Word of spirit (Hijacked: Veil of Marlow)

I'm hijacking the thread, it's now about a new spell line that we've discussed, tested, and that will go live soon*. We'll be having some people test it out in test server in a semi controlled manner before that occurs. The spells are obviously very experimental, and are subject to change after an observation period. It's part one of a multi-step plan, but warrants some solo time to see how it plays in a live environment.


The Shadowknight being the sly and manipulative tank that he is, calls upon Dis/Marlow to veil his comrades in a dream like illusion. In the eyes of his enemies his team mates look just like him confusing the enemy, making it unsure who it should attack.

Veil of Dis
Level 30
Store Bought
Group (not raid) buff
.5 second cast time
2 minute recast
3 Tick duration
Redirects 20% of the hate generated by the group to the Shadowknight
100 mana cost


Veil of Marlow
Level 60
Dropped in a similar fashion to Taraztu's Healing Flames
Group (not raid) buff
.5 second cast time
2 minute recast
3 Tick duration
Redirects 40% of the hate generated by the group to the Shadowknight
300 mana cost



Both spells function under the same cool down, so you may not use them in tandem. Both spells take up a real buff slot, including on the SK himself, though the code skips over him in reality.

A working example.

Pre Buff: The shadowknight pulls in a mob. He casts a terror which generates 675 aggro. The Shaman in the group decides to cast a slow, that geneates 700 aggro. Mob runs off shadowknight attacks Shaman. Shaman is sad.

Post Buff: Shadowknight casts veil of marlow. Shadowknight pulls a mob. He casts a terror which generates 675 aggro.Then the Shaman in the group decides to cast a slow, that now generates 420 aggro. The shadowknight gains the remaining 280 aggro, putting him nicely at 955 aggro, assuming his timing was solid.

This has obvious implications on groups of mobs being pulled. While it may not help much if just an SK and a shaman are duoing, if everyone in the group throws out some hate, the bonus hate the SK receives for each mob should give him enough of a buffer over everyone else to get the situation under control. For those having trouble visualizing it.

5 party group
5 mobs

If everyone usually generates 100 hate, and all the mobs pick up pieces of that 100 hate, the mobs should scatter and attack various group members. The paladin would of course at that point AE blind, and pull the mobs all on him.

If the shadow knight casts the Veil of Marlow slightly before the mobs arrive, everyone is now generating 60 hate, and the extra is going to the Shadowknight, who in this example is still doing his 100 hate, likely on just 1 mob. This means on most mobs the SK will have 40*4 hate, as he is getting hate from each of his group members, for each mob. At that point if he wants to hold it for much longer he'd have to tab and terror, as the 2 minute cool down prevents him from using this as a primary hate generator. But at least he has time to get the situation under control.

I think this nicely solves the issue with SK's on multi pulls, while not harming the paladin roll as the AE tank. It takes up a buff slot, so even if it was raid wide, wouldn't be that useful for a fully buffed raid. It is not as reliable as a real AE, as it depends on your group mates acting enough to generate some hate to leach, but a group with good communication should be able to create some new and interesting opportunities with this spell.

Discuss. And standby for a volunteer call on test in the next day or two.
 
Is there any chance of this going in the song box at all, because the moment I read buffslot on everyone I lost my erection.
 
No. It using a buff slot is part of its balance. Do you really roll with 15 buffs in most 6 man groups?

That and we are getting to close to maxing out the buff box limit in a typical raid or stacked group. That causes zone crash lulz, and is something we'd kinda like to avoid.
 
No. It using a buff slot is part of its balance. Do you really roll with 15 buffs in most 6 man groups?

Yes as a matter of fact, especially with a shadowknight. Vortex, Succubus, Ashpyre, Random mob based debuffs(Suppression ,tashania, malo, random dots that land on you), call to battle,rbow, random dps clickies (flames of rage/concealed strikes), Deathsave, and even more shit I forgot. Not including the rage you get when you fill someones first buff slot they are preserving to dispell malo because it cannot be resisted and casted all the time.

There is simply no room for manaskin.

Edit: I don't even use shaman stats and I constantly roll with 13/14 buffs, I could have more.
 
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on sk, when duoing or grouping I have the following buffs:
Raego (or druid hp buff if ti fades)

Rfocus
eot
eotw

jb (or spiritual bliss if it has faded)
emp (or shaman haste if it has faded)

dmg shield (mage or druid)
regen for stamina (if druid ds)

selfbuffs:
soul shroud
shroud of leech
illusion either fire elemental or undead frog
blessing of the combine
shield of the combine
voice of kaezul
spikecoat (from mantle of the forest)

and sometimes I have:
sos
shiritris ward
then I have to click eot or something else.

Then I try to make room for:
shroud of nightmares recourse

As you might get, I have problems fitting all the buffs I want atm. Usually I have to drop shaman stats. Also sometimes I have to make room for debuffs from mobs. I usually dont fall below 14 buffslots occupied unless ive been out duoing for some quest for a long time.

Freeing up one more buffslot on the sk would be a real problem. On the shaman it could be done, on the druid I could do it, but not on the sk.
 
that being said. The spell does have some really really interesting possibilities, and it might be a big help.
Atm, Im trying to visualize the biggest problem scenario I have as a sk, and how this spell would affect that.

