Feeling tired today so felt like making this. It’s something that’s been annoying me for awhile so I wanted to rant about it even if no one cares or it will change nothing.
For example all 3 chain weapons suck base right now. Yes you can still do good with them. People did good with the Thunder Hammer before it got buffed, but it still needed a buff. The only reason the Chain Axe shines is that it is slaughter and headtaker.
Same with Ogryn clubs, they have thrust which is nice but still aren’t in a great place. If they had head taker or Slaughterer they would be in a much better position, if still not perfect.
Devil’s Claw Sword doesn’t have them so it’s bad. It is good at groaner clearing but struggles beyond that.
Knife can be an exception, but that’s because it’s very mobile and has tons of exclusive blessings that synergize well with zealot crit.
Thunder Hammer is only able to deal with hordes because of those traits, and the special attack really only does sufficient damage with thrust.
Before people come at me with pitchforks and torches I’m not calling for nerfs, just frustrated with weapon and blessing balance. Make rampage be a power up instead of a damage up, its already harder to activate than Slaughterer, headtaker, and thrust. Although Head Taker on the Heavy Sword would need to be brought in line for that change (which should probably happen anyways).
Its actually horrible because most of the weapons feel like noodles for the first few hits until they “get going” but then the weapon forgets how to be sharp between fights so your super cool weapon that was killing all the bad guys just does ye olde paddle slap for 4 swings until it changes its mind (gets enough buff stacks).
If it were me i would remove every one of these blessings so other effects could shine and weapons could just be rebalanced around sensible and roughly deterministic breakpoints.
With slaughterer even the Deimos force sword, which doesn’t have wide sweeping attacks at all but only has a forward in a straight line attack that still “cleaves” into enemies in multiple rows, still becomes a horde decimator.
It happens already at the 2nd stack of the buff, as it will punch through multiple lines of enemies tossing heads around. Absolutely crazy blessing. It honestly feels like a better horde clearing weapon than the illisi force sword because it hits so hard and fast and has noticeably better stagger too.
Just get a deimos sword with 80 finesse(I hope you have taken the high-finesse pill) and 80 dmg and put slaughterer on it = amazing horde clear. Even the flak armored scabs and dregs lose their heads in single hits at max stacks.
The one I have only has 59 in first target, I’d like to try one with poor warp resist and high first target instead. Can’t even imagine how it must absolutely annihilate stuff.
Making Rampage power actually makes heavy sword worse. Power stacks additively with power, but multiplicative with bonus damage.
I agree with the problem you’ve identified but you definitely don’t have any kind of passable solution offered here. I really do think it’s as simple as tuning the base stats of these weapons along with minor blessing buffs/shuffling.
Ideally later down the track hopefully the weapons that crutch of super strong blessings have some of that power shifted to the base weapon while those blessings are massively toned down.
Exactly what I said. 50% power + 50% power is +100% power, so double damage
50% power + 50% damage (rampage, Zealot RC, warp unleashed etc) is 1.5 X 1.5 = 2.25 times base damage.
Note how in the second case we end up doing more damage. Hence since head taker is already power, changing rampage to also be power would actually mean less damage output.
Yes correct, and on heavy sword you can have +75% power from head taker, while most of the time you’ll only have +20% damage from RC (up to +35% damage with max martyrdom as well). So since we have much more power bonus than damage bonus it is currently beneficial that rampage gives damage rather than power.
Hence why I say rampage being changed to power would actually decrease your damage output.
I feel like we need a fundamental change in the way CC and cleave works along with the blessings that modify them. It seems like there would be 3 useful core damage mechanics for melee (excluding stuff like +toughness sustain).
Single target damage
Cleave damage
CC
To some extent single target and cleave damage appear to be somewhat achievable on the same weapons/blessings while CC often amounts to knocking stuff around too much or being irrelevant because it’d be better to just kill something outright than it would be to CC it.
Without trying to change too many things at the same time, I’d tackle CC first. Tweak the ‘make enemies go flying’ effects more towards either ‘knock down’ and/or ‘stun in place’. It wouldn’t look as cool as it does to make stuff ragdoll everywhere but I’m not sure how else to make it useful compared to raw damage.
