Holding your sