Elf careers shade and handmaiden low risk high reward

The point is she shouldn’t be able to be a one man army she has to have flaws for her teammates to make up for. I wont sit here and pretend like glaive has it flaws it doesn’t on legend I run it with SS and power v chaos/As and I can do everything better than a slayer or an ez mode halberd can. I just pop my ult with hm and go behind the horde and deal with it in no time flat.

Those cooldown builds also often force you to give up valuable +dmg modifiers for fighting off other things however, which then forces you to brute force your way through other situations (assuming you’re going the ‘‘min-max’’ route.)

And honestly only daggers seem to dish out reliable single target burst versus bosses and they force you to practically hug the boss every stab which again brings you back to the 180 slam risk where you’re just going to be out of the fight, get flung away or have any potions you had running end by the time you’re up.

What they could look into is the non-charged leftclick damage on stealth and make it more reliant on heavies since you can 1shot CW’s with just leftclicking on daggers which I felt was a bit silly to the point where I just charge attack them simply for flair.

I noted earlier that;

Getting behind isn’t always an option either due to hordes/other stuff that can whack you in the back of the head. Bloodfletcher also doesn’t always seem to reliably give ammo back either by the way… even when mobs are facing entirely away from you their unit-frame doesn’t seem to agree.

My point with that is that this would mean that the extra backstab damage isn’t reliably applied either.

I’m very happy for you that you seem to be one of the few people not eating dirt when they try that in an actual horde and immediately get surrounded by aggro-swaps and animation-cancels as they suddenly prioritize you on a whim! If I try this I’ll spend most of the time blocking and being target practice if I’m not with my back up against a wall because I won’t even get the time to start dodging even starting at max range. That’s with daggers though.

Which is why I simply can’t see this happening:

I never use my ult against true hordes since the cleave on it is horrible and unreliable and it’ll make aggro clunky for myself and my teammates as mobs will suddenly turn to them and hit them or turn to me and hit me when I enter/exit stealth. More often than not people will use it as an escape or as an elite-killer and even then you’ll have to rely on double-heavy attacks to kill off any extra elites, sure the ult charges fast and sure you can get it up in a few seconds on a dummy with critbuild but that isn’t actual games.

What I won’t argue however, is that in a coordinated 4man premade team it really excels, but what else would you expect - everything does if you communicate properly…?

More often than not I suffer a lot of risk as DD shade playing in pugs especially when there’s no other melee around or you get a ranged ironbreaker. To get by I duo with a footknight in most of my games these days.

Here’s the picture of the stormfiend in question that downed me in stealth after we as a group-effort clutched a stormfiend and a chaos patrol (??? AI DIRECTOR PLEASE) that all spawned in one spot, along with all sorts of specials and disablers, you name it we had it twice-over. It was challenging enough I assure you, we’re usually players with 50-300 damage taken and were by no means prepared for this. Had there not been a shade, bountyhunter AND a footknight we’d have died before even starting, and we still nearly died, one of us actually did - we all went down once. If not for the bombs from the ranger veteran we would’ve died too.

The fire-while-dead bug is nice btw, please leave that in fatshark, it was our well-deserved reward.

edit: On a different topic, lately I’ve been finding myself not enjoying waystalker at all. They really need to fix the ‘‘1 damage on chaos warrior headshots’’ with longbow :confused: Especially with how frequently they seem to spawn now… I’d almost rather have less CW’s spawn and have them be twice as strong, but that’s just me. They’ve always felt weak to me since closed-beta compared to how ‘‘strong’’ they’re depicted on the trailers and such. I had the impression before CBT that they were mini-boss fights almost the tier of a regular ogre.

So I’d say a lot of the issues with ‘‘Waa X can oneshot Y’’ stem from the CW’s just spawning too frequently and needing more power instead to be more of a threat. Rather than numbers.

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Daggers are ridiculous and so is the Hagbane bow. To me they make Slayer and Huntsman redundant.

You don’t even need to be a shade. Handmaiden is better. Why? Hagbane and a faster ULT and access to daggers.

CW? Dagger = dead, Boss? Hagbane = Dead(Strength pot? super dead) ULT not needed for fast kills here.

