1h sword is an absolute beast of a weapon on handmaiden. Can stack to kill stormvermin with 2 heavy headshots, marauders with 1 heavy headshot, it hast good light attack sweaps, good dodge range and satisfactory blockstamina. CC is good with light, light, heavy combo, attack speed is fair enough for such a potent weapon.
2h sword has very good horde clear, but the heavy attack stab should deal alot more damage against armoured. What makes it alot worse than Kruber’s and Salty’s 2h sword is the simple fact that the sweaps are underhand strikes, making it hard to hit multiple heads (or even at all), which results in a de facto hefty damage penalty when compared to the human 2h sword.
2h sword is rarely seen simply because Keri doesn’t have a ranged option for super armour, and fighting a CW with 2h sword is tedious, to say the least. Kruber can take handgun to compensate, and Salty has BH’s active ability as well as guaranteed ranged crits. Zealot can make up for it with insane attack speed, fighting CW with him and 2h sword isn’t as bad as it is sometimes claimed.
Daggers I’d say don’t have a “phantom swing” problem per se, but simply a reach problem. In some situations, you can run into enemies until they block your movement and you’d still miss. It’s a hitbox issue that can easily be solved by slightly increasing the DD’s range.
DS has no reason to exist since SnD can do everything DS can do, but you don’t have to sacrifice damage against armour. SnD is, imho, Keri’s overall best weapon. Can never go wrong with that package of mobility, stagger, CC, horde clear and armour damage.
Spear is pretty meh. It is surprisingly strong on Shade (it would appear it can “double hit” bosses due to its reach, giving it a similar bosse killing output as SnD or DD). I have a very certain Handmaiden build that relies entirely on CC via spear push-attacks and is insanely strong, but it’d really wish the heavy attack chain would change to stab first, sweap second. It is easy enough to chain into heavy stab from the first two light stabs, but as most of Keri’s weapons, spear suffers from a quirky attack chain that takes some time to get used to. Armour damage is also poor and like with 2h sword, Keri doesn’t have a ranged option to deal with super armour, so Shade benefits from spear the most again, which is a bit counter-intuitive.
I’d say most of her problems could actually be solved by giving Keri some kind of anti-super-armour ranged weapon. A while back, someone suggested this (high?-)elven bow that shoots magic fire-arrows. Would be a cool HM exclusive ranged weapon (could even work without ammo but with an overcharge meter). But that’s another topic.