Handmaiden Ult suggestion

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
1

Let me preface this, that I think, that Handmaiden is in a good spot right now and doesn’T need any buffs. She has her own playstyle that is very fun to play. But there is a thing, that kinda bothers me and if I go by gy reddit a few other people. Her ult is weirdly anti synergistic to her kit. Yes, the ult enables amazing clutchplays and contributes to the clutchmachine that handmaiden is. But using her to the fullest often means dashing through a few/ a lot of enemies, depending on wether you chose the extra crit or the bleed talent. The rest of her kit seemingly revolves around being on the frontlines and being with the team. (i.E. stamina aura and emphesis on melee bonus). If you jump away (or even go invis after it and drop all aggro on you), there will be a gap in the frontline and it will take a while for her to get back. Something that often feels very awkward.

The proposed Change is the following: Increase the CD of her Ult by 15 seconds (nearly doubling it), but give a second use similar to the BW double-ult . That allows her to instantly get back to her team and make it far less awkward to play with one in the team.

What is you opinion for this change? Would that be too strong? (in my opinion it would still be weaker than BWs double ult, since that ult has a big stagger as well. Even if that cd is slightly bigger and needs a talent, but the Handmaiden would need talents as well for her ult to be more than just a double dash without stagger)

Edit: Missing words/grammar

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I’m against this because HM ult has been nerfed once before, where if she passed through enemies it’d cause bleed, now for her ult to cause bleed you have to purchase a talent. What you’re suggesting is to nerf the talent further by increasing the CD? Just doesn’t seem to be a strong enough ult to justify that even with the double dash.

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Tbh I don’t think it’s a nerf, as you get to apply it twice in a row, making it kill twice as fast or apply it to two different parts of the horde. You can still use it often, but you can also use it AND stay with the team ANd kill that horde fast in the process in exchange for a longer CD.

Edit: Added Quote and removed repitition

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I totally agree with this thread.

HM has great team based passives but her dash ultimate A N D level 30 talents are more solo-play orientated.

I don’t get it why she’s built like that. Why give her a team based stamina aura and fast revive + hp if she’s going to be dashing all over the place away from her team?

Her kit is quite confusing.

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I’d rather this be an optional talent then. As I don’t really want the ability to double dash, and I’d be a bit jaded if it became basekit on top of increasing the CD, which would have to happen if this became basekit.

I would like the bleed mechanic be returned as basekit though.

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That’s a fault of the user not the career, the HM is an excellent supporting hero who can safely revive team members like no other, which can be extremely useful on cata.

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I beg to differ, if the character has 2 outa 3 ult options that encourage ditching her team then its a design problem, not a user problem.

Because if the design dictates that you must do something to reach the intended potential of the character then you cant blame the user for doing it.

Same logic as when Zealot wants low HP, you dont blame them for staying low you can only be annoyed at the ones who made it optimal for him to do so…if that bothers you at all.

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With ult being so short can’t make it powerful need longer cd baseline or lvl 30 talent increases per effect. Double dash seem unuseful though with bleed effect.

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I strongly disagree, allow me to use an analogy to make my point, it’s not the cars fault for bad driving, it’s the nut behind the wheel.
The principle applies to HM, she’s an excellent supporting career and very helpful in premades and her ult allows her to get in and out of combat, quickly, allowing her to be the teams medic, especially with the high stamina regeneration. She won’t be able to support her team in this way should her ult be nerfed or removed.

Now I realize you’re argument is from quick play experiences, but that’s quick play in general, you get people who want to rush or speed run, and they’re usually the first to die by a special that snipes them, then they rage quit. That’s the norm. You also get people who play far worse than bots, remarkable as that may be. I do not believe it is wise to nerf careers based on what happens in quick play, it’s recommended to play with friends and go into the game with a strategy, especially with cata, quickplay is something of a dumpster fire as it is.

