I’m gonna start with a list of the pros/cons of the chainaxe
cons:
light attacks effectively lock you(and your camera) in place
light attacks cannot cleave unless the first tick of damage kills the enemy(which it never does because ~70-80 dmg is very low)
attacks all have lower damage than most other weapons. light attacks have the same damage range as tactical axes, and the only heavy attack with lower damage is the catachan knife.
heavy attack1 has a bad, near-vertical swing angle, making its cleave very hard to use
no access to brutal momentum for infinite cleave
significantly lower dmg to carapace than combat axe heavies
pros:
faster light attack swings(so you can lock yourself in place more easily)
push attack → heavy attack 2 chain has moderate cleave
special attacks do more damage than chainsword specials(but not more than eviscerator specials)
The chainaxe is one of the worst melee weapons in the game right now. Every time I’ve tried to make the chainaxe work in heresy or damnation, I find myself incredibly dependant on my team anytime a horde shows up to actually deal with it, and still doing less melee dmg to things like crushers.
The only buff it really needs is more damage. Like, twice the damage. The chainaxe, as long as the light attacks hold the player in place, should dish out enough damage to make the vulnerability worthwhile. I’m talking 230-280 dmg per swing, between the 2 ticks of damage.
As it stands right now, using the chainaxe just feels like griefing myself and my team.
The chainaxe needs to be the king of melee single-target light attack damage to justify the reduced mobility while attacking. I absolutely should not need 2 light attacks to kill a fodder zombie in heresy and be stuck in place staring at it the whole time. Right now there is no reason besides wanting to rp as a world eater to use the chainaxe over any other weapon.
Ideally, if you want a high-damage single target melee weapon, the choice should be between one of the combat axes for more mobility and adaptability, or the chainaxe for maximum damage potential and better armor penetration.
Apparently the blessing Thrust does a lot for the heavy attacks, especially when revved up, but yes, I agree that the chainaxe should be buffed a bit for its niche and remove the camera movement when the light attack shreds.
I was looking through my inventory after they made thrust work on Rev attacks and realised I was sitting on one with T3 slaughterer and T3 Thrust. Those rev heavies do be one shotting pretty damn great. Pretty sure I could one shot a Damnation crusher with it with Zealot Ult if I rolled carapace on it. It’s pretty legit if you just pretend light attacks don’t exist. It’s especially nice with flamer to clear up all the tankier stuff flamer leaves behind. Also very very good assassination target damage.
I think with good blessings it’s a pretty good single target machine, especially after the power changes allowing more cleave for the push attack → heavy horde combo. I definitely agree though that light attacks currently serve little purpose and that does not make for a very dynamic playstyle with it. It’s just push attack and heavy attacks for days. It works but it could use more variety when using it.
Have you tried it since patch.
Its miles ahead compared to before. Its really good now on the sticky Camera when ripping through foes.
What bothers me is the Heavy attack. Its so freakin slow to wind up. Yes it gets super fast when releasing but only at max wind up. Chainaxe iMO is meant to do light attacks for sure.
I run it with the Blessing that gives you more Power on kills. 10% per kill i think.
With that and Maniac Perk its not bad. you can One shot practically all the Specials and some elites with special light attack. Most of them are Maniacs.
Its the best perk out of all iMO against enemies. Maybe if you have Unarmoured or Flak aswell its gonna be really damn good.
Yeah I have seen some people rock the chainaxe in T5 and they were no slouch. While those were all headshot crits in your video, it’s still pretty impressive. Curious what your blessings are.
315 Eviscerator revved lights
[didn’t get data on Chainsword revved heavies]
I think in most/all cases there were no blessings or feats mucking things up, but note that chainaxe is doing pretty well even with pretty lousy attributes.
Buffing flak damage sounds interesting. Basically let it one-shot basic flak ranged guys like Achlys does (which is why Achlys is rank 1 on this chart). Chainaxe does quite well (it’s 3rd best), but it’s a bit hard to see how they could buff it so it 1-shots flak basics without giving it ridiculous mauler DPS too (though maybe that’s not the end of the world).
