Rogue concept design part 3 (Bladedancer)

Rogue
1

Bladedancer

Main stats: Dexterity, Stength
Main weapons: Dual wielding one handed melee weapons.

Philosophy: The bladedancer moves through the battlefield and breakneck speed, beheading foes and artfully dodging attacks in the same breath, a dual with a bladedancer will end with them across the room and you with your head on the floor, not understanding how any of it happened.

Class passive trait: 35% base dodge while moving, increased attack speed while standing still.

Core Abilities:

Iron Waltz: Dash to a location, spinning your weapons around you as you go, dealing damage to all nearby enemies.

Exsanguinate: take a small leap backwards as you throw one of your weapons out in a wide arc, dealing damage and causing enemies to bleed. Has 2 charges, charges are refunded when your weapon returns to you.

Overpower: strike an enemy heavily with both weapons, if their hp (%) is higher, deal massive damage, if lower, deal less damage and stun them.

Run through: Charge wildly at an enemy, pushing them back and knocking other enemies aside as you go. Channeled ability.

(High tier/ Bladedancer only skills)

Berserker: (Toggle) enter a stance which allows you to ignore all enemy armor/ resistances, as the cost of taking 50% more damage yourself.

Dance of Death: Enter the ultimate fighter state, launching an attack on all enemies in an area at blinding speed, each enemy that dies from this skill explodes in a shower of blood, dealing additional damage and marking nearby enemies with assassins brand.

Passive nodes (aside from the generic ones)

Ambidexterity: Increased damage if weapons are of a different type.

March of a god: Skills deal increased damage if they werenā€™t the same as the last skill used.

Tempo: each different skill you use increases the damage of the next skill by 10%, this stacks up to 5 times, and all stacks are lost if you use the same skill twice in a row.

Momentum: Skills which cause you to move increase your dodge rating and damage for an amount of time.

Wrath of steel: Large increase to physical damage, but you can no longer deal elemental damage.

1 Like
2

Looks interesting. I would add maybe some armour shred into the kit (maybe assassins brand ?), maybe in the form of ability trees and one passive tree node. I have been personally looking if bladedancer cannot be the only dual wielding and you were faster, sir/madam. Also, maybe some sort of flicker strike (if you played POE) as a class mastery skill? And one skill for defense (as an example, Diablo 3 - Demon Hunter - Smoke screen). Would add that rogue/assassin feeling into the fray (also, the skill itself would be like that enemies cannot target you specifically, but they can target the area with AOEs so that you are not invulnerable).

3

TBH itā€™s a fairly bare bones concept, but the idea was that they would rely mostly on dodge and mobility for defense, since (you know) if youā€™re going to put dance in somethings name, i should expect that it moves around a lot.
as for armor shred, iā€™d personally have no issue with that, there could easily be talents in each of the suggested skill to go full armor shred route, since i didnā€™t really give any example of potential skill talents.

1 Like
4

Or maybe movement attack skill like Shadow Strike in GD? :thinking:

5

iā€™m not familiar, but the idea was a bulldozer type ability, might come with a body shield type of talent that blocks projectiles from the front or something.

youā€™re thing sounds good too, i just donā€™t know what GD is to comment on it in any intelligent capacity.

6

GD - Grim Dawn and Shadow Strike is active attack skill in Nightblade mastery.

Example of gameplay: v1.1.7.2 Grim Dawn - Dunefiend Acid Shadow Strike - Witch Hunter - Crucible 4:46 - YouTube

Skill description:

P.S: I remember in old versions 6 strikes build was made using SS, 2 Chaos Strikes from components and CD reduction from some procs. Was very enjoyable.

7

sounds like the shadowstep ability from the base rogue concept idea i posted, just more vertical than behind.

8

Will take a look at your proposal. :blush:

1 Like
9

Yeah, looks similar. :blush:

1 Like
10

These bladedancer ideas are fantastic imo. Its very distinct from Sentinel which is important. I tend to find characters that donā€™t do magic or elemental damage boring but this structure has a lot of potential.

11

big thank, TBH iā€™d be satisfied if even one idea made it into the final design, but based on a sarno response to one of my past posts on the runemaster class idea i donā€™t think thatā€™s tremendously likely, unfortunately.

12

On the plus side if your ideas donā€™t make it it might mean they have something even better in the pipe which can only be a good thing :smiley:

13

I assume the post you are referring to is this one, which does nothing to suggest that we donā€™t consider community suggestions (why would we have a forum section for them?). The post merely clarified when we started working on one of the skills in our game.

As the creator of a number of threads which have been replied to, I am sure youā€™ll be familiar with the notifications our forum sends when this occurs. You might remember this post in one of the threads that I created. I spent several hours (mostly while working on other things) considering whether I should respond. Ultimately, I decided I did not need to - I didnā€™t think the member of our team whoā€™d been working on that skill would mind, I didnā€™t want to discourage people from sharing their ideas with us, and I figured you would either forget about it or at some point ask whether your thread had been the inspiration for the skill.

