I’ve been trying it out, and about half the maps seem to just … eat the projectiles. Not parts of the maps, the entire thing. They do damage on the initial pass, they stick in the ground, and when recalled they do nothing.
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That sounds like some sort of bug.
Umbral blades is one of the Rogue metas - it did get nerfed recently especially with the poison being nerfed too - but it should be working ok.
THere are a few bug posts about ranged skills having lots of terrain problems especially on certain maps - perhaps you are experiencing the same? Ritual Lake is a very bad one right now.
May be worth posting a bug thread about your experiences.
It is very much a bug. A lot of the current map tilesets will just eat Umbral Blade projectiles and then spit them out at like twice the max distance you can throw them. I posted about it on the Bug Forums quite some time ago and updated it multiple times with which tilesets were eating them and causing issues, and they’ve just yet to get to it or even address it as a problem.
It makes playing Umbral in any capacity just so frustrating that I’ve almost stopped playing Rogue at all until it’s fixed. All the other Rogue skills are clunky or severely weak compared to Umbral that they aren’t fun to play either
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I’d think yes he probably has opened a bug report:
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I somehow read right past that. That’s what I get for multitasking too much. 
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I did post a Bug Report. I first noticed the issue on the Void Amalgamation fight where the Bladestorm daggers would hit the middle of the hitbox of the boss and then get SHOT so far out of the hitbox, and usually off my screen.
This is the original post with my Edits if you want to comment or add to any issues you may have found so hopefully the Devs will take a glance at it.
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Well, I reported quite a lot of things into the bug forum… most of it never got fixed. I have a gut feeling the just don’t track the bugs forum at all, despite the sticky post saying otherwise.
You could ask a streamer to kindly make a video to show the bug or something. Maybe that way it gets to dev ears, dunno.
I’ve had a lot of luck with the exploding blades spec. It hits fairly hard for not just a ton of gear. You kinda have to have decent idols and some lucky exalted items to make it work lategame but it’s fairly easy to get there. Even if you don’t immediately cap out defenses or do everything you’re usually supposed to do, it can still make it most of the way through Monolith just on Calamity and Soulfire. If you’ve banked those on other characters, this is probably the way to go. You definitely also want the gloves that convert bleed chance to ignite chance, Maehlin’s Hubbris. Those are pretty much mandatory for this build as well. It specs Bladedancer and eventually takes all the dodge and bleed available.
Once I hit level 100 on that character, I may post a build guide with some advice on how to play it.
One thing I will tell you here though as far as aiming goes though, is that since the blades stick and explode, instead of aiming directly at enemies you should kind of stand at full screen distance and stack some up, then run over and hit them to get them to walk into the blades, which will then act as landmines and shred them. You can also kind of stand at about 2/3rds of the screen away from large enemies and stack them in front of them so that the explosions and sometimes the knives themselves hit. This is how I deal most of my damage. If you toss blades willy nilly by clicking on the enemies, they hit and go way behind them and then the explosions miss, which is obviously no good. However, regular hits and then Ignite damage will kill most of the smaller ankle-biter enemies, so you don’t necessarily have to negotiate this on every single pack or enemy that pops up at you.
The thing it most struggles to deal with is teleporter enemies that jump to you and bypass your blades on the ground. For these, shift and decoy help a lot, as well as smokescreen to a lesser extent. You can still chew them up by casting them in front of you and then running across them, where they will then walk into them.
Hope that helps!
They do, there’s just an awful lot of bug to fix.
Unfortunately I cannot reply to your Bug Report anymore but recently I have been playing a lot of bladedancer and noticed this issue only during online play. To get the SSF experience for speedruns I often played offline and never had the mentioned issue.
I might create a new bug report when I get home with a small video demonstration of the issue. Hopefully this gets fixed.
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Update: So I used Umbral Blades with Explosive Blades while wearing Maehlin’s Hubris and Soulfire on my Rogue all the way to 100. I sometimes also wore Apostate’s Sanctuary against bosses. I’m not in love with it, but it does work okay. I wouldn’t do a build guide on it though, because I don’t think I’d recommend it to anybody.
The map lowering your range is an issue, but what becomes a bigger issue later on is that a single throw is never going to kill a large group of 10+ mobs or large monsters and you kind of really need it to in order to stay mobile. Your hits will absolutely never kill anything outright because most of the damage is coming from ignite, so you have to aim at the ground in front of enemies constantly. This is especially annoying against enemies that teleport to you. So what you end up doing is using Shift and Decoy to kite them around while you throw the daggers literally directly on the ground next to you so that enemies eventually walk over them, which causes them to explode. While this works, it’s tedious because you’re having to think about spacing and cooldowns really hard in a way you don’t have to on other classes and specs. (I died a lot playing this Rogue, yeesh.)
You also can’t do extremely good boss damage because you need to sacrifice at least some of your build for dodge / ward / movement speed / cooldown recovery to help keep you alive. If you don’t have enough, bosses like Empowered Lagon will start to attack too frequently for you to get out of the way sometimes. But this build also needs throwing attack speed, or else it’ll take forever to get your attacks out in time for them to matter. Very tight balancing act.
I think if the base damage were a little higher or there were better ways to increase ignite damage (I’m sure there probably are) then it would be a much more viable build. It also depends way too heavily on you having several (upwards 5) really good Exalted items with damage and resistances on them. In the current game state, it’s also just too hard to stack the damage you need without giving up stats that keep you from dying instantly against certain bosses or encounters. At least that’s the case before you start racking up Legendary’s, which I never have.
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Interesting that it would be an online only interaction, but would also make sense. Lots of strange interactions popped up once MP released compared to when we were offline. Please do make a video showing how the blades interact!
I don’t really know how to do any of that kind of stuff so my only hope was to just describe and replicate it as often as I could to make it easy to identify and fix.
This is one of the cases that the build looks so cool theorycrafting it but when actually playing it it doesn’t pay off so well.
I was so excited dropping a 3LP soulfire relic and 3LP firestarter weapon and finding your build at the same time, but playing it felt a bit lackluster. Sure it works and can go far in monos, but the combat feel is not very good with it. I guess I’m too anxious to wait ignite ticks.
I still have plans to try it another time, since I have all the legendaries, but I love rogue active skills, playing umbral blades, shadow dagger, shadow cascade is very fun.
I had to drop it for a moment and now I’m focused in regular physical shadow daggers damage.
Next Im thinking in light shuriken and some build focused in shadow cascade without shadow daggers.
Overall they bring more enjoyment from gameplay
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