Summon Shade/Dark Shade Question

jlb1705

Summon a shade versions of yourself to attack an enemy and fight at your side for 18 seconds.

The shade slashes at an enemy, dealing 'X' Magic Damage and occasionally whirlwinds all enemies around it, dealing 'Y' Magic Damage. The shade's attacks inflict Minor Maim, reducing the enemy's damage done by 15% for 4 seconds.

This ability scales with your highest offensive stats.

My question is: How often does the damage tick on this skill? Pretty much every other DOT tells you that info in the tooltip. This one does not state it explicitly. Does the shade attack every second? Every two seconds? Whenever it feels like it? Thinking about tweaking my stamblade build and am hoping to have a little more info before I go to the trouble of slotting and leveling a skill like this. I know Alcast has it in his build, but I don't just follow that stuff blindly.

Gilvoth

jlb1705 wrote: »

Summon a shade versions of yourself to attack an enemy and fight at your side for 18 seconds.

The shade slashes at an enemy, dealing 'X' Magic Damage and occasionally whirlwinds all enemies around it, dealing 'Y' Magic Damage. The shade's attacks inflict Minor Maim, reducing the enemy's damage done by 15% for 4 seconds.

This ability scales with your highest offensive stats.

Whenever it feels like it

i prefer the other morph, [ shadow image ] it enables me an escape and does small supportive damage.

the morph your referring to [ dark shade ] in my opinion just doesn't do enough Damage (noticeably) to justify the use of that morph, especially in the manner and way, you are talking about.

jlb1705

I should clarify: I'm asking about PVE applications. I don't really have a use for a teleport.

Kolzki

It does damage every 2 seconds. The total damage per cast is good and it scales with your highest stats from magic or stamina. For pve it’s worth running on both mag and stamblades.

jlb1705

Every two seconds... That helps.

Any insight on why that might be preferable to Twin Slashes? According to the tooltip Twin Slashes appears to have higher DPS. Is it mainly trading a bit of damage for sustain since it uses magicka rather than stamina?

Kolzki

I think I’d chose the shade because of the longer duration, magicka cost instead of stam and small amount of added aoe. You might be able to drop leeching strikes to run both if your group support is good. Consuming trap can also help with sustain in that case.

NyassaV

jlb1705 wrote: »

Summon a shade versions of yourself to attack an enemy and fight at your side for 18 seconds.

The shade slashes at an enemy, dealing 'X' Magic Damage and occasionally whirlwinds all enemies around it, dealing 'Y' Magic Damage. The shade's attacks inflict Minor Maim, reducing the enemy's damage done by 15% for 4 seconds.

This ability scales with your highest offensive stats.

My question is: How often does the damage tick on this skill? Pretty much every other DOT tells you that info in the tooltip. This one does not state it explicitly. Does the shade attack every second? Every two seconds? Whenever it feels like it? Thinking about tweaking my stamblade build and am hoping to have a little more info before I go to the trouble of slotting and leveling a skill like this. I know Alcast has it in his build, but I don't just follow that stuff blindly.

It's good to not follow Alcast's stuff blindly. 50% of the builds on his site aren't fully thought out or whatever. Sometimes he does the math wrong.

Moral of the story; never huts to double check

Goregrinder

For most PVE, you don't really need shadow image, cloak is enough to save you from most combat scenarios. The other morph doesn't do a whole lot, but it is SOMETHING and that is better than nothing in PVE.

For PVP, shadow image is sooooo valuable for most NB builds. I would not PVP without it unless I was running some kind of Drain-Tank-Brawler build that didn't care about escaping. Cloak itself is sometimes not enough, and you need shadow image to pull you away from people's Invis Detection range.

zvavi

Shadow image is also very good for nb tanking, sooo fun, fights where you need relocations, casting it again for the teleport costs no Magicka BUT does apply the major resistances buff on you, which is a very nice thing imho. So dont say teleport is useless in pve, many scenarios can get some value from the teleport. I enjoyed it especially in vFL hm.

Djennku

Dark shades is a good skill for PvE nightblade builds. It gives minor maim as a debuff that can have a 100% uptime for you and your group, and is especially good when you're soloing, as well as being a great DoT. It is considered a pet and works with necropotence and other sets that require a pet. I highly recommend it.