How useful is Shadow Meld

I am in the process of respecing my DM/DA scrapper and trying to decide between Dark Mastery to get Tenebrous Tenticles (more AoE is nice) or going Soul Matery to unlock Shadow Meld for emergencies and alpha absorber (I would be above the def soft cap with SM on).

My two reservations are lossing the AoE (although a 30 degree cone is not great) and the 3 sec animaiton for SM. It seems like in an emergency by the time 3 secs are up you will be dead. So it would most likely only get pulled out at the start of tough fights.

Has anyone tired Shadow Meld much and have suggestions. This character will be mostly solo with some small teams.
Thanks.

From what I hear Shadow Meld is good for the exact reasons you mentioned. Not as an auto-toggle power but as a situational power for absorbing alphas and for emergencies. Remember DA has another emergency/alpha dealing power in Dark Regen, so you'll have plenty of time to use SM alongside it if needed.

TT is a really subpar AoE power for a melee toon. You don't want to have to go out of melee to fire an AoE on a scrapper.

The three second animation isn't a problem because Shadow Meld doesn't root you. Fire it off while running to the next spawn and you'll be able to absorb alphas easily.

I have Shadow Meld on an Elec/Elec scrapper and love it. Decided against it on my DM/DA because I needed conserve power and wanted physical perfection.

Thanks for the input guys. I was a little surprised, is sifting about in the forums a bit I had the impression people didn't generally think much of SM.

I picked SM on an elec/elec stalker and i love it. Kick in SM, run into the middle of the spawn...hit BU, AS the boss...then LR the rest of the mob....GLORIOUS!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Smiling_Joe ::looks at RaikenX's signature:: Something funny.

Shadow Meld is nice but I have seen a lot of dark armor builds with fairly significant defense to all in the the low 30s. That much defense, your resistances, awesome heal and ability to lock down half a spawn with OG or CoF in my mind would make Shadow Meld somewhat redundant.

I actually like the combo of Teneberous Tentacles and Nightfall for real significant aoe damage. Both attacks are on timers of 20 seconds which combined with almost any significant recharge in your build gives you a viable aoe attack chain. People are also underestimating the width of TT it is a wide, wide cone. Nightfall is awesome but fairly narrow so most dont like it, I happen to be a big fan though. Then both attacks have fairly lare to hitdebuffs, I am not a numbers guy so dont quote me but I want to say 7.5%tohitdebuff on TT not sure about nightfall. That is pretty significant if you are sporting low 30s/high 20s defense numbers.

Now that I have made that elaborate argument I will say it really depends on your toon, dark armor especially needs to be in the spawn to work and jumping back out to fire off cone aoe would be somewhat counterproductive. TT is still a viable option because of how wide the cone is, you should be able to fire it from the edge of a spawn and hit most of them well keeping them all in your auras and heal range. It will stop the aimless wandering that OG can cause too! It looks cool and fits thematically. I would actually avoid nightfall on a dark armor toon, you really have to back up quite a bit to catch most the spawn, otherwise it turns into the shadow maul of ranged attacks, looks great hits for a bunch but tricky to use.

My spines/regen uses the dark mastery and the combo of throw spines, teneberous tentacles, run in spine burst run out other side Nightfall just melts spawns. It's a lot of fun, I call him the lord of the cones...I should make him into a female toon called "Check out my Cones!"

I haven't tried Shadow Meld, but I can tell you that I found Night Fall and TT to be kind of a pain to use on a DM/DA. I had five Posis in each and a recharge in NF, so I was hitting ED with damage, but they just really didn't do much. I was disappointed, because the character concept is a magic type and the ranged attacks really fit, but even using Soul Drain and backing up, I just didn't do that much damage.

So overall I don't think you'd be losing that much. I still miss the idea of it, but in practice, those powers just don't do enough to justify backing out of combat to use them.

The last I knew, the Dark Blast AoE clone powers in the Darkness Mastery epic pool were still using ranged damage modifiers, meaning they do less than 1/2 the damage you would expect. If that's been fixed, that's fantastic, but if it hasn't, they aren't worth having unless you have some really excellent use for the immobilize in TT.

Is that a bug, then? If that's the case, I might just shelve that scrapper entirely until they fix it. Cones still aren't optimal in a pbaoe-centric scrapper, but I really liked the concept and kind of missed them when they were gone. I just ultimately had to drop them because the damage was so low.

I find shadow meld useful

Shadow Meld is extremely useful. If you happen to get defense debuffed just pop it and you'll be fine. I use it on my claws/wp and while it's up I'm soft capped to every damage type in the game.. Also, if I remember correctly, the defense buff it gives is instant. It doesn't wait until after the 3 second animation to become active. Hope this helps.

I used SM on my db/elec when i played him it works great if used properly it has a long animation kick it off when you are about to run into a large mob group or if you just used your heal and taking tons of damage heal kick SM start killing things gives you a boost for a short spurt to be able to whittle down the bad guys and give your heal time to recycle.

Worked great when I used it like I would mog on a regen