Maybe it will, if new difficulty will make slaverat have 45hp lol. And then. Only maybe
I would be as surprised as @Flinlock to hear that you can block Ratling Gunner Shots with a standard weapon; I panic hold-up my block every time one focuses on me in the open and it doesn’t work.
I think you might be mistaking losing stamina as having meant you successfully blocked the shots (while blocking it takes several shots to knock down a stamina shield). However, there are attacks in the game that will damage your stamina while not reducing the damage. Some are:
- Ratling Gunners w/o a Shield
- Bile Trolls Spit
- Poison Wind from a Globodier
- Etc
I am doubtful but won’t discard your comment; I’ll try it out tomorrow as I have time.
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No damage reduction - yup. But Handmaiden is IMO the most “survivable” class in game due to ult giving awesome opportunities (and it also decimates hordes by itself).
Well no, zealot is way more, even iron breaker is better because he can get away from way more bs situation and dont crap your teammates
You are 100% right, I made the exact mistake you said rofl. My apologies for spreading wrong info, thank you for the correction
(Its hard to tell online, this is genuine not sarcastic)
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Oh, dude, all is good 
we all get it wrong sometimes; I’ve been wrong a dozen times before and I’ll be wrong a dozen times again (at the very least). No harm done!
So… no Jedi mode?! Sad face indeed!
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No mate, I’ve survived impossible encounters s HM, where IB and Zealot would get surrounded and killed. As HM I always had an easy way out.
HM not only dels more dmg than IB and decimates hordes with dash, but she can also revive people at will. Oh and push-attack spam is magnificient.
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I’m really curious in which situation can axe&falch zealot can get surrounded in. Mobility wise they are pretty similar except zealot can actually take a hit.
It’s really not often; if you run Onslaught on the mission Into the Nest there are waves of Stormvermin and Plague-Monks that come in roughly every 30 seconds. If you don’t wave-clear fast enough you end up pinned in a corner by 40 Storm-Vermin pretty quick. Our Kruber held on like a brick house when he was cornered because he had his dash, but I imagine that Handmaiden would’ve mulched them. Fun mission!
Well zealot would just probably kill all that shiet or would dash out of it on passive. IB with pistol can stun hyper or atleast slow it down (its stuns stormvermins and monks too) and his skill give a lot of survivability even outside of his passives. HM can’t take too much beating, IB can and have way to live through it. Its just different playstyle, but that outside of topic.
I don’t even think that shield gonna work like rest of shields, its gonna be probably buckler and work little different than normal shields
They are nowhere near similiar. Handmaiden can just dash around with added 3s of invisibility.
Zealot can’t just disappear from danger.
And yes, v. skillfull player can be equally safe as Zealot. But I’m not skillfull and as HM I single-handedly have taken out bosses along with hordes. My ONLY real problem is specials because when fighting hordes I’m experiencing lower framerates so I fail to properly time my dodges.
And BTW Handmaiden has this awesome built-in dodge range buff, that is more than adequate, I’m not even using the dodge-range talent, instead I simply use stamina regen, so I can spam the spear push attack ad nauseam.
End result? I’ve managed to succesfully revive the team on several occasions, deliver top boss damage and top damage overal. Yes, Handmaiden can get effectively 1-shot, but with her dodge range and AWESOME range of the spear getting hit is v. v. rare.
HM simply doesn’t get hit due to spear awesome range, her own dodge range and dash ability.
She can control the horde thanks to 180 degrees push/block angle so everything in front of her gets in the constant push -> push attack spiral to death.
And she has longbow that can 1-shot stormvermin on HS, 2-shot on bodyshot and succesfully remove specials with 1-2 hits. You have stormvermin patrol going after you? Dash and elliminate them with headshots - you have several seconds to do that -> 3s of inivisibility + the time it takes the patrol to reach you (and you can create quite a lot if you dash and keep firing while going back).
What Zealot does WAY better? Slaying CWs.
