To specify my “other”. Empowered power sword has stupid levels of stagger. Controlling multiple Ragers with a sword that also kills them all in 2-3 hits is bonkers. You have to commit to a full meme build with feats and blessings to make claw sword have that much impact. I honestly wish they’d addressed that rather than cut the activation down so much.
The main thing that was visibly wrong with PS before was that stagger was way too strong on it. Damage could have been adjusted, activation time/slowdown increased, and cleave nerfed, but…
With the activation attacks nerfed PS lost something very important. I couldn’t think of any worse adjustment it could have had. Now it just doesn’t feel right. The main thing with PS was that you wanted to keep up the active window. I kinda feel like it lost its identity.
I’m also pretty sad because this kinda closes the door for any weapons with similar mechanics in the future.
Edit: I also have to say that getting class-specific weapons into middling power territory is kinda bad. Class weapons should have identifiable upsides that would make them more desirable to run instead of the shared weapons. This also goes for things like Evis, Plasma, Helbore, TH, and such. Currently, only the Psyker staves and FS work like this, and maybe the TH that isn’t top tier at all, but at least has the boss/elite chunk fantasy going that other weapons just don’t have.
Because activation is dumb and robs us of moves. Honestly in my opinion the Power Sword should have a charge level like the Lucius. If you just let a heavy rip like a normal attack its little more than an FX change. As we charge and approach full hold it gets its current activation damage which is still cray. Damage and target scaling on charge level.
Then make the special a move for single target where you power it up and stab, like the cleave force sword no enemy bind up.
Yeah they could’ve nerfed a lot of other things than the amount of swings you get per activation, and it would’ve kept its identity. The activation spam doesn’t feel good right now even though it’s still good, and if you’re not spamming it, it feels lame. I’m sure there are 12 people out there with Power Cycler who feel like it’s perfectly balanced now. Meh. 1 extra-rare weighted blessing that also only shows up at Tier 4 to make a weapon gain its iconic identity is far too gimmicky for the majority playerbase to attain/enjoy imo.
My position is that we are asking a weapon the game has called “Power Sword” to do a job it is not meant to do.
Let us look at the lore side; this is why we expect the weapon to perform as more than it does now. In lore it is a weapon that is used to go through heavy armours. It is activated at the start of a fight (aka when it will be used), and deactivated when it is not being employed as a means to cause damage. It is a weapon you can find in the hands of an Adeptus Militarum, Eclisiarchy, Astartes, Ministorum and every other adeptus you can name… That is just on the “good guy” side. It performs the same for everyone.
The reality is that in the game setting, we cannot have a weapon that does that. Always active, it trivializes close combat threats and even larger enemies become better handled in melee. The option would need to be that all weapons with activations are now On/Off and not powered up temporarily.
So lets do that. Now we have each character archetype with at least one weapon that is going to just explode anything less than the tougher enemies. With four people, even they now become a minor inconvenience.
Pair that with the desire to allow us to purchase the blessings we want, remove locks, and have a higher base rating in store for lvl 30. Now we are 4 people entering a mission that we walk through just swinging away. Feels great for a bit, but now we have no real reason to keep playing. We can install doom and turn on god mode to blast monsters and mutants away all day. So why play this game to earn materials to get better gear? Seems like we are “done” and we have “won”.
Maybe they up the difficulty? Ok, so now we are back to a weapon that should be powerful not being powerful enough. round and round we go.
It should not be called a Power Sword. OR we suspend disbelief, we accept that obstacles are part of the game and this is not CoD or PuBG etc… the challenge is not outplaying other players… It is the game itself. We accept there are things that need fixing and tweaking, but it is not as simple as “making it happen”. We play the way we do, or we choose not to. We provide polite feedback and we do so once. This way others can add in and there are not 500 threads about how damnation is not hard enough even with super duper high intensity and planetary bombardments while I am blindfolded and hey everyone, acknowledge how super awesome I am at this game…
FS cannot tell you to suck it up cause they already have your money, but… They do.
The weapon cannot be the only weapon we use.
The weapon is not meant to be a constant use weapon, hence it is give to the sharpshooter… the shooter of sharpness. Sharpness of aim, not melee weapon.
