The wonderful @telopots has made a useful video about the intricacies of the Devil Claw Parry special.
Thanks to him for making it, I just wanted to share it here for anyone who might find it useful.
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I honestly never tried parrying. It seemed inconsistent but this inspires me to try a stamina build with a devil claw and get a weapon… Wait. Nevermind. I can’t do any of that reliably.
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It’s a nice gimmick but not really enough by itself to redeem devil claw swords, when compared to actually good weapons
If it put you in block state while riposting, now THAT would be interesting
The jank and ragers section explains why the devil’s claw is fun…not that it doesn’t feel good to land the move. Its a lot better than the tactical axe but that isn’t really a high bar to clear for me.
Parry is the entire reason I have a Devil Sword Zealot build. This, crit spam with shred and savage sweep, and the totem to make up for the ‘Jank’ and Rager 2 hits, with a Boltgun to round out the armor weakness. It’s really fun and I don’t entirely understand peoples aversion to it. Given the amount of Knife Zealots I see running around people already are deciding not to use ‘the best weapon’ (Heavy Evisorator) for favor of fun (high speed and dodge potential) so not sure why people are so hell bent on calling it bad when it still cleaves through waves and specials in 1-2 hits and only fails against the heavy armor targets (which you can account for with a ranged weapon).
I think it’s specifically worth using on a Zealot though, Veteran and Pskyer are to susceptible to the jank most of the time. Though a shout Vet could probably make it work, but yeah.
It’s just fun and a lot more usable than people make it out to be.
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I think its real problem is just latency making it difficult to get the proper parry window. You’d have to get the right feel for each match’s ping individually.
Sorry, but he isn’t a Darktide partner, so we cannot trust his content 
I think you pretty much figured it out in your post. Zealot has the heavy sword, which is basically a steroided catachan sword with its own brutal momentum. The backslash special is way more useful for fighting a lot of entities you’d think the counter would be bae for (bulwarks…) and it destroys ragers without having to use the special at all. Catachan sword can have shred, but is there any reason to not-use crit loadout heavy sword which already overflows with crits?
Funny you say that cause I was just thinking the exact opposite when just musing myself about this post. ‘Devil Swords are just better Heavy Swords’.
But thinking on it it’s pretty much entirely a playstyle difference. To me the fact that the heavy swords ‘Horizontal Sweeps’ are all locked behind a combo in the light attack swing and none of them have one as their heavy completely invalidates the point of them to me. To me if I’m doing an ‘overhead’ it’s because my intent is to kill something armored, but heavy swords do absolutely nothing to armor so having an overhead is useless.
Where as my Devil Sword 1 has a horizontal sweep as it’s starting heavy, and all it’s attacks are diagonal back and forth swipes. Just spam lights at the wave until something worth while comes along, then behead the whole thing with a heavy and savage sweep already proced. Need to focus one thing that’s left behind? don’t worry, the follow up heavy IS a drag down attack going back from the left, letting you clean up any big units like a flak gunner or rager with the follow up swipe after stunning them with a savage sweep cleave.
It just lends so much more to a cohesive playstyle to me, with a funny parry for fun as a bonus. Verses a backhanded swing that does absolutely nothing a heavy swing wouldn’t have already done, and a bunch of diagonals and cross chops that sometimes intermittently do the attack you actually want.
The lack of Shred is also a minus for me, since ‘totem spam’ needs as many crits as it can get, so dropping that 20% for a minimal damage increase with something like Rampage isn’t to interesting to me. Headtaker / Savage Sweep I can see making up for that, but allas I have never seen it and even then, by that point just ignore the crit totem spam entirely and just charge forward with momentum.
But yeah, at the end of the day lack of ‘sweeping heavy’ combined with a lack of need to ever really ‘overhead’ anything makes Heavy Swords none interesting to me. But if it’s enjoyable to you? More power to you. This if nothing else is just an explanation on why Devil Sword ( I specifically) might be still worth peoples attention xD.
There is a heavy sword with sweeping heavies though? I’m sure a ton of this is just not playing with the game enough. The catachan has a sweeping heavy it borrows from the heavy sword. Every other move is literally worse besides the parry which is anathema to the current Darktide gameplay of speed clears and speed progressions. Fishing for counters on the best possible targets isn’t reliable without mashing the special as noted in the video above, worsening the potential of this weapon even more.
Crit spamming lights that hit 4 entities and have absolutely cratered flak damage is not turning my head at all. Not compared to hitting 6 enemies with a brutal momentum equivalent and 40% headtaker. They’re both horde clearing weapons but one has way better horde clear tuning. And better performance against elites, because it functions on the assumption that you are the one controlling combat instead of responding to incoming damage.
But ultimately I think the devil’s is probably the more interesting all-human weapon choice taking the combat knife out of the picture. Its the combat axes that are either way too boring (the two good ones) or way too janky. The tactical axes are similarly unused, and similarly disappointing. So it gets a pass.
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