How would YOU balance the dueling sword?

I found one at 1:52:44 No sign of possible weapon rebalances.
The pickup rate was somewhere else. They answered questions, you can read them on the right.
At some point they said balancing is very hard for them. And that’s fair in terms of new elements. However, after years of their introduction, and tons of feedback that isn’t a valid excuse.
Anyway, it’s up to the management to decide what they should do in their working hours and accordingly what new things we get in the game.

Maybe the dev didn’t wanna say on stream that the game designer in charge for bakancing is a shroud field zealot main that plays on malice and blames his team mates not picking him up after going down running ahead.

They literally just have to copy deathwish (or the darktide equivalent) to challenge good players, i dont know why they say its so hard for them.

And their solution was to give us havoc with overtuned ranged enemies? Sure its challenging but the melee aspect is not.

Attacks give the enemy the “duel accepted” buff granting them nurgle’s blessing and taunting them. Perfect for a “dueling” sword.

I’d rather they buff other weapons , like the powerhammer is not worth taking because by the time you’ve activated it , you could’ve killed 1-2 crushers with the sword

There are multiple replies here with possible fixes for the DS, so I will add my biggest grief with it:
It is ridiculously simple to play for how well it performs. Especially the mk IV, that thing only has four different attacks.

  • the one heavy attack
  • the “two” light attacks that rotate
  • the push attack aka light two
  • the special activation
    And they deal with every thing!! Lights for horde, heavy for anything bigger. It doesn’t even matter what it is, just dodge dance heavy stab everything that’s not naked. For flavor you can use the special activation to kill a bit slower but safer. There is no variance in gameplay, no nuance between enemies, doesn’t matter if gunner or crusher… Just mindlessly backtrack while heavy stabbing. And while at it it favours the worst play style ever: fastest backward dodger does not die.
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The weapon is absolutely broken in almost every regard, perhaps with the exception of horde clear - but even that is not bad, it’s just mediocre. And on Zealot it’s even good, so it has literally no weaknesses to balance its incredible strengths. Not even no serious weakness - no weakness at all.

I think I can make only three absolutely true statements regarding the balancing for this weapon:

  1. The insane damage is the main issue, and it’s mostly due to the over-the-top finesse multiplier - as such, this has to be nerfed
  2. The mobility is the second issue, but given the weapon theme it should stay mobile. On top of that, even if it had average mobility (eg. like Devil’s Claw), it would still be OP due to the insane damage so while mobility could be nerfed, it’s only a secondary balancing avenue
  3. Class restrictions aren’t a balancing avenue in any manner. It was already broken on Psyker and there was barely any reason to use anything else on this class aside from literal boredom or personal preference.

With that said - it should have its damage hit hard alongside some other secondary nerf - reducing the mobility to be a bit worse than the Combat Blade, making the attack hitboxes more demanding or reducing the absolutely bonkers attack speed are some of the options I could think of. In any case, the weapon needs a hard nerf, nor a medium or a light one. It’s currently the melee equivalent of VT2’s Moonfire Bow and Briar Javelin, entirely killing all choices in its class.

I also like @Hank_jw’s idea to change the special to parry. I don’t know why it wasn’t the default, it only makes sense for it to be the case.

And sure enough, I’m not a savage beast that can’t ever pick anything that ain’t meta in order to have some fun with the game - with time, this ability became a necessity as people become better at the game. But I cannot rely on my teammates having the same level of self-control in order not to ruin the fun for me whenever I decide not to go with the most OP meta build, so this ridiculously overpowered crutch has to go.

For all of the “bUt iT’s a pVe gAmE!!!11!!11!!” idiots - you can have your unabalanced toys the moment I get to block people from matchmaking based on their builds. Until that is implemented, shut the hell up and stop ruining the fun for those of us who don’t need a crutch to play the game well.

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Almost entirely take away carapace damage, and severely reduce flak damage, and I think you’d still have a great weapon.

instead of a parry, i’d like a special attack “deflect”, essentially similar, but once you deflect hits, you can chain into lights or heavies after the deflect.

which would at least make it more unique and interesting than dclaw and maybe more elegant.
many times parrying with dclaw but people just smash their way through, becoming a special attack useful only if you are alone or in very danger.

Sounds good, doesn’t work. You cannot balance this weapon with penetration due to Uncanny Strike - you could set both Carapace and Flak to 0%, and people running Uncanny would notice maybe ~20% reduction in damage.

Uncanny Strike deserves a nerf of its own, but that is beyond the scope of this debate. And the Dueling Sword is broken even without any blessings at all, you could remove all of the top picks for it (Uncanny Strike, Riposte, Agile etc.) and it still wouldn’t knock it off the top spot in the meta.

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Yes, that’d have to be part of removing the carapace and flak damage.
I’m not 100% certain what you think I meant, but to be clearer: By “take away … damage” I mean the net effect is that carapace and flak targets take negligible to “little” damage from the DS, after all modifiers and effects.

This is from a HAVOC 35+ perspective since that is where it shows up and is basically mandatory on zealots and vets, so the solution is:

- nerf it a bit, reduce carapace damage and maybe finesse multiplier
- revert giving it to zealot and vet, and make it psyker exclusive again

that solves the problem.

