[renowner]

Yeah I'm a spellthief currently, after having not played the game for a good long while. I tried to make the smoke wall work but its just entirely useless most of the time. Pretty much everyone has an option to move before attacking, leaving the smokescreen, or just you know. . Moving one tile to get out. A line of smoke is just kind've the most useless way for smoke to be used.

When its tied to ninjutsu, you can make smoke with a bomb. So you also get some damage, and its an AoE.
Bakaga shuriken lets you apply smoke while striking someone.

Smokescreen from spellthief lets you. . . Pretty much just waste three momentum, really. You'd be better off using distortion or invisible weapon or something.

I also never really notice anyone cast confusion either, since a single target confusion that does no damage isn't usually worth the effort. Maybe we could have it changed to combine the two? Smoke that has a chance to confuse when you cast it on someone? I still don't really think i'd use it at that point but it would at least be SOMETHING to make it less useless.

[Collector]

It's true. Behold, flank jail.


(Smoke Screen is in a pretty good spot and doesn't need a change, but these suggestions aren't bad. If it becomes a circle the hit number might need to be tweaked, though.)

Okay, so this is a pretty good example of how people are wrong about smoke screen. The only person that hit debuff applies to is you if you do this. You need to be standing IN the smoke screen for the hit debuff to touch you. If you fire into it from outside of the smoke, there's no hit debuff. Putting yourself in a corner under smokescreen doesn't do anything but hurt your own HIT.

Ninjitu does seem to apply to ST smokescreens, though.

And the idea that putting it below an enemy means they HAVE to move is kinda the problem we're addressing here. It's a 3m skill that does nothing but prompts an enemy to use a movement ability, one that will probably take them out of the smoke screen, do damage, maybe move you in the process, and just generally have better value than 'make an enemy move for less momentum than the spell's cost.'

Smokescreen has a bunch of other problems such as a lack of spamability. You can only have 1 down at a time, probably because at one point it could be used to obfuscate an entire battlefield which, as someone who used it a lot when it was a thing, was an awful mechanic and please don't ever suggest it being a thing again. RIP the good ol' days of screenshotting a battlefield every time I threw down a bomb, but also I won't miss it.

It's a 3 momentum trade that you will always lose in terms of value unless the person under it just has no idea what they're doing. It could theoretically be comboed with some form of immobilize, but even then it's not the skill that's doing the heavy lifting in that case. It needs a change to actually have some possibility of impacting a match other than being a trap option that will only put the caster behind in terms of momentum.

New Suggestion: Lower it to Lv15-25 and keep it as 3m for its first cast, but any time you cast smokescreen with one already active, it deletes the old (which it already does) and makes a new one but refunds 2m?

I'm... out of the smokescreen, dude. It's not my turn. The point is the person IN the corner has to teleport out or endure flank jail. It's a funny joke.

Also, 'lack of spammability' is the opposite of a problem; it's balanced in that regard as-is. Making an enemy move is a rather powerful ability in certain situations (See: formations). The 'trade' in this case is making the enemy move. Lowering the level of smokescreen and having it refund M makes the problem worse, not better.

One of STs strong points is utility. Having an ability that can make enemies move is a great utility.

[FaeLenx]

>Counters formations

I don't know if you're just memeing at this point.