Quote Originally Posted by GeneralDiomedes View Post
Consider one other aspect to the phasing. If I'm not mistaken, the 50% incorporeal miss chance does not apply to many spells as we have no touch attacks. Therefore, the only way to give Shadows the ability to 'dodge' spells is to make them phase. Some will argue that we should just implement touch attacks, but those same people have also suggested many other changes that will never, ever get implemented with the resources the dev team currently has (this would fall into that category). I suppose the doable game mechanic change would be to make shadows zoom around much faster thereby making them harder to hit with ranged spells/attacks (or even give them the ability to dodge ).

As for difficulty? If you remove phasing, they will just die even faster in a firewall (or by any other method), making the quests that much easier. Since DDO quests are mostly and exercise in resource preservation, killing things faster means the quest is easier (to those that just say phasing makes it longer and more annoying, but not harder). Shadows will need some beefing up to compensate. More frequent attacks would be the obvious one as their ratio of attacks to the time they are vulnerable to attack just went down considerably.

And if I'm not further mistaken, I thought that the Monster Manual description of Shadows described their tactics (in part) as popping out of a wall in a dark corner somewhere, making an attack on an unsuspecting adventurer, and then popping back in. Sounds like it's in the spirit of phasing at least.

On another note .. lets see some Blink Dogs!
In pen and paper, any magical spell can be avoided 50% of the time by an incorporeal creature unless the spell has the [Force] descriptor. So, I says remove phasing and give spells a 50% miss chance, just like attacks. It can't be that hard.