possible problem with shadow meld

[Valamir]

in previous patch shadow meld was changed and "fixed"

i'm not going to speak about its effectiveness and its new +block/parry bonus but want to focus on the effectiveness of its spell defence part...

for what i saw the way shadow meld works is to add a certain number of points to all our resistance values, at dc0 this bonus is 51 and go up with higher DC...

the "general" spell mitigation value get increased but the improvement we see seem to be just an average mitigation value keeping in consideration all the res.

to test that i tried (whitout shadow meld active) to equip a +70 res item and noticed that spell mitigation went up a bit, then i removed it and used shadow meld and the improvement on spell mitigation seemed proportional to the boost to res

if this is true shadow meld doesn't really improve our spell mitigation but "just" the resistance on various spell types that are calculated to show an average mitigation.

so what is the problem?

simple there are many mobs later in the game that debuff res to 0... an example is fighting firemages in RI... they debuff fire res to 0 in first second of fight and then start to happy nuke. in this situation our shadow meld is totally useless as it bonuses to fire get reduce to 0 too and spells will hit for max dmg.

this can be true basically for all high level caster mobs making this stance totally useless as a "spell protection" stance.


for this reason i think we should ask for a change for the way this stance works, a flat %dmg reduction will be way more efficent, maybe adding also a bonus to our "saving throw" for resistance purposes.

just throwing numbers..
10% spell dmg reduction and resistance
+5% spell dmg reduction and resistance / DC level

[DrK]

I do agree that the resistances on this stance are basically meaningless.

I personally think that the dodge/parry issue needs to be fixed regardless.

I am now of the opinion, however, that we would be better off if shadow meld was just dissolved into the other two stances.


For instance take the accuracy bonus and DC increase and apply it to ebon blade and take the resistances and block/parry bonuses and apply them to armor of darkness.

That would bring our stances up to par with the other defensive fighters' stances and in the case of armor of darkness would make it more closely match it's description.

[velzevul]

Originally Posted by DrK

I do agree that the resistances on this stance are basically meaningless.

I personally think that the dodge/parry issue needs to be fixed regardless.

I am now of the opinion, however, that we would be better off if shadow meld was just dissolved into the other two stances.


For instance take the accuracy bonus and DC increase and apply it to ebon blade and take the resistances and block/parry bonuses and apply them to armor of darkness.

That would bring our stances up to par with the other defensive fighters' stances and in the case of armor of darkness would make it more closely match it's description.

BRILLIANT!

100% my vote.

and make Shadow Meld a stance where we cannot melee, but rather attack with spells out of the shadows, but can FD in. Also take a major mitigation hit against direct melee attacks, but have increased spell effectiveness, and FD ability.

[Ralfazar]

Wait, attack with WHAT spells? Torture? WoD? Oh man, we'd be a killing machine in that stance then! :roll:

[velzevul]

it was a joke about a stance. even if not, FD would be the idea, not spell dmg, but i highly doubt sigil will ever give FD to DRK this game

[dethlord]

Are you guys sure this is how the resists portion of the stance works?

My resists are all over the board, some over a hundred and some around 40-50. It seemed to me that using that stance gave me about a 30% (not sure the exact number) increase to each resist from what it had in EB for instance. I am not at home right now so I can't double check but I am sure that the higher resists increased more than the really low ones.

Can someone confirm this as I am at work right now?