Lastly, nerfing HM won’t prevent people from rushing in quickplay, people would just move onto another career that they deem more suitable, such as Slayer, he use to be the main focus for speed running for his insane speed and his ult allowing him to reach places that people otherwise couldn’t, the result was they nerfed Slayers ult (which really hurt its fun factor) they added fire walls in boss fights (an uncessary change in my opinion tbh) and they added invisible walls around the map to block shortcuts. You can;t jump over the wreckage blocking the road on Fort B anymore, and you can’t jump the gap to get the 2nd tome on Halescoure anymore, atempting to do so means you’ll hit an invisible wall and promptly die now. All these changes were done to prevent a small percentage of players from being able to rush or simply take a shortcut, and yet despite the changes they still rush, and poor Slayer’s ult was gimped, and he’s pick rate suffered for it. I don’t want to see a repeat of that happening to another career.

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Doubling Ult usage is a buff. Period. That’s not something that needs to be debated.

I will only quote this as a stand in for your post, as it is the premise for your whole point of view. The Goal is definetely not to nerf Handmaiden. It is to make Handmaiden’s Ult inherently more snyergistic to the character’s kit, without overbuffing it. If the increased CD is too long, you could argue, that the CD shouldn’t be increased by this much. Not increasing the ULT Cd would make cheesing with Handmaiden too easy tho, as you could get twice the distance in the same time as now, which makes it a neccessaity to increase the CD. Also the situations, where you need to use the ult on cooldown as of now means, that your team is dead. A condition, where neither the increased critchance nor critchance if of much importance. Thus making an increased CD not detrimental to the character’s Power, when she uses this talent. And being able to invis dash out, kill a special and Dash back is definetely a very useful thing for the first talent in the row as well, but here you can argue, that it’s often good to be able to be invis more often.

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The comment you’re quoting wasn’t directed to you and I wasn’t talking about your suggestion.
We’re talking about a different subject here, which was the way HM’s ult currently functions and how Frosty believes that the poor strategy employed by some players, by using her career to rush, is somehow the fault of the career and not the player’s who wish to disregard their team and rush ahead. If his argument is to be believed then to buff her ult to a double dash would “increase” this misuse of her career.

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Ah, sorry for my misunderstanding then. But I also think that she has a design problem with her 2 ult talents, which require her to ditch the team to make the most use out of them. The bleed is best applied to as many enemies as possible, eaming you want to just ult through that horde. That would mean ditching them. The crit talent is a little nice since you don’t need to dash through that many enemies at once and also makes her take more of a similar approach of a non vanish shade, staying at the edges of the horde. In many maps, you cannot use this ult for this tho (think all tunnel maps), meaning that here as well you would like to jsut dash through the horde to get that sweet critchance. A bad idea in that scneario, that shouldn’t be encouraged by the design. But since the basic design idea is cool, that encouragement should be rewarded with the proposed change instead of leading to a misplay. Wouldn’t you agree in this point?

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No worries, these things happen.

To be clear, it’s not that I’m against the idea for double dash, (who wouldn’t want it?)
It’s more to do with HM already having a strong ult, that only really works well on her career.
My issue is making it basekit, because this would mean she could have double dash with gift of Ladrielle and that could bust the balance of the talent. Though I understand you’re attempting to fix the issue of how Blade Dancer and Power From Pain, can put her in trouble.

My suggestion is to return Bladedancer as basekit for HM, and to apply the double dash mechanic onto Power From Pain, but it also applies the longer CD debuff if you take this talent.
This will give HM a choice between evasion (Gift of Ladrielle) and offense (the new Power from Pain)
As for the talent to replace Bladedancer, I’m thinking a talent which allows Dash to apply stagger to enemies, and invulnerability for 3s, giving her a talent which grants support and survivability.

That way, you get the fix you’re after, HM gets a buff to her talent, and Gift of Ladrielle becomes a stand alone talent that will not become OP, and in fact has some interesting competition, making it no longer over shadow the other choices. Though I would like to see Gift of Ladrielle make a return to 3s of stealth or be buffed to 4, instead of the current 2s, should we make these changes. (Not necessary however)

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Very true, but its different.

From my perspective it´s like giving a fishing pole to a guy while telling him to use it to feed himself. Then you proceed to tell him its forbidden to fish in every single body of water for a couple of hundred kilometers…naturally he´ll just ignore it and fish anyway if he´s starving, albeit sneakily.

