First and foremost, the base ability doesn’t do anything to enemies, no damage, no stagger, it’s just a “run fast” button. Not to say that that alone isn’t useful sometimes like to close distance to archers or banners or any troublesome specials, but there are 2 talents that incentivize hitting enemies with it, i.e., using it during hordes since it has such a low cd, but the ability is so awful that it’s normally best not to even try this. As stated before, it doesn’t stagger enemies and by the end of the dash, every enemy will have a swing coming for you and you’ll likely be surrounded, putting you in a bad situation where you have to block dodge and push a lot before being able to deal any damage or make use of your crit buff for example. Bladedancer also doesn’t fix any of these problems as it is still way to risky to try and the damage is negligible. Lastly gift of Ladrielle is terribly designed talent that causes a frontliner to dump aggro on to their nearby teammates all for a couple free swings on enemies.
Suggestions:
Baseline: Enemies directly hit by the dash should be lightly staggered to make it safer and more incentivized to use. Using the ability should also put handmaiden into a dodge state where enemies can’t track you for the duration and half a second after it completes. A light bleed like in 1.6 would give the baseline ability a purpose other than holding onto a 20 second career skill for reposition purposes.
Talents:
Power from pain: Dash causes your melee strikes to increase your crit chance by 5%, stacks up to 5 times, last 12 seconds total.
Idea is using the dash to more safely approach enemies or flank them thanks to the baseline buffs and receive “power from pain” to deal more damage to any enemy type. increased the total time because the buff has to be built up over multiple attacks.
Bladedancer: Same, just a damage buff, maybe up it to medium stagger (a stumble) and probably enough to kill the next tier enemy. Say if the baseline kills slaverats, bladedancer will kill clan rats. If that’s too strong, just it can always be reduced.
Gift of Ladrielle: Enemies hit by dash are blinded for 3 seconds and considered staggered but no longer bleed. Kerillian also disappears from enemy perception for 2 seconds after the dash. The reason invisibility is kept is as an option to safely remove a threat before returning to your allies. Using this near your allies will create an opening for them to attack due to the blinding effect instead of putting additional pressure on them like the current iteration does, but here you would choose damage or stagger.
Her dash just simply doesn’t do enough by itself as it is now when compared to similar ones (FK, Slayer, BW, Zealot) and could reasonably be compensated with an increased cd, maybe 30-40 seconds. Let me know if this is a better direction for her perceived role and whether it still fits the lore of a handmaiden.
There has been quite a few threads discussing her Ult, which all came to similar conclusions.
To add to the points made:
Shade can have HM Ult, that’s actually safer and more useful
She doesn’t gain the Crit benefit of the Crit Ult if she Block-cancels in front of the Horde
It leaves her in awkward spots, which you need Block Cost to survive
Apart from the Stealth Talent, it’s probably the worst Ultimate in the game
Rarely useful outside of Medpack/Ress Ults
Most other Mobility Ults have the Stat increases attached to use (other than Kruber’s Attack Speed Charge, which is safer to use and allow for Block-cancelling)
Both Bleed and Crit Ults are too situational to be useful
While she feels like a support Career in other aspects, none of her Ults reflect that
Unless it’s for speed runs, I can’t tell if the CDR Talent is supposed to be a joke
My suggestions while keeping the same Ultimates:
Leave Stealth Ult as is. Add a buff to allies if she lands a kill on an Elite or Special after it.
Change Bleed Ult into something else, really. It becomes pretty useless at higher difficulties. Maybe a flurry of attacks in front of her could be cool, to match things like the BH, WS, Pyro Ultimates. High AoE damage on low armour, and a buff to her or her allies depending on the enemies hit.
Make Crit Ult proc from Block-cancelling, and make it give a full stack when used on Bosses, and a 2 stack on Elites. This can make it feel more useful, as it’s only safe to use in very specific situations rn, and even then you rarely get enough stacks to make use of it.
However, I would much rather see some sort of AoE buffing from one of her Ultimates.
My experience with HM:
I’ve been maining her on Cata for a while, and use 2H Sword and 1H Sword as my main weapons, but have good builds for every weapon.
Like a projectile mirror image type of thing? Otherwise I don’t see how it would differ than just the bleed other than visually. It’s sad how BW has the closest cooldown to handmaiden yet hers does so much more.
Her ult is one of best position tools and support one. You just need to know when to use it her stamina regen is thing that even when you are in bad situation you will get out of it without bigger problems and with ult even easier. See somebody strugling you can ult to him and share aura that will help a lot.
See some special but behind few fat armored enemis, ult and snipe without problem.
