Talk:Shadowling (5e Race)

Revision an/or Balancing

-What should be changed to balance it? I have no ideas. Poltrique (talk) 16:06, 26 June 2019 (GMT)}}

Balance Issues

I see that the previous tags were removed on the basis of testing? But in terms of standard, this race doesn't really make much sense and is overly complicated in many aspects:

• It has superior darkvision, and so should have the usual sunlight sensitivity, instead of that light sensibility (Sensibility? You mean sensitivity) which is also not a good idea since it gives you a flat -2 penalty. This is discouraged in 5e in comparison to 4e. Make it more like drow.
• Willful darkness gives truesight. This is something no race really should ever have, even for a limited time. If they do get this, they should get nothing else, and even then they should be slapped with a design disclaimer.
• Shadow body not only gives you the construct type benefits with none of the drawbacks, but you also even get DOUBLE hit points at leveling up?? No way.
• Shadow of Deaths is a conjuration spell for free that triggers at death. It could be toned back to be more balanced, and even then, it would be a prime feature for the race that would kick out just about anything else. This doesn't even have the definition of what the creature is, nor its stat block.
• This thing plus subraces gets a total +4 ASI on top of all that.
• The Solidark subrace lets you get a free conjuration of MULTIPLE shadows and buffs the already broken shadow body. Same problems with voidshadow.
• Shadowborn gets rid of the penalty from sensitivity even. Good grief, and you get a full revive as a revenant. Better than half-orc
• Darkmade gives you better necromancy at lower levels than spells, and even the ability to summon a CR6 for goodness sake. Enough said.
• Blackhound has the same egregious problems as the solidark and shadowborn in mob summoning, and the fact that it gives you three creature types, which just doesn't exist.
• Brightshadow breaks action economy by summoning more mobs and also negating sensitivity.
  

All in all, this thing is a nightmare against balance. I could see this working only in an overpowered setting, and even then, the wording and grammar need a lot of help to be bought to 5e standard. In a typical setting, no way is this ok. It functions more like a monster.--Yanied (talk) 12:26, 10 January 2021 (MST)

Okay, so there's a lot to clarify, so:

• Superior Darkvision has been corrected, it no longer gives a flat -2 penalty, and the light sensitivity, instead of sunlight sensitivity, is by design, as disadvantages don't stacks so having it most of the time is well more than annoying, and I wanted to prevent going toward a race that would encourage solo playing, like giving disadvantage when doing anything with an other player character that would not have darkvision.
• Willfull Darkness gave Truesight so the character would "see" invisible creatures inside, but I seem to have forgotten that it also give sight into the Ethereal plane, so changed into blindsight and added no sight beyond that
• Shadow of death require that the character could see his attacker when he/she dies, and being unconscious prevent that, so it can't be used, except when the character receive enough damage to outright kill it in one attack, which never happen in all of my games, and than it's not even sure to activate with the DC, except in high level play, which is far less useful, as the creatures summoned gets killed quickly in high level play, and in lower level play the creatures summoned will focus target the one that killed the character, and the summoned creatures are not capable of reason, so they won't attack other creature if they can attack the creature that killed the character or move toward that enemy, they will only attack other enemies if they block the path to the killer, and they won't attack like an ally just to stay and continue their chase. The only thing they could do would be to make an ambush, and that's for preventing forcing the player to be That Guy, that ruins plans, because those creatures would just charge strait. Though, adding the stat blocks for the creatures is quite the good idea, and I didn't think about it.
• Shadow body gives less than what the construct type would give and has more penalties than what I could find for the construct type. Also, the thing with double hit points is not, like 2(hit dices + con mod + bonus (from tough feat, for example)) but rather hit dice + 2(con mod) + Bonus, because I wanted that a shadowling who has a negative con mod would be extra frail, but if it had a high con, it would be tough as nails, but I can see that a character with 20 or more constitution would be quite broken, having 100+ additional hit points than an other character of the same class, especially a barbarian, which con is both a boost to AC and hit points, doubling their hit points form an average of 325 with 24 con and the tough feat to an average of 465 with same con and tough feat, so yeah... Changed it to the same bonus as tough feat as, while the idea of a frontline wizard with a negative con mod, that dies constantly to activate the Shadow of death trait is funny, it push the player to min-max as hell, making a front liner/healer? put the highest stat in con, no matter what, or a back liner? with the exception of a healer, Lowest con possible so to activate the trait as much as possible. So now, the 40 hit points bonus at level 20 are not missed for front liners and they don't push to a min-max build as much. (Can still see the play of a solidark 24 con barbarian with tough feat and an almost endless amount of healing potions, that would be quite the damage sponge, or a paladin with same con and with tough feat and heavy armor master, take very little damage from weapons and if needs be can heal itself).
• ASI fixed to be more in line of SRD, though inversed the ASI from general race and Sub race as it doesn't make a difference and my vision of those subraces are more diverse then what a 2-1 ASI could bring.
• Solidark Subrace now spawn less shadows, as in retrospect, I can see that it would be quite the power house if activated and 12 shadows spawned, even at level 20, so 6 shadows max at level 20, while still very powerful, is not as insane, and game breaking.
• Shadowborn, while removing light sensitivity, and making the Shadow of death trait more often, The fact that the player come back as a revenant is also a drawback as, you can't resurrect an undead, nor heal an undead with magic, so it's basically the worst of all of them. Also, if the character dies while it's a revenant, well goodbye, it's the same as the void card of the deck of many things, you can't bring back the character, except with a wish spell, i think, and than the character would probably already it cast to come back to life. I just didn't want to box it so that the resurrection of the character could only be done by a wish.
• Darkmade, the thing with the CR 6 is that it's that the character can't be resurrected as it's an undead, so only a wish or DM quest can solve that, and I didn't want it to be lackluster as it's probably the last act of the character. Also, for the "better necromancy at lower level than spells", well I forgot to specify that only zombie or skeleton form could be made with Willfull Darkness. While it still is stronger than low level spells, I can't find a way to make it weaker as at low level the character could at most control 4 zombies/skeleton, and once destroyed than they can't create more until the 24 hours cooldown and the end of a long rest after that 24 hour. so not as powerful as it look at first glance. and at higher level moving undead giants is basically impossible, with the size of it and the fact that it's an undead so it would only be useful in a singular dungeon. the best use I could find would be to use Minotaur skeletons, as they are the best bang for your buck.
• Blackhound, I can't find what would be the problem with fiend, elemental and humanoid, as fiend and elemental would only be relevant with spells like protection from good and evil or the divine sense of paladin, so it's not really an advantage, it's just a possible hook for rollplay, and for the summons, it's not reliable to use, and the enemies just have to leave or lock the summon for an hour to get rid of them, also there's the fact that those summon are described as parts of the soul of the character, so if the character gets resurrected before the timer is up for them, they disappear, as you need the soul of the person to be free and willing.
• Brightshadow, Same thing about the fact that you need to die form a singular attack while conscious. But I still drop the number of creature spawned from 1 will o wisp and 2 shadows to 1:1.

