I play Handmaiden because it feels the most Vermintide-1 of all the Elf careers, simply because it offers nothing of mechanical value unlike Waystalker with horde/special-annihilating trueflight and Shade with (buggy) boss-annihilating backstabs. Handmaiden is the standard Vermintide experience.
It’s also the worst of the Elf careers by far, but that’s kind of the point. Waystalker and Shade do things, Handmaiden doesn’t. And in V1, no one did anything too differently from one another, either.
Why bring kerillian for thining out hordes if u can bring Sienna. Ceremional Dagger is on par with kerillian melee weapons, range dps is better, F-ability is at same strength but only has 40 sec cooldown and sienna is nuts vs bosses with bolt staff.
Before that nerf kerillian would bring nice team utility, because she needed less healing or healed the team, now this advantage is gone, for higher difficulties.
What rly was busted were 50% ammo back from the f ability and they adressed that.
The regen gave kerillian an own niche and purpose. She is now just a shallow sienna and from a design perspective i find that change pretty bad. They either should find a way to nerf it without breaking the passive or give her a new niche.
Considering the group hp regen only begins at 18% while carrying 2 grims; I think the changes pretty much make the point of rolling with an elf in a dedicated 4 man a bad move. If that was their goal, they succeeded. AS far as pushing through hidden nerfs go–it’s one of the lowest thing I’ve ever seen this company do in the years I’ve supported them.
It was disappointing and ruined for many what was supposed to be an exciting release.
She is still good as long range elite/special killer and does that job well enough.
Sure other careers can fill that spot too, but that could be said for any other career.
Careers shouldn’t be a niche pick in the first place but able to fill a certain role.
There is a best pick for any of those roles and so you could say for the other cases they are just “shallow versions” of something else.
That still doesn’t make it less viable.
Also compared to Sienna she still has 2 other good and usefull careers for high difficulties were Sienna is pretty much shoehorned into Pyro.
meh, ive done better on legend with elf than anyone else but I don’t play sienna, basically everyone got gutted and the game got less fun, if I wanted to fight nothing but storm vermin and bosses 100% of the time I would just go back to QoL mod v1 over playing this trash on legend.
elf might be the overall worst character now. Hard to say until we see how the other classes perform with their nerfs.
She was already only of middling strength past recruit difficulty. Now, I doubt she is gonna be played much.
The Handmaiden is actually my favorite of her classes. The nerfs to crit made the shade meh, and the nerfs to waystalker made her just an overall worse choice than the handmaiden.
The handmaiden is actually a great mix of support, damage, and tanking… though its more avoidance than tanking.
On point sir! 
Building Handmaiden specifically for tanking results in a substantially resilient hero that can safely divert large amounts of enemy attention to her, while allowing the rest of your team to kill them in relative safety.
NOTE: only really works if you have teammates who are playing in a team-based fashion, preferably over VoIP, and so may not work in a typically public game fashion. (I’ve tried a couple times, it doesn’t work very well.)
End result is a hero who can shove to draw aggro on a crowd of enemies, and if there’s less than 10 or so of them swinging at her she will have a higher stamina regen than their ability to go through. This allows her to periodically shove / swing again to maintain aggro, and either hold still while allies swing at their backs, or dash away to cause the horde of focused enemies to chase after her.
Two Chaos Warriors and a Stormvermin? No problem, they swing slow enough that she can just stand there and tank all their hits.
Can even deal with hyperdensity for a little while. Had 30+ rats on Champion bubble up out of a spot on the ground and was able to block tank it for a good 3 seconds or so before needing to dodge backwards. May not sound like a long time, but was enough to allow the Ironbreaker to charge his flamethrower, and for Sienna to fully charge a conflag burst.
1.) Hp regeneration has always been useless in champion+
2.) Good. This isn’t supposed to be a ranged game. You can still play completely ranged and Recruit and Vet if you really want to if you are level 25.
