Elf careers shade and handmaiden low risk high reward

people dealt with the density in the NDA tests and 1.05 beta though. legend just required a more specialized party and people had a role to fill, rather than “lol everyone can kill everything i dunno :man_shrugging:”. as it is now the game is nothing more than an arcade game and people trying to compete for the high score at the end of the level because everyone is a meat grinder and shotguns can kill specials from 30 feet away.

the only way difficulty comes back at this point is by doing things people have already cried about endlessly, IE character nerfs or spawn rates. there was a shot to change it up, but instead listened to people that fluked their way into legend due to the game being completely broken on launch and didn’t want it taken away from them. there’s a reason the average legend random is absolutely atrocious and nobody works together.

they’re backed into a corner here and i wouldn’t expect it to change.

honestly a flat change to the skill won’t work since each weapon’s damage is different with it. each individual weapon would have to have its multipliers tuned i think, due to some of the things listed above, or maybe the cooldown changes depending on the weapon. that’s a hell of a lot of work though and would need people actually putting together competent lists and values which seems to be asking a lot nowadays.

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I agree, but it’s still worth a try. Some things are blatently too strong.

Yeah, tuning ults and cooldown reduction depending on certain weapons seems like a necessary and difficult thing to do. If they’re willing to do it, it would be amazing though. Dual Swords for example require a bit more cooldown reduction to remain viable on higher difficulties.

I’d also add that starting with nerfs on a melee class rather than the OP ranged careers seems like the wrong way to do things. Ranged are carrying too hard and you won’t know what the game will be like until you balance those first.

(CDR builds)

Maybe you need a new difficulty level created. Some of the recent buffs are just now making veteran enjoyable for 3 of my friends. They still prefer other games because the melee feels grindy. They enjoyed vt1 so its not the nature of the game they have an issue with…

If a single weapon makes a career feel overpowered, the weapon is at fault, not the career. Same with a single ability. Glaive is certainly a bit too good at everything at the moment, but the Daggers really sacrifice a lot of utility for their single-target power. The Glaive is a specialized armor/Elite killer, and it does that thing well. What makes it too good is that it still kills hordes quite well too, and armored enemies in hordes too. Reduce its cleave a bit, maybe also its light attack AP and it soon turns from a jack-of-all-trades to a specialized weapon that can still do other things at a reduced efficiency.

Handmaiden’s Gift of Ladrielle may well be too powerful even if considered by itself, but especially compared to the other two options. If the increased damage hit some useful breakpoints (likely to kill clan rats or Fanatics) it might be useful, but that’s hard to test at the moment, but I think there are mods that would help. And Dash already has one of the shortest cooldowns, so that reduced even more, especially as you need to use time to position yourself well before every use, is quite poor choice too. The best that could be done would be to buff the extra damage to useful breakpoints (and give us relevant numbers about it), and figure something else to replace the reduced cooldown. Not sure what the latter should be though. Damage reduction? Cheaper pushes? Ideas are needed.

Shade’s cooldown does certainly feel a bit too short right now, and did feel like it to me even when it was reduced to its current state. Tweaking the cooldown by weapon(s) equipped would likely be too much work, both balancing- and code-wise. Tweaking the damage multipliers is quite doable though, as there already are different multipliers for some weapons. Otherwise, I think Shade is in quite a good place atm.

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I’m not gonna make a grand case as everyone has made it blatanlty obvious, DnD is a risk reward weapon that MIGHT have a bit too much damage on chaos warriors shrug imho tho, i think they’re fine.

Glaive is the issue, always has been it’s TOO good all around. It does everything without drawbacks i can’t fathom certain weapons keep getting nerfed or altered when the glaive just sits there being… well a cookie cutter.

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I’ve noticed dual daggers producing higher numbers on charged attacks than dual axes. With the extra power talent on handmaiden/shade, you can one-shot charged headshot stormvermin, berserkers, and plaguemonks, with shade ult for deleting chaos warriors. Slayer can’t do that to stormvermin without stacks (or a heavy % build) and can’t do that to berserkers without a crit.

The charged attacks on dual daggers also don’t rely on stamina, so shade/handmaiden end up with better melee boss dps than slayer as well (not counting shade ult).