Poltrique (talk) 20:28, 12 November 2021 (EST)

The balance tag was removed, but I still see some glaring issues...

In terms of "solo playing" I'm not sure that is supported by 5e innately. I think all games more or less assume there to be party, and thus all content is built that way. Therefore, bulking up on one and making it powerful for that reason warrants a design disclaimer already. Solo campaigns require more DM fiats than an inherently powerful race. There are also the usual culprits of wording and links here. Anyway, back to the traits.

• The Superior Darkvision + sunlight sensitivity is better but the wording for sunlight sensitivity I see has been modified to be a weaker nerf. The idea of your "face" being in light doesn't make any sense because that's not really mechanically grounded. There is a reason why sunlight sensitivity is written with the creature's location in mind, rather than a part of their body. This makes for unnecessary fights at the table about whether your player is facing in a cave or outside. The plain sunlight sensitivity would be a better choice.
• Casting darkness on yourself for Willful darkness makes no sense since the spell affects a point within range, not a creature you can touch. That's a small dink. The bigger dink is THIS HAS NO DURATION. You even gain +5 AC, breaking pretty much bounded accuracy. As if that wasn't enough, you gain complete invulnerability to nonmagical attacks on top of immunity to a damage type. The CON save you make every turn is also false balance because what the heck are you going to do at higher levels when the save surpasses the possible checks you can make? This just isn't feasible. The most you can do for a race is try to make a 1-minute transformation like shifter. Even then, you cannot give so many benefits or you risk surpassing the power of a barbarian's darn rage (which already gives resistance to BPS!)
• Shadow body is still confusing. So on top of immunity to poison and disease, you are only unconscious for part of your rest? What's that supposed to do? It really doesn't balance out the immunity PLUS the additional hit points gained per level (which still make no sense to me. You're not a toughie, you're a dark wisp I shine a light at), which is 2, not even just 1 (which is what galapian gets. The -2 to initiative is also false balance and thus unnecessary. The flavor is all over the place for this trait.
• If you die, how do you still have a line of sight? Also, among the options you summon with Shadows of death is a freaking CR6! This has been pared back, but it is still a trait that takes over most of the balance budget here. There needs to be some culling at this point.

Now onto the subs:

• Solidark can be resistant to all damage types. Wow. I can see this being a race's SINGLE trait (and for only like one round maybe). But this race is already over saturated. Same goes for summoning not just one but multiple possible shadows.
• Voidshadow's nebula is flavored like you disintegrate everything. Is that what you mean? That is OP as heck. Also, this is the CR6 summoner.
• Correct me if I'm wrong but Shadowborn can copy magic items?? What the heck, that's a class feature if any, and not even Artificer has anything that broken at 1st level. Also, this one isn't even affected by sunlight anymore. Also, also, coming back as a revenant REALLY should be a DM's ruling. Or coming back in general, really. Closest to "usable" I have seen is on the shade race. And you can see that has a disclaimer.
• Darkmade is trying to put necromancy magic out of a job at low levels. Also, triple type, again, does not exist in 5e. Also, my goodness, the sheer summoning after death.
• Blackhound summons a CR3 and can cast a mass invisibility over an area... Just yikes. Also, triple type aaaand super death summons again.
• Willful darkness just gets weirdly versatile with brightshadow. This also can ignore sensitivity and summons not only wisps but also shadows, oh my.

This race doesn't seem to be very well along the trail to balance as the changes made do not tackle the incredibly imbalanced way everything is loaded and overdone. This is much more like a powerful monster than a race for an adventurer to start as. In addition, the power level of the traits are much more like that of a mid to high-tier play of class than anything a race should get. If further balance is not possible, it is probably wiser to make this a class or subclass instead because with the summoning and the resistances and... everything, this is just too much.

My suggestions are to model this after other shadow races like shadow fiend or shadow walker, which are more balanced and pared down. If needed, look at comparable Featured Articles to better grasp how races in 5e should be built trait wise, like the nocturne. Otherwise, consider taking these powerful traits and turning them into a shadow class or something else more appropriate. If you wish for this to still remain a race in its imbalanced state, you will have to keep it in a user page due to the balancing difficulties it poses.--Yanied (talk) 21:10, 12 November 2021 (MST)