heu… no?
why? because.
There are too powerful things in the game. There are balanced things also. And there are weak things.
The greatsword are not weak. Far from that.
And DS is in the overpowered things that need a nerf. But tbh, that’s not the only one that need a nerf.
This is my take too. The special might feel useless in Malice, but I’ve had a lot of good usage out of it in Auric and Havoc.
Agreed. I usually use Anticipation, and with that it’s fairly easy to get a blade beam off while in the middle of a horde by just spamming dodge. In high-intensity situations I’d wager it’s better than the Illisi ! That small sword is hella good but it cannot stagger any Elites while unactivated.
Sometimes, I wonder if the game wouldn’t have been better off with a system that judges kills and hits based off the amount of opposition there is.
Having slower falloff or lower requirements for those not playing T5 hint would somewhat level the field; This is going to be hard to balance.
Aye yeah, the game has tons of problems tuning some of these things. CDR on Elite/Special kills is ridiculous at the game’s highest levels, but fairly tame at the levels most of the playerbase is running. Assail’s original incarnation had a similar problem in reverse, it was oppressive at lower difficulties, where a level 7 Psyker could essentially roll around with something that Damnation level 30 players found good enough to basically replace their tooled up stave/gun. Wasn’t a huge balance issue for people playing Auric Maelstrom, but would allow a single-digit-level Pysker to just “LMB” their way through Malice missions without ever letting party members fight anything that wasn’t a Crusher or Boss.
If you’re playing Auric Maelstrom where you’re literally never not having stuff thrown at you, the sword’s charge rate probably feels fine. At regular Damnation, for me at least, it was difficult to find many situations where I’d have opportunities to both fully charge the sword and have significant targets remaining (or at least that were still close and clumped up), and so just usually ended up discharging it at the first bar, which does at least clear hordes, but at lower difficulties I imagine the charge rate gets increasingly frustrating.
I was using it earlier on regular damnation for the feel of how it scales to lesser groups. I got several clips of me looping the slash on the hordes spawning there and my teammates got a couple scraps. Major Assail vibes but it did take me speeding ahead of the team in SG to hog kills, so that’s far less irritating to me. And not like the magic spam where they do it from the backline alternating M1 and R. The empowered blade is actually a super strong Illisi style sword swing while also generating the wave. Essence is still gained from killing enemies with this slash while dropping the boof. I was using the half charge to make another half charge wave unleashing it in the face of a mob. I wasn’t even in SG in one where I get about 6 off in 10 seconds.
However Mk8 greatsword, I just don’t get why you’d use this. It just feels like there is no actual trade off worth mentioning here to the Mk6. Not like the relic greatswords with their different loops and that uppercut that makes Mk2 superior on paper. No combo into that light push attack, besides to not do the superior heavy stab? I hate when they do this. Its pre-overhaul Obscurus again, just awkward combo routes that are bad vs the other variant.
Yeah it’s a tough one… the lack of scaling has certainly come with no end of issues. Like assail etc. on lower difficulties. On the other hand if there was scaling like that, many - probably myself included - would just consider it cheap for the higher difficulties too. There’s no easy answers there.
Btw decided to pop back in this thread after doing a few tries without my usual talents and I have to say I was surprised. For example with a typical bubble build (pic below) built for fast ult CD’s, it couldn’t even handle basic hordes well enough. Worse cleave & dmg ofc also meant it took a lot longer to charge up the special, and since I now had to rely on the staff a lot more just to get the job done, that difference got even greater. All in all the sword felt like a literal shadow of what I was used to:
So anyone who feels it’s weak, I urge you to at least try something like the second pic. Considering the sword’s fantastic finesse dmg AND Malefic Momentum AND True Aim (key for keeping Malefic Momentum stacked), as long as you keep the buffs stacked it absolutely shreds in this version. Plus ofc. Vent & no Empyric Resolve make it easier to get to and dance in high peril (usually I consider Empyric Resolve a meta but this build makes it harder to quickly build & maintain peril the way I normally could):
Bro playing 4-D chess making it seem like the new weapons dont need a nerf. Which it doesnt, but it wouldnt be random if they did nerf.
Why in the nine hells would you nerf weapons in a PvE game with no competitive or PvP aspect?
All that does is take away some player’s fun because other players don’t like a weapon & don’t want anyone to have fun with it.
Exactly for this reason
Cause it takes the fun of the other players.