Well everything ? Bops can one headshot on max stack, and 2 into body same and way faster. He make room for teammates (what HM dont because invisbility lose aggro instantly), amazing monster damage, and dont die because of some bs hits, (you know monks and running attacks) not like HM. If you are so pro at dodging then why do you even play HM ?
And spear have same push that have every other non shield weapon, its have bigger inner block but not push.
HM spear monster damage is simply awesome.
Yes, I know you can spam pistols for good damage too, but as HM with a spear I actually got better results via sustained clobbering.
and dont die because of some bs hits, (you know monks and running attacks)
Well, yeah, except HM is the only class I don’t get hit by those, thanks to having huge clear areas due to spear slaughtering hordes like no other.
And are you really sure the block angle isn’t also the push angle? I mean, dual daggers feel pathetic when pushing, while spear does the job just great.
ANyway, we can talk stats etc. all day long while my personal results are WAY better with HM than with any ohter class, while it’s one of my least played, simply because it’s an easy mode for me even compared to Zealot.
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You can check it on armory mod.
And yeah bops do amazing damage (around 1/2 of hp in 12 shots and thats in good situation is less than 2 seconds) but I though mostly on normal hitting, rapier or dlc weapon do ton of damage. Overall we are talking off topic right now. We can both agree that elf have op weapons just like saltz dlc weapon 
Rapier is nowhere near spear. Axe + falch is v. good. vs everything, but it’s nowhere near as good as spear spam vs monsters.
And yeah, Axe and falch is too damn versatile. It has good horde clear on push attack (take Zealot stamina shield talent and spam it all day long) and falch attacks, it is damn good vs stormvermin, charged attack slays CWs.
Anyway,
all I’m saying is I, mediocre player, am having a lot more success surviving as HM than with most other classes and I find it quite easy actually. So the whole argument “poor Kerilion has no survivability” is simply wrong - she has weapons and skills that allow here to get out of tight situations or to prevent them from ever happening (clearing out horde in an instant).
It doesn’t mean Zealot isn’t great at survival, IB is also pretty good (but one has to build for specific forms of it, usually something is sacrificed - I don’t like dual hammers vs armor performance at all) - but there was an assumption that they vastly outperform HM - which is only true if we assume they are all getting hit comparatively often. And that’s not true - no way I could ever dream of clobbering bosses as short-range IB as I do as HM (she can easily dodge out of harm’s way even if you make some serious mistakes).
Anyway - will archers bring back shields? Hope not, cause I hate shield gameplay (slow, slow, slow) and the whole premise of spamming shield bash and then being pretty much useless vs bosses (OK, IB can do some decent damage via drakefire spam, but I always enjoyed ability to quite effectively bash troll’s skull in with an axe while the pistols were cooling down 
).
I personally love shields. I use them alot despite them being underwhelming, prolly why I’m a vet/champ pleb. Just because you dislike something does not mean it can not be useful for others, they should be brought up to being useful for those who enjoy using them. I am sure there will be more than one way to deal with the hordes of archers, shields being only possibly 1 of them.
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If something is broken, it should be reworked or removed, and not the whole game adjusted to make it work.
At the moment the only real point of shields is to mark the most probable worst player of the run. This way I can know from the beginning, who most likely will be tough to kill, but useless overal (there are exceptions).
For some absolutely unfathomable reason some people enjoy the shield gameplay as it is. But some people also enjoy getting their nuts whipped. Different people, different tastes, but objectively - shields aren’t really fun for most people and their performance is underwhelming. Blocking arrows doesn’t really add much fun factor, and it doesn’t fix the main problem of shields, which is - you trade mobility and damage for some mediocre crowd control and blocking.
Most people you know perhaps, different groups of people have vastly different play styles. There are the min-max speed run only legend hardcore people, and there is nothing wrong with that do what you enjoy. However there are also those who play simply for enjoyment or a fun action RPG hack and slash gameplay who are not trying to do “the perfect run” where I see more shield use as people still play it for enjoyment’s sake. like it or not the two communities are going to cross time to time. While I agree shields need work that Is no reason to ostracize them or remove them entirely because they do not fit the type of gameplay YOU enjoy. Your’s is not the only community playing.
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