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.
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 @weeping.moon 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.
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.
I think a big part of that is because the melee options they set to be good elite/single target eliminators are actually all extremely lacking at dealing with them in any density, leaving the melee slot to horde clean up for most players. Even ogryn who has smashing instruments in his arsenal has literally no reason to use them when in close range, because that’s where his ranged have their highest DPS, stagger and no opportunity to miss. When even the Rumbler makes more sense to just spam M1 its not a good place to bonk.
Chain weapons pretty much exacerbate the problem present in all anti-elite melee weapons to the 100th degree. Swing for an elite but if a groaner protects the president well that’s it.
I agree entirely and my data shows this problem. Ranged weapons are generally way better than they should be based on their lore. The boltgun outpreforming the thunder hammer in armor busting is the best example.
I agree with this. They also have bad cleave damage. Unfortunately my attempt at brevity somewhat obscured the critical point i was making about horde clear for heavy attacks in the above video. The chain weapons should be much better, with heavy attacks, at horde cleaving. The catachan sword sits (against poxwalkers) right in the range of a rampage and savage sweep heavysword. The chain sword should be there for TTK. The chain axe should be worse than that but not a ton. The heavy chainsword should be in the range of the illisi or power sword.
The eviscerstor, when added, should be a hilariously dumb weapon to use with enormous damage. By the way this proposal of mine has proven remarkably popular. People like the idea of a literaly stupid dumb huge weapon that is super dangerous to use but hits enormously hard.
I will say i find this less punishing on chainsword due to its push-attack being a thrust and for the chain axe its pretty reliable to do a push-attack and hit the elite. They also have a less disparate profile between push attack specials and heavy specials. Unlike the thunder hammer which demands Thrust to hit sensible breakpoints. The chain weapons usually don’t hit a lot of oneshot breakpoints so you often expect to need a few followups. Not on everything of course, but you can get used to repeated special hits or followup lights or heavies more easily here. The costs are lower.
Fundamentally, this is because ranged weapons are better than melee. That’s why we don’t send men out with swords anymore.
Melee is an important part of w40k, but it’s a romance thing. There are a ton of reasons why ranged weapons are universal in modern combat and most of those reasons are present in the game, even though game ranged weapons are mostly weaker than real firearms.
But the sword is very romantic, so I hope they fix it.
Absolutely true, of course, but that doesn’t really account for the whole problem. My tests are all roughly uniform in their distance and conditions. This was melee range. The crushers could potentially hit me. I had to dodge the attacks. Yet the hammer still underpreforms. It should not. This is where 40k mechanics come into play. A toughness 6 entity with 3 wounds in carapace should tank a rapid firing bolter far better than even a single hammer swing.
Imo this comes down more to blessing balance and base damage over weapon behavior. Shattering impact is the likeliest reason bolter can do such dumb things. But i need to prove its not pinning fire yet.
I cannot in good faith let this thread die. Nice work on the videos by the way, I find it hard to disagree with most of what you suggested.
In particular, I like the idea of giving traits specific to certain chain weapons to all of them, such as the quick activation for the special attack on the chainsword or the latching behavior of the Chainaxe lights (with some exceptions of course). It may give each weapon less identity, but it gives chain weapons as a whole more of an identity which I personally believe is more valuable.
While I honestly doubt we’ll see too much of an overhaul to the current weapons, at this point I’m hoping we eventually get a patch that adds some rebalancing along with more variants of the current weapons and maybe even a new one l. Fingers crossed. At the very least, they don’t have a leak of appropriate feedback.
Me thinks you are wrong on this thesis, because Mats Andersson just gave an Interview in which he stated that enemy difficulty will change a lot with talent trees. Some will have their stats buffed, too , moving breakpoints.
They surely must also change weapon balance, since they talked about shifting the game pace.
There are weapons that are absolute garbage… catachan sword, laspistol (even with the buff, this weapon is bad)
There are weapons that are a little weak: combat blade, chain weapons are in this category
There are weapons that are average: most of the weapons of DT
And weapons really too strong: Bolter (I think that they should reduce a lot the cleave effect on it), ripper guns (but far less than the bolter)
And we have also the problem that blessings that buff damages are so strong that other blessings seem a really bad choice… if we add that several are badly designed:
speedload: why do we have to slide???
between the eyes: hitting a weak point while being suppressed, that’s a fun requirement
devastating strike: same effect at T1 and T4???
efficiency: great… reduced ammo use for not using your weapon… sure, we have plenty of time without any fights going on…
By the way, while checking gameslantern I have seen that:
I hope that they will reduces a lot the cleave on boltgun… it is really needed.
In fact, the cleave system itself has to be checked.
Brutal momentum on a CA is really too strong if we compare with other weapons. Cleaver has a great cleave also, the weapon itself is a little too strong. At contrary shock & awe (that I tested) is absolutely useless. BM on a latrine shovel is also bad.
I have not tested everything (need to test Ogryn clubs with BM, it is planned), but obviously weapons perform differently with the cleave system. And there are strong differences that create a gap in term of efficiently between weapons.
Well ogryn clubs don’t get brutal momentum, and as far as I can tell the paul doesn’t lift target restriction with it like shovel. The clubs are in a weird spot where it is totally usable, but one meta loadout removes the need for the other clubs in the game at the minute, except for killing unyielding (and MK3b can’t even make good on that on every unyielding ogryn enemy because of the stupid headshots not working ‘design choice’). It even minimizes the disadvantage of your horde weakness, though it is extremely luck dependent because you can’t just limit RNG to item crafting. So I’d like to see some reworks for that, too…I really like Mk2 club, but its just in a position of ‘why’ like MK4 cleaver vs. MK3.
Considering breakpoints in Darktide are already pretty… fluid, I’d guess they’re either being changed with current weapon values already in mind when combined with whatever new possibilities the new perk tree opens up.
It’s possible we’ll see some minor tweaking every here and there, but I genuinely don’t think we’ll see some radical overhauls of the current weapons in October. Seems like the amount of rebalance they’re already doing is pretty significant already without adding this on top. I won’t complain if I’m wrong, though.
At the very least, I’m hoping that the near complete lack of any significant balance changes since the Power Sword/Flamethrower nerf has been a result of waiting to get this system in the game first, so hopefully we’ll see more active weapon development and balancing following this patch either way.