When I can see all the mobs before pulling them, and have some distance to move around, I can usually handle the situation, it takes work but that usually doesnt lead to chaos. The bad situation is when a named or a mob spawns adds that goes for group, or when respawns happens and goes for group, and its more than 1 or 2 at a time. because then as im working agro on the new mobs, someone nukes the old and I lose agro on that mob and it all becomes a bad circle of no agro. Now assuming these random mobs goes for a wizard the wizard nukes it and a healer heals the wizard. In this scenario I assume the mob would go for me? correct? Other scenario is it goes for a healer, and the healer heals himself.. Now another groupmember would also need to do something for me to outagro the healer. It might be a dps on average would need another tick or so to react and have time to do something before it fades, but it might solve the situation, Im just not sure till Ive tested it.

But yeah it definitely sounds interesting.

Would it be possible to have the spell go in buffslot for group, but in songslot for the sk?

another possible solution would be making this buff not stacking with soulshroud, having soulshroud be the stronger buff. that way the buff will simply not land on the sk thus not taking up a spellslot, but will land on the rest of the group where it has a working effect.
 
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When I can see all the mobs before pulling them, and have some distance to move around, I can usually handle the situation, it takes work but that usually doesnt lead to chaos. The bas situation is when a named or a mob spawns adds that goes for group, or when respawns happens and goes for group, and its more than 1 or 2 at a time. Now assuming these random mobs goes for a wizard the wizard nukes it and a healer heals the wizard. In this scenario I assume the mob would go for me? correct? Other scenario is it goes for a healer, and the healer heals himself.. Now another groupmember would also need to do something for me to outagro the the healer. It might be a dps on average would need another tick or so to react and have time to do something before it fades, but it might solve the situation, Im just not sure till Ive tested it.

Don't underestimate how much hate is generated in 12-18 seconds. But as you also said, it needs a field test.

Would it be possible to have the spell go in buffslot for group, but in songslot for the sk?

This is not possible. Having it skip the caster may or may not be possible, and would streamline the code checks at least.
 
I'll point out again, part of the balance of this spell is that you and your group DO have to work around it being a buff. It has the potential to really let your group go wild with damage, AE's, whatever. You DO have to think with it in mind, and it is a different mind set. That's very much the point.
 
another possible solution would be making this buff not stacking with soulshroud, having soulshroud be the stronger buff. that way the buff will simply not land on the sk thus not taking up a spellslot, but will land on the rest of the group where it has a working effect.

how about that? it would really really help, and I think having it demand a buffslot on the rest of the group would be a limiting enough factor. This would also limit its use to scenarios where youre not using sss, and dont have certain classes in group, and would still make it suck for raids. It would also mean that at lower lvls when youre probably not running around with as many clickies and you dont have soulshroud yet it would still take up a slot.
 
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I think the buff slot arguement is pretty invalid considering it's a 3 tic duration. Recourses, ashpyres, etc can easily share a buff spot with this. I think it's awesome that all the complaining about shadowknights has resulted in something like this....there are some pretty awesome implications with a spell like this. Just as an example of something I would like to see done with this buff: Take a fairly standard-ish xp slaughter group, say 3 rogues, a whatever (monk sounds like a winner to me), a healer, and toss this on an SK into the mix, go somewhere where mass pulls are expected like the rust or HHK. Do the buff, do a mass pull with the monk and have run the mobs over 3 blast traps that were set in advance (+hate on all the mobs x 3), rogues evade, monk FDs, then hammer down mobs one at a time...I'd like to see the actual outcome of something like that b/c I'm bad at math and abstract thought.

I think shadowknights were already pretty awesome to begin with, but this is pretty cool.
 
I for one am incredibly excited about this. I can already see multiple combinations and scenarios where this would be ridiculously helpful. It's a spell to use when you need it/can plan for it, so the buff slot issue can be worked around. This actually makes me want to play my SK again.


All in all, fantastic idea so far. Hope to see it implemented well.
 
Yes as a matter of fact, especially with a shadowknight. Vortex, Succubus, Ashpyre, Random mob based debuffs(Suppression ,tashania, malo, random dots that land on you), call to battle,rbow, random dps clickies (flames of rage/concealed strikes), Deathsave, and even more shit I forgot. Not including the rage you get when you fill someones first buff slot they are preserving to dispell malo because it cannot be resisted and casted all the time.

There is simply no room for manaskin.

Edit: I don't even use shaman stats and I constantly roll with 13/14 buffs, I could have more.

So you use it when you need it for big pulls, have dps click their call to battle for the pull and they can put it back on after..

*whew* that was really hard to figure out..
 
Will we be able to cast this on different groups, or only the one's we're in at the time?

And regarding buff slots, this effectively allows DPS classes more room to do what they do best, by reducing their agro by a fair chunk, even if the SK isn't tanking. If the SK IS the one tanking, it raises the bar even higher. I'm sure you can live without CTB or your fantastic Illusion: Gender or whatever for 18 seconds for that.
 
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I am having trouble believing some of the posts by Shadowknights here. For years we've been asking for some form of AE aggro and we finally get something and you're STILL bitching? On some of the hardest content in the game I sometimes run as little as 10 buffs. Click your retarded 5pt DS ring buff off and get over it.

I'd be more than happy to help you test this Cyzaine, if you still need that done. My only question on it is if Voice of Kaezul/Soul Shroud/Aggro tome etc. aggro mods will increase the amount of aggro this spell gives to the Shadowknight?
 
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This seriously seems badass to me and I love that it can be used in conjunction with the aggro generation capabilities of another tank in the group.
 
I know this sounds silly, but will things like Atone, Jolt, Concussion, etc adversely affect this (intentionally or not)?
 
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