Give both a very strong push. Like, Ogryn shield tier.
Heavy swords.
Make a thrust (current mk9 and mk7 push attack) it’s special
Give them a strong strikedown push attack with 100% rending. You can make it bottom-to-top direction (like mk6 second heavy) to balance it out (so it’s not easy to hit a weakpoint), but then make it chain into an overhead strikedown (mk9 first heavy).
Give them +15% carapace penetration on heavy attacks.
Sometimes the progression of balance development is pretty funny.
Heavy swords used to be some of the best weapons in the game because there weren’t many crushers or maulers and they kill ragers, shooters, shotgunners extremely efficiently.
At some point, they introduced severe powercreep in the form of certain talents, the dueling sword buff, the weapon being shared to vet and zealot.
So around that time they buffed how many crushers spawn. So now the heavy sword is average but still has a niche of killing many elites super quick and having good hordeclear, and the dueling sword still wins out because surprise, a weapon that can quick as many elites as quickly as possible wins out in an elite spam meta, especially if it also happens to come with some of the best mobility.
Then they said “well why don’t we just buff elite HP so the dueling sword (and now arbites weapons) don’t trivialize them anymore?”
Now the heavy sword is genuinely irredeemable trash. The solution? Make it function near identically to the dueling sword.
There’s some parallels to carcinization in this. Go down this path long enough and eventually every weapon will play near identically to the dueling sword, just with a different model.
I think people were more confused with why it was so good vs other weapons avaliable for Zealot. Especially the chain weapons that are apparently part of their thematic charm, they were totally awful on launch. Heavy sword was buffed pretty early on when a lot of other weapons didn’t get anything. Its Headtaker on launch was +75% power at max stacks. Unfortunately it was locked to Zealot for the entire time it was worth considering.
Crusher I don’t rightly want to call a bad weaoon because it does damage almost like the bonkrod on Arbites from their stagger. It’d be cool if there was more finesse boosts to Zealot for weapons like this. The 25% crit damage one on Arbites is particularly punchy for the push attack. Zealot has to rely on Duelist for similar numbers.
If the only differentation from a dueling sword after buffing it are drawbacks, it plays into my point that this game needs a different approach to balance than continuing to play the buff-to-catch-up-game
I just want to bring heavy sword in line with other weapons, not make it compete with duelling sword. And also give it some unique moves, not yet-another-sword with horizontal attacks for normal enemies and vertical attacks for uniques. It will kinda overlap with powersword, but still slightly different and available to more classes.
Duelling sword is not a baseline, it needs another nerf. Or like 3 more nerfs if that’s how fatshark wants to do it. If they want to keep it’s insane finesse scaling, they have to remove uncanny. No way around it.
And for crusher, well, I just think powercycler on it will be fun and I don’t want to do something stupid like copying thunder hammer. Powered attacks are not that strong on a crusher and activation is slow, it will be fine. Can be adjusted if it turns out to be too strong.
Yeah. Relic Blade’s Activated Attacks specifically could use a slight nerf to Damage.
You didn’t mention them but… Power Falchions could use access to Rampage and a +10% bump to Attack Speed. The former being due to all of the other Bladed Power Weapons already having Rampage, and the latter being due to Power Falchions feeling like they should feel normally while using Trench Fighter Drill.
Relic Blades’ Activated Attacks are too strong, while Power Falchions need a little bit of help. That’s why I brought Power Falchions up there.
I’m not as opinionated about Force Greatswords, though. What would you do to bring balance to the Force Greatswords? Haha, get it? It’s a Star Wars joke!
… I’ll see myself out…
I agree.
Heavy Swords do admittedly need the help against Carapace after Crushers got their HP buffed, though. Heavy Swords were already balanced where they were before, and now they’ve been left behind definitively. Devil’s Claws are also in the same situation…
Two-Handed Power Maul (“Crusher”) is doing JUST FINE where it is, however. Please DON’T buff that thing because it doesn’t NEED to be buffed.
force greatsword is totally cracked but less than like 10% of psykers use it because they don’t even swap to melee or use any buttons besides R when playing. it completely ruins using any melee on psyker besides like uncanny poaching with the knife or macro abuse with dueling or the small force swords.
Heavy sword is a tough one. Due to the increased attack speed in havoc there are effectively two versions of it:
The auric and below version which is plenty strong; eats hordes for breakfast on every char and has solid carapace damage by alternating special and heavy attack.
The havoc version which is only playable on zealot with FotF (maybe shroud field as well) because you need increased attack speed and stun immunity because you will still be hit in a horde. I recently tried a melee exe vet in ~havoc 25 which is achievable but not fun to play.
While I genuinely agree with not wanting weapons to be balanced around havoc the heavy sword is a tough nut so here is my take:
The light attacks even without dodging have an inbuilt movement speed reduction, that should be removed. Next step is to improve on the dodges as this weapon is not a big/large weapon anymore (with recent additions to the roster). Now the weapon should feel much better to use.
Next step: increase the cleave of the special, it currently has sub 1 cleave, to make it less prone to counterattacks while in the mid of a mixed horde. Do not touch the carapace adm even more, it is a sword with rather high finesse values and high damage on the heavies as well as enormous cleave. It needs to keep it’s downside to add to the variety of the melee weaponry (we don’t want a high cleave ds to be the next sole meta weapon).
The attacks of it are very unique as are the combos so I would not touch them. There are even some L-shaped attacks which can be used to either clear a horde or as a strike-down depending on camera angle so I wouldn’t change them.
Combat axe, force sword (not greatsword), combat knife, thunder hammer, tactical axe (not a fan, but it works if you have really low latency and can stack attack speed without glitching out)
Relic, devil’s claw, shovel and shock maul I consider good enough, but on a weaker side.
Ogryn’s pickaxe, shield+maul are good. Shovel, cleaver, maul are viable, but weaker than other.