A big sweep attack or flurry of attacks in a cone or something similar, which mechanically could behave like a shotgun blast, with some sort of Melee animation. Good vs low armour, so she doesn’t just take Shade’s role, but with some effect on armoured enemies.
It could also not be damage, but a Stagger + AoE buff, to make her able to Frontline against Elites with smaller weapons, while having the Crit Ult for DPS-type builds, and invis for Special killing/Utility.
These ideas could both make the CDR Talent (Asrai Grace) useful too. Strength levels of the Ult should factor this in.
The Handmaiden is excellent and her ult and skill tree are fantastic, almost to the point where it is OP and cheesy. Great class to use if you want to solo maps. Perhaps requires a higher skill ceiling which confuses some people, I am not sure how people could complain unless that is the case. The dodge potential and stamina regen are crazy too.
I agree with what you’re saying about her potential and skill potential, but I’d argue that in terms of her Ultimate effects, what you’re saying only really applies to the dash part of the Ultimate and invis Ult specifically.
The other two Ultimates are just way too situational and awkward, and are probably the least useful Ult effects in the game because of this. I play Cata+ solos and duos, and these effects are rarely worth going for unless I want to completely drop positioning, whereas other Career Ults are almost always useful.
But yeah, she’s highly underrated and has really good build potential if you know what you’re looking for.
Yep I completely agree with you, the other 2 ult talents seem to be useless, I have never used them myself and I have never seen anyone else use it either. Definitely could use some competition for the level 30 inv dash talent. Would be cool with some lore-friendly talents.
Yeah the talent’s could use some facelift, i personally don’t think the current ability+stealth combo is in anyways a bad ability. Tough creating some talents which for instance increase the cooldown significantly but give it a added effect or benefit would certainly make it more interesting from talent perspective.
I don’t know how practical a melee combo is for a career skill because it sounds dependent on the weapon you’re using and if it isn’t it would be weird for her to pull out a new weapon to do that and then reequip her current weapons. Also what do you mean by AoE buff?
Also what were you tagging me for?
I never argued against this, in fact, I think they could nerf her stam regen aura speed and it would still be fine because no matter how many push attack combos I do I never run out of stamina. She has good passives, some okay talents but her ult and level 30 talents are pretty bad.
Huge agree that dashes should put you in dodge state. It should be this way for all dash ults. Can’t count how many time I’ve ulted with FK then gotten immediately hit as it’s finishing by a random slave rat that wasn’t staggered for no apparent reason. Really takes away from these ults as things are.
Even though it’s not my main, HM is my strongest character and I basically don’t fail runs when I’m playing her. It’s not that HM is crazy strong, it’s that her strengths (mobility, control) are magnified by a skilled player in a way no other class offers.
The tree is a bit wonky, but at least there is more then one viable build there. The ult is sad until you get lvl 30, which is unfortunate. Easy fix IMO is to make 1s stealth baseline to the ult (for aggro control and stops attacks from knocking you mid-Dash), and the lvl 30 talent can buff it up to 3s (1.6 level). The other two talents will become appealing in their own right once Ladrielle’s isn’t required for mechanical reasons anymore.
The inv dash is amazing. It gets abused to solo Cata 3 weaves. I don’t think you understand how good it is. A case can be made for the 2 other level 30 talents but it would have to be pretty crazy stuff for good players to not chose the Inv Dash.
I don’t care how “amazing” it is for cheesing weaves, the problem is it is detrimental to your teammates when they are in a tight spot and you dash away from them. I also don’t think the invis talent is meant specifically for good players like you insinuate, it is clearly the easiest and safest to use but it’s harmful towards team play.
the problem is that invis is a poorly designed mechanic that involves NO skill ceiling at all and will teach the player bad habbits, so if you want to get better you shouldnt use it. Her ult is on a very short cd so its hard to justify to give her a stronger ult. She has excellent survivability and its possible to get out of every bad situation with her ult, even without invis. You can see her ult as a tool to get rid of threats as fast as possible (banners, specials, kiting bosses while your team deals with the horde,…). Since 2.0 block cost reduction and stamina(recovery) became way more important and Handmaiden became an excellent support class aswell. She can help by maximizing your teams dps by allowing stamina hungry weapons (ual axes, billhook,…) to always deal the max dps while also giving your team more safety just by staying close. Its also pretty much impossible to get block broken with handmaiden if you go for full 90% bcr and even if you get block broken, the first hit will give you ult right away. I saw many ppl saying hm is one of the weakest classes but thats simply not true, what she has is inane abuse potential that should be reduced. Examples are invis and ofc wraithwalk. You can not only cheese weaves, you can cheese everything with those two tools, have you ever tried a ts with invis handmaiden? super ez compared to other classes.