I’m not advocating for a nerf or a buff to either weapon necessarily, just bringing up a balancing decision that confused me: Why does Slayer with dual axes have worse anti-elite/anti-boss melee than dual dagger handmaiden or shade?

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Because dual axes push attack/charged attack got nerfed, it used to onehit stormvermin on highest difficulty. On the other hand, dual daggers recently got damage buffed.

When did dual axes get nerfed? The only change I remember was when they fixed the hero power scaling and everything scaled down (1.0.5), but that was a nerf to everything.

I agree at least in terms of class balance, people complain way too much and frankly most of them seem like apes anyway. “muh favorite class isn’t as good as this class, plz nerf”

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The power scaling had huge impact to some raw damage output classes. Recent buff to shade I think is good step, and I am looking forward to see others get buffed as well.

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Dear OP
Is it that hard to ask for a buff to something you like (that actually needs it) rather than nerfs to what you don’t like?

What happened to live and let live?

E.G
I use slayer most games, i think he should gain a trait that boosts his dmg, for the rest of the stage after a Roger/troll/sf/cs has been killed… (10-20%)

There was that hard?

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That’s the point. Utility.

People are free to play any character and career how they please.

Sure love the lie and exaggeration.

Are you sure you aren’t talking about yourself? All your complaints sure make it seem like one too many Kerillian players took your precious green circles and now you’re on the forums throwing a temper tantrum. Your post could be entirely condensed into one sentence: “Kerillian players are doing better than me so her careers and weapons should be nerfed because my opinion and feelings are more important than actual balance, reality, and all other players.” Rather than posting non-sense, post something of actual constructive substance.

All relevant.

Why? Having maps full of chaos warriors makes them a joke. Starting empire in flames and having 8 chaos warriors before you even get in the first burnt down building and you want to not have a function to kill them efficiently on a periodic basis? Or when so many runs are inundated with armor and elites or there are deeds that make the game significantly more challenging.

I swear there are so many of these threads where people either lie through their teeth or they don’t play the game. Still lying either way, I suppose. Some runs the director is nicer. But most runs, the maps have so many elites and armor that these functions to deal with them quickly are necessary. I don’t want to be in a game where a Chaos warrior takes forever to kill and then the map has 50+ of them. Especially when 8+ are condensed in a small area and it’s like fighting old patrols every so often. Then you all forget that most of this gets sucked into the fight with hordes, specials, and bosses.

Before you people post this drivel, actually take a hard look at the game and thoroughly think about the design and the implications of taking certain courses of action; especially when these actions would affect all of the player base and not just you.

18 Likes

+to this

I’ve also had significantly more frontloaded armour in my games recently, paired with high density patrols. I’d honestly rather wait with looking at further balance till they’ve slightly reverted some of the HS nerfs and have done some quality-of-life work on some of the 2handed weapons in the game (animations/attackspeed bugs etc.)

I currently mainly play UC and Shade and I’ve helped clutch plenty of situations as a shade, sure - but those wouldn’t have succeeded if not for decent teammates doing their part as well; and stacking classes is inherently going to feel bad if you’re all using the same weapon-types. I always ask my ranged classes what they’re using so I can switch over to hagbane/LB/Repeater or to switch between flamewave/fireball.

One of the main reasons people will call BS/feels bad currently seem to derive from situations where you have 4 tanks or 4 ranged and they’re like ‘‘Where my green circles at’’ when you literally force the game into a first-come-first-served basis then as well as leaving yourself open to threats you can’t address.

I think Shade is in quite an OK spot atm in terms of healthy risk/reward, especially when even the slightest latency is involved with DD the threat ramps up significantly. It’s a very twitch-based class and even with the ‘‘instant ult’’ I never have it up often enough to kill every elite out there on a whim with it. A lot of it is just solid AIMING for the headshots with DD and quick follow up charge attacks.

Sure we can take out every first CW but I’m gonna have to haul ass and hit something to get my ult back up if I want to kill more, and that puts me at more risk too. They don’t ‘‘just fall over’’ when I’m hitting them either, that’s just RNG crits if anything and with mobs being able to stack inside Chaos Warriors and bosses you have to be very aware of what you’re fighting and whats going around you.

