Handmaiden Bladedancer talent rework idea

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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TL;DR make Bladedance work more like Slayer’s Dawi-Drop

At the moment bladedancer doesnt scale that well when you use it on higher difficulties, i’m pretty sure it only has noticeable effect on recruit and veteran. There is not much of a point of using it especially since the other options are so much better.

The idea is that while you are dashing (and maybe slightly after for half a second or so) you deal extra damage and maybe stagger more. Given the low cooldown on Dash i think something like 50-75% extra damage would work and maybe give enough stagger to at least stagger stormvermin and maulers slightly.

As for the existing effect, i would either keep it as it is or maybe enemies hit during Dash bleed for a percentage of damage done (if such a thing is possible). Or just do both (probably for less damage if that’s the case XD).

Depending on how strong these changes would be maybe increase the cooldown time? This is probably something that would require some testing first.

Anyway i just thought this idea would be cool and somewhat thematic, i’m not really sure about the exact damage/stagger values that would be balanced. Absolutely love the Chaos Wastes by the way!

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Current Bladedancer iteration:

The talent can kill every horde enemy on Cataclysm. Scaling after that is mostly modded realm and is unimportant for balance decisions.

Bladedancer really doesnt need to be any stronger as it is.

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Do you happen to know the radius of Bladedancer’s effect by any chance?

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It’s actually a decent talent on its own merits, though I think 2-second invis is often better due to how enemies can begin tracking you so quickly after you finish a Dash, and Power from Pain is more meta because of the (frankly stupid) amount of crit it can stack and high crit is just so powerful.

Bladedancer can kill most of a horde wave in a second or so, and can make very dangerous mixed hordes into just a group of elites. It might need some buffs (I think the ability of enemies to track the player while Dashing is a problem that needs looking at), but it doesn’t need a total rework.

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Nope. But I assume that the enemy hitbox and HM hitbox only need a minimal overlap (as seen in the video). So … um … about two Kerillians?

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1.5 units.
For reference, Footknight basic charge width is 2, wide charge is 5. Most aura radius is 5. WHC shot radius is 10, Merc is 15.

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The arrow on the ground that appears when you hold the career skill key before releasing approximate s the width of the move incredibly well. If the width of the move was double it would feel amazing being able to escape from a horde and clear out squishes around armors. Though given how narrow the move really is it feels hard to maximize safety and damage.

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In this case, I think increasing the radius would make it less niche. If the damage ends up being too much, it could be lowered a little. I think the talent has a problem of being overkill even in its niche (so a dense horde in a narrow tunnel) because vs Skaven hordes the damage is more than their health.

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I don’t think that’s very fair, considering cata hordes are often not just trash enemies. A talent that requires you to put yourself way out of position (and often just gets you hit anyway, with enemies doing insane 180 degree spins to get you) should probably be doing more than just killing some trash (unreliably at that, as your clip shows), particularly when you could do the same with a whole heap of weapons without putting yourself at any risk at all.

An ult that’s significantly weaker than a shotgun blast probably needs to be looked at, regardless of both being able to kill trash.

A longer CD for more damage would probably be fair. If it’s too strong when considering wraith walk, wraith walk should be removed. Should be anyway, considering it’s just a talent that’s completely pointless outside cheesing.

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The 180 degree spins might be a problem but i rarely encounter them. I even do dash without block into hordes from time to time and so far haven’t seen much issues. Only Packmaster got me in such situations but Patch Notes claim this has been fixed. I also never bought into the argument with out-of-position. For me this is purely a player issue. You can dash in front and your team can follow up plowing throught the weakened enemies. You can dash to the front and create a new battle front because stuff in your back dies alone. You can dash horizontally to the battle line. There are so many options without leaving your team in the dust and the dash range isn’t that far that you are totally isolated. Also, it has the large advantage that Bleeddancer draws aggro instead of dumping it on team mates. So it is the better team talent.

Unreliable. If you want to put it like that. There is some underlying counting mechanism as it seems which can cause the career skill to have one tick more or less. So for enemies which have health equal to your damage it will be unreliable. Effectively, this only affects Marauders.

I can’t do the same with other weapons though. Not in the same time frame and not with the same safety. I give you that you can fire multiple shots in a row while you have to wait for the career skill. But the safety argument is a strange one. I can dash while blocking, using a shotgun leaves me open to every single hit in the surroundings. Shotguns (and weapons in general) also have a cleave limit. Bleeddancer hasn’t (as far as i know, although someone claimed something different, would have to test). Also Bleeddancer ignores shields which only a very minor amount of weapons do. Also, you can still do all the normal dash shenigans like resurrecting and healing still while damaging enemies and keeping the aggro on you this way.

