Deande is my favorite character, second to only Mellka. I have won so many matches with her. I understand why you would want her changed though.
[quote=“ShadowHaven, post:48, topic:1543467, full:true”]
Have you tried using comeback king, i believe it explodes for about 140 damage when your shield breaks.[/quote]
Don’t have one, but I’m not sure it would do all that much since it’s not getting all of the other multipliers. Plus, the whole Burst Dash thing isn’t really a big part of my damage; it’s nice burst, but my bread and butter is straight up melee (hence the attack damage and attack speed).
Wouldn’t really surprised me.
I’m actually pretty glad I don’t PvP (much less PvP with Deande). I’m pretty sure the way I play Deande would be entirely wrong (I prefer to use Alani and Galilea who do best in PvP exactly the way that I play them).
Strange…mine never decays. I’ve tested this before.
Yeah, I just ran an incursion match and I just went up to a thrall and got my 5 crit hits then walked away. I definitely noticed a dramatic attack speed change and it didnt seem to decay
1 Like
I dont think they ever decay. Same applies with VoV.
I dont like her new uppercut! Is slow, hard to land and drops your speed also you dont get the extra dmg or life steal. I tried to use it againts a party of supporters but in the end it didnt help actually my dmg was awfull.
Ground zero has an awfull lock animation just like her ult! Long set up, stationary, dmg splits and long animation lock (once with wft i stabed deande’s face and killed her).
Was burst dash created to weak a target to directly engage? -30% dmg dosent help to finish a target but a silence, slow will.
She has access to a slow, and I think they just wanted to give her something super unique.
While I agree that Deande needs work, I just wanted to comment on this.
First, Battleborn don’t really need to be spectacular at PvE. I have soloed on Advanced with Deande as well as others like Miko, Reyna, and such - and when I play Deande, she clears the stage faster than some of the other Battleborn.
Second, and please don’t take this in a negative way - it isn’t meant as such - but Deande’s cloak should be used to kill Battleborn because she’s an Assassin, not run away unless it’s up and you have no choice. This works really well 1v1 - use Holotwin to position yourself around a corner or at least out of sight. Uncloak. You’ll need to be uncloaked for a bit before engaging, depending on helix and item choices - this just takes practice. Now, when Holotwin’s cooldown is, say, 6-8 seconds, come from your hiding spot and attack an enemy from behind. Unload all your damage, if getting low on health use Holotwin. Now - if you’ve done a good bit of damage, many Battleborn will retreat for healing and/or just stand there with low health after the Holotwin dies because they think the danger’s over. Instead of using Holotwin to retreat, use it to run behind the character maybe 20-30 feet and wait. Depending on whether the enemy remains or runs back to the safety of your base, position yourself behind them, and unload again. If you have cooldown reduction items and the correct helix choices, you can often use Holotwin to both initiate and then … re-initiate 
It requires very good timing, a lot of sneakery, and a good map sense to time the cooldowns. It helps if you attack squishy and/or already damaged Battleborn. She is definitely an advanced character.
I’d recommend lots of shield items, too, and taking the Helix that applies 50% of her shield to Burst Dash. It does indeed make you squishy, but Deande is all about damage as quickly as absolutely possible and good positioning. I also think a lot of people get stuck on Deande’s thrown fan Helixes. Essentially, you want to use thrown fans to participate in minion killing from a safe distance or, very rarely, to finish someone who is running with 10 health. People who ignore her Melee and Stealth helixes are gonna have a heck of a time killing anyone. 60-80 thrown war fan damage won’t cut it.
My problem with Deande is that she’s very weak against a good team that sticks together at all times and makes it very unlikely to find 1-on-1 scenarios in remote locations - but this goes for a lot of assassin characters.
Personally, I think you can fix Deande in one move - make her Ultimate an instant cast instead of having a warm-up, or, at the least, a severely reduced warm-up. You’d come from behind, do damage, and finish with the Ultimate - like Rath, only … not quite … because Dreadwind on a good Rath is just crazytown 
Remember - she’s basically invulnerable once her Ultimate has started. If you don’t split the Ult to 3-4 Battleborn / Minions / etc. you can unload from almost complete safety … once the warm-up is up, of course.
Good luck!
your post actually helped me understand deande better, thank you very much!
