The Hellbore lasgun has a nice big bayonet on it used for a secondary attack. The animation for which is a lunging thrust which can be combo’d over and over again. The thrust is relatively fast and just straight forward. For this reason when used in combat you end up, standing in front of an enemy thrusting over and over again to kill them.
This does not feel good, feels like you’re weapon bashing ineffectually, why not just pull out my shovel, its fast and cleaves and does around the same damage. For this reason the bayonet serves no purpose. If the bayonet had a niche, such as a high damage single target attack, it would make sense to use against a charging mutie or a lone flanker.
As an example this weapon ability could have a slower thrust, twist, and pull animation that dealt enough damage to warrant the slower animation. It would feel much more visceral and rewarding to use against stragglers.
In its current state it just feels like it is made of nerf foam. Flailing wildly with it and doing chip damage against single targets.
most special ability that imply close combat attack aren’t here to replace main weapon,they are often here to prvide faster attack or hight stagger capacity.
in your situation, I think the intended way of doing is:
you’ve been surprised by an ennemy while shooting, stab him once with the bayonet to interupt him then switch to the shovel before he can hit you.
I would take a longer animation for higher dmg. Yes its not a replace your melee option by any means but i want the bayonet memes in the game. x.x
I think there is a potential for a bit of niche fun to have since the Hellborne lasguns already underperform a little bit. Not gonna start comparing it to a Bolter cuz widely different things but even in its own category lasgun vs lasgun to me it feels just lacking. Making the bayonet a bit more usefull stricktly on single target would be fun and add to a nice niche Krieg playstyle.
I think this could be semi viable if nothing else just for some funny roleplay or something.