I just got a pretty good heavy sword. Its so strong but feels so boring to use. I heard that this strength comes from how head taker is working with it. Every Zealot I see is running heavy swords. I don’t think this is a healthy development for Zealot having such a one-sided weapon usage. I would like a rebalance on head taker like lowering the percentages.
Edit: I think heavy sword by itself is in good state. It’s just head taker pushing it into what power sword was for veterans pre-nerf. I think just adjusting the percentage is fine and to not touch anything else. And maybe calling it boring is a bit much as well.
I will say I agree that since the Rampage buff it’s a bit too much. I do find it absolutely hilarious that after defending the heavy sword for so long against terribly uninformed people saying it’s bad, that it has finally caught enough attention to even get a nerf thread. Extremely funny stuff, though also a little exhausting.
Pre Rampage buff I’d say it was fine enough. It is generally very good but does pay pretty heavily in the way of terrible carapace damage and ok but generally mediocre unyielding damage. They also nerfed the special attack way too hard. That was my favourite damn special attack in the game and I’d be happy to see it lose some DPS if we can get the old special effect back in return.
As a side note I still don’t see it in Damn that often myself. I see way more knives, axes, and even thunder hammers.
you are vastly understating how good the power sword was and still is.
power sword with power cycler still clears hordes faster than heavy sword does, while also being able to effectively kill and stagger crushers, multiple ragers, or multiple maulers with energised lights.
heavy sword is strong for sure, but saying it compares well to powersword in basically any respect is simply wrong.
for a bit of comparison, a perfectly statted power sword with just power cycler doing an energised heavy will retain a 2 shot to the body break point on its swing against damnation poxwalkers up till the 5th enemy hit, with the 5th enemy still being killed if it is the 6th enemy hit on the 2nd swing.
with head shots it straight 1 shots the first 3 poxwalkers hit and retains 2 shot break points up till the 6th enemy (who is once again still killed by being the 7th enemy hit in the next swing if it was a headshot, or the 6th enemy hit if it was a body shot).
The swings are perfectly horizontal and prioritise heads so getting the majority of your hits as headshots isn’t even unreasonable.
a perfectly statted mk IX heavy sword (best horde clear variant) with fully stacked t4 headtaker doesn’t even reach a 2 shot breakpoint on body hits on the same enemy and can only 2 shot with headshots if one of the swings hits that enemy first. even if you assume 2 heavy sword light swings for every power sword heavy it still doesn’t match up. It can’t even reliably hit significant amounts of headshots per swing as only one of its lights is perfectly horizontal.
This only gets worse if you factor in a second blessing as the power sword gets slaughterer, which is a far better damage increase than rampage which the heavy sword gets.
even looking at just hordeclear it’s not even close.
The buffed headtaker still lets you use special to stagger ragers out of combo with about 2 stacks of lv4 headtaker.
It was always viable but painfully boring (normal sword has shred + devastating strike which lets zealot spam ult for dps, heavysword can almost keep it going but it’s not reliable). Kind of like flamer but at least it didn’t take up a ranged slot.
devastating strike is trash now lol cos fatshark “fixed” it by which i mean nerfed it into the ground for no reason and failed to actually follow through on what that nerf entailed.
now it has no duration, only the swing that crits gets the infinite cleave, subsequent swings do not.
With lv4 shred you can keep above 60% crit chance(depending on whether you take +%crit perk), that’s almost 2/3 of attacks being crits, around 2 is enough to reset the ult(depends on how dense horde is, of course), which also refunds itself with its own guaranteed crit(plus all those other benefits like toughness, instant stagger against most enemies…etc.). Imagine 2 light attacks and you get to press F again, or 1 heavy2 1 light3 for more damage.
It not having a duration(IIRC it used to not let the crit itself ignore hitmass but rather gave a duration of hitmass-ignore after the crit already hit) but applying to crit attack itself fits Zealot perfectly.
Of course I’m not opposed to buffing Devastating Strike with +10/20/30/40% power on crit scaling with lv, but it’s not trash. (what’s actually trash is Vicious Strike, it’s like a poor man’s rampage, which got buffed)
I’m aware it just feels much less satisfying to use now. Also kinda annoying if Ragers are running at you at the front of a pack so you don’t have HT stacks yet. Don’t get me wrong it’s fine just not a big fan of what they did to it.
