2H Hammer is bonktastic
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Yea Bardin’s not dual axes melee options are all pretty clunky and despite their slow high damage focus pale to other classes’ options for blending up hordes or sacking elites. Seems like everyone just defaults to dual hammers on other Bardins, IBs sometimes use something else since they have smiter and can play loose in melee without a care but the horde clear and decent fast heavies for armor with the THP generation is a no brainer. And it does come back to a lack of safety, mobility, attack speed and good damage on these weapons with other careers. Maybe another combo weapon like an axe and a hammer would provide something more like the sword and dagger for general use and mobility.
Meh, just making all good weapons play the same and introducing new weapons because the old ones aren’t up to scratch seems like a bad plan to me. I love that slugging it out with a big hammer feels completely different from deftly poking holes in ratmen with a rapier, and that holding a frontline with a shield is like playing a different game from slicing stuff up with two fast blades. It’s not at all a bad thing that dwarven weapons feel different from elven ones, even if they are a little “clunky”. As long as they’re just as effective overall. Making Bardin’s weapons play like Kerillian’s with a different skin will only make the game worse, not better.
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Honestly, I am tired of this “clunky” argument or that all weapons should feel “smooth”. For me it is an excuse to slap even more attack speed on weapons. And personally, I think that powerful weapons of mass-destruction should feel “clunky”, more “clunky” as some of them currently are.
I have played so much Axe & Shield on Cataclysm and the weapon feels awesome. There is no need to change anything.
It is all about weapon feeling and fun, and you or your team mates having overpowered weapons is neither fun nor is it a good feeling. It feels bad.
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Weapons in this game aren’t all designed well when it comes to matching the scaling in difficulties.
A weapon that is more balanced around dueling a single opponent or perhaps 2-3 enemies will not fare as well in higher difficulties especially Cataclysm due to hyper density or mixed density of trash mobs and elite/shield enemies.
If I were to play with certain weapons in Adventure Mode or Chaos Wastes it would be due to relying more on ranged and the occasional jump into melee combat while not expecting to hold front line at all. However should team mates get downed and a horde shows up the chance of such weapons coming through in the end are less then using something like Dual Hammer or Cog Hammer which can more easily spam through a horde (unless certain Cata waves).
Rng of team composition and more so if playing Chaos Wastes emphasizes certain weapons above others because as a baseline they don’t feel as hampered in most cases imo.
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Your argument would make sense if Bardin’s weapons were powerful to make up for being slow, but they aren’t. At best he makes them less slow with the Slayer or just baseline tolerable with Ironbreaker and Smiter. The other 2 Bardins have little in the way of choice for actual effectiveness and it shows in player picks. I’ve not seen a Ranger without dual hammers or the cog in months, same with engineers minus a couple token shield users here and there. If your idea of ‘balance’ is replacing the weapons in the game with DLC then I guess nothing should be changed. Similarly if an Ironbreaker Bardin focuses on crowds and still gets buried in terms of melee kills by a Waystalker with a glaive the obvious answer is that Bardin’s melee kit is poor. Tons of faster weapons with more mobility, cleave and tons of armor damage across all kits and they are viable on all careers. Warpick for instance just feels awful vs any weapons. in the game, and as if it wasn’t unsafe and mediocre enough if you make the mistake of not charging the heavy that full 2 seconds or whatever it barely does more damage than a light sweep. Meanwhile the Rapier charges much faster and has like a 50% damage penalty for missing the second charge stage.
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I feel like this discussion has gone off topic a bit with the shields.
Personally, I don’t want Bardin’s weapons to get an AS boost, that’s a lazy change and I don’t honestly think it’d improve them as much as people think. I don’t think dual hammers or cog hammer need any buffs, that much was stated in the OP, nor do Bardin’s shield weapons need a buff, they fulfill their role well and I do see them get taken in QP (A&S especially). 2h hammer is solid too.
What do need buffs are (imo) from lowest to highest priority: great axe, it works well on Slayer and to a lesser extent IB thanks to sheer tankiness, 1h axe (it gives up a bit too much for what it does compared to alternatives) and war pick. War pick I’m not sure what to do with, it needs something to set it apart and make it worth taking over the others.