With a concoction AND decanter things change, but you spec into that as well so you’re sacrificing stuff for it. Much like the shotgun builds ranger veterans use to great success, you spec into that too.

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Rewind to a month ago when everyone was saying that shade and handmaiden were useless and not worth playing. Just leave it be if it works well for God’s sake.

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They’re supposed to be two of the hardest enemies in the game on the hardest difficulty in the game. The rate at which the cooldown recharges means that you can delete almost every CW you’ll meet in a map. You can clearly see a pattern in weapon buffs to add more Arp, and to add more Arp to Kerillian’s weapons especially. This will likely continue through all of the careers and weapons.

The reason Shade’s ult cooldown was reduced in the first place was because of a lack of arp, which made her feel useless. Now that she’s getting it, the ultimate doesn’t need to be as strong. The point is, at the minute there’s no need to build for certain damage as you can always just ult one-shot elites and chunk bosses just because ult is up. What’s the point in having such an in-depth and prolongued gearing process, if some abilities let you bypass stats entirely?

You can take Elite killing builds as any career and use Elite killing weapons as any career. You can then use these to focus Elites and do your job. They still won’t one-shot Chaos Warriors like some ults do.

If you feel that strongly that you want to one-shot Chaos Warriors and Elites, you could always play lower difficulties. Not even saying this to mock, but as a legitimate alternative.

I’m not even saying I want rid of it. Just that it shouldn’t be such a short cooldown if weapons are being made better for Elite killing and that you should have to properly build for the maximum amount of damage from it.

Also:

Interesting points about Shade’s ult.

(CDR builds)

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They’re buffing the reasons she was ‘useless’, after already buffing her to make up for said uselessness. That’s going to make her too strong, obviously.

(CDR builds)

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Would be nice to have a devs perspective on this.

If there’s anything they should change it’s the ridiculous risk involved with the first and last few seconds of stealth, if they do that then sure add a few seconds. But if I’m forced to block for the first 5+ seconds of stealth and potentially even die because everything finishes it’s animation, and even bosses chase me around the map for the first 3-8 seconds of stealth then just no.

Especially not if everything will actually cancel its animation or turn it my way when I exit stealth. Which will be forcing you to turtle the moment you touch something, every-time since you get no time to react otherwise.

For context I had a flame ogre kill me in stealth today when he suddenly turned to me (nobody behind me) and I’d already been in stealth for nigh half the duration. I know flame/gunrats will keep shooting if you enter stealth when they’ve started and I’m fine with that but bosses giving you the finger when your stealth should have long since been active is just risky as heck.

Essentially saying it’s nice they tweaked some ARP but if you want to change her ult then give her QOL changes first. Also feel like glaive has suffered a bit through 1.8.0.1 and I never use it anymore myself.

And then there’s the damage caps for bosses that have been keeping her in check from ‘‘one-shotting them’’ which already made them plenty more challenging and forces you to have a concoction on you.

What made Kruber so overpowered was that he had a series of shots all lined up with his ultimate, and then there was the machinegun bug - this setup allowed him to practically ignore the damage cap with his repeated damage and his safety-from-ranged since he could theoretically be halfway across the map by figure-of-speech where shade can get the classic ‘‘180-slam’’ and get her teeth knocked out.

Boss-dancing is something that takes a bit of practice and a good shade plays a lot differently than your average shade.

I should also add they may want to look into concoction spawn algorithms first because I’ve encountered spots where there was repeatedly spawns of 2-3 concoctions spread across a map with barely any other potions…

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Op said these careers were a cakewalk from the start.

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Was speaking about CW, not Bosses. She chunks bosses. Sorry if I’ve given that impression though. The point of her chunky Boss damage was that she doesn’t have to really build for that. She can do it with any weapon or any build. While it’s nice to have a little extra vs them, I still think you should have to build a lot more than you do to reach the damage she’s reaching without.

As with Huntsman, Shade has issues with her ultimate. I don’t think that makes up for how strong it is though. Being smacked the instant you come out of stealth is pretty annoying. There’s plenty more risk to reward with her sure. Cooldown builds seem to take away from that though, as any time there’s a spooky Elite, you can just off them in an instant. Once they’re out of the way it’s just mopping up infantry.

(CDR builds)