Amongst the Melee weapons in 40K the chainsword is unequivocally the most iconic. So it should probably be a quite good weapon. instead I would say I see almost no one using it. There is something decidedly lackluster about using them. Even if statistically they don’t seem that bad. I have done decent damage with them in games on damnation. But they feel something in the range from meh to disappointing to use. Herein i will try to interrogate why. First I will reference a primary example from lore as to how chain weapons perform in combat. Second I will look at how they are represented on tabletop. Third I will compare them to gameplay in darktide. Fourth I will look at aesthetics and effects that might be impacting the weapons from a feel perspective. 1. Lore I wasn’t able to find a primary source that I personally have access to. The rulebooks leave much to the imagination but I will try to describe my recollection of a duel from the first Gaunt’s Ghosts book. In it the chainswords used in the duel are both turned on for the whole fight. When the blade makes contact with flesh it instantly tears into it, cutting through clothing and bone. Even just the lightest touch serves to create nasty gashes. The weapons are described as having whirring monomolecular spinning blades. In a sense these descriptions evoke a weapon that doesn’t require the user’s muscle to cut, but rather cuts on the lightest touch and carves deeply when force is applied. Far from a realistic chainsaw, more like a fantasy one. 2. Tabletop crunch Minis game In tabletop the Chainsword and chain weapons in general have commonly been treated as close combat weapons with no special benefits (besides conferring an extra attack as per all closecombat weapons). This appears to remain true for one handed chain weapons in 4th, 5th and 9th (and from my memory that includes 6rh and 7th). I could not readily find chain axes not in the hands of an astartes, though such exists in lore. And eviscerators were 2x strength and AP-2 (capable of penetrating carapace). Dark Heresy: provides a more nuanced look at chain weapons and standard weapons with the following stats tables: Axe: 1d10+1 Armor Pen 0 (with mono edge upgrade adding +2 pen) Sword: 1d10 Armor Pen 0 (with mono edge upgrade adding +2 pen) Chainsword: 1d10+2 Armor Pen 2 ChainAxe: 1d10+4 Armor Pen 2 Eviscerator: 1d10+10 Armor Pen 5 Briefly, what is the take away: as a player I think everyone feels naturally that chain weapons should be on the higher, not lower, side of the damage pool. That just feels right. Maybe they’re clunky in other ways, but they should hit like trucks. 3. Gameplay I’m going to summarize rather than list in detail. Everything does less damage than the Antax and Combat Axe. Yes everything has a bit better cleave but it doesn’t feel very impactful in game. The eviscerator does it best but honestly does not hit that hard or cleave that well either. Its strange but the giant two handed weapon feels less impactful despite being slower than a one handed axe. That just seems wrong, especially for chain weapons. [weapon comparison] does this distribution feel right to you? It doesn’t to me. 4. Fourth Feel I can’t really quantify this. I spent some time trying to think of what the chain weapons feel like in darktide right now and the word “paddle” came up in conversation a lot, this is NOT GOOD. That’s when it struck me. There’s an aztec weapon called a Macuahuitl (don’t ask me to pronounce that). It looks EXACTLY like how it feels to swing a chain weapon a lot of the time. A wooden paddle with unmoving serrated blades. It also accurately describes the negative feeling you get swinging a chain weapon. In fact many of the chain weapon attacks feel exactly like this: [History's Deadliest Weapons - The Macuahuitl | Man At Arms: Art of War] I will just describe the video. In the first swing the user hits the mannequin and does not cut it at all. It literally hits like a wooden paddel. In the next swing the user hits the mannequin and only manages to cut it a little. “that’s pretty brutal” says the narrator…as the second strike finally tears open a bit of flesh for the first time. Far from brutal it looks like getting hit with a serrated paddle. Which is what it is. And what chains weapons feel like, which they shouldn’t. Chain weapons have whirring blades that cut deep into flesh and tear open wounds. The fantasy of chain weapons is that the blades serve a similar (but more flashy and gorey) purpose to super sharp magic swords and light sabers. They cut into soft flesh as a hot knife through butter. Effortlessly. Rattling against bones and sinews as they slowdown deeper into the body. Chain weapons should resemble something like weaker power sword that grinds instead of getting totally stuck the way a chainsaw might. Not…well…a paddle. Paddle is bad. Audio One issue i have noticed with all the chain weapons is that you cannot really make out the fact that they are doing a light rev on swing. There’s too many outher sounds going on. Because of this the audio gives the impression of slapping the enemy with paddle more often than hitting them with razor sharp whirring blades of adamantine. This is especially bad on the heavy attacks for the chain axe. The feedback on these attacks is dull thwapping. The eviscerator does it best but still tends to thump more than rip and tear. This is a problem on several fronts. There is often little to no engine audio windup before the swing There is often little to no engine audio winddown after the swing Chain weapons should not be off when swung. They should always be on when swung. The Eviscerator does this well specifically on heavy swings. If you chain heavy attacks there’s a persistent purring sound and persistent movement on the chain blades. All chain weapons should behave this way on all swings. Note how as soon as I start swinging lights the sound vanishes. Revved attacks always sound great. Especially grinding against flak and carapace. Visual For the most part, the visuals are pretty strong. Except in a few key areas I want to try and highlight below. Hit decals are mostly good but sometimes it looks more like i bludgened them than hit them with a tearing cutting slicing weapon. Enemies are not dismembered or cut open enough. perhaps this is a tech limitation or even a settings one on my part. But it seems like enemies should be cut partially in half and from different angles more often. Right now I seem to only be able to remove arms, legs, bisect the torso and behead enemies. What about partially cutting them in half or cutting them in half on diagonals or horizontally? Its not required, probably bottom of my list actually, but it would help get the feel right. Partial dismemberment would improve the feel of chains weapons. Light attacks with the chainsword, if allowed to rest a split second between mashing LMB for swings, actually render an animation like they are latching but just do not and don’t make any sound at all so you get this dumb wiggle on the target with no feedback. Proposal This is just my idea, so I’m open to argument. I think that chain weapons should be doing more damage than the axes, and be more single target oriented weapons with lower cleave and slower handling. If the axes are the Kantrael Lasgun then the Chain Swords should be Bolters. Right now they seem like they’re trying to be more cleave oriented than they should be and it ends up feeling weird to paddle multiple enemies. If they shared a spot with the axes in the “hits one or two people, with blessings, and kills them in one hit” category and just roared for a huge pile of damage…I think that would be more fun. The chain axe definitely needs to swing for more than a normal axe. I also think some of the reason they feel bad has to do with animations and lackluster sound effects. So work on that too. Make them roar more. Make them run when they are swung until a little after they are done being swung. Don’t make me rev it to see the chainsword do chainsword things.

