What do Shadows actually do?

Hi all,
So I’m building my Vampire Rouge and I’ve just respected a few things because I’m now 2h sword wielding. I’m trying to think thematically about the abilities a vampire might use and decided that Synchronised Strike felt like a good idea. I see that it casts out Shadows but what are there purpose? They don’t seem to taunt or attack despite the tool tips suggesting otherwise. Is this a known bug that they just stand there? It’s of note that they react when I press Shuriken but nothing else. Working as intended or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks. :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh, the abilities I’m utilising are:
Flurry
Shuriken
Sync Strike
Smoke Bomb
Shift

There are a plethora of interactions that shadows have throughout three Rogue masteries.

My best advice would be to use LT Tools and search for Shadows and look at the various different skills and abilities that can utilize.

TLDR: Shadows can do a lot of the same things your character can do with the right nodes in a variety of different skills.

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Ah ok. I’ve seen them used with other skill to create blades but I thought they would also do something in their own right. I guess they are used as a bridge then.
Thanks. :hugs:

The game is normally good at eluding to what things are but there are a few things it misses. The tools link also misses them. These shadows being an example, unless I’m being silly and missing something?

No, they have acknowledged they want to give a good solid pass on the help notes and stuff all through the game. Over the years the details and finesse of a lot of stuff has really started to add up, which is a good thing because it makes for the ability to really play a LOT of different stuff, but it also means it’s much harder to catch up on where everything and anything interconnects.

For now we have LE tools which does a pretty fantastic job of it. I’d really recommend leaning into the search function in it because it’s great!

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If investing in passives it’s actually 5 shadows

And with 1.0 they also imitate explosive trap.

Shadows will imitate your attacks, but only work for some skills.
They are a great way to scale damage late game for umbral blades and shadow cascade.
The skills being cast by shadows have the same power of your skills x the increased shadow damage. So they will have more damage if you invest in passives and affixes that increase shadow damage.

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Thanks for the info. :hugs:

I thought that they would imitate melee attacks as some of the tooltips say that they leap into the enemy. When they did almost nothing I just thought something was wrong, I think I perceived that they would have some sort of basic ability, even if very minor.

I’ve only been playing a month, so I’m trying go to learn as much as I can. The main problem with ARPGs is that the main issue is starting out. I think that the people who have been playing for some time and had the privilege of learning and growing as new information is released forget how much of a wall it is to understand the game.

Another example is crit chance. I understand that you can have crit avoidance and one cancels out the other but, why would you want several hundred crit chance? The guide talks about the different ways to add up the crit chance and the 5% that you start with. If crit avoid can be counted by crit chance, then wouldn’t 200% be the max you would ever need? Assuming 100% crit avoid is a cap.

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Crit avoid cannot be countered by more crit chance. It either works (you avoid the crit) or it doesn’t (you take the crit). This is why people get it to 100%. At 50% Crit Avoidance you’ll still take a crit ~50% of all hits. Crit Chance maxes out at 100%. Once you go over that the rest is wasted.

Crit avoidance also maxes out at 100%. Once you hit that target you cannot be crit, (no matter how much crit chance the enemy has) and any extra is wasted.

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Ah ok, thanks. I thought it might work a bit like the resistances. Guess not, but this makes things easier crit chance wise. :smiley:

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Found a valid tool tip in the Lethal Mirage tree called “Pact of the Desert” (top right in tree). It says Shadows can cast 1 ability (from Shurikens, Acid Flask or Shadow Cascade) and use your stats. :slight_smile:

Yes. There are a number of nodes in different skills like this.

For instance in Synchronized Strike “Wave of Darkness” has your shadows use Shadow Cascade. In Umbral Blades, “Umbral Remnant” has your shadows drop Umbral Blades.

So there’s all sorts of interesting interactions you can combine.

Maxroll.gg guides recommend 200% crit avoid. I’m confused by that as well.

Increased % crit chance” sums up and multiplies your actual crit chance (base 5% + “added +% crit chance”

So with a sword that reads:
Increased %100 crit chance
Added 10% melee crit chance

you will have (5%+10%)x2=30% crit chance on melee and 5%x2=10% on non-melee

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That must be a typo. Been playing this game since Alpha and I don’t recall ever seeing someone recommend over stacking crit avoidance. Also, to my knowledge, there is nothing in the game that shreds crit avoidance.

There’s nodes that make enemies vulnerable to crits. Maybe it’s that?

No. I overlooked that falconer got a passive with 66% crit avoid to minion crit multi. You wanna stack crit avoid way past the cap on ballistas.

Crit vulnerability does but I don’t know if any monsters have it.

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Oh. Right. Yeah but that’s to increase your minion damage output. It has no effect on making your ‘crit avoidance’ actually better because the extra beyond 100% isn’t needed for the DEFENSE part of Crit Avoidance.

Their isn’t, to my knowledge. Again, the OP had mentioned over stacking Crit Avoidance seemed to be strange and I was talking about the actual function of Crit Avoidance itself. The “Finesse Them” passive is an added function that only happens with that node.

So you’re saying that your crit avoidance can’t be lowered by mobs? Even when there are mechanics within the game that make the enemy more susceptible to crits? I.e. there are no mob mechanics that do this to the player? Or once at 100% it can’t be lowered?

‘Crit vulnerability” is the mechanic I’m specifically referring to here.

They should add monster database to lastepochtools like it is in grimtools. Then we could know for sure. I haven’t seen any crit vulnerability debufs on me ever. But I just got 300 hours and I have a habit to cleanse whenever I see anything down there in the debuff corner.

Anyways, if it’s not there, they should definitely add crit vulnerabilty to enemies.

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