Here comes the “but but but daggers suck against hordes!”

Please, with resourceful management and daggers, I’m ULTing like it’s going out of style wrecking hordes sliding through them.

The only thing that they suck at are these phantom hits they get every now and then.

Yet here I am as Slayer, with okay block attacks that are fast, but daggers are just as good if not better and my boss damage is no where near a handmaids with hagbane bow. Huntsman with his ULT isn’t even as good as it. Go figure.

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I won’t go too deep into this debate, cause I don’t really care about it, but this sentence is bothering me.
Career ARE designed to fill a role (or more than one, but not all). Of course, a skilled player can do everything with every career, but you can see by the way they’re built, than they have a purpose.
So yes, imo, you shouldn’t be able to tell yourself “We don’t need Boss damage because we got x Career” but more “We need Boss Damage, we could use a Shade”
Of course, having a Shade shouldn’t guarantee you that you get Boss damage, maybe the player is using some kind of build not focused on Boss dealing…

It’s kinda hard to express my point, but I hope you get it xD
Career are designed toward a few roles, and thus they’re easily (not only from facility, but people will tend to do so) buildable toward it. So yes, when in need of a specific task, you should be able to pick Careers you want to bring.

PS : About that, I feel this is where some career fail. Battle Wizard, Which Hunter Captain have no real purpose (or badly designed). In other context, Career like Handmaiden should be refocused on their role. I’m not sure a lot of people actually use Handmaiden as an offtank-support (with rez, stamina regen, and all)
Damn right now I feel like Handmaiden is Brigitte from OW, a designed tanky-support, but these option give her so much sustain that she can go DPS (I know there isn’t such thing as DPS in VT, but you get my point).

Anyway yeah, career have a role and you should bring career you need for the jobs of the map (A sniper, a boss dealer, a support, an elite killer, a cleaver, etc…)

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Hagbane without breakpoints can be quite cumbersome against specials, and slayer is basically a TANK shade… If you take half the hits a properly specced slayer can take over the course of a run as a shade it would mean you’re getting screwed at every corner and slayers are balanced for it, just as shades are. With just the jump’s attackspeed and 2h hammer with parry and swift slaying dual axes you can almost always go toe to toe with a chaos patrol if you abuse your jump stagger. Even a shade would struggle with that without a concoction so let’s not go that far. I love playing slayer as much as I love playing shade. (that said Fatshark build his damage reduction into his kit already… It’s so mandatory. And he lacks passives.)

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Nerf glaive:

  • less cleave
  • less AP on light attack

Nerf HM gift of ladrielle:

  • stealth breaks on attack

Problem solved

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Glaive can be nerfed, or other weapons boosted. So far i agree.

Dagger - well need skills, lacks range, block etc.

Glaive better than halberd and certain staffs/ranged/meele, NO! it’s not.

Compare the halberds block,push-attack followed be 4 headshots with the rather slow charged up-attack followed with the down-slash. Halberd is far superior.

3 seconds stealth, goes fine the the purpose of the ult. Dash through horde, kill special, without the 3 second it will be more or less a suicide mission.

So 3 seconds of stealth is needed, and balanced.

I do not realy think you are after balance, I think you like conformity.

If you are right, your logic must be used on all classes!

IB = 13 seconds gromlir, and damage reduction -> remove that.
Ranger = Invisibility to cheese out -> remove that
Sienna = Can do a round with only ranged-> remove that
Kerrilian = Can kill without aiming-> remove that
BH= Can shoot without removing ammo-> remove that

etc…

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:+1:

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I’m not clear what experience you’re saying that with? I’m also not clear how good you are at this game? Which careers do you main? While I swap quite I a bit I’ve also I’ve played quite a bit of shade on legend, I’d define myself as an average player at this level. (IE: I wipe regularly on legend) When I do use shade I choose a crit build, with DD most of the time, (I feel like I’m depriving my group of a lot of CC so sometimes if there is no CC in the group I’ll use swords instead.) I generally use the repeater bow for ranged speical kills. Also I could optimise the abilities on equipment a little more.