[image] Reginald: But the SFX and VFX for more things is generally good with notable exceptions. The balance in melee is garbage, way worse than the balance for ranged weapons. Chain weapons being the worst offenders by far. The biggest issue i see is that powerful blessings make a subset of ranged weapons simultaneously far safer to use and far more powerful than any melee weapon except the single most powerful exceptions such as power sword and force swords. To sum up: if these weapons matched their SFX and VFX we’d all be much happier lol

[image] Reginald: The powersword doesn’t make sense in against the lore. You usually have really insightful comments, but I think you wrote this too quickly. Would you be so good as to go over it and see if it can be cleaned up for clarity?

Woopsies. The power sword when compared to lore and crunch occupies the wrong position in the balance. It is one of the best horde clear weapons in the game by far when it should be second string to chain and even mundane weapons in that domain. Power swords confer better strength and superior armor penetration but no attacks. Meanwhile chain weapons in modern 40k and mundane weapons, in older versions, confer extra attacks with no AP advantage. Thus chain weapons should be the kings of slaughtering poxwalkers and groaners comparatively. Without crit-chastise gimicks the chain sword can’t even land within a 10 second margin of a power sword on 50 walkers. Chain weapons are pretty middle of the road. Which is bad.

Yeah, power swords should be specialised to shucking out armoured enemies from their armour. A power sword is just a sword similar to the the Catachan Devil’s Claw but with much better armour pierce.

In tabletop, perhaps, but it’s a lightsaber in the novels. Literally. Eisenhorn has a powersword with no blade. Granted this is a relic from the very, very olden times, and a demonhost blows it up, but it shows where the powersword ends up when it tops out. It ‘feels like’ it’s easier to make a powersword that puts the energy blade over a regular blade, like the regular blade provides a framework for the energy field to extend over, like the frame of a tent, but it’s not specifically necessary for the concept. That said, IRL melee is one target at a time. There really isn’t any ‘kill five guys with one swing’ IRL, and I suspect in many ways TT reflects that, but I lack the experience in TT to be sure. Multitarget melee attacks are actually a tad silly… but are most certainly a fundamental element of the 'tide franchise. (Bit of an exception is entering pike formations, but even then it’s about moving/cutting pike tips, not hitting many men, and before someone claims it’s not a thing, DiGrassi records it being a thing with the partisan.) Most melee irl is about hitting a guy who can be expected to be defending himself, and using all your abilities to hit without being hit, not attempting to cleave a crowd. It’s not totally impossible mind you, it’s just very impractical. People (even tightly packed) are still too widely spaced for anything but the longest weapon, a wind-up that strong would leave you very open, and you’d have trouble stepping though. George Silver (in his book from 1599) spoke of pitched battles and called this kind of fight ‘the press.’ He reported that in the press you could only attack with thrusts or downward blows, because the men on your own side were shoulder to shoulder and so were the enemy. (In such a fight he highly praised the basket hilt for the preservation of the hand and arm.) That said, if you DID want to cleave a crowd, a lightsaber would be ideal.