Bleeddancer is very strong, especially in more narrow areas. So if you say it is kinda niche, I could partially agree although you find corridors in all maps and the talent is far from useless in open areas (as said, dash parallel to the battle front then).

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Or, more likely, you just don’t dash at all because doing so would put you in a bad position and you’d die, lol. The idea that you’re going to dash through the situations the ult would be useful over just swinging is really not a very reasonable one. You end up only ever using it on trash that you’d kill basically just as quickly by swinging your weapon at anyway.

I’ve used HM a bunch, both on live and in modded stuff, and unless I’m abusing wraith walk (at which point I’m just memeing), you end up barely bothering to dash through stuff. Bar maybe the crit talent, where you can cancel your dash very early and still get alright value from it.

Yeah, which is mostly irrelevant outside modded content, which you said yourself isn’t something we need to care about for balance. Any situation you’d really hit the cleave limit with a shotgun shot on is a situation the HM is just suiciding by dashing into.

Shotguns leaving you open is a player issue, dash relying on you putting yourself out of position is not. It’s a dash, it dashes. You either have to go on weird awkward flanks and dash back, or you dash forward, and are now in the middle of a horde in a corridor. Whereas if you have a shotgun and some basic situational awareness, you just left click and the trash dies, without you needing to leave your good position.

If you’re going to have to rely on super specific positioning (such as flanking the side of a horde in a corridor) or being at risk for the stuff either in front of you or the elites you’ve just put behind you and decided to let your team deal with (for some reason), you should be rewarded more than a bardin left clicking once, or maybe twice if there’s a lot of shields. There’s no reason you’d bother running this talent over the alternatives in the same row, let alone the alternative horde clearing choices. An ult that’s just an occasional alternative to your melee weapon in low pressure situations is not a good ult, regardless of the CD on it.

Also as to the timeframe argument, I actually went into modded realm and tested, trying to roughly spawn the same amount of enemies you did (3 gors, 3 ungors, 4 fanatics, 3 marauders, 3 assassins and roughly 8 clan rats), and bardin kills them all within two shots. That takes about a second, if that. It could possibly be one shot even, though I didn’t want to stack them literally all right on top of each other, because that’s not terribly realistic and I have no idea how cleave behaves if you do weird stuff like that. This is on cata with no ults, an orange grudgeraker with 10% vs skaven and 6% vs zerkers, and a charm with your standard chaos/inf split.

An ult that is worse than two shotgun shots is not a good ult.

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Well, you conveniently left out some arguments and I have a very very different experience to you on Cataclysm concerning the safety, positioning and amount of usage for Bleeddancer.

But this discussion is leading nowhere. I don’t see any point in changing the Bleeddancer talent as it is very strong already and has several advantages. Outside of Fire Walk there are not that many damage sources which are as safe as the talent.

But it is simpler if we just disagree and move on.

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At first I thought this was a little silly because I do think Bleeddancer is strong, but there is a good point in the reaction time of enemies hitting you during/after a dash. That would be the best quality of life you could give to this game since so many careers have dashes.

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You can disagree, but when your example is demonstrably outperformed by two shots from a shotgun, I’m not sure what there is to really say. Blade dancer is not even in the same league as fire walk, particularly burnout.

I’m not sure what arguments I “conveniently” left out, either? The unreliable point I guess, because you just agreed with me that it is unreliable, but that it isn’t vs skaven? I didn’t really see the point of responding to that, there’s not much more to say there. I said something, you gave specifics about it, that’s kind of all there is there.
Rez dashes maybe? They’re neat, but they’re not really unique to the talent, clearing a bit of trash around a downed ally isn’t really worth noting.

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Blade dancer is pretty silly atm. You either run invis if you want to grief your team or PfP to become the ultimate blender. Assuming you don’t die within a second of dashing because you misjudged the horde’s size and got stuck in the middle of it while the part you just dashed through already did the 180 flip and is executing a collective running attack into your back.

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If you can’t see it, you can’t see it. It is as simple as that. You are not here to be convinced. Neither am I. So it is easier to disagree instead of going back and forth endless times.

As I said, our experiences for Cataclysm are differing wildly.