It is OK if it acts like all the other activate weapons. No countries will fall, no empires will crumble and no one is going to kidnap your dog. It is a game. A game you play already and earn the things to get more weapons. That is the game. Play. Don’t play. Just stop the pissed off 14yr old walmart toy aisle tantrums. (not directed at any one person in particular.)
Eh… Class identity does have to be taken into account when creating weapons. I was in the group that didn’t think PS was something that gave melee power on par with ogryn or zealot to the vet, I’m not really sure if it would have been the top pick on Zealot honestly, but maybe.
PS already had alternatives on Vet. I was running both Knife (that is surprisingly good outside of pox walker hordes) and Caxe5 (which was pretty competitive) pretty regularly.
To give you something else, Force swords before the buff and the new variant were pretty garbage (both DS and Knife were far better options), but still, 80% of psykers were running it. Currently, I haven’t seen a psyker not running one of the new FS variants (either Deimos or Illisi), and believe me I’ve seen a lot of psykers.
Is this a problem? Do we want to do something about it, or is it fine that the class weapons get used more? Illisi is pretty much close to the top melee weapon now btw, and Deimos has some brutal one-shot potential even without the special.
I mean classes aren’t really broken down to melee and ranged. Take Zealot with the armor pen ult on ranged, and the range damage increase perk when enemies are close. I don’t know why it is so desired by the community to just make Vet as bad in melee as it can get (it is already the worst btw, and was even before PS nerf).
I actually think the entire problem with the powersword is similar to what you say. It is a weapon meant to deal effectively with armor. But in 40k Toughness is a factor. What the powersword is doing wrong is having an on/off button you have to constantly crank. Its been bad since day 1 when it was 3 swings per. Its still bad now (but way worse). I have tried it twice tonight and I hate it. Its an awful weapon to use. Not because it is weak, in fact its basic swings are pretty decent, but because I hate constantly smashing the toggle just to swing.
The problem with the power sword was that it did far too much damage to crushers and other T4-T5+ enemies. In 40K we have a concept called Toughness and a concept called Armor Save. in Darktide we just have a health bar and then we have armor values. But rather then just downgrading the armor of the enemy, or treating it as unarmored, or something like that, the power sword is swinging for like 500+ damage. Why? In 40K lore and crunch it remains at the strength of the user. Let it have its cleave, let it always be on, but let it not hit for near so much damage. and then let it ALWAYS be on. That was how I would have reworked it. Power swords, and I cannot stress this enough, are not high damage weapons. They are armor penetrating weapons.
I have to disagree.
Sharpshooter is long to mid range threats. Counter shooter.
Zealot is Close to mid range threats. Flamer, shotguns, braced auto-guns. Spray n pray with shell cracking melee weapons.
Psyker is your red mage. They can assist all the other roles. Bring the right tool for the job, and you are CC, crowd clear, long range suppression and target removal.
Ogryn is your tank. Sadly, their shield is made of paper painted to look like a bulwark shield. We should look into that… but they are long range support & suppression, mid to close range damage control, body blocker of enemy and ally range weapons.
Can everyone do everything the other archetypes do? Sure. Not as well, but of course they can do it if needed. I do not bring my PS if I have to deal with a lot of close up. I bring my Antax. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Just my long take on stuff.
It would be cool if the 2 Power Sword variant we have had different moveset like Deimos and Illisis Force Sword.
Deimos does bonker single target damage with its stab moveset while Illisis is horde clear monster with it horizontal moveset and cleave special.
The pre nerf Power Sword was clearly an outlier because it’s pretty much top tier at horde clear while still crazy good at dealing with Elite/Special and even Crusher. After the new patch it was still good at both thing but I would still prefer having 2 version of it rather than Swiss Army Knife.
That way we can pick a gun that could fill its weakpoint and have more variety in how we build our Vet.
I know this is a tangent but I honestly think Zealot would completely break PS beyond reason. All that bonus damage I’m pretty sure can hit points where you literally one tap every poxwalker you cleave with head shots. Their vastly superior stamina stats and ability to be uninterruptible with TWBS would basically entirely neuter every weakness the weapon has. Then you could even throw punishment (bonus impact feat) in the mix and I can only guess you’re stagger locking entire patrols of crushers.
Yeah I’m very glad it’s not on Zealot I think that would truly be next tier broken. To a greater extent pre nerf but even with the current version to a large extent.