[image] Rant about Chain Weapons Gameplay Feedback Not formatted, low effort copy and paste from Discord. Other posts highlight the issues with them better, consider checking out Reginald’s post since it covers the same problems but has more detail and better formatting. Chaxe is in the best spot right now, but any +power blessings nerf the light attacks. It should also do enough damage with the rev to where I don’t need to do weird chain weapon tech to 1 shot a crusher for such a risky special attack. Heavies being good cleave side to side giv…

I don’t know about lore or Table Top accuracy, but you could make melee weapons that are chain, or even power sword and thunder hammer and such, have better weapon special activations, and for greater durations… But they have ammo. Gasoline for chain weapons and power for the others. Need to be reloaded and ammo found. Weapon special to turn on and off the use of “ammo”. That way it justifies for balancing the more damage compared to the “normal/medieval” weapons. Whether that’s a new ammo resource or the same found on maps I don’t know. Zealot should probably have something similar to veteran for melee ammo generation.

Its not a crazy idea, I’ve seen it passed around. But I’m kinda opposed. I think its better if we just make the weapons better. I don’t even think chain weapon specials are bad, I just think the rest of the weapons they are platformed on are needlessly garbage to make room for them Also. Part 2 is complete and this completes my labors on Chain Weapons which started with this thread back in…April. @FatsharkCatfish Going to ping you on this as well for the sake of completion. Sorry about that but its my big labor right now so I’m going to boldy go. Please pay special attention to the heavy attacks section as, despite being short, its critical to the weapon balance. [Chain Weapons are Trash | Part 2 | Darktide] My timestamps are as follows. I’ll refine them and update them over the day to provide finer granularity. 00:00 Opening 00:20 Intro and catchup 01:26 Begin balance discussion 01:59 Balance framework 04:03 Problem statement 04:33 Special attack balance 06:37 Key detail 07:21 Chainsword special damage 08:10 Special activation timer 08:45 No Regs 08:59 Light attack balance 18:43 Summary of light attacks 19:27 Heavy attack balance 20:32 Chainsword hordeclear 20:38 Heavy chainsword hordeclear 20:45 Chain axe hordeclear 20:59 Summary of changes 22:35 Idiosyncrasies 24:10 Chain weapon design problems 24:57 There is no eviscerator in darktide @anon61080228 this section includes your work. 26:51 Outro I just noticed a minor error in my calculation on Bruisers. Combat Axe is pulling 446 on mauler bodies but is oneshoting scab bruiser bodies and I don’t know why or what error I made. But in any case bruisers are 450 not 400 and I didn’t catch that for everything. In my video I do place the Heavy Chainsword in the territory of power sword or illisi for horde clear. That might be overmuch and maybe it should be brought in line instead with the heavy sword so there’s still room for a real heavy eviscerator to show up. But either way I think Zealot needs a weapon that lands in bull-butcher Mk3 territory and the giant chain weapon is probably the best one for the job.

Great video. Chain weapon fixes can’t come soon enough, lol. +1 for taking damage off of blessings and putting them on weapons. Needing broken OP blessings to make weapons feel merely adequate is tragic.

[image] Reginald: Its not a crazy idea, I’ve seen it passed around. But I’m kinda opposed. I think its better if we just make the weapons better. I don’t even think chain weapon specials are bad, I just think the rest of the weapons they are platformed on are needlessly garbage to make room for them There’s a problem about the balance in this game. Lot of weapons are average. Several are totally useless (catachan sword by example). But the problem for melee weapon is, in my opinion, the cleave system. Every too good weapon (compared to others) are weapons that cleave (cleaver, CA with BM, TA with BM, HS etc). Chain weapons have poor cleave… and even with blessings that increase their cleave. I believe that it should this point that FS has to check. Sidenote: before a certain discussion, I had not the same opinion. However, after lot of games, it becomes obvious that the difference between a good weapon and the bad ones is the cleave.

Chain Weapons are just wrong

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback

Reginald August 31, 2023, 2:47am 341

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Chain Weapons are just wrong

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