I enjoy that build too but I question whether Ult spam is giving much extra DPS. It’s not nothing but as you pointed out your crit rate is already very high, more impactful for the stagger and continuous toughness regen (which can be turned into haha funny team medic with that one feat).
That’s curious, my experience with the heavy sword is pretty much the opposite - especially if we’re using the power sword as a comparison. They’re both very competent horde clearing weapons, which is fine. It’s not a problem that a weapon specializes in a particular thing, it just has to be less effective in other areas.
For me, the heavy sword in its current iteration fits that bill pretty well. Cleaves through hordes like nothing else, but runs up against a wall when faced with a crusher, even with the recent buffs. Spamming the special attack with my heavy sword (a fairly good base 371 with T4 headtaker) it still takes around 13 or so weak spot hits to bring down a crusher. And you’re not hitting any other targets while doing that. That’s pretty much the behavior I’d like to see from a weapon that is as competent at horde clear as the heavy sword.
For my power sword veteran that number drops to about 8 body hits (charged, obviously). While cleaving through the crusher. And meanwhile he’s killing hordes at the same pace. This isn’t the most scientific comparison by any stretch, maybe I’m missing something, but to my mind the power sword doesn’t pay anywhere near the same price when faced with carapace armor. That’s what makes the difference. The power sword does specialized horde clear while ALSO being competent in other areas.
You could be right about headtaker in and of itself though. I haven’t checked the numbers, but it’s certainly true that blessings in general are poorly aligned when it comes to damage output.
Heres a radical idea. Lets stop calling for nerfs to every weapon that feels half way decent and instead focus on buffing the other half of the weapons that nobody touches because of how poorly they perform.
The hvy sword is a horde clearer and nothing else. You get an armored target and youre going to be swinging until your arms fall off, leave it alone.
Further more, stop worrying about what you see zealots using. I see calls for nerfs to the flamer, the heavy sword, bolter and axes. That leaves the “meh” eviscerator, the strictly crowd control crusher or the extremely flawed thunder hammer and I guess the only ranged option will be the autogun. If you want to see more variety in zealot weapon usage, buff the 3 class weapons a little. I assure you a large portion of zealots would love to use the evis or thunder hammer specifically but they just dont hold up.
Not really a viable solution to PvE balance. There are 5 difficulty levels for a reason and if you keep buffing every weapon up to the highest point you will inevitably down grade those difficulty levels to the point there is nowhere to go for experienced players to get a challenge. That goes triple for pre-mades. No, stop, I already hear the argument coming. “Just add difficulty 6 problem solved”. No, at FS’s development pace making them do many times the balancing work bringing up the majority of the roster up rather than a handful of things down, on top of creating and tweaking a whole new difficulty level. Not even slightly a viable approach to achieving balance.
This is just a straight up lie. My heavy sword two shots both Rager types on Damnation, I even have a video I recorded showing this floating around somewhere, and I think I recorded it back when I only had head taker 2 on it so… Flak is absolutely not an issue for it. Carapace? Yes that is a legitimate weakness, one I think keeps it kind of in check, though I will say again I really don’t think it needed the buff to Rampage whatsoever. That’s compounded by the Rampage and head taker bonuses being multiplicative with each other.
I would be fine with Rampage going back to the levels it was at previously for heavy sword. As stated previously in this thread I do think going any further than that would be a mistake. So I somewhat agree with you on leaving it alone, even if all your reasoning looks extremely dubious to me.
I used to like Evi, but for a 2 handed weapon it feels underwhelming on Damnation. Maybe I just need different blessings on it.
Crusher…I used to run it all the time, but these days it just kills mobility too much for me, does poor damage and its attack patterns / swing angles aren’t great for horde clear. I just get hit far more than should with a crowd control weapon when using it.
i can just say that, u cant nerf heavy sword before u nerf Anthax mk5 combat axe, if they will do it i would assume that devs have no clue about what happens in their game XD
Right now Anthax mk5 combat axe is the king of kings in melee that outperform literally every other melee choice in all aspects, and the only thing that u need for is to roll brutal momentum on it.