I like the Greataxe. I love the Greataxe. You love the Greataxe too. Have a post I wanted to make ages ago but couldn’t be bothered.
Stagger
Because we both love the greataxe, we both have to come to the realization that even attempting to circumvent the power system, without some skaven/chaos/infantry you can now bop a rat directly in the forehead in cata and unless it’s a crit it or already staggered it won’t die. That probably shouldn’t be the case.
As you are also an impeccable individual with impeccable taste, we both know that plague monks no longer get staggered with the greataxe in cata. This makes fighting them with a slow weapon more difficult. You must know take opportunist to engage head on with plague monks or berserkers. Let’s try and fix that for at least Slayer.
Cleave
Sometimes you like to take the greataxe on RV or IB. The greataxe plays nice with IB until it comes time to start cleaving hordes. If you don’t have maxed out AS it’s horde mauling is pretty damn slow. Because you don’t like this. Let’s speed up the cleaving combo by allowing his push attack to go immediately into the third hit of his three hit combo.
I guess that’s it.
I think the greataxe should stagger more and have a better transition into cleaving without necessarily increasing the power or cleave ability of his charge attacks. I also thing the damage could use a very very very very very small boost.
Faster combo transitions would make it flow better and contend with this new game. More stagger to plague monks means you’re not waiting for them to stop being dangerous so you can engage them. It’s harder to cleave into a horde while effectively dealing with armor that may be hiding in that horde. This would help.
Here is a really well thought out post with a proper idea for balancing. In practice, it may become overtuned. But your suggestions are subtle and directly address the issues w/ GA. Too bad Fatshark has the dexterity of a bull elephant when it comes to tuning and this will never happen.
Why yes, I do feel and think all of those feelings and thoughts!
Personally, I’ve always thought 2H axe felt like a direct downgrade from 2H hammer. It offers less armour damage, less cleave, less stagger, and worse attack angles for a miniscule improvement in attack speed. But it looks cooler and I like axes, so I want to use it.
Pre 2.0 greataxe had some advantsges over hammer - 0,95 vs 0,85 dodge made a difference and light attack chain was faster and cpupled with push attacks allowed some kind of horde clear. Heavies while not spectacjlar were better at it, but still, push attack allowed me to escape some bad situations.
2.0 comes and dodge ranges are now equal (so I can kite bosses with hammer in hand, yay) and hammer’s ability to just stagger whole ranks of enemies suddenly means that the team can deal a lot more damage. While before greataxe was my weapon of choice for both Ironbreaker and Ranger veteran, now it’s 2h hammer and 1h hammer/dual hammers.
The buffs and tweaks suggested in this thread are right on the spot, especially push-attack chaining into 3rd light would be cool.
Anyway, it also show that balancing cata via hp pools was a bad idea. Well, too bad. More elites, more specials, more tougher infantry, maybe new infantry type for rat horde between clanrat and Stormverni (or chaos between marauder and mauler,l could have helped. But nooooo, give everyone a ton of HP and watch how all balance goes out of the window.
The biggest problem right now is that it’s other 2H counterpart, the hammer got movement speed and does the same damage on bonks for being slightly slower. It’s telling that the most damage you can get out of any 2H weapon with Bardin is just 2 2H hammers that you quick swap between for repeated bonks. The charge attacks simply can’t keep up with the other options also due to it’s subpar horde clear. Which is priority number one now to contend with this new system.
I feel that tweaking it’s moveset will allow it to shine again, as well as make using it more fun to engage in.
Actually 2h hammer delivers more dmg vs superarmor.
It deals a bit less vs bosses.
But it doesn’t require you to block cancel every 3rd shot, which will always reduce the 2h axe output a bit.
Anyway, qq cancelling is one thing I’m going to make a thread about, since it’s immersion-braking, game’y and absolutely anticlimatic idea, and there’s no fun in it, really. I mean, learning how to hit faster by switching weapons? What kind of heresy is this?
The greataxe light attacks are actually pretty fast, esp with swift slaying. However you do have a really good point. Taking a greataxe overhead to the face and NOT dying as a man-sized basic unit shouldʻt be the case.
