One of the most important things they could do to balance weapons is adding some kind of stat to the weapons that modifies their power against monstrosities.
This would instantly solve the most glaring balance issue which is that weapons with a high rate of fire can shred bosses and weapons with a low rate of fire fail to do any real damage to them.
The second you’re dealing with an enemy who is just a wall of hitpoints all the balance around ammo efficiency and breakpoints to kill normal enemies etc. just goes out the window. If your weapon doesn’t have cruise control for rock & roll it’s bad and there is nothing you can do about it.
So the single biggest thing they could do to make it so that half the weapons in the game aren’t a liability to your team the second a boss fight breaks out is make sure that slow weapons get a damage bonus that normalizes their DPS against big targets.
The #1 reason why the bolter is a stand-out weapon is because it has the damage and penetration of a slow firing weapon with the capability to go full auto when something simply has to die right now. When you’re fighting a beast of nurgle the question simply isn’t “Should I shoot it 30 times?” the question is “How quickly can I shoot it 30 times?”.
You’re very right! I think the other thing with the power sword is that they tried to balance it by making the the mobility on the weapon terrible. So it feels both disgustingly powerful and a little terrible to use. It also has one of the best attack patterns in the game for what you need it to do, especially with the cleave bonus from the power field. They could even change the heavy attack pattern to make it a little less of a horde slaughterer. But other melee’s certainly need buffs.
I think one of the really big issues with things like Power Swords and Bolters is that lore wise they simply are superior to Las Guns and Chainswords. They are supposed to be better, so having everything in the game balanced against its own slot is always going to be a problem.
This game would be infinitely better if your character had like a point budget the same way a Warhammer army does, and you have to make choices within that budget. That would allow them to make a Bolter or a Plasma Gun genuinely superior to a Las Gun, but you’d have to pay for it somewhere else, like maybe you just can’t have the best gun and the best sword at the same time.
Insane to me how few people in this thread know what they’re talking about re:Power Sword. Play exclusively Heresy currently, for Ethos.
The power sword is possibly the worst melee weapon vet has outside of axes. And the power sword is really good. But it relies on a single gimmick that requires good timing and skill to utilize and make effective. Which is thematically appropriate, and shouldn’t be punished.
-Catachan swords with any cleave blessing out-pace it instantly by having better mobility and stamina vs horde.
-Catachan dagger has so much movement potential and enemy lock it’s spectacular, genuinely great against every enemy type if you know how to schmoove.
-Shovel is a middle ground weapon that’s good against both armored and hordes, but is a bit boring, imo.
-Chainsword specializes in rager/Crusher stun-kill, but is otherwise still strictly inferoir to most options, could do with some animation tweaks for horde combos.
-Every axe besides trench is so heavily specialized in single target they’re giving up horde for it, which isn’t a good trade-off imo.
-Chain-axe is just a confused weapon that’s neither as good as the chainsword against armor, or against hordes, it requires some animation tweaks(or to swap the animation lock from lights to heavies).
The power sword isn’t an issue because it can deal with every situation, its slow and needs to rely on its special to even be worth using, it’s an “issue” because it allows bad players to do okay with minimal input, which is fine. There need to be low-skill good-effect weapons for accessibility. I hope that as people get better weapons they’ll realize that there are equally effective options to it, that provide better bonuses depending on play style.
Weak point kill to be exact, but that’s basically the same thing on horde enemies with a lot of the axes. That blessing on MK V with its diagonal down + horizontal sweep light attack chain is glorious.
Power sword should have special attack cooldown from 5 to 10 seconds, after it wears off imho. I honestly dont want to see its damage being nerfed, i just dont like seeing it powered up nonstop. Have yet to play it too…
The name of the game, in high difficulties in -Tide games, has always been versatility : just look at the way they (tried to) balance weapons in VT2.
Exec Sword too good at everything ? They slightly nerfed the light attacks. Still OK at horde-clear, but requires a little more care to not get hit in between swings.
Elf double-swords are crap against elites ? They buffed the push-attack stab armor damage.
It’s also generally agreed that the best melee weapons are the ones that can deal with everything reasonably well, like the Axe&Falchion, the Sword&Dagger, the Mace&Sword.
What I’m trying to say is that, if a weapon is very good at something, it doesn’t need to be awful at everything else to counterbalance that fact.
