The main point of force swords (for me) was to take a more defensive melee option to help the very frail Psyker kit stay alive by avoiding lethal damage. With the removal of infinite dodges this functionality is basically removed. It previously allowed you to aggressively dodge and slide with the staff out and then switch to melee when you actually needed to dodge big to avoid a mutie or crusher or sniper or trapper or dog, all of which generally result in a one mistake death for Psykers.
The damage buff in compensation is a joke, if you want an offensive melee option you would pick the dueling swords, which are quicker, higher damage, and have better mobility. Because force swords are now forced into the same functional role it is hard to justify picking them over the dueling swords, leaving them with a lack of meaningful identity.
If fatshark are determined that unlimited dodges are somehow broken and refuse to entirely revert the change, I hope they will at least introduce a new mechanic to the force swords that resets dodge count when switching to force sword, which would restore that original defensive functionality. They could give it a short cooldown if they don’t want it to be tech chained for unlimited dodges.
They never needed them, it was a very questionable quality to begin with. Illisi still does way way better cleave damage and has a much faster clear speed that DS (can also generate massive toughness gains with on warp kill talent). Deimos is much of a muchness with DS but can stagger lock elites with its special attack making it pretty safe to kill with. Obscurus has had an identity issue since Illisi and Deimos were released, it could probably keep the infinite dodges to make it distinct from the other two but I’d kinda prefer they found something else to make it worthwhile.
The dodges were the main reason I used them, so (to me) they very much did need them. Which is why I’m here giving feedback to let them know they’ve taken away something quite significant from my play style.
Illisi still has its horde clear role, sure, but I don’t need that with my staff. Deimos is entirely outclassed by dueling, and the special attack is actively suicidal in higher difficulties with its animation lock, unless you’re fighting a single enemy, in which case there is no real threat anyway. The main use of the Deimos special is to quickly gen peril without actually using it, because you have a min warp resistance stat roll and peril gen is safe toughness.
Illisi still putting out big boy numbers while being very safe and easy to use. It was downright broken before. I enjoyed the infinite dodges, but I knew they weren’t going to stick around forever.
I’m curious what this playstyle looks/plays like to need more than 5 dodges without pause. I haven’t played a huge amount of Psyker with the patch, but I never noticed a loss of effective dodges at any point.
Haven’t used it after patch 13 since DS has just too much utility with Mutant deletion + killing crushers/maulers superfast, but before that, you could just dodge constantly with it. It really had a different flow to combat that way than anything else in the game with Psyker’s incredibly low cooldown between dodges.
Mostly a lot of dodging and sliding with the staff out while surrounded by melee. The sliding meaning the dodge count doesn’t reset, and even the exhausted dodges work to put you in dodge state, so it let you front line with the staff (unlike the other classes who would be doing something very odd to have ranged weapon out frequently in the middle of a horde). Because playing a staff like that means you’re often at max dodge exhaustion when a threat shows up, it was still possible to quickly flick to force sword and have fresh dodges to avoid the one shot killers like charging muties or surprise snipers, etc.