While the balancing has improved a lot, the Armour Damage Modifier on some weapons still bugs me. There are still too many weapons that are just worthless against Carapace.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want every weapons to be S+ tier against Crushers, but there shouldn’t be any F- tier weapons that just can’t deal any meaningful damage. Yes, you could always bring a Bolter with something like a Devils Claw, but the point is that pretty much any weapon that is considered good either has Uncanny Strike, which is still S tier after the nerf, or already has a high ADM against Carapace with their heavy attacks.
After some testing on my Vet melee build (without the Rending talent), I needed 19 heavy attacks with the Devils Claw to the head to down a Crusher, which is ridiculous considering I had a crit chance of around 45%. I just think the minimum ADM from heavy attacks and some of the light strikedowns, like the Vet shovel, should be way higher to avoid situations where you can barely scratch them.
Sure there are weapons that have bad horde clear compared to Devils Claw, but it’s way easier to take on a horde with a bad weapon against them than taking on crushers and maulers with bad ADM weapons, which is why most people avoid them.
I don’t really use DCs, never liked them much, but I would say invest into crit and weakspot talents, and then parry Crushers and aim with the riposte strike at the head. You can absolutely murder bosses, monsters, captains and even demon hosts that way too.
I’m aware of the damage potential against bosses but this is about Carapace armour and with the Vet running the 10% rending and the talent that applies 2,5% brittleness, you can actually fight Crushers decently with the DC, however my point is specifically when using them without any rending, as some classes and builds simply don’t have access to it, like Chorus Zealot for example.
The 19 headshot hits were already with full crit build + weakspot dmg, which makes it more obvious how ridiculous weak they are against carapace. As for the riposte attack, you cannot always deflect overhead attacks, as they will stagger you.
There is simply no reason why some weapons are dead weak against carapace, especially when there are so many weapons that can just do everything good, like the Relic Blade or Psyker swords.
If you aim for crits and weak spot hits, with ripostes you should be hitting between 1000-1600+ damage crits. Just heavy headshot crits did something like 600 dmg for me, and that’s without majority of vet damage buffs.
Yes, DC is on the weaker side as anti-armour weapon, and this can be a problem in certain Havoc situations, but in most cases you are likely to have different tools to deal with armour, especially on vet. This to not be said people don’t make devil claw work in Havoc 40.
Certain Havoc modifiers do make a lot of weapons far worse of course, but that’s a question to Fatshark, why they prefer to use all the colours in the rainbow, and stuff like rotten armour instead of addressing the player power creep issue. I have wrote a rant about how havoc modifiers don’t help with build variety in Havoc when the game mode was initially released. Things have changed somewhat since, but some absolutely silly Havoc difficulty modifiers combos are still here.
In the end of the day Devils Claw is great at horde clear, amazing at dealing with rager, and absolutely sh…on majority of bosses, so being “weak” versus Carapace isn’t that bad, unless you insisted about bringing it into the old Rotten Armour modifier.
Taxslaught imho isn’t worthy for melee purposes, because in a normally progressing mission with a reasonably normal team its pretty difficult and close to impossible to get the stacks on with a melee before the target dies, unless its a boss and even then it often does very little for the outcome!
A weirdly placed talent that’s at this point really there for a specific Infiltrate Shredder build and old nowadays deprecated rec lasgun builds. In my opinion it should embrace it niche nature and be merged with Infiltrate or one of its subnodes as a permanent effect!
However right now as far as melee goes, its a “What if i’m left alone” talent and there are solutions to that that require no futher talent point investment.
Devils claw is an extremely strong and especially safe option for nearly everything you can encounter. So obviously there needs to be some drawback or it will overshadow any other melee weapon. And that is it’s viability into carapace. Which btw can be mitigated on some classes, as you already mentioned.
But keep it limited to weapons that need it like Heavy Sword and Combat Axe (for non Rashad marks, but honestly I wouldn’t mind Rashad also joining the “very good against carapace on heavy attacks” squad)
(I like when Big axes deal Big damage to armor on fat heavies >;3)
Because other classes don’t have it and my point is that it is not only bad but unusable against carapace. A weapon shouldn’t be forced to be used with a certain talent to be usable and you should always be able to at least deal little damage against crushers in melee and not be completely defenseless.
There are much better weapons that delete everything and while you’re right that it should have a disadvantage against something, there should be no circumstance where you simply can’t do any meaningful damage against an enemy. This is what I meant that I don’t want every weapon to be an S tier choice against carapace. If it would need 8-10 heavy attacks for a crusher with my build that needed 19, it would still be a bad weapon against carapace but you could at least do something. People don’t use DC for this exact reason and it’s not the only weapon that suffers from this.
Yes, I strongly agree that no weapon should be so insanely ineffective against Crushers. Like, you could halve the number of hits to kill a Crusher with headshot heavies to 10~ and it’d still be terrible.