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.
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.