The calculation changed for me when I saw this post, which came a month after you saw the thread announcing Assemble Abomination - you were still claiming credit for it, and you had still not checked with us whether it had in fact been where the idea originally came from. You were also continuing to create threads containing about a half-dozen skill ideas each.

I thus had a growing concern regarding how you may react when we released new classes such as the Rogue. Letā€™s say we release her with 12 skills available through her base class. How might you feel if 6 of them were similar to suggestions you had posted? 8? 10? Itā€™s a cool tidbit if you suggest something that makes it into a game - but what if you begin to believe you have contributed a substantial amount of design to the game? What proportion of her skills - and maybe those of her mastery classes - would be the tipping point where you may begin to think that you should be listed in the gameā€™s credits, or perhaps be paid?

I donā€™t know you - I had no way of knowing the answer to that. Iā€™d like to be clear that I donā€™t think youā€™ve ulterior motives when posting; Iā€™d simply watched you react to one situation, and begun to worry how you might react to something similar but on a grander scale.

Even then - when I reluctantly intervened after more than a month, my only goal was to try to encourage asking us if a post had in fact been the original source of an idea. As the creator of the thread announcing Assemble Abomination, had you messaged me privately Iā€™d have been happy to chase that for you internally and get back to you. If we do use one of your ideas, thereā€™s a very good chance of us proactively posting in the pertinent thread to let you know. We never try to dampen peopleā€™s enthusiasm for the game. We have no reason to.

Please understand that we have been working on Last Epoch since May 2017 and most weeks we have two meetings dedicated to skills. We will sometimes have been the first to think of something. That doesnā€™t mean we donā€™t read, discuss, and sometimes implement community ideas. It only means that community suggestions arenā€™t our sole source of skill ideas.

9 Likes
14

I see, it would seem that i had read to much into our past interactions. in case it helps in our future discussions iā€™m coming from a background where the only real big-game beta experience i have comes from the diablo 3 necromancer beta and the heroes of the storm beta (iā€™ve been a blizzard boy for a bit too long in my opinion, and have been looking for alternatives in light of the increased activision interference, which is what initially brought me to last epoch in the first place) and while Blizzard has on occasion made a post on their beta forums from a community management account, they never got nearly as involved (or as personal) as yā€™all, (and by personal, i mean that you actually make posts targeting specific peopleā€™s attention as opposed to a copy/paste ā€œofficial corporate dialogueā€, which i appreciate as it makes it easier to reply to you, as a person, rather than a corporate entity.)
as for my personal expectations, i make these posts with character concepts and skill ideas and whatnot because they represent the character iā€™d like to play, and nothing more. if no ideas of mine made it into the final design, then thatā€™s just how it was and i have no choice but to accept that (and itā€™s not like itā€™d be anything new to me, after probably 120-150 item and character concepts on blizzard forums, all i had to show for it was a pair of pants in diablo that had to be highly modified from the original idea to be usable, and an example of a character skill showcased at blizzcon that ultimately didnā€™t make the cut into the final game when the character actually came out, of course i could be reading hard into even those, as blizzard with their community management team being what it is never outright said to me that the things were based on my idea, only that the way in which they functioned was so eerily similar and specific to what i had suggested that i had no real alternative but to think i had influenced it, which is more or less what seems to have happened here with the abomination skill.
if the rogue ends up looking even vaguely like my concept ideas, be it 10 skills, 8, 6, or even just one, i would be excited, sure, to think that i may have influenced it, but even more so that at the very least, someone with a say on the matter either had the same idea or agreed with me that such a skill or concept would be fun and cool.
i donā€™t mean to impose my ideals on you, and iā€™m grown up enough to know that, as i am not an employee, and as i have signed no contracts or commissions or been directly contacted by a member of eleventh hour games (aside from the above rebuke) that i am entitled to no form of compensation or recognition, iā€™ve only been on this boat since the end of may this year (it was a birthday present to myself) so i canā€™t really say iā€™ve been with you long enough to have really influenced the game with my forum posts and ideas, i just thought it was neat when an Eerily similar skill design popped up a few months after i had posted such an idea, in the future i will be more careful to avoid offending anybody by taking credit for an idea that i most likely didnā€™t have first, but i would also be happy if, even in dm, someone would tell me if I had made a difference.

(also sorry for the wall of text, as it wasnā€™t a concept post i didnā€™t really think about spacing until it was a bit too long to do anything about it)

15

So the take-away from this thread is to not post too many ideas that MAY be similar to what the devs have already made or risk being potentially silenced in fear the devs MAY have to add your line to the credits

Is GGG staff member names also going to get a mention?

16

Well yes, theyā€™re staff & get to be named in the creditsā€¦

17

How was that your take away from this. It is not about posting. It is about claiming credit without confirmations :thinking:

18

Most large game companies try to keep theorycrafting on the forums to a minimum or blatantly avoid theorycrafting stuff. There are legal repercussions (intellectual property). I would suggest that to sign up on the forums there be a line in a user agreement that says something to the tune of users forfeit ownership of content posted to these forums.

It is very cool that the devs are so closely tied to the community. It also opens them up to legal liability if there is a bad actor around.

Would be nice if they could overtly used ideas from the community and give credit without threat of being sued.

19

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.