Your opinion on daggers interests me, how do you feel they perform against hordes, their strike range, block/push areas. I find them to be quite weak in several areas, though I’d agree that the charged attacks are strong vs armour, but I would think that is why they are weak in the other areas.

Chaos warriors often come in pairs sometimes more, more regularly than not I would guess at the moment.
I’ve popped my ult only to have the Slayer, Bounty Hunter, Pyromancer, Huntsman or even just a Halberd Kruber, kill the CW before I can run over to it, usually in a far safer manner than I could. Being able to kill 1 with the ultimate does not seem all that powerful to me when your suddenly surrounded when you do it.

There are other powerful uses for the ultimate though, healing friends with bandages, reviving others. moving up to and killing some specials.

But then as I said I think I’m an average player, perhaps I can’t ramp her curve up as far as you can?

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That’s the point of Shade as a career.

See:

We must be playing two different games. The typical map has so many chaos warriors you can’t practically kill them with your active unless you wait for it to go off cooldown. You can spec towards CDR and gain it back faster via attacking enemies, but that’s a spec.

Which doesn’t mean much. When there are so many of them throughout any given game, how can you possibly try to even argue that point.

No, it was too long so they reduced it. Nothing has changed with armor penetration. She felt useless because half her talents were broken, her active was too long, and it didn’t feel significant.

Pretty weak point. During a boss fight your active won’t be up frequent enough without a conct pot to make that point have much significance. And one shotting elites isn’t anything new. Any career can one shot pretty much anything but chaos warriors and bosses.

Saying that abilities let you bypass stats is a nice distraction from the truth. Everything has its place. Huntsman and Shade actives give massive damage spikes. If they needed most of the character’s gear to be aimed at boosting that alone, then the developers failed at their design. The abilities should, in general, act independently from properties. The properties should be geared towards enhancing general gameplay of melee and ranged combat, not actives.

You talk about an in-depth gearing process, but then advocate this? By doing what you suggest, that would absolutely kill any customization and “in-depth”. To make a career useful you’d have to make all of it based around what it’s currently set up to do. There would only be one or two viable options. Then you say make the cooldowns longer. Did you not see any of the points about how many elites there are in a given map? Having over 100 isn’t exactly uncommon. And then you have deeds to boot. Elites seem easy when a team is coordinated and players are efficient.

Thanks for proving my point about the drivel. You simply try to counter what I said by stating what the OP said(elaborated though). Which doesn’t make sense because I already explained why it’s asinine.

The most amazing thing here is how many people like you or OP are busy pushing insignificant ignorant bile like this when far more important matters should be attended to. Neither glaive, handmaiden, or shade are overpowered or need to be touched right now. Rather than worrying about, oh, say:

Chaos hyperdensity
Erratic AI director
Patrols spawning in front of people and being silent
Certain talents being practically useless
Bile trolls
And so on.

All this effort to push personal agendas rather than more critical situations.

:+1:

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You’re not thinking about the Glaive hard enough if you think it’s worse than the halberd. The elf has the best mobility in the game. Kruber doesn’t. You can call up whatever attack you want at any time you want with her weapons. That is the central difference between Kerillian and everyone else. She’s the only who’s had any thought put into her classes and design.

And since CBT, it never fails that people want to keep calling out nerfs upon nerfs to her. Still astonishing to me was the amount of whinging over the Waystalker’s regen, which wasn’t really that good, which got it killed to the point of non-existence. Activating at only less than half HP? Didn’t think about the Level 15 talents, did you? Ammo regen was already the only choice, but you just solidified it as yet another bit of false progression and choice in a game predicated on such a concept.

The OP shows zero understanding of the game and is just as unqualified on criticizing it.

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My hero. You really hit home with what you said. I wish more people realized what you realize.

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hmm, what would happend if the elf had halberd instead of glaive?

Then, like Kruber, she’d have non-functional feet every time she swung the weapon. And only have two useful attacks. The cleave is Kruber’s only means of horde clearing and it’s admirable, but it’s followed up by a bugged attack: the Halberd thrust not only lacks the AP of the chop and swing, but the hitbox is on the axe-head and not the pike.