Personally, I think you can fix Deande in one move - make her Ultimate an instant cast instead of having a warm-up, or, at the least, a severely reduced warm-up. You’d come from behind, do damage, and finish with the Ultimate - like Rath, only … not quite … because Dreadwind on a good Rath is just crazytown. Remember - she’s basically invulnerable once her Ultimate has started. If you don’t split the Ult to 3-4 Battleborn / Minions / etc. you can unload from almost complete safety … once the warm-up is up, of course.
I would like to clarify for the previous poster, that Deande is quite vulnerable throughout the duration of the entire ultimate attack. She can be damaged (and killed) while attacking an enemy (during the ult after the warm-up) and can even be CCed while attacking as well (during the ult after the warm-up).
As I have mentioned in a previous thread, reducing the startup of the ult may cause some balance issues (especially if removed completely), due to how effective the attack can be (although it is difficult to use).
The only relatively fair changes (regarding Deande) that I have seen mentioned on these forums have been the following:
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Addressing Deande’s vulnerability throughout the Ult attack, and her self stun after the ult. Of these two specific weaknesses, I would consider the vulnerability throughout the attack to be most important to address, as it is more viable to account for the self stun weakness as opposed to the vulnerability throughout the attack.
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Addressing Deande’s movement speed.
If I were to address Deande’s movement speed I would look into doing the following:
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Increase base movement speed by 5% or increase base sprint speed by 10%.
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Redesign the Beast of Momentum mutation helix option: The mutation will grant a 20% movement speed buff instead of 10%, although the duration will be unchanged (5 seconds). Furthermore, instead of receiving the buff by killing an enemy, Deande would receive 4% movement speed per normal hit (capping at 20%). I think it would be quite fitting for a helix option named “Beast of Momentum” to build up incrementally as momentum would suggest.
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Make the Beast of Momentum helix option no longer conflict with her slow. I think this could best be done by either swapping the level 5 helix options (not including the mutation) with the level 2 helix options, or by moving the Beast of Momentum mutation down to the level 2 helix options. All of the other assassin characters (even the large majority of characters in general) have CC in their kit either by default or by level 2, so I think it would be more appropriate to swap the level 2 and level 5 helixes (not including the mutation.)
3 Likes
I agree with the changes above, especially around her movement speed and Beast of Momentum which I think is very lacking right now.
I’d like to suggest that at the same tier, her 5R helix, Roguelike could use a boost especially when compared to Pendles’s 3R helix Backstab. Both increase their user’s melee attacks to an enemies back by 25%, the difference is that Deande’s is only in affect for 3 seconds after leaving stealth, while Pendle’s is active all the time.
I think that Deande’s helix should drop to a 15% increase to melee strikes against her enemies back, but be active all the time just like Pendles’s. I think dropping the damage amp to 15% for Roguelike vs. 25% for Backstab balances the fact that Deande gets her passive 25% bonus while attacking from stealth, while Pendles has no such innate damage bonus.
Ok, you’re right - she’s not completely invulnerable after the warm up, I didn’t mean to imply that. What seems to work, sometimes, is AoE damage and CC spells, and those are easier if she’s on one target during the cast than if she’s splitting her attack between two or more baddies. In the scenario above, though, I was describing her use in a 1-on-1 scenario. Very few times have I been damaged and rarely killed when assassinating a single character, once the ultimate has been cast, and assuming it kills the character. Obviously if they’re still alive after, anything goes. And to reiterate - I believe her weakness is against a team that sticks together at all times and leaves few 1-on-1 encounters. I also think that she gains a benefit from being an underplayed character - not a lot of people have a lot of experience against her. On the other side of that … Oscar Mike is in 99% of every Incursion match I’ve ever played.
That said, I just played against a Deande last night that single-handedly destroyed my whole team Definitely in the top 3 I’d ever seen. And it was partly a pick-up team, so, lots of people running around on their own, but there were times when she’d engage 2-3 of us and still almost always win. I killed her twice as Orendi, and I believe her score at the end was 27-3 or thereabouts. This, though, I’ve seen with literally every Battleborn. There are some people that are just god-tier with a specific character, and it really isn’t about the character itself - it’s often about the skill and, I’d assume, practice and theory-crafting of the person playing that character.
The question is: how do i keep my target in range? You cant outrun many bb and have no way to keep them close untill lvl 5.
