (total of 15 ticks possible).

While this may initially sound like a damage loss to cancel, there is a considerable period of end-lag after all 15 instances of damage have already applied, and this end-lag can still be cancelled. This helps get more damage out in a small timeframe and is a welcome change, since there may be times where a boss appears without Wound stacks and there’s no time to apply 3 stacks to Eviscerate them before they disappear again.

Opinions

So to answer all of the people who’ve been asking me what I think about the Shadower changes, I’m going to break it down into different aspects.

Damage output

A KMS Shadower who I’ve known to be very scientific in testing all the different aspects of Shadower has tested the total 3 minute damage output.

The Remaster has increased Shadower’s damage, primarily because they balanced the new Assassinate’s damage around 100% 3KP-boosted Nate 1 which almost no one was getting. Bloody Explosion does notably more than Meso Explosion as well. As far as numbers go, the balance team definitely know what they’re doing.

Background behind Meso Weaving

Before I go into my opinions about the new Bloody Explosion, I feel it necessary to cover some background information.

The Killing Point System

The Killing Point system was introduced in Justice Patch and had a long history, but I’ll summarise how it worked right before this remaster.

Shadower Instinct passively lets you get up to 3 Killing Points, which are accumulated just by damaging any enemy with any attack other than Assassinate. If Assassinate was used with 3 Killing Points, its final damage would be increased by 2x. However, Nate 1 and Nate 2 interacted with Killing Points differently.

Nate 1:

Nate 2:

So, under this system, if a Shadower had 3KP and used Nate1-Nate2, both would be unconditionally boosted by the Final Damage.

The main way to accumulate killing Points was via Meso Explosion, which threw lots of coins everywhere and gave 1KP per coin - making it trivially easy to stack to 3KP almost all the time. As long as you used Meso Explosion at least once every 2 Assassinates, you’d basically always be throwing at least 3 coins around, which meant that basically every Nate 2 was being boosted with 3KP.

But there was further optimisation to be made. In order for every Nate 2 to be boosted with 3KP, the only thing you had to do was throw 2 coins inbetween each Nate2 in the Nate1-Nate2-Nate1-Nate2 cycle. That wasn’t a problem. The issue was boosting Nate 1 as well, for even more damage. Because, as we covered earlier, if Nate 1 was boosted, then the next Nate 2 would guaranteed to be boosted too.

So the ideal situation was to have the coins hit between Nate2 and Nate 1.

Problems with Meso Explosion

Meso Explosion became what we know it today when in 2016, right before the V update, they allowed it to be used during other skills. This effectively created Meso weaving as we know it today. But even though it could be used during other skills, other skills couldn’t be used during Meso Explosion. So in a sense, it had its own delay. And this delay was longer than Nate2, so using A-A-M would be slowing down your Assassinates, which wasn’t ideal. People eventually settled on A-M-A and accepted the fact that Nate 1 wasn’t meant to be boosted.

Meso Explosion had its own set of problems around 2016. To recap, this is how Meso Explosion worked:

During this entire process, there are multiple round-trips between the client and the server, and Meso Explosion was considered “in use” throughout, so high-latency users were basically stunned while using Meso Explosion.

The complex process also meant that there was a significant lag-time between when the Meso Explosion button is pressed and when the damage actually registers - a.k.a, when the Killing Points were counted. So even low-latency users had a significant delay between button press and 3KP registering.

The AWAKE Patch

The AWAKE patch resolved many of the issues with Meso Explosion, with the patch note:

Overall skill logic has been improved to help alleviate the error where an entered skill would not activate due to things such as potion use, pet auto buff and auto feed, or skill activations that do not affect character actions.

This allowed skills to be used during Meso Explosion, removing one source of the inconvenience of Meso Explosion. The logic of Meso Explosion was also further improved so that it had less server-side checks, making it in general a lot more usable. But because of the missile travel time, there was still a minimum amount of lag between button press and the damage registering.

