Handmaiden and her Spear

Hey all, not the best at making post but here goes nothing.

In the recent patches we’ve seen some fixes and buff for various weapons. Sadly, not much has happened to the Elven Spear to deal with its current issue, its near uselessness in the higher two difficulties due to an over abundance of armor. What is generally considered a puncturing/penetrating weapon, lack any armor penatration at all. The glaive in comparison just mulches armor and has an easy headshotting charge attack that deals absurd damage compared to the rest of its attacks. To put that headshot damage in prespective of the two weapons, the easy to use downward headshotting charge attack of the Glaive does around 50% more damage than the precision stab of the spear charge attack. As I’m sure many will agree, the Glaive is by far the superior choice for most late/endgame content, even for the Handmaiden, whose poster and lore weapon is the elven spear.

Where am I going with this you may ask. Well I humbly request that the Handmaiden recieve a passive buff for the spear, in the form of all the thrust/stabbing attacks with the spear have some degree of armor penatration and possibly a headshot damage buff for a stabbing charge attack. I feel it’d be ideal for light attacks to have a 50-75% armor penatration due to the easy of spamability and already lowered damage. As for the charged stab, complete armor penatration would be preferred, especially if it gets a slight bump in headshot damage.

As it stands, without a buff, there are quite a few situations and missions where a spear wielding HM either has to use a longbow or go sit in a corner and play add lookout for the rest of the team, even more so with the recent longbow ammo nerf.

Pros:
-Glaive
High damage
Decent cleave
Armor penatration on all attacks
Insane and easy headshot damage
-Spear
Decent cleave, great on block swing
Average dodge
Decent attack speed

Cons:
-Glaive
Clunky attack speed, though mostly remedied
with properties/talents and/or traits.
2 shields, properties and talents fix the issue.
Slightly under average dodge, theres a talent for that.
-Spear
Low damage
Poor preformance against armor
Precision required for average headshot
damage

Not saying lets turn Handmaiden into a blender like waystalker/shade, but a little skill based buff to the weapon FS claims to be her signature weapon would be appreciated.

1 Like

Well, she HAS skill buff of +15% power. Players can obtain +10% vs armored property on spear, but yes, it maybe still not enough to be as powerfull as Glaive… But maybe it must not be? Spear has 180% block arc, it is defined for crowd control.
But I agree that it’s headshot damage might be increased a bit, since it is realy close to a skillshot. And maybe reduce Glaive cleave? Just to make it elite/boss/armored killer.

But i love my glaive :’( it kills everything efficiently :smiley: and feels super fun to swing around like crazy!

the spear has a higher dodge streak , a huge block/push arc more stamina , higher dodge distance multiplier.
its charge attack is unique in having a a 4 directional move that can be added or not.

the glaive has huge return time after its second charge strike , which is single target

There are advantages to the spear and its a very nuanced weapon. does it need a small buff? maybe but it, like just about all of the elfs weapons are very good as it is.

2 Likes

Against armor, you use charged attack with the spear, as with many other weapons. What’s more, the stab already has a huge headshot multiplier (as seems to be the case with all weapon stabs). So there is already kind of a “skill-based buff” in. However, something feels off in the targeting of that stab to me. It may be just the wonkiness of the training dummies and furious movement and other action happening in normal gameplay while trying to hit, but it’s surprisingly hard to score headshots with it. Getting those more consistent would solve a lot of the spear’s problems against armor.

1 Like

Glaive averange charged headshot is 50. Spear is 15. Just to make it clear. I’m hardcore spear fan but god damn it can i get a little bit rewarded for hard to aim headshots.

1 Like

That should also be compared to the weapon’s bodyshot damage. Pure headshot damage is different from multiplier, and the Glaive is a stronger hitter overall. I might be tempted to test a bit if I remember, though. And the difficulty of spear’s headshots is something we seem to agree on.

Spear body shot light -0 heavy -6
Glaive body shot light - 8 heavy 16/20 one-two combo

I play both Shade and Handmaiden with spear and I have tried glaive on both of them. Spear gives you much better survivability on the expense of not being able to deal with armor as quickly as with glaive.
With Handmaiden I use longbow for armor and charged attacks for super armor but my role in the team is to deal with hordes, specials and and save downed teammates.
I run Shade with volley. Spear one shots Chaos Warriors with light stabs while using infiltrate so it’s much better than glaive which requires 2nd charged attack which is really tricky or impossible to land in a horde. Also Shade’s passive helps killing Malauders and Storvermin from behind with light attacks.
Spear had longer dodges, more dodges, 180 block arc, more stamina, range, speed and is godlike at crowd control. Glaive on the other hand is better against armor but the charge is very risky since you can’t cancel 2nd charged attack once you start it. There is no reason to use glaive in my opinion unless your team really lacks armor penetration and has lots ar crowd control alrrady but that rarely is the case from my experience.

it used to hit a bit harder and was faster, but somewhere along the lines people posted insane things like “it cleaves chaos warriors” and that was enough proof to get it toned down. the mobility is still nice but being borderline useless on chaos warriors and not being able to instantly kill stormvermin/maulers in melee is a massive negative. i want to like it again but it feels like a gimmick weapon at this point.

fixing the headshots on it might help a lot though as you currently have to aim quite a bit above their heads to actually get a headshot, or do an anime style jump stab.

1 Like

This.

I really wish the spear was a little better. Every time I play the spear in legend and there’s a mixed horde it’s basically a miniproject. Give me about 5 minutes to clear this. I’ll slowly proceed to kite stuff and eventually, painfully kill the elites.

The glaive is much more straightforward. I clear a path and unload combos on elites. It’s usually overkill on anything but CW. Unlike many, I don’t actually think that the glaive is less “safe”. It sports a generous attack speed and light cleave while it actually doesn’t hamper mobility (think 2h hammer, axe+shield).
The only time when I really feel safer with the spear is when dealing with packmasters and gutter runners in melee.

1 Like

eh, it’s a little less safe if only due to the lack of guard cancels. that is pretty much the only reason i take damage with the thing. it’s worth putting up with just for the killing power though.

1 Like