Basically it sounds like in lore it’s not supposed to be the king of single target damage, but more mid-range, so making it the king of working through lighter flak enemies sounds like a great niche to carve out for it while also being lore-friendly. (And whatever flak penetration changes might happen would also improve its push-attacks presumably, since it should be unsually great at flak hordes when they’re grouped up too, if this is the role they decide to give it.)
To me the heavies are the weakest part of the weapon. I think they should either
change the angle of the attack to be more horizontal (the boring fix) OR
keep the bad vertical swing, but give it unusually great cleave targets and damage (for a single-target weapon). That way if you happen to stack enemies in one spot, it’s potentially pretty amazing at dealing cleave damage in those situations, but they’re pretty rare. (And also as a weapon with very cheap Pushes, setting up these situations is a little easier than usual.)
(The image is also just personal weapons testing. Most weapons tend to have Damage attribute of 73% or higher (the chain axe is actually the one outlier with 62%).)
Basically my point was that the damage, while decent, does not outweigh the negative aspects of the light attacks.
The fact that it doesn’t one-shot every basic melee and ranged enemy despite it’s downsides is what I’m complaining about, and basically limits using the chainaxe to only using heavies and pushes.
Also my rev dmg claim was just personal experience tbh.
(also, in-lore the standard cadian lasgun is not supposed to be the on-par with the bolter but here we are)
They could try that, but then your arms would probably be swinging wildly divorced from your head which might end up kinda messy. Personally I have no issue with the locking behavior, you get used to it, and then it fades into the background. I’m quite fond of it at this point as the simple solution is to stop trying to wrench your camera around when trying to hit targets and instead be very deliberate and aim at those targets.
I completed a bunch of testing and can say with confidence that the chain weapons all do quite abysmal damage to common enemy types. Even with some of the best blessings in the game the chain axe remains pretty dissapointing in output. They simply need more damage against lower tier enemy types. The special is high-risk-high-reward as it is and gives them the capacity to reach up into carapace but at great personal cost. This is good balance. The weapons themselves (heavy and light) just need to become good.
Ye naw I also see the aimbot thing as a fun addition so youre absolutely right, if it werent for the damage being next to nothing, then the aimbot head tracking on lets say the antaxe, would be an added bonus.
But on the chain axe, it ends up feeling restricting as hell cuz not only would you be locked into hitting only a single enemy per light swing, youd end up not even killing that enemy in that swing or in 2-3 swings.
Actually this is probably the arena it preforms best in because the strong special attack can be used to oneshot dogs and muties etc. I run the chain axe there all the time. I’m not saying it doesn’t need buffs. I really want to see this weapon be able to really compete. But its not garbage. It also has very fun and satisfying and challenging to use mechanics. Its the best chain weapon in many ways because of that alone.
Slaughterer and headtaker. Together they put my chaxe in the same TTK as heavy chainsword and chainsword against hordes. I just spam heavy attacks and pushattack->heavy until theyre dead. Not that all the chain weapons don’t need obvious buffs. But its totally usable as a B grade weapon.
I maintain it mostly just needs ~25% more light attack damage (would barely reach breakpoint to body shot poxwalkers with max damage, RC, and max head taker) and maybe base light cleave of 1.2. That’d just be enough for the light attack to hit 3 poxwalkers with max slaughterer stacked.
Lights are a bit anemic for their animation commitment. Fix that and I’d have no real issues with the weapon. Thrust rev heavies already hit great single target breakpoints, especially with Zealot Ult tech (activating right after the rev heavy starts sawing).
Oh and Zealot Ult resetting thrust stacks really needs to be fixed. That bug has been acknowledge so I assume it’s not intentional but it’s a bit embarrassing that bug has survived this long already. Cucks T Hammer even more.