The Halberd requires windup time. The Glaive does not. Kruber can’t dance in and out of the hordes while swinging it, and he has no panic button like the Glaive’s ultra fast push-attack combo. You have to block cancel every swing if you want to engage the horde and you don’t have the kind of speed to effectively juggle super hard targets with your overheads and the chaff surrounding said hard target. Not to mention you can’t really be mobile in that kind of situation either.

If the Halberd is backed into a corner, it has a much lower survival ratio than that of the Glaive.

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i cannot believe this thread.

firstly, the shade needs skill to play. you need to understand all enemy attack patterns and holes on their defences, and take care of your hp pool because you’re not a primary ranged class. in order to utilise the ult well, you need to understand how and when to use it. it’s not so simple as ‘press ability and delete boss or cw’ as you guys make it out to be, there’s target priority and positioning that takes a lot of experience to master.

the shade and handmaiden are melee-focused characters. you can’t just sit back and shoot stuff all the time. it promotes the melee-oriented game - especially when people have been crying about ‘ranged meta’.

secondly, you complain about the handmaiden being able to attack in the 3 second stealth… and how this relates to not being a team player. WHAT? an ability doesn’t decide whether a player is a team player. the PLAYER skill/decisions and positioning decides that. when i’m playing a shade i’m almost always defending the squishies when an ambush comes up, same as hm, a 3 sec invis doesn’t stop me from peeling things that’s latched onto my wiz.

shade and hm a cakewalk? wow. that’s a first. i wonder where are the people crying about the dominance of ‘ranged meta’, they’ve suddenly gone silent, haha.

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Perhaps you are right, still I find block, push attack, attack, attack and attack on (put in a dodge) halberd so much more easy to do against a one, two or more CW than then up/down slash.

And the cleave attack on halberd is good against uniform hords, throw in some other creatures and the next attackss fill a meaning.

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If glaive is nerfed then elf has no good meele weapon except elven sword against CW etc.

Spear, hmm 12 charged hits.

Ohhh, daggers, yes they work!, On shade and waystalker that might be usefull, but on HM with the stamina build, would that not be strange…

All other classes has weapon that works, and can be used to kill CW and horde.

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These classes were much worse off awhile ago. As of right now I am very happy with where that at and have never shook my head playing with or as either.
I think we should direct our focus more on WHC, WM, and RV. Less nerfs, more buffs.

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This.

Rephrase that to ‘‘even out’’ : D. Otherwise we’re gonna see yet another shift in ‘‘meta’’, and people will just end up even more confused.

Elf probably have the most varied and ‘‘useful’’ melee array. DnD is fantastic vs anything elite / special bar berserkers.

A glaive nerf doesnt have to be a straight nerf across the board, it’s issue ( which have been harped on since day 1 ) is that it can A) Cleave with the best of them B) Demolish armored targets C) Until just recently it also had the HIGHEST multiplier in the game ¯_(ツ)_/¯ resulting in a weapon that only had strengths which was VERY easy to use.

This thread is a joke. Cry moar. People were just asking for a buff for the elf a couple of days ago lmao.

The glaive has been nerfed a lot already lol. Even with a shade using her ult, you have to time it so the second hit of the heavy swing connects with the target for around 19-23k damage. Meanwhile, sword and dagger or daggers hit massive amounts of damage, I can’t even count it all. The glaive is in a good place right now, jack of all trades, master of none. Krubers halberd wrecks hordes just the same, if not better. spear is actually better for horde clearing but lacks heavy damage, which is the opposite of daggers. And if this whole argument is about “skill”, then why don’t we remove the beam staff from Sienna? She can just stand still and keep the entire horde at bay. She can even stagger stormverim patrols. Stop crying about everything, jesus christ. How about we get Witch Hunter Captain a buff, and other less than enjoyable classes.

As for you babies crying about the shade “deleting” bosses, tell you what, run up on a shade and ult a chaos spawn. You’re gonna take aggro and get grabbed as soon as you pop out. You have to time your attacks and know when to strike. Even then, the Huntsmen with a speed potion can pump out way more damage and from further away where he doesn’t have to worry about being hit.

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