If I want to watch a movie, I sit in front of my TV screen… if someone can kill everything, there’s a problem cause you are forbidden to play.
And I love the weapon
But it is objectively too strong. It has horde management, deals with carapace and has high mobility.
My opinion is not that they should nerf carapace or mobility (at contrary of the majority)… but they should nerf its capability to deal with hordes.
This is a VERY tired debate. Power creep is a very real thing, even in PvE.
Solely buffing hurts variety, makes the game increasingly dumbed down as it becomes more and more of a DPS race between buffed enemies and players, damages the experience of anyone who wants a more balanced experience and just flat out causes issues.
Compared to zealot’s mid 2h sword, psyker’s is actually a greatsword.
It just doesn’t synergize with rest of psyker’s kit as well as it should; but it can definitely do the work and psyker’s skilltree helps it a lot(+cleave/peril, quell on melee headshot kill…etc.).
Also, you don’t need to gain charges to use special to stagger enemies such as ragers. Full charge is extremely situational as it should be.
Psyker has great dodge due to upgrade in skill tree, dodge while activating.
Learn to use activation as stagger tool without charge.
I’ve been using it with DD and scriers gaze and I love this thing. I mostly play melee on that build though so the activation not staying for a long time didn’t bother me.
What did bother me was that hordes are often not big enough to actually fill the thing up unless you play on high end havocs. It’s got that Vermintide 2 WP issue where your bar only fills with the very last enemy of the horde and that’s kind of bad. On the havocs where it’s tuned correctly it feels really really good though.
The only real complaint besides this I have is that yet again they made a psyker sword where block resetting is optimal. Cmon, get rid of block resetting, garbage mechanic
I’m glad the special is something you use occasionally and not the core of the weapon gameplay. We really don’t need another vet power sword situation.
The special works great on high intensity where you can kill a lot of groaners/poxwalkers. You need to find the right window, cause the range is not good. So the best is to use it when fighting an horde. This means find the space to activate the special and have the time to use it before getting hit.
I tested it also in damnation. It works, but sure you often have to retain the special until next horde wave
Several mechanic should scale with the difficulty… assail, this special but also CDR on elite (ogryn and psyker) or special (veteran and psyker again)…
What do you mean? This (mark VIII) is busted op, it is ds IV in big. It would have been op without the activation. Easy horde clear, good stagger, heavy attacks eat tough foes for dinner… You can even attack a spawn from outside it’s reach. The only thing that makes it balanced is that at least this one cannot be given to vet and zealot. The emperor forbid.
Anyone but me noticed they broke their unspoken rule that unactivated swords cannot handle armor?
The other mark will probably be even better once you mastered the wonky move set as it is usually in this game.
Just think on that for a moment. Seriously.
As an example:
It’s the same reason why when something is too weak, you don’t nerf every single other thing in the game but buff the weak thing. PvE / PvP / single player, none of it has anything to do with this - which is why all games even single players always get nerfs & buffs while support is ongoing. All of this is just common sense.
I would like to emphasize the important implied part here about doling out both buffs and nerfs. It’s even more important to do it right in Fatshark’s case since they historically have taken forever to make balance changes of any kind.
As OP as the DS is, there are also plenty of weapons that have fallen so far by the wayside as to be borderline troll picks.
So yeah, nerf DS, but make sure you have some good weapon buffs to take the sting away (braced autoguns anyone?) or people will riot since we have no idea when the next balance patch will be.
It’s all about the overall optics of the patch.
Wait, aren’t you describing what Havoc mode did? Buffed everything and now they can buff everything else accordingly?
Wait, is fatshark just gonna take the power creep and ramp it up with more cool blessings and new perks that start stacking with our talents or interacting with them in unique ways, thus trivializing the Havoc mode so that it’s obtainable for more players, thus allowing more players to achieve their power fantasy?
If that’s the case, why would they ever do it that way when nerfing one thing at a time leading to a crawl when it comes to changes stagnates the playerbase with content as it becomes a trickling drip of content as we’ve seen in the past? It seems to me that they’ve given themselves large amounts of real estate for which to allow us to grow as players. I keep saying that it’s possible that these havocs will eventually carry reds that will harbor unique effects for us. Maybe not, I wouldn’t hold my breath. But the point stands, now we get to go to the next “season” of gear soon-ish.
Who knows? We’ll see.
