All chain weapons’ revved up attacks have a massive drawback of locking you in one spot until the channeling ends - what is already rather incompatible with how game plays these days, especially on the higher difficulties, where you can’t afford to stay in one place like that due to mobs number and their aggression levels.
What even worse than that is when you try to target some elite inside a mixed hoard with a revved-up attack, you often just hit a chaffer instead, completely wasting all the time spent on the attack’s preparation and execution (if it’s overhead heavy attack it’s kinda slow too).
I also doubt many people will argue that all of those weapons could use some buff, especially if it’s mostly of QoL nature. Those are definitely not weapons contributing to power creep in any manner.
As an improvement to this experience, I believe all chain weapons should have inbuilt “snap to elite” behavior when a revved-up attack hits a mixed crowd, ensuring that in cases like that you will always hit a high priority target instead of chaff and at least won’t waste all that time for nothing. This should be like that for at least the strikedowns and stabbing kind of attacks
The animation commitment sucks. Special Activation should just buff all chain attacks for a period of time, consuming extra stamina for push attacks and blocks while active. It could be done through Strength, Brittleness debuffs or Rending buffs.
Also delete Uncanny Strikes, let chain weapons posess the unique armor piercing traits.
Uncanny isn’t universally bad thing though. On weapons like combat blade or vet’s shovel which are challenging to wield and hard to survive vs hoard with, Uncanny is a good addition, balanced with all those cons.
Nah, it allows high mobility, high attack speed type weapons to do way more damage to armored enemies than they should. Also if Uncanny didn’t buff DoTs it wouldn’t be so egregious.
For using knife on hordes bleed + mercy killer is the way to go. Psykers get Riposte through Scrier’s Gaze.
They have this feature already. If you rev and swing into a horde the chainsword will either latch onto the first elite/special/boss it hits or the latch on the last target after you’ve expended the weapon’s cleave. And because elites/special have a bigger hitbox than trash mobs, you’ll hit latch onto them instead of trash mobs if they’re occupying the same space.
With strikedown attacks you routinely will be hitting chaff instead of elites if your intended target is surrounded by the former. What you say may be the case for vanguards or other multi-target attacks, but strikedowns and other single-targets will hit the first target it meets.
I wonder why I see mostly RB zealots and DS vets in my matches, and those with Combat Blades are either noobs, or meme-ing oldtimers, or - the most rare case - really good players belonging to top 5% category, if it’s so problematic and overtuned weapon?
It’s not an issue that a small percentage of good players can do miracles with certain weapon, balance must never be centered around them, making the weapon effectively useless for the rest. Best players breaking balance should just be accepted as a feature, capped in some way if needed, and that’s it.
What you see in some YT videos out there isn’t something absolute majority of DT players can repeat with the weapon. A typical DT player with combat blade will be a rather fast but mostly useless 5th wheel on the team. A good (but not the best) DT player will be just ok with combat blade, not OP in a slightest.
Relic Blade has better cleave, further reach and more stagger than combat blade, worse mobility. Dueling sword has further reach. DS is easier to use than combat blade.
So Combat Blade isn’t a problem of any measure then, if other weapons are more efficient than it in wide variety of scenarios. Why exactly it needs to be nerfed, in any way? Taking Uncanny from it, which is almost universally taken on it, is a nerf.
I understand but cutting out skill with an auto aim isn’t the right choice.
Not saying there ain’t room for improvement, I actually do use chainsword and chainaxe in maelstrom missions. So, I know, hit registration sucks when you’re trying to hit an ogryn in the face and instead you catch a limb or a trash mob you wouldn’t even expect to be in the way.
That’s a feature of just the mk III Eviscerator’s heavy attack. I’ve thought about it, but am not sure if that’s the thing all chain weapons should have.
The differences between all chain weapons are too subtle and they’re competing with nuclear sabers and knives that put legendary drops from MMORPGS to shame. There isn’t a single solution that will solve their problems.
I think snapping to elites/specialists would be a nice little QoL buff honestly too.
If you did that it would break the one shot builds though, assuming you mean to trade that functionality for the one you mentioned.
