Hello!
I have been playing the devil’s claw mkIV on my Zealot and Psyker recently and had quite some fun with it. It pairs very well imho with the surge staff as a non-force horde clearing melee weapon, and there are actually some arguments to choose it over the Combat axe (a few…)
One thing bothers me though: the special “parish” ability
From what I’ve read it seems most players feel the same way as I do. It has currently very limited usefulness. Most of the time blocking is just safer because you can hold the button and block several different attacks while the parish only stays a couple seconds and works only on 1 attack. Even while forcing myself to use the parish ability instead of blocking the damage output is so insignificant that it’s not worth the effort. I also point out that the parish ability use stamina just like normal blocking would, so it doesn’t offer any benefit in this regard either.
Here is what I propose: instead of the “parish” ability working as the weapon’s special, let’s make it become the default behavior of the weapon while blocking. So when you hold block, your character will block and parry upcoming attacks. This will allow to add a different special to devil’s claw swords: a special attack like axes (a low damage high stagger) or dueling swords (a fast stab) or heavy swords etc
I don’t think it would render the devil’s claw broken as it would still have the same weaknesses (low stagger, low armor damage) but would make it a bit more competitive and fun compared to some much stronger weapons like Caxes and Taxes