I’ve seen some videos where they do a heavy stab with it for easy headshots. Afaik, the dueling sword can only do a quick stab with the special action button, right? I have it mapped to my mouse side button, and I can’t get it to do a heavy stab.
Press and hold your primary fire button. After about a second (depends on the weapon) that then launches a heavy attack: which is a stab, at least on the Mk IV.
Good sign that you need to pay more attention to tutorials.
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You must have a MK V dueling sword. Only the other marks can do stabs. Go to your inventory screen, click your weapon and when selecting your sword on the top right it’ll have a button saying “marks” and let you swap the mark.
To be fair, since the crafting rework this was never actually explained
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The game has tutorials?
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By Hadron, in the opposite direction to the mission terminal, there is a passage leading to Sephi, the tutorial/testing area. She’ll help you.
Except for the ‘toughness blocks all damage’. She’s lying with that one, it only blocks a % in melee (so 100% toughness blocks 100% of hits, except the ones it doesn’t, and 50% toughness blocks 50% of the damage, ect)
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Yeah toughness only blocks 100% of ranged damage.
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Each weapon family has multiple variants. Each variant has a different set of moves & dmg. Duelling Sword IV is one of the more popular ones. Both its heavies are stabs (good for elites), and all of its lights are up → down wide swings (good for hordes & easy headshots).
If you open your inventory, there’s a button to examine weapon details. In details you can see each light & heavy & special attack, each with their own damage & stagger table for all types of enemies & hits. What it doesn’t show however is the actual swing pattern, combo chains, unique attacks only accessible from specific combos / attacks, or push-attacks (often unique attacks themselves with their own dmg tables you can’t see anywhere). To learn them, you have to either find them online or test & see for yourself.
For reference, I’ve been working on a little picturebook to make it easier to compare weapons and their characteristics. Basically I pull the weapon details, then test out and add other missing data and save the image. Here’s everything except for the equip / sprint / slide attack for the psyker’s new Force Greatswords (omitted the unique Force Sword push-attack’s 9m range & 1-dmg weakspot stagger too, but ppl here may not know that it does that):
The pic ofc doesn’t help with Duelling Swords but I haven’t done this for them yet. It should give you an idea of how the combat system works at least.
All in all, you have lights, heavies, specials, block-cancels (tapping block resets combo, vital for some weapons to have instant access to some combos), pushes, push-attacks and that’s just moves. Weakspots, crits, finesse modifiers in general *(finesse = weakspots & crits), blessings talents etc all come on top too ofc. All finesse dmg bonuses apply to the weapon’s innate finesse dmg portion only (finesse dmg portion for weakspots for example: weakspot dmg - base dmg = finesse dmg portion), so weapons are not at all equal. Some weapons will do atrocious body dmg but fantastic finesse dmg. Others get barely any bonus dmg from finesse hits at all. Yet others do fantastic crit dmg but barely any weakspot dmg, etc.
tldr; Darktide is not a simple game. But learning the distinction lets you uncover things like how a zelly crusher is a fantastic crit & weakspot weapon, or how an Agripinaa shotty is an absolutely insane sniper given enough +weakspot/finesse bonuses.
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