Duelling Sword Has Been Buffed

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
81

The weapon has two more marks, one of them being quite different from DSIV and was considered to be off-meta as it gets for the duration of DS existence and was entirely ignored by the community.

Why should vets who mained the off meta obscure weapon suddenly lose it over a different mark of said weapon overperfoming?

And why is it so difficult for you people to accept that the different mark exist? Isn’t the ignorance of said variable a good indicator that you should probably leave the DS question to someone who doesnt have this meme-ish fixation and can look past the safe and very fashionable whining about DSIV?

82

Cause armor is the main danger still. Game needs more dangerous enemies like plasmaguners, that can counter players. And some basic enemies need buffs aswell, so it would be inefficient to shoot them with bolter/plasma, but autoguns and lasguns will shine.

Enemy healer/buffer, casters.

Either dodge distance on some weapons needs a nerf, or melee enemies tracking buff. Dodge is way too powerfull and forgiving. Block and shove almost have no use, in 99% you just need to outspam enemies with dodge and attacks. Slide spam also allows to turn of ranged enemies ai without any resource cost.

Even if you build vet or psyker around range playstyle it’s still extremely easy to lock up ranged enemies in melee. Wich should be the role for charges and invis abilities. And so why would i use lasgun, if i can melee a pack of ranged trash mobs so easy.

Flamer/purgatus need some change to infinite cleave. Purgatus especially, it doesn’t just decrease the possibility to be swarmed, it stright up removes the whole layer of danger.

Now with CDR nerfs the game feels more right and not like some fan made mod (i don’t have my final conclusion yet about abilities too spammy or not). They should focus on fixin such core gameplay problems much harder.

83

You can’t unmake the Cucumber of Doom!

84

Crushers and Maulers are among the most dangerous enemies in the game, as they have the potential to take down a player in a single hit. On top of that, they appear in large numbers, forcing players to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Here, I want to highlight the point that “weapons that are effective against armor are practically efficient against all enemy types.”

For example, let’s compare the Heavy Sword and the Shock Maul. If a Rager (Maniac) and a Crusher (Carapace) appear in front of you, the Heavy Sword can take down the Rager in a single hit, but you would need to land 25–30 heavy attacks to defeat the Crusher. In contrast, the Shock Maul can take down a Crusher in just about six hits, while still killing a Rager in roughly three.

In other words, anti-armor weapons function as “all-rounders” that can handle almost any situation without the need to switch weapons. If, hypothetically, the Shock Maul required 25 hits to kill a Rager, the situation would look very different. There should be a clear trade-off: highly effective against armored enemies, but very inefficient against Maniac-type enemies.

CDR, the direction of the balance adjustments seems reasonable. Zealots can now reduce cooldowns by a maximum of 100%, meaning their abilities can be used at most once every 30 seconds. However, with Curios, an additional 12% reduction is possible, and the effect lasts about 10 seconds. Personally, I feel that the base cooldown for Chorus could be 70 seconds instead of 60.

Additionally, I would like the staggering effect of Chorus to be disabled against bosses. I’ve seen non-Nurgle bosses repeatedly defeated like punching bags, which is absurd and not fun at all.

Veterans have been improved compared to before, but they still feel overly powerful. In particular, the effect of “Duty and Honour” is far stronger than “VoC.” Its cooldown is 30 seconds, while the invincibility effect lasts 15 seconds—meaning that, if used skillfully, a Veteran can become invincible every 15 seconds. Moreover, the effect applies to all allies, so if there are two Veterans in a team taking turns, the entire team could effectively be invincible almost constantly. Any player can understand how problematic this is.

Unlike Zealots, Veterans are not restricted in their actions while using their abilities, and the effects activate immediately. In the next update, I hope these aspects will be carefully reviewed, thoroughly tested, and appropriately nerfed if necessary.

3 Likes
85

I just did!
here’s a direct quote from wikipedia-

“Thrusting weapons that could split the rings of mail, or find the joints and crevices of plate armour”

note that nowhere it is stated that estocs can pierce plate armour (the thing most enemies are wearing), which is explicitly what happens ingame.

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86

Or rather it might be not depicted but possible.

87

honestly i would be happy if the duelling saber had mid-low armour pen but high pen on crit heavy poke if it’s finding breaks and weaknesses in armour

instead ingame you can just slash straight through carapace more effectively than actual guns and high-tech laser beams

i still think thunder hammer should be the definitive anti boss/armour weapon though

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88

Yep. Melee in the game is way overpowered.

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89

The problem is that they’re going to nerf a weapon that works well for all other classes just because one shouldn’t have it.

They could also just remove that specific mark for the veterans and keep it for the other classes where it’s not an issue. Although, the real problem is how certain damage types scale, which is what makes specific weapons tend to be meta and others not. Well, the game’s ‘balance’ of spamming large groups of certain enemy types also plays a role, but we know Fatshark won’t fix that. So, why ruin the weapon for everyone if only one class is the issue?

90

Are you seriously implying that DS4 is fine on other classes?

lmao.

Edit: After checking out activity, seem like dude just have some hate boner for Veteran specificly so no wonder I guess.

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91

I stand by the opinion that carapace is really holding this game back. It just kills build variety and dealing with waves of it every game is just perpetually annoying.