Completely undocumented was a change where Meso Explosion would actually animation cancel Nate 2:

addAttack.skill = 400041025 refers to Eviscerate, and addAttack.skipActionFrame = 6 indicates a skill-linking system. This refers to the bossing version of Eviscerate which is meant to be linked from Nate 2.

Of note is skillPlus.0 = 4211006, which is the skill ID of Meso Explosion. This meant that Meso Explosion cancelled the second hit of Assassinate.

One could only assume that this was added as yet another prevention of the “clunkiness” of using Meso during Nate 2. Who could possibly know why this was added? But in any case, it changed things significantly. Previously we avoided using Meso during Nate 2 because the delay would slow down our Assassinates, but now that phenomenon is gone AND the animation cancel exists to speed up the Assassinates. This changed the game significantly.

The two schools of thought for Meso Weaving

Many Koreans now realised that A-A-M was not only viable, but likely optimal because it increased the number of Assassinates they were able to put out, and GMS people discovered this as well and eventually Meso-cancelling, not just Meso weaving, was known and used everywhere by 2021.

But there were people who stuck to the old school method of A-M-A. This goes back to the first point in this section, where ideally not just Nate 2, but Nate 1 would be boosted, which required 3 coins from Meso Explosion to hit after Nate 2, but before Nate 1. Animation cancelling Nate 2, especially at 0 attack speed, created a situation where this time interval to squeeze in 3 coins became prohibitively small and you would be virtually guaranteeing that you never got any 3KP-boosted Nate 1s.

How much was the difference? Because both Nates deal 6 lines and are affected by Shadow Partner, it’s easy to just look at the damage numbers: 240%x2 + 350%x2 = vs 240% + 350%x2 = 940%. Having Nate 1 boosted at 100% of the time would be a 1.25x damage output increased from Assassinate compared to 0% 3KP Nate 1s.

This gave rise to the delayed injection method of Meso Weaving.

The idea is that you pressed Meso between Nate 1 and Nate 2, but so late into Nate 1 - during the 3rd hit of the 3-hit combo - that the coins taking their time to fly to the enemy would arrive after Nate 2 hits. This produces the effect that we wanted where Nate 1 was boosted.

Of note in that above video is this frame at 4:33 where he takes his Battle Analysis of the different weaving methods:

The first is delayed-injection (A–M-A), the second is instant-injection (AM-A), and the third is animation-cancelling (A-A-M). He counted the number of times each Nate was boosted (first row = nate 1, second row = nate 2) and each time it wasn’t. He concluded that animation-cancelling wasn’t viable because of too much damage loss due to not getting 3KP-boosted Nate 1s.

Animation cancelling still had its plus points outside of damage, however. 3KP consumption depended only on Nate 2 and getting as many Nate 2s out as possible - people who animation cancelled reduced their Sonic Blow cooldown more. Attack speed was also faster, so it offered more reaction time to dodge things in bossing.

Me personally? I tested myself with various methods at 0 Attack Speed and found it exceedingly difficult to get 3KP Nate 1s even with the delayed injection method. Animation Cancelling turned out to be better once I got better at it. But I noticed that because of the process above with multiple checks between client and server, Meso Explosion actually attempts to cancel Nate 2 mutliple times during one cast. So using Meso slightly before Nate 2 would still cancel it.

Here’s a video with keypresses. My keypresses are basically Alt -> C (hold C), Alt -> C (hold C), which translates into Meso -> Nate2 -> auto-use Nate 1 from holding the button. This was a comfortable way of producing the animation cancel, and as a plus point, because Meso was used before Nate 2, some of the coins would hit between Nate 2 and Nate 1, producing the 3KP Nate 1s for more bonus damage (you can see in the video there’s a decent ~50% 3KP Nate 1 rate).

Opinions on pre-remaster Shadower

I’m going to go through various aspects of the pre-remaster Shadower. Some are good (at least from my perspective), some less so.