As far as careers go I’d like to see RV gain Smiter as a talent choice. That’d cement him as a ranged-melee hybrid career and open up some melee breakpoints.
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Yes, some of Bardin’s weapons could do with a buff. But my point was more that it would be a waste to turn his weapons into copies of Kerillian’s or something like that, instead of making them stronger in another, more fitting way. More power, more stagger, more cleave, or whatever. Not just make every good weapon in the game a fast and mobile finesse weapon, because having weapons that feel different and fitting for what they are is actually pretty cool.
Another factor that needs considering (and you do touch on that) is talents and passives. A significant part of the reason some of Bardin’s melee feels lacking compared to others is because he doesn’t get the same powerful buffs other classes get. Even in the case of a technically non-melee class like Waystalker, a talent like Assassin (that also happens to synergise really well with elven weapons) means a world of difference in melee effectiveness. Case in point is Slayer, who does get a bunch of powerful combat steroids and on whom Bardin’s weapons feel fine. And some classes have skills or actives that can compensate for a weapon’s weaknesses really well. Stuff like shade being able to go invisible to prevent being overwhelmed when wielding daggers. Or Handmaiden getting a lot of stamina regen and a dash. I think that if this game were like Vermintide 1 and talents and skills weren’t a thing, the meta would shift dramatically and Bardin’s weapons would not feel much weaker than those of other characters at all. So maybe to normalise Bardin’s combat potential the classes could do with some tweaks. (Either his or other character’s ones; but that’s a different discussion…)
Also, the way this game handles difficulty disproportionally affects different styles of weapons. Example: On difficulty X a nimble weapon with fast strikes might need 2 or 3 hits for a kill, while another heavy weapon might need only 1. Then the difficulty goes up, and suddenly the light weapon might need 3 or 4 hits, but the heavy one suddenly 2. That’s no big deal for the light weapon, but a world of difference for the heavy one. The same principle applies to things like stagger resist and cleave mass, which can affect different weapons in disproportionate ways. Or simply enemy density. These a lot harder problems to solve, however.
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I don’t want to see attack speed slapped on everything. It’s just an easy comparison to other classes in the game since they are still following the same rules. Only when they go for slow attacks they have properly high damage, and when they are about just smacking large numbers of enemies they are actually killing them quickly as well. Bardin’s melee options are simply outdone by the rest of the characters and it isn’t really the other characters being overpowered minus the couple token offenders like Shade and BW being so head and shoulders above the rest of the group (at least the other elf careers can hold a candle to Shade but only BW has huge psynergy with most of her kit no one else can come close to achieving). Its also unfair to use one career as the basis for nerfing weapons like what happened with most of Kruber’s kit and Mercenary (even though the issues then as today are more the giant zealot-numbers of buffs he earns for just slapping a couple enemies). There are other balance issues in the game, clearly.
But on the topic of melee as melee-weak characters, Bardin is far lower than comparable classes. Huntsman has Smiter and one in the eye, WS and BH have Assassin while BH also has blessed combat, BW has famished flames. Ranger Bardin gets Bulwark/Mainstay (the 2 stagger perks that should just be removed since they are never picked) and Foe Feller…your boring attack speed buff. Engineer gets the same stagger talent choices and a neutered version of blessed combat with no ranged crits or crit resetting. Just having the stagger talents cut down to 3 would be a huge QoL for the game in general and do miles for Bardin’s kit, but also something in the way for supporting melee with either as the other characters have. Bardin has a lot of blacksheep qualities besides just most of his vanilla melee kit feeling distinctly weaker than the others.
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I don’t think you should nerf the slayer, but I agree with what you said… I believe a good idea would be to add special attacks to weaker weapons such as a 1-handed hammer and pickaxe, and add direct buffs to weapons such as more damage and penetration on the pickaxe, more vigor on the one-handed hammer, more damage on the throwing axe, increase the damage of the sweep grudges and its number of bullets by 8, change the attacks of the one-handed ax (so as not to be the same as the victor), among several other buffs…
That’s just the weapons, apart from some reworks of several of the bardin’s talents.
see what you think:
I know necro was released but that doesn’t mean we should be doing it ourself
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bruh
Ironically still relevant now. Bardin’s weapons even in the distant future of 1.5 years later are still lacklustre at best and could use a bit of buffing.