I've seen people begging for Shadowstep on Ninja for quite a while now.
Now, I'll first say that I hate the idea. I tried to keep magic away from Ninja as much as possible. Blitz is pretty much the only exception to this rule, and hey! Everyone and their mom complains about how it "doesn't fit". Shadowstep is a teleport. Plain and simple, it is a magic based ability that places you "behind" your target, and I just didn't want to add that in. In addition to the magic theme it grants, It also puts too much focus on Ninja's backstabs, which in my opinion, pushes him over the line of "Ninja" to a "Rogue" or "Assassin" type class. To me, Ninja is interesting because it offers a different approach to typical rogue classes that you see in MMO's. Adding Shadowstep is just pushing the class in the wrong direction.
All of my personal feelings aside, I'm going to lay this on you all. I'm wondering if the people asking for Shadowstep ever played Dreadknight when it had the skill. If not, I have some bad news for you.
The Skill
Sucks
Balls.
Sucks balls you say!? How could this be! It teleports you behind your target, so we can get off lots of backstabs! Delf, you're an idiot!
No, actually, it doesn't. I mean, if that target is standing completely still, yes, yes it does do exactly what you want. However, if that target is moving, it usually teleports you about 2-5 blocks behind your target, which is often completely out of melee range. Why does it do this? Well, because all teleport skills that we make, we have to provide checks to prevent exploits. Due to these checks, it actually spends a lot of time making sure that you can actually teleport to where you want to teleport to. By the time it finishes, the person you were teleporting to is nowhere near where he originally was. I did my best to try and improve this proccess. I reworked the logic at least 3 times trying to appease the outcries of the Dreadknights, but in the end, it was never good enough.
There is a reason it was removed from Dreadknight. It's just a shitty skill for HC. If we never had to worry about players using these things to teleport through walls, maybe things would be better, but we do, and so it sucks. The only possible way to make it not suck is to apply a stun to it, which the balance team discussed in brief while DK still had the skill. It made a little bit more sense back then, and I probably could have done it. However, the whole reason for it's existence was for it to be paired with Harrow, a life leech nuke that could only be cast if you were behind the target. I thought Harrow was a really wonky and unreliable skill for HC, and therefore decided it was best that I simply remove both of the skills, and try to push a different theme onto the DK. I won't say the final DK turned out amazing, but at least people aren't raging about how their primary offensive skills don't work anymore.
Going back to the Ninja, when people were originally asking for Shadowstep, the only way it would make sense would be to do what we wanted to do with DK, give it a stun. However, the Ninja already had Blackjack, and did not need another stun. Seeing as how I hated the idea anyways, and I had just had FrontFlip rejected by the big man, this made it very easy for me to ignore the request.
Now that Ninja doesn't have a stun, well, you could add it. I wouldn't like it, but it would work. I can't say I know how Kainzo feels about all of this, but regardless of how he feels, the Dreadknight section contains nothing but facts. ShadowStep is slow, and it's ineffective. You cannot have this skill exist in any form without a stun. It just doesn't work.
I just wanted to throw all this out there since people are bringing it up again.