If the DS gets a generic damage/utility nerf, it’ll fall off from psykers the most (if not entirely) since the classes that benefit from it most natively (as in through talents on strong HAVOC builds) are vet first, and zealot second. It’ll basically remain mandatory on vet who will now three shot crushers instead of two (and still have plasma).

For the argument that the SG/DD psyker is strong with DS, see above premise - nobody runs that build in party finder HAVOC 40. And in T5 auric you can do well with anything so it doesn’t really matter.

So yea, a generic nerf will take the originally psyker exclusive away from psyker first, and leave it as mandatory for vet’s plasma build.

In conclusion, DS should not be available to all classes, and therein lies the problem.

I understand. What I meant is that you’d have to either introduce special damage multipliers for DS against those enemies (like eg. Ogryn’s Rock has against Mutants) since tweaking the penetration around won’t do anything due to the way Rending (and thus Uncanny Strike) works, or design some other interaction entirely.
Unlike other weapons, simply changing the damage values against armor types (that’s what Penetration is) will have no effect here thanks to Uncanny Strike. And as overtuned as the blessing is, I don’t think we should nerf the blessing just for another nerf to a single overperforming weapon to work when the weapon can be affected in a way that simply works on its own (like reducing the Finesse multiplier, overall damage, mobility, attack speed etc).

Not to say I wouldn’t want to see a nerf to Uncanny Strike as well, obviously. I just believe it shouldn’t be a part of compound deal without which whatever balance change has been issued to DS doesn’t work, as in that case the balance of the weapon would entirely depend on this single blessing not being OP - and I don’t trust Fatshark devs not to forget about this interaction two major patches down the line.

It was already incredibly overpowered on Psyker back before the patch gave it to Veteran and Zealot. Sure, it wasn’t that obnoxious back then since Psykers usually used it as a backup and mobility tool, but for meta slaves there was no real other choice on this class since it was overperforming just that hard.
All the patch did was highlight the issue of Dueling Sword being overpowered. It should have been nerfed back then - removing it from Zealot and Veteran is not fixing an issue, it’s merely scaling it down so that instead of three classes having one melee choice, there’s only one such class.

instead of removing content, just nerf it

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just because is overtuned? would be better to balance it properly first. issue would be solved then

having more weapons to play with different archetype is better, because you have more room with gameplay. adding weapons to archetypes for then removing them is weird

and zealots need shovels also, cause it is not an identity weapon of veterans

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while i agree, zealots need a shovel, i’m on the fence about just giving original class-specific weapons to other classes (case in point, the DS). TBH, i think we should get more new weapons, even if they might mirror existing stuff, but not hand old ones out to other classes, since it ‘might’ create balancing issues.

A couple thoughts on my end.

My issue with the Dueling Sword is the damage against armored enemies. I have many years of experience with HEMA saber, and they typically work in one of three roles, Cavalry, Infantry, and Dueling. Cavalry sabers are heavy, meant to be swung in a downward arc (assisted by gravity) with great cleaving cuts against targets lower than oneself. Infantry sabers are lighter, but with relatively stout blades to take a hit/practice hitting stuff with, and are great for fighting against opponents between spear/bayonet and grappling distance. Dueling sabers tend to have very light blades, be very fast to maneuver, fast enough to outmaneuver/outrun an infantry saber, but with blades that are relatively light and fragile (meant to either stick someone with, or draw first blood on a cut, not necessarily disembowel someone or cleave them in twain).

None of these are particularly great against armor. I don’t care how great a fencer or how much experience you have with a saber, trying to thrust at armor joints/gaps isn’t terribly functional. This is something I’ve actually trained some against opponents with a curiass and helmet, and while I can hack at forearms against such a fencer, trying to go for a gap in the armor on a deep body target is a good way to lose a bout. There’s a reason armored fighting typically is heavily focused on grappling and halfswording or great big percussive strikes.

So with all that, I’m fine with the mobility and defensive ability on the Dueling Sword, that’s all great, and I’ll be that guy, I don’t think stuff should be balanced Havoc or what the top 0.1% of the playerbase is capable of squeezing out of a weapon, and in a coop PvE game I think it’s okay for some things to be over the top in some areas if it suits the weapon’s role/vision. The ability to so effectively engage armored targets is the problem, because that’s not what the role of a dueling saber should be. If the DS is a great tool for generally just keeping oneself alive through mobility and skillful defense while being murderously effective against unarmored opponents, I’m think that’s perfect. The weapon should be great at mobility and offer parry/riposte opportunities/mechanics, not be a Weak Spot Nuke for Crushers.

Likewise, the Special action shouldn’t be a great concussive blow that staggers opponents, that fast and direct head cut is a great basic saber go-to for unarmored swordplay, but against an opponent in even a bicycle helmet it’s likely to just bounce off instead of significantly stagger them (unless you hit them square in the face, which is generally the easiest target to defend), the special should be a parry/riposte.

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The solution has become so clear to me:

Give the Ogryn the Dueling Sword.

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