I want a balance update that focuses solely on the state of Havoc balance, and the audio issues like Mutant always sounding way too far away, trappers still not making net shot noise sometimes, bursters making no audio until they’ve already jumped, etc etc.

92

You’re forgetting that the people “testing” these changes are the same people who led the charge on the power-sword nerfs. Instead of insisting that the various bugs get fixed THEN seeing how the weapon actually worked before making further changes. Ditto with releasing an entirely new class that got absoutely zero actual testing before release. Hell even Verant wasn’t that stupid.

I will say it again. Any decent studio would have a dedicated test server for PUBLIC playtests and take its feedback from that and carefully planned internal playtests. Not from a handful of talking heads picked for the size of their social media following and how well they kiss Obesetuna’s boots whenever possible.

Frankly at this point its pretty obvious that this studio doesn’t even have a QA section. They just put whatever together, have some unpaid intern see if it starts up on receptionists computer, and if so release it.

93

As @Hank_jw has stated in a different thread, the playtested voiced pretty much exactly our criticisms but fatshark did nothing with their feedback

Edit: it’s actually in this thread:

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94

Would be interesting if chorus attracted bosses to the zealot. As if the chorus has enraged the boss

95

Part of the problem with this game now is just that. The best weapons are all high-mobility because they offer high mobility without compromising on damage. While the weapons that are supposed to be focused on damage (thunder hammer, chain weapons, power swords) are barely ahead but require forgoing mobility in exchange.

It should be simple. You take a weapon like the knife, catachan, dueling sword, or tactical axe when you don’t intend to melee a lot. They’re just enough to let you beat down a few walkers or a lone elite that got in your face and light enough to let you run like hell from a bigger horde. The heavier weapons are for when you want a balance or primarily intend to melee and plan to stand and fight. Instead what we have are what should effectively be sidearms doing better at a primary weapons job than the primaries.

The whole mess is just ludicrious. Its as if a modern military issued only pistols to its troops because they were more effective than rifles, carbines, or even artilley.

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96

I don’t think you read the patch notes because they directly buffed ds5’s heavy. Currently, I would argue that ds5 is better than 4 after the patch. Ds5 does more damage to unyielding on heavy than 4, hits the hard cap of dodge range (removed on vet shovel but not this thing lmao), has light 3 so spamming lights into mixed hordes is very good, and the parry does more damage. The only thing ds4 does is have a little more heavy damage against everyone not unyielding.

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97

Poor obscure off-meta weapon…

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98

The problem is bigger than DS. Some of us have called it. Our concern was dumbification of the game difficulty by talent tree changes which grant excessive power and often safety. The core gameplay is supposed to be about reading the environment and smart movement, not just pressing Mouse1.

I would imagine this is pretty tricky, but I feel the DT talent trees should enable playstyle variety NOT a simple power and safety stacking.

Maybe it is time to borrow the army point cost system from the 40k tabletop? There every unit has a point value / cost, and you have a 2000 point budget.

6 Likes
99

Over the past few days, I’ve spent long hours playing with various random teammates, but Auric still mostly ends up being a walking simulator.
The gameplay is almost always the same: spam Gold Toughness and Shield, burn everything down with the infinite AOE of Inferno, and wipe out elite hordes with Bolters, Plasma, or DS while VoC delivers powerful stagger. Even if someone gets caught by a Trapper or an accident happens, Chorus just cancels it all out.

Since I wanted to get a sense of usage rates, I tracked Ranged for Veteran, Melee for Zealot, and Staff for Psyker. I did not track Ogryn or Arbites.

  • Veteran (57 players)

    • ES: 4

    • Stealth: 2

    • VoC: 51

    • Bolter: 18

    • Plasma: 29

    • Bolt Pistol: 4

    • Infantry Autogun, Helbore: 3

    • Laspistol, Recon Lasgun: 2

    • Revolver: 1

    • Melee – Mostly Power Falchion and DS, followed by a high usage of PS. A few used Combat Axe or Chainsword, and almost nothing else.

  • Zealot (35 players)

    • Fury: 5

    • Chorus: 28

    • Stealth: 2

    • DS: 21

    • Relic: 5

    • Evis: 4

    • TH: 2

    • Knife: 2

    • TacAxe: 1

    • Ranged – Almost entirely Flamer, with only a few using Revolver or Braced.

  • Psyker (26 players)

    • Shriek: 3

    • Shield: 21

    • Scrier’s: 2

    • Inferno Staff: 20

    • Electro Staff: 2

    • Voidblast Staff: 1

    • Recon Lasgun: 2

    • Infantry Autogun: 1

    • Melee – Roughly split between DS and Great Force Sword, with a few using Force Sword (Deimos).

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100

Lol, I feel like an alien with my builds that I test…

I actually play zealot, to discover what we can do with the new talents tree.

I actually wanted to test the new boltgun / bolt pistol. I wanted to play fast gameplay. So I play combat blade / tactical axe + Bolgun MK III / Bolt Pistol MK 6 / Agripinaa Revolver

Must say that I take a lot of fun with these builds… like I was with my favorite build before the update (using Achlys Combat Axe)

1 Like