Hello! This is something I been debating on throwing together for a while, but with me ‘winding down’ after grabbing skulls for the golden throne and likely taking a breather until the new class releases (for varieties sake and to ‘smell the roses’ as I’ve re-worked all builds into ‘a state I comfortably like’), I figured while it was all still relatively fresh in my memory, I’d create a list of weapon types that ‘no matter how hard I tried, never felt usable and could use some serious help’. This is ‘overarching lists’, as now all marks for a weapon are combined together, so even if one marks is terrible (as most ‘middle fire rate’ options are, not all but more than half) you can just use ‘the good one’ and be happy about it. As such, this is a list of all weapons I found to be ‘truly useless’, and even with me having a token build or two that uses them to the ‘greatest effectiveness I could’, they still just did absolutely nothing, and felt awful to us. This will mainly be a list with block text, with ‘honorable mentions’ at the end, feel free to ad more and I might toss a build at you that might make you view them differently! (or not but in any case here we go! Also I’ll be suggesting solutions based on my playtime/thoughts behind the weapon, but those are just to make me feel better. Main point is ‘these need help’ however one decides to help them.)
As it’s been mentioned a few times now, I’ll start this list of with:
Combat Shotguns
Truly just, products of their time. They take half a mag to kill anything with their ‘primary fire’ at medium+ range, their only interesting function is locked behind a ‘constantly need to shove one bullet in between each shot’ mechanic that just feels awful for how bad each individual shot is, and the only used case I ever found for them was to slap Flechette and Manstopper on to them and get as many crits as possible with a crit build while forcing them to do damage with bleed. They weep forever, and actively waste ammo with their low capacity and horrible damage output. Especially with the new class shotgun being introduced, and the double barrel also existing and just dwarfing the used cases of these even harder (as you can comfortably put Scattershot/Flechette on that and it’s own cleave will carry you wholesale), you basically decide to be a crappy revolver with the slug shotgun or sob and never use them. As such, my main thought would be to make the alt fire a ‘mod switch’, basically take the ‘flick’ animation in it’s current special reload and just have it ‘change mags’ into it’s special fire shells, with it having a unique mag for each reloaded manually. This would allow context switching on the fly while still requiring you to ‘take a breather’ and pump in shells when you have a moment, and let you ‘dump shells’ like the shotguns seem to want to allow you to do. Probably double their ammo capacity on top of that and make them ‘Brace Autoguns but different’, would be nice to see. Buffing their shot ranges to allow for them to hit things at say 15 meters out for full damage would be nice to, getting a 2 shot on a special when you are barrel stuffing them is nice! Dumping 5 shots into the same special 2 extra feet away from you does not. I think that would honestly be enough to make them super useful, but any further buffs to damage would not be scoffed at.
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Helbore Lasgun
This weapon isn’t exactly bad when taken in a vacuum, it just once again, is a product of it’s time that needs a face lift. Weapon that requires headshots and crits is fine in a vacuum, and adding Armourbane honestly made the fast fire variants feel really good to use. But it’s ‘I’m taking out a display piece’ weapon swap feels just god awful and makes it feel terrible to use, and when the plasma gun is being taken out faster than it, you know you’ve F’d up hard given this weapon is worse in every way. I feel taking the swap that happens when you use E-stance and just using that as the base swap for the weapon would do wonders for it, allowing it to be a proper ‘response to action’ weapon either by long range poking targets, or by dumping shots down range quickly to deal with lower level specials or weakening bigger ones. Also, I know dev’s have worked hard on these animations, but just remove the ‘overhead slash’ from the ‘heavy hitter’ variant and give it the poke as well, a single target slash that can’t even 1 shot a gunner is just, why even? With an animation like that you feel like you’re supposed to be waiting for something like a rager to close and then insta gib it, but no, you leave it alive with half health and it just demolishes you. It feels terrible, and the weapon should be a ‘keep away’ weapon anyway, so just let it poke, or give that slash obscene cleave or something. Beyond that, I’d say just give it a bump to headshot aim assist (as it can feel impossible sometimes to hit a head when an enemy slightly raises their shoulder and the weapon just keeps hitting that instead) and maybe slightly increase the finesse values, and the archtype is golden.
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Vigilant Autogun
Just a strictly worse lasgun init? Like, in every way, does roughly the same damage/hits the same breakpoints, has a couple interesting firing mods, but has like obscenely small ammo capacity and takes forever to kill anything. Unlike with the Lasguns which are basically saved by infernus (a fact I will get into in the honorable mentions tab) this gun does jack f all. It’s got terrible ammo economy, terrible breakpoints, and it’s perks can’t even save it as why the heck am I stacking crits/waiting for surgical when I can do that better with any other weapon that exists, even a laspistol has better TTK than these things half the time. To that end, I would like these to be ‘the DMR/Battle Rifle’ I thought they would be the moment I saw them. 1 tap most unarmored/flak targets to the head, ragers being the only thing that take two, so deadly accurate still has a purpose in letting you dome them as well. Make that low ammo capacity worth while, with every shot placed between the dome dropping a special with say, 10-15% increased range damage (as most classes can do that if they want to) in damnation+. This weapon should earn the lack of ammo economy by being a quick special dropping machine, not an ammo hog that can’t hardly kill an armored guardsman without dumping two shots into him.