I like my chain one shot builds, but even though “one shot build” sounds OP, it’s often quite difficult to make work due to being locked in the animation. Just today I died in a havoc on my scum because I was trying to chain kill (pun unintended) a bunch of crushers. It’s just dangerous as hell. Doable if you’re really aware of timing, positioning of enemies, and when to dodge. But man, it’s living recklessly since your line of sight on the ones in the back is blocked (that’s what caused me to get flattened).
Maybe if they introduced a new mark with the special functioning like you suggested that’d work?
Otherwise, not sure how you fix it. Improving the time to kill would end up being a buff, I think. Because even if one kills slowly, and one kills fast, but they do the same damage, then the one killing faster is going to end up killing more stuff.
My solution is to run chain weapons with some kind of stagger (VoC on vet, Blackouts on Scum), the exception being eviscerator on Zealot, as it kills quickly enough, and has a moveset that makes headshots easy enough to land, while also having greater range for safety to offset the danger of having to stand still. Also the blackouts suffer from not working with DoT kills, which worsens the build a bit since on scum at least, chain axe synergizes nicely with crit and poison, or can work with bleeds, your blitz does much less damage than other options, and if you do take the poison on nade talent, then there’s less stuff for you to get kills on to regenerate them, as they’ll just wipe out chaff. I really hope they look into fixing that.
I’d be okay with a slight nerf to uncanny. But I don’t want it removed from the game. There are some neat combos you can do with it, and they’re not altogether easy to make work. Namely, grenades.
I don’t like the risks of being locked in place with certain special attacks (this isn’t just chain weapons), but at least now you can dodge out of them. The thing is with all this power creep, the risk is hardly ever worth the reward, especially when you have weapons, or bottle cork screws which do more damage with basic attacks than chain axes.
What I would like to get a good QoL pass so we can get:
a fix for having your screen jerked around when locked to enemies. This happens rarely, but can be really disorienting when you suddenly look at the floor or ceiling. Seems to happen when sawing enemies who are in certain animation states, rapidly moving?
a fix to the special attacks FAILING to connect, despite “hitting” the enemy
A fix to special attacks connecting and doing some damage, yet getting interrupted / shortened somehow
Chain axe MK XII still needs its light attacks audio and general feedback improve. This was attempted once, but I consider the results really low effort. It just doesn’t feel like a chain axe, and more like a plastic 1 handed mace. “Oh, hi Kruber, I didn’t see you there”
To be fair this is vet melee dmg which is insane rn
Higher crit chance (Desperado and default)
Higher weakspot dmg (Desperado and 30% weakspot dmg node)
The talent that makes enemy take 20% more dmg on hitting a crit
Skirmisher which is free dmg for breathing
(I also suspect you’re running mercy killer on the knife with the class that gets free bleed for hitting anything?)
And ofc Uncanny Strikes that need to be toned down
Replicating this with dmg with Zealot combat Blade requires very good luck or martyrdom
I think I never (or almost never) have seen vet topping the melee damage charts in my scoreboard with any competition present in that category on the team. So however “OP” it may seem by just looking on some abstract numbers, it’s just “lab numbers” and thought experiments so far, not something creating an issue. Good vets routinely top range damage chart, and the really good ones are topping the overall damage charts even - but that’s about it. Though kraks are overtuned for sure, need their amount to be reduced by 1, longer CD too, may be even raw damage reduced.
Vet has a huge boost on weapons that benefit Big time from weakspots and crits, he does more dmg than Zealot with these
DS vet (without thrust) can 3 shot Havoc 40 crushers if his very easy to proc talents (mainly skirmisher, and either Focus Target or Agile Engagement)
This goes to 4 shots with Knife and the same talents. 4 hitting a Havoc 40 crusher that has 9750 HP and carapace armor, on a extremely high mobility and fast attack speed melee
If you can utilize the knife to survive in havoc as vet, and consistently hit heads and weakspots with it, dealing millions of damage, you already belong to tiny percentage of really good players and should be largely excluded from balance considerations. Building balance around such players is the worst strategy possible when balancing games. Very good players breaking balance should be just accepted as feature / necessary evil. It’s much more of an issue when every other player can do similar things with a broken class liks HS, by just pressing a few buttons once in a while.