Case in point in Darktide : the Catachan sword is very good at horde-clear and cleave, but has AWFUL weakpoint and armor damage. On the other hand in VT2, the Falchion, its spiritual equivalent, has very good weakpoint damage and good armor damage on the last overhead.
A lot of weapons in DT just don’t follow that design philosophy. Axes are even slower than they were in VT2. The dagger has very bad DPS against armor. Tactical axe has almost no cleave without specific Blessings. Dueling sword lives and dies by its weakpoint damage. etc…
This so much. The weapons in V2 felt so much better because while having different strengths they didnt feel that terrible at the stuff which was the weapons weakness.
Witch Hunter Axe had high dmg and was good vs armor and shield, but not that good at cleaning Hordes due to small cleave. But it never felt as terrible as in this game.
Guess what, the (i think MK V) Axe which is an exact copy of the attack patterns even has a bar that says “Cleave Targets” and has no freaking cleave at all. The weapon just feels terrible as soon as there are 3 enemies because you cant hit more than 2, while still damaging only 1.
Victors Great Hammer, Dual Hammers, Rapier, Axe and Falchion, Axe. None of those weapons felt terrible to play with. They play different, but I had fun with every weapon. You could kill Special Targets and deal with Hordes with differing efficiency but I never had the feeling I have with Dark Tide, that they are terrible.
Same goes with the other V2 Heroes weapons.
In Dark Tide it feels like you only have s**t choices, completely sacrificing one ore the other.
Nearly every weapon in VT2 is ‘good enough’ to use at every role. I’m not crippled against hordes with the dual daggers, I’m not crippled against monsters with the 2h hammer, and I’m not crippled against armor with the sword and shield. They shine at other things, but they’re ‘good enough’ to be used. I wouldn’t call VT2’s weapons homogenized at all.
The autogun balance is incredibly weird right now. Stagger is all over the place and the Agripinaa Mk. VIII braced autogun has higher damage and stagger than even the headhunters.
Another really big thing that I think Fatshark needs to factor into their balance of the game:
Ammo is NOT a good balance lever.
It seems like a very obvious way to balance weapons, if a weapon is super powerful you just give it very little ammo and then you can’t use it all the time.
In reality however this completely breaks the balance of the game, because of how the game’s challenge is actually structured. The parts of the game where you’re most likely to die are Boss fights, hordes with lots of specials and elites in them, and setpieces where a lot of enemies spawn while you have to complete some task under time pressure. Most of the time when you’re just dealing with the regular trickle of enemies there is no real threat.
Because of that you are infinitely better off with a weapon that is crazy powerful in a pinch but can’t be used all the time than with a weapon that has huge amounts of ammo but chokes when you need to clear a room right that moment or die.
Balancing around ammo availability is a huge mistake. At the end of the day having the ability to spend your way out of certain death with limited ammo is simply way better than having a slightly smoother ride through all the chaff in the hallways where you were never in danger to begin with.
The difficulty comes in spikes, so you want a weapon that can deliver maximum firepower in spikes. Balancing on ammo will always bias the game toward those weapons.
I suspect the reason for Power Sword’s current state is either one of the following or both:
Wanting to not scare away the shooter crowd that would inevitably be drawn to Veteran, Fatshark decided to give it the most straight forward and satisfying melee weapon possible.
There exists a two handed power sword exclusive to Zealot that was cut from launch (which is strongly suspected based on leaked weapon insignias) and so the disparity between a strictly ranged class performing amazingly well in melee compared to a strictly melee class isn’t really resonating with the devs because they know Zealot just has just the same insane killing potential on a very similar weapon.
Honestly though, the Eviscerator could be made to serve the current incarnation of Preacher very well, if the individual ticks of damage each rolled for crits separately, and Chastise was made to give a period of crits rather than a single crit, as it did previously. It might also need a slight bump in crit chance, or the ticks might need to be a bit more spread out to give a greater chance of proccing, but it all ties in with the Preacher looking to harvest crits for bleed, bonus crit chance, damage reduction, and ability cooldown. I do love the combat knife and the synergy it has with this loadout, but honestly shelving the eviscerator just feels wrong.
Looking forward to the two handed power sword zealot subclass, but don’t you dare try to charge for it!