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And with that, I pivot over to melee’s:
Tactical Axe
Figured I’d start off the melee’s with the most worthless melee of them all, the Tactical Axe. There’s no saving this thing, it’s a knife that’s bad. Just full stop. Only ever hits single target, only has chops on all of it’s combo strings, has the same mobility stat as the AFHEH POWER SWORD! And has Penetration without Uncanny Strike, and a crit stat that’s on the weapon so instead of being a hidden 15% like the Combat Blade it’s 12% max. It’s only saving grace is they gave it agile, but ohh what’s that in the distance? a Duelling Sword? which dwarfs all other weapons in every way while also having Agile? dang, guess this truly has literally no purpose what so ever. Like, literally this weapon has nothing, it’s kingdom for a niche, and to me the only way to save it is to give it one that’s been asked for repeatedly and would work so well on this weapon. That being ‘duel weild’. You have a tactical axe in each hand, attack twice as fact, have rager style sweeping heavy strikes, and make this weapon into what it seems to want to be which is ‘many attacks give me much power’. Stack up Decimator quick, with twice the chances to land hits, and now this weapon suddenly has teeth even if it largely still only hits 1 enemy at a time. But best part? with two weapons you’re now hitting up to TWO enemies at a time! Incredible stuff, I think this would make the rest of it’s stats actually make sense, and propel it from ‘so bad I literally see anyone that’s using it as griefing’ to ‘this is increadible I can’t wait to use it’.
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Shock Maul
A ‘recent’ edition, so it’s somewhat surprising it’s here, but it pulls through with a lack of general identity, and being a ‘jack of all trades master of none’. It stuns 1 enemy!..so the rest can kill you, it has Crowd Control and good cleaving attacks!..but no further cleaving talent so it gets stopped on the wave constantly. It has a Pen stat!..but nothing else to add to it so it’s still slow at dealing with armor. One can’t even say it’s useful against specials as it’s overheads are it’s light attacks so you’ll have to spam them to kill the target you want to as the wave will stop any of your heavies 99% of the time. It’s just not a very good weapon, a neat design power crept before it even released. I’d say main thing to do would be ‘all hits now apply Electrocuted, the empowered hit is simply used to apply stagger/stun a heavily armored target as this weapons not meant to deal with those but can if needed’, and add a blessing that states ‘massively increased cleave/reduced hit mass against electrocuted targets’. Now it fits it’s niche perfectly, slapping on High Voltage and the new blessing and now you’re cleaving through the wave with ease every other hit, doing bonus damage to finish all of it off, and still have the panic stun button when needed against larger targets. This weapon is just ‘so close’ on every level, but it falls short, so I figured it deserved a ‘full listing’ spot as I never see it, verses being in the honorable mentions.
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Power Maul
The only weapon that escaped the Ogryn Buff train, and it was also the only weapon that like, super needed the help. Literally same issue as the Shock Maul but worse, as you have to turn the thing on constantly to get it to function. My only thought as to why this didn’t get buffed is they are working in the background to convert this into an overheat weapon like the new relic blade, and tbh if they do that this weapons fixed fully in my eyes. But until then, it’s absolute garbage, literally unusable outside of applying batter and any of his weapons can do that better and faster. It’s funny to use with stagger, but it just can’t do anything without 'hitting the butt’n, and having to hit it over and over and over gets old REAL fast. Having to do so multiple times to light attack something down with it’s overhead swings sucks too, as that’s like the only way you do good damage against armor but you take 4 times as long to kill anything because you have to push the button each and every time. Just give it the overheat mechanic, it would work so perfectly on this weapon I beg of you.
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And now, to the honorable mentions, the weapons that ‘work well enough’ or are only off in superficial ways to me/just need a minor damage bump, so I lumped them all into one category as my thoughts should hopefully be more concise…
Honorable Mentions
- Latrine Shovel, it’s fine, but just worse than Pick Axe in every possible way. I’d say just increase it’s base attack speed and it will be golden as the ‘quicker less point investment’ option.
- Chain Weapons, they do insanely well and I’m an apologist for them, but in a world where DS exists, let their damage be front loaded again and be gentler with the ‘camera grab’, and these weapons go back to being ‘all around staples’ for more than just me.
- Combat Axe, Honestly pretty great, but giving a few more attacks increased cleave on some variants here would be nice, it’s single target but would be nice if there wasn’t just 1 variant that had a push attack that could deal with the wave.
- Heavy Sword, again, it does it’s job and works rather well, but I could see it getting a base damage increase and that just being a holistically good thing.
- Thunder Hammer, just give the Crucis that like 2-3% damage boost it needs to 1 shot crushers at base, getting blue balled is no fun, even if it’s vary hard to hit the scenario in which it procs. Like, it’s so close just give it to the thing.
- Double Barrel Shotgun, insanely good…when it crits, otherwise it’s a wet fart and I don’t understand why so much of it’s damage is in a crit modifier. Even that out so I can double shot at least a gunner to death with a none crit and it’s golden.
- None Recon Las weapons, these are carried by Infernus in my eyes, and leaving them as ‘the Infernus machines’ is fine, but seeing them get a bit of a bump to their headshot forgiveness (especially if the Vigilants get touched) I think would be super nice.
- IVe Crusher, honestly it’s real good with it’s weird super high Finesse multipliers, but seeing it get the overheat mechanic as well I think would be awesome. It isn’t as needed as the Maul though as it’s base hit’s clear out a lot of things, but honestly that’s the main reason I think it would fit on it perfectly.
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breaths, ok, I think that’s all of it! I can now let all these thoughts rest in my head, and ‘move on’ with my life. May this list be useful to somebody somewhere, or just be a nice read for catharsis XD.
