Having chained and powered through probably many thousands of heretics at this point, my impression of chain and power weapons is they feel massively underpowered if they aren’t revved or powered up with their special action first. So why am I using these weapons again if they take an entire extra step before they can hit with their full power? Why don’t I just use a combat axe or something that doesn’t need to be switched on to work, and then only works for one strike?
I submit that having to do this, to switch chain and power weapons on for every single strike, is anti-fun, and strongly incentivizes against using those weapons. Again, this is my personal impression and I recognize yours might differ.
Eviscerators in particular feel like a massive drag to use, especially for a melee class. They’re fine for chopping through hordes of zombies on malice, but take them into heresy and damnation and they feel like whacking a brick wall with a pool noodle. Not only do power and chain weapons totally fail to offer the 40k chain/power weapon fantasy, but even without that expectation, they’re a drag to use.
So I propose the following: give chain and power weapons an actual attack for their special action, maybe a staggering pommel strike or something, and make them rev up automatically on heavy attacks. That’s it, make these weapons live up to the fantasy and make them more fun and less momentum-breaking to use, without the drag of having to be switched on for every single attack first.
I love my evis and only play damnation/auric. In fact, I have tried probably every melee weapon out on my zealot and ALWAYS go back to my evis🤪
I use special for carapace, whenever I use my dash, and monstrosities. It completely destroys them. The stagger is great for Ogryns and ragers, too.
The evis is great for its “all rounder” mix of good stagger, damage, and cleave. It for a huge buff in patch 13 and it is phenomenal
Edit: someone also told me you get more cleave when you activate special so I’ve been using that for horde clear too. I use Wrath and shred for blessings so my cleave is probably already insane
I’ve no real experience with Eviscerators on Zealots ('cause I love my Bonk-Shtick and my Cata-sword) but I totally love my Chainsword on my Vet. It completely lives up to its tabletop role (though I’ve to admit this is Kill Team influenced [older system]). It’s very fast (“+1 Atack with this weapon”) and if you rev it up it tears through flesh and armour alike … (taking game balance into account, too).
And the power swords do feel quite good, taking balance into consideration again. Powered up they cut through everything and from a lore perspective one might think we do just not have those legendary equipment, but the standard issue garbage of the Astra Militarum…(true that explanation feels lacking, but it could justify the behaviour a little bit )
Maybe I’m missing something because mine does only minimal stagger, and middling damage even to groaner/poxwalker trash. Takes multiple swings to kill one crappy little zombie. I mean come on, that does not feel like a 40k eviscerator. The only time I’ve ever felt like the in-game weapon feels like a proper eviscerator was using it in malice and below, where it actually does cut zombies in two with gore flying everywhere. In damnation all it does is mildly inconvenience them until I whack them a few more times with the foam bat mislabeled “eviscerator.”
To be clear, we’re talking about a 378 base stat weapon with 80% damage, with +25% flak, +25% maniacs, savage sweep IV, and momentum IV on it. It doesn’t really get any better than that, and it still feels weak and underpowered.
I’d have to look at your skill tree, but yea it does seem weird! I definitely don’t one shot trash 100% of the time but I think my dps is just as good as my devil sword, dagger, etc on him…it’s just very differant gameplay.
Devil sword I can dodge, attack, and move faster.
Evis is slower but when I hit a dude, he is getting knocked down. Hell, I even knockdown big dudes with my special. So it’s like another layer of defense for me.
I usually start with heavy, then do light. I’ll do heavier if it’s a big dude or carapace. I do lights if there are only 2-3 enemies though.
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