So for handmaiden, locking so damn much of her power into an ability that demands she dash through heaps of enemies will then just naturally make people do that. Because thats what you gotta do to get the most out of her.

Telling people they cant do that is pretty much like saying “here you have a character with an ability that rewards you for dashing but you are actually forbidden from generally using it, have fun”.

Also i never wrote a word about nerfs, i just observed that it´s how her kit is structured, like how BH with crossbow will prioritize larger targets when his passive is up because that yields more value for it. And not use his ult for smal ones either.

What you are suggesting instead is just a deadbeat frontliner who spends all her time waiting for her teammates to screw up before giving them a quick ress. Why choose to make something like this when you can have a fighter that helps alleviate the pressure so the teammates do not get overwhelmed instead?

Why would you ever pick fail mitigation over fail preventation?

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15

This double ult could be made a talent. Add some CD time, and add something interesting - like the enemies you pass become aggroed to you for 10 seconds, and they start to receive +15% damage from allies for the duration.

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I don’t see anything wrong with her ult power, the FK and BW pretty much share the same ult, a dash forward designed to charge into the enemies, though in BW case she can use it to set up firewall defense.

FK’s talent allows him to stagger hordes and elites which can be very useful, HM’s ult use to apply bleed, but that was removed for some weird reason, but it’s still useful as a means of escape, or a means to get to an ally quickly to help them fight off hordes, with the stamina regen bonus, and worse case scenario, res them too.

I honestly see her as both, she can handle herself effectively in hordes, and she can snipe elites, or bring hag to for CC gians and monster DPS, and if someone does go down she can safely revive them, quickly too, as well as granting a THP boon. This allows the other survivors to focus on fighting the enemies without having to worry about trying to res their comrade as the HM can reliably and safely do that. She’s a strong career in the right hands, and her passive stamina regen is fantastic in high intensity situations.

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If I’m understanding the OP correctly, this is not what they were hoping for, as they want the double dash to be a passive so she can use the bleed talent safely, by applying it into a horde, then dashing back to her comrades so she’s not separated from them, and the same benefit would apply to Power of Pain and Ludrielle. By making it talent specific, it doesn’t solve the problem the OP has mentioned.

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…The problem was not the power in the ult, the problem is that it has anti synergy with the rest of the kit. And that it functions as a round of Russian roulette rather than an ult in cata more than it doesnt.

Look at bladedancer and power from pain, both have the activation condition of dashing through enemies to be useful.

Going through enemies = Going away from team

Going away from team = Bad, particularly in cata, especially if she is the main frontline.

For Footknight he stops if he meets a elite or if he wants to, BW has the option of double dash so she can go back and it wont be a problem.

Handmaiden ends up going on an odyssey, one that she is rigged to die in or make her team struggle for at the very least.

Yeah she can do that without ult, if she picks spear and shield that is, otherwise she is a poor frontliner since her ult does not help with that and her other weapons arent good for it.

.-…This is not even a merit? Bring something unique.

Handmaiden with hagbane is a utterly terrible choice, she wont be able to use it regularly without constantly running out of ammo due to lack of sustain. Monster DPS? Anyone who plays cata handmaiden and uses hagbane there knows that the default ammo supply barely puts a dent in monster healthbars…even waystalker uses str pot and twice as many or more shots.

Far better to have someone who prevents that from happening rather than someone who mitigates it to a degree.

Which bleeding career isnt? This is not a perk at all, and her “Strength” is likely among the weakest outside solo speedrunning.

Merc, grail knight and WHC are all better…? Even Shade when talking high numbers of monks or non CW elites.

Honestly i get the feeling you play legend more than cata because most of these statements hold far better there. That or you exclusively use spear and shield.

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Ahhh. Okay, now I understand where you’re coming from, in that case, the OP does have the right idea of giving HM a double dash so she can double back. It’s either that or to change the way the ult interacts with the enemies.

Fair.

Well, I mean you can have both, but yeah I understand now, her ult isn’t very good at preventing people going down, which is true, and though the safe revives are great to have, the ideal situation is not to go down at all.

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All I’ll say about the idea of a double ult is that Ladrielle shouldn’t work with it; a double dash with invis would be pretty silly

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