I think Blade is a very difficult character to balance because of his lack of skill expression. If he were to be strong he'd be really braindead OP and I think that's something that the game is better off without. We kinda got close to a taste of that in the 5.5 patch where Blade could stat check bad players as an immortal w+m1 melee character which is really lame. I like the direction they've been trying to take him but I think it will continue to miss the mark if they don't move towards improving his skill expression.

The Goal

• Move Blade away from being a fat DPS with mid sustain in his Bloodline Awakening
• Move Blade towards playing around Daywalker Dash and Bloodline Awakening timings to go in
• Make Blade rely on Scarlet Shroud as his main form of survivability
• Give Blade a stronger Ultimate Ability to rely on. His ult costs more than Venom's, and as much as Wolverine's, Spider-Man's, and Moon Knight's, all whilst providing less disruption and kill threat as the others.

If these changes achieve it, Blade would be more fun to play and would be more open to skill expression, enabling him to be strong in a healthy way.

Daywalker Dash

This ability did get pretty hard with a nerf in an attempt to make it more usable which just wound up failing. Most notably the sword variant. In the 5.5 patch it did enough damage to be a solid sustain tool and had a slow which was nice to avoid kiting. However, with the Season 6 change, it wound up eating too big of a hit to its damage and now the ability just strictly applies less anti-heal.

• Anti-heal per hit increased from 8% to 12.5%
• Spinning animation twice as fast

So, effectively:

• Ability is less likely to miss hits because of the faster hit speed
• Anti-heal stack goes from 32% at maximum to 44% (stack this with the ultimate for an 90% anti-heal as opposed to the 72% on live)

These buffs should make the dash much more consistent as a damage tool and as a anti-heal tool.

Thousand-Fold Slash

This ability is also really missing an oomph to it that I think it needs. It leaves Blade in a really telegraphed position and struggles to kill confirm. Here are some ideas I had to increase it's usage as a utility and rewarding good line-ups. This ability should really punish enemies getting hit by it.

• New Effect: Once held for 1 second, initial dash slows enemies hit by 40% for 4 seconds

Eclipse Edge

This is Blade's current active team-up with Moon Knight. On paper and in certain situations, it can be really strong. However, the ability does a couple things that contradict itself.

• Firstly, it does not assist Blade in maintaining his Bloodline Awakening stacks.
• Secondly, its two parts contradict each other.
• The first part is a short distance dash that deals damage. Seems like you want to get close and personal, right?
• However, the second part is a bunch of projectiles, which can be difficult to land up close

So none of the ability really synergizes with Blade's kit, and it doesn't even synergize by itself. It's definitely not a horrible team-up ability though, but they could really do better with it. I don't have any specific ideas to improve the ability aside from reworking it unfortunately, and at that point I think you should just give Blade a new team-up or potentially explore him being an anchor.

Some great team-up buddies could be:

• Black Panther (Blade recovered in Wakanda, plus they're both DPS struggling in the current state of the game)
• Daredevil (DD is a meta pick who could reasonably fit thematically with Blade)
• Luna Snow (Maybe we finally get to hear what song made it to Blade's slaylist. Also I think Iron Fist deserves to get a team-up with somebody else now)
• Psylocke (Psyblade ship fuel)

There's probably more I didn't think about and considering Blade did get a new team-up before characters released before him I wouldn't expect the rotation to be soon unfortunately.

Scarlet Shroud

This ability is going to be key in increasing Blade's agency and skill requirements, so all changes made here are pretty much just going to shift Blade towards requiring some proper timing.

• Daywalker Dash damage resisted to cooldown reduction ratio is tripled during the "Parry" phase of ability (normally would need to block 200 to get a full charge, now only needs to block ~70 damage to get a full block)
• "Parry" phase now grants 100% damage reduction
• Overall damage reduction reduced from 80% to 65%
• Cooldown reduced from 3s to 1.5s
• Energy Recovery increases by 2% for each Bloodline Awakening stack

These changes should reward Blade for being active with his block instead of holding onto it. Imo this ability's current identity is to use it as an disengage, or risk blocking maybe 1 cc just to get hit with another once you use it. This tool should be Blade's way of staying in instead of relying on stat-checky lifesteal. Good Blade players should be able to fry a backline if they get in and hit good parries. Blade shouldn't be contingent on bad players failing to punish him and getting stat-checked which is what the 5.5 version seemed to be heading towards

Health Changes

Unfortunately if he remained at 350 hp he would probably stay as a fat DPS and would potentially wind up really hurting the game with that health pool. Keep in mind I'm not nerfing his gun here. The only other heroes that match is HP pool are Wolverine (who is exclusively only able to deal damage up close) and Mister Fantastic (who deals very little damage). Daredevil got close to 325 but absolutely ran the game at that health value with a much less consistent damage mitigation tool than this reworked Scarlet Shroud concept.

• Base Health from 350 to 300
• Bonus Health from Bloodline Awakening maximum from 75 to 150
• Bonus Health from Bloodline Awakening ratio from 1x to 1.2x

Now he should get a bit more health from his engage, but shouldn't be able to stat-check as hard with a pocket healer as he would be with the changes as a good chunk of sustain is now going to come from the Bonus Health and block. Might be a terrible idea but I think it would be a reasonable counterbalance with all the insane buffs I'm giving him in this hypothetical. The Bonus Health changes are mostly to make up for the lost health on an engage and to buff his ult again to prevent him from being blown up after he pops it.

TL;DR/Summary

Basically here's my goals

• Reward skill with a rebalance of his sustain
• Give him a strong niche that stands out and has a reason to exist
• Make ult more impactful in a thoughtful way

Just Some Notes

Just to get it out of the way, the numbers aren't perfect. I don't have a testing team or a way to actually experiment with any of this so I'm not entirely sure if these would be functional or good changes. Just purely thought experiment.

Let me know what yall think I kinda just sat down and wrote all this out and it might be terrible or maybe I cooked. A lot of these ideas have been floating around in my head so they've had some time to warm up to me so keep that in mind lol.

As far as my credentials I can really only peak GM (grinding past GM is awful people in this game have terrible egos) and I've been playing Blade since he released in S3.5, got well over 20 hours on the character in live games and a lot spent just trying to lab stuff in the practice range so I feel as if I have a decent grasp on him but surely there's somebody out there who thinks I'm an absolute scrub with no right to speak on Blade's balance.