6th Jan patch Opinions


Since you are virtually guaranteed to have 20 coins on the ground after every Sonic BLow, the burst rotation will be: Toggle Pickpocket -> Sonic Blow -> Eviscerate cancel -> Meso Explosion -> Toggle Bloody Pocket -> Assassinate. Because of Bloody Explosion’s cooldown and lower damage at high coins, it’s actually more damage to use Meso Explosion instead. It’s a small difference, but to have Shadower’s boss dpm become more transparent/elegant it makes more sense to make Bloody Explosion stronger to make it the optimal choice every time.

Suggestions / Hopes for subsequent changes

12th January KMST changes

Wow, adjustments within 6 days.

Developer Notes

In the 12th January update, the usability of Assassinate and improvement of key attacking skills are in focus.

First of all, we would like to inform you about the changes related to the action delay of Assassinate. In the 6th January Test World update, the action delay of the first hit of Assassinate was significantly reduced in exchange for the removal of animation cancelling with Meso Explosion and Bloody Explosion. The main issues caused by this change are as follows:

Firstly, the action delay of the final hit of Assassinate is the same as pre-remaster, but the use of Assassinate in field hunting was inconvenient as the animation could no longer be cancelled.

Secondly, depite the decrease in the action delay of the first hit of Assassinate, the sum of the action delays between the two attacks is longer than when the final hit of Assassinate was cancelled with the pre-remaster mechanics.

To solve the above problems, we would like to improve the sense of control in bosses by modifying the overall action delay of Assassinate such that the sum of action delays is shorter than the animation-cancelled pre-remaster Assassinate.

In addition, the pre-remaster animation cancellation of Assassinate's final hit was added back to improve the sense of control in field hunting.

In addition to improving the delay of Assassinate, we also want to improve Assassinate and Bloody Explosion to preferably attack enemies with high maximum HP within the attack range. In addition, the range of attack in Bloody Explosion is adjusted to be in line with its skill effect, and the usage count status of Shadow Assault is improved to be preserved with Buff Freezers.

Double Stab improvement

Forward and backward ranges increased by 15px. Upward and downward ranges increased by 10px.

Thief Agility

Now no longer breaks Dark Sight. Still can’t be used with the flash jump.

Pickpocket

Fixed an issue where sometimes dropped coins could not be used.

Meso Explosion

Fixed an issue where sometimes normal meso on the field was consumed.

Assassinate

Nate 1 animation reduced by 30ms. This was done by removing the final frame of the animation. Because each frame has a minimum of 30ms in the animation regardless of attack speed, this removal will improve 0 attack speed users disproportionately.

Nate 2 animation reduced by 60ms. This was done by removing the final frame as well. skillPlus reference to Meso Explosion was added back, so animation cancelling with Meso Explosion is back (not for Bloody). Because the first 6 frames of Nate 2’s animation is unchanged, animation-cancelling has the same action delay as pre-remaster.

It’s fucking fast now. And it’ll be even better at 0 attack speed. Only issue is if the 0 attack speed users have high latency (thoughts n prayers go out to GMS).

If Murderous Nate 2 doesn’t hit anything, Murderous Intent is no longer consumed.

Bloody Explosion

Forward range increased by 55px, upward range increased by 90px.

Shadow Assault

A tag “isBeneficial” has been added to invoke a special logic to preserve the buff gained from the 1st 3 uses of Shadow Assault.

12th Jan patch Opinions

The real issues with the remaster were the latency issues and the up-jump with flash jump interaction. Neither of those were addressed but hey, 0 attack speed users just got ridiculously overbuffed. We were already going to benefit a lot in damage output before this 12th Jan adjustment and now it’s an order of magnitude better. Latency related issues are complex and understandably take a very long time to address, so I understand why it’s not in here. Thief Agility should’ve been totally fixed, though.