3.) Shade is a terribad solo class and always will be because of the way enemy aggro works. However if you play with an organized group that manipulates aggro, Shade does ungodly damage and the nerf is well granted. Characters like Waystalker are a little touchy because it caters to lower skill players, but Shade is a character that requires an organized team and a skilled player so balancing her for her requirement is a good idea.
4.) Handmaiden is also really good in groups. her stamina regen aura is incredibly powerful (especially with Foot Knight, Unchained, and Ironbreaker) and with talents her own stamina is so ridiculous that she is a really solid choke point tank. Her ability to safely revive people with this stamina and the fact the she can revive even when knocked back makes her an insane support. The dash allows her to reposition better than anyone else in the game which is perfect for her role and the new bleed can clear damaged Slaves/Clan Rats to make it so that her stamina doesn’t drain as fast as she is ressing someone. Just because a character isn’t good when you yolo quick play doesnt mean the character is bad.
5.) Waystalker is trash. In the state she is in she is there to provide a strong early game character while you find better ones for the later.
I can’t agree more with that. Later in game Handmaiden is VERY strong.
Congratulations on your circles, birdman. They’re very circular.
Grats. You sat and farmed kills. The fact that you staged all of that is pretty good(not). Try harder though.
he’s not wrong that she’s still strong and capable, though i think more of that has to do with the enemy nerfs more than anything. posting a blatant carry job isn’t really doing any favors though. everyone gets them and with how gimped champion is right now it’s going to happen a lot more even at high ends.
The only way you would possibly get those numbers is by farming stats and padding. If you just go through a champion game as normal, you will never see those numbers. Like, a Sienna with 1/4 the kills? Nice joke. Need to try a lot harder with that lie you’re trying to pull off, bird. There is also no way for anyone to confirm you actually did that on champion either. Regardless of difficulty, those numbers will simply not exist in a normal run. especially not skewed in such a way.
you’re right they won’t happen in a normal run and that’s why i said it was a blatant carry job. this screenshot is from a beta run on the 5th so not the same game build, but the other two were dead weight that died after the first event and died again shortly after we ressed them. nothing set up or fake about it, just terrible players. it happens, especially with how much lower the difficulty bar is now letting just about anybody get through champion.
hell, screenshots like this get posted on a daily basis in the discord i’m in and everyone laughs at them. there are bad players everywhere, and good ones who can make any class look overpowered. i can post one of myself on a level 10 kruber doing almost as much as a level 30 sienna. these kill board screens are completely meaningless, other than for laughs or shitposting.
well they were not hidden they were simply undocumented and apart from the hp regen nerf were all expected, expecting broken beta builds to go live is a bit naive, if you don’t want to accept the changing landscape of buffs n nerfs till balance gets better your best off not playing for the first 6 months of release and skipping all beta’s in the future.
waystalker still strong still capable of playing a pure ranged game in champ , you just have to stop trying to beat others to the kill and pick targets with a degree of sense.
Handmaiden - all those hidden buffs really helped, Eldrazors precision getting a 50% power boost, dash getting 3 sizeable hidden buffs has made it a really good offensive and utility move. uninterruptible revive is still meh but on t he whole a very solid and fun career now and my fave of the elfs currently.
shade- didnt and havent played , just not my thing so no comment there.
What if they were all 1000+ hours V1 players and this was a blind run on one of the new maps?
That’s not the point anyway. The point is that WS isn’t bad atm, don’t blame the game.
No it proves nothing. To reach 797 kills you have to afk the map quite a bit for alot of hordes, which is a not very likely scenario for the average game. Also you got carried by the fact that the other teammates were not even 20. Meaning you can kill everything before they have the chance to hit the enemy due to power difference by power level and not class. Take a decent lvl 30 Sienna with you and you have at most 70% of her dmg and kills.
Without knowledge about power level, player skill and how the map was played these scoreboards are worthless. If there were an API that allows to access all scores from every game you could aggregate those to meaningful data. Single examples will never be a proof for game balance.
Excuses & excuses
Points for effort into fiction
