The Invisible Blade class has a few issues that make it in need of a rework. Firstly, it takes too long to stack up bleed, which is the class's primary mechanic. By the time that the bleed reaches a respectable amount, the enemy should be long dead. Additionally, Eviscerate, one of the class's signature abilities, is implemented poorly - its use case is set to NEVER it’s INFINITELY better to let the bleed stack and use dirty fighting, instead of clearing bleed stacks for negligible damage. Finally, the Arcane Bleed and Crippling Throw abilities are a bit awkward to use.
Below, I’ve outlined some ideas that can serve to make the class more effective and a lot more fun to play with. The ideas remove the passive bleeding concept and instead allows the class to rely on it's active abilities to bleed any foes.
Bleeding Wound: Damage that the IB deals accumulates as wounds. This should be a counter of how much damage the IB has dealt to the target. The damage should stack, but have some fall off
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Hemmorhage: Instant activation - wounds on the target opens. This causes bleeding damage equal to some formula.
Sample formula:
Wounds = (Damage Round 1 + Damage Round 2 + Damage Round 3)
DEX Scaling = 1+(DEX Modifier/30)
ROUGISH Scaling = 1+((ROUGISH/6)*0.25)
Here, the 15 DEX mod multiplies the base damage by 1.5x
The ROUGISH scaling is in place to limit the potential damage from something like a Weapon Master’s crit.
With no ROUGISH, the damage is halved.
The (damage) can then be dealt twice per round over 3 rounds.
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Eviscerate:
Deals weapon damage + Sneak Attack die as bleed damage
If(TWF)
Rolls a second attack with half sneak die.
Bleed damage is empowered if the target is at 50% health.
Eviscerated targets have 15% physical and bleeding damage vulnerability for X rounds.
This makes Eviscerate a two-fold ability. If used as an opener, the IB can deal additional damage that can be used to boost the bleeding power of Hemmorhage. However, if used on a lower health target, it can be used to attempt to secure the kill with the empowered damage.
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Crippling Throw:
With the change, this would no longer cause bleeding. Instead, maybe it can deal weapon damage + SNEAK die damage. It should retain the slow.
It'd be nice if the weapon restriction could be adjusted to focus on Rogue weapons overall, instead of the 'one-size-lower' clause. Additionally, it might be a decent option if allowed with thrown weapons (Explicitly: shuriken, dart, throwing knife, throwing axe) as they've received no love recently.