Ranged attack is oky but not enough… I just cant stay in the back throwing fans but also i cant get in and out without risk and probably wont kill anyone…
Hollowtiwn to get in or out, thats my everyday dilema
Well. Conclusion. Broaden her hit boxes (burst dash, melee), decrease wind up (blink storm and personally, burst dash), decrease Holotwin cool down.
2 Likes
I agree on this so much but Decoy in its current state is just not that great. What they should do is rework her decoy so that it doesn’t have health but relies just on the timer. Of course this would require for them to change some of her helix options like her level 2 and her level 9. [quote=“devjbev, post:62, topic:1543467”]
Broaden her hit boxes
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Yes please! [quote=“devjbev, post:62, topic:1543467”]
decrease wind up
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I am fine with the wind up, the problem with blinkstorm now is that she stunned longer than her enemy is. That is not okay. [quote=“devjbev, post:62, topic:1543467”]
decrease Holotwin cool down.
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Read my suggestion at the top. The cool down isn’t much of an issue since decoy is out for 8 seconds. That means decoy’s cool down would be 20 seconds all the time. It is now but it dies way too quickly lol
I would also suggest making the clone a little more…intelligent? I would use holotwin right in someones face and my clone would go off to some other nearby target and I’ve caught the clone taunt a few times when I needed it to hit someone.
But, there has been multiple times where my clone would follow low health battlebornes and they would die of the explosion, which I like.
Deande and that is most BB’s of her type as a melee character archetype (melee weaponb ased character that is an “assassin”) is critically flawed in how they mesh in BB.
As in they are easy to counter, hard to balance and very hard to carve niches for them on top of having heavy competition with other non melees or melees that are of a different archetype.
That would be a pretty dead giveaway, though, if your clone couldn’t take damage. It also seems like, even at 30% of base damage, an unkillable 8-second clone would be very, very powerful.
I’m OK with giving the clone more health, messing with the cooldown, changing the effects, and so on, but it should probably either be (for balance reasons) that the clone is unkillable but does no damage, or is killable but deals damage. A third option might be that it’s killable, deals no damage, but does a lot more self-destruct damage - kind of like a Boom Bot or Suicide Thrall.
I know that there are current helix options that already do some of these things, but many just aren’t strong enough to be worthwhile in most situations. An exploding Deande clone that does, say, 400-500 damage, might actually have some use. Or one with 100% of Deande’s health but that does 10% of her damage, or one that does 100% damage but has 10% health, and so on.
Haha really?
Ok, so here’s Deande’s new Ultimate. Get Ready!
On activation, Deande summons 9 clones of randomly-picked Battleborn. Any Battleborn that the player has unlocked are capable of being summoned, wearing any skin that the player has unlocked for that Battleborn. Clones have 400% of Deande’s base health, last a maximum of 8 seconds, and are incapable of dealing damage. Instead, Clones will taunt any enemy Battleborn in range, using any taunt that the player has unlocked for that Battleborn. Clones will continue taunting as long as an enemy is in range and will move to re-engage if an enemy dies or leaves taunting range. Furthermore, Clones get larger the more damage they receive (up to a maximum of 400% of their base character size), will begin to glow at 50% health remaining, and begin to blink at 25% health remaining. The Clones’ model size, amount of glow, and blink speed increase as their health declines, up to a maximum of 400% base model size right before death. At the end of 8 seconds, any remaining Clones will complete a final taunt and perish in an exploding shower of rainbow-colored shards. Shards that are not of the native gold color can be picked up, but will not contribute to the collectors’ actual shards on-hand.
Booyah. You will now have a Deande played in every game. Ever. Ever!! And you won’t even have to balance her 
2 Likes
I agree that there are some things about Deande’s kit that could use reworking. Specifically, her ultimate’s wind up/vulnerability and her movement speed.
But I have spent a load of time recently trying to really understand her kit, and just recently it finally clicked. Deande has the potential for some serious burst damage, but her greatest strength is her utility. The way you engage with Deande will make or break her effectiveness.
No activation cost shield gear (negative reload), grey max roll skill damage, purple attack speed with shield strength secondary. This gear set up gives 538 shields…and it’s cheap. Calculated Risk at level 4 allows you get some serious damage. Holotwin with full shields -> burst dash your target -> melee their face off. Now they’re slowed, fighting you and your clone, and they take 23% extra damage from “The Culling” helix.
Once I adopted an aggressive mentality and realized holotwin is for engaging and not retreating…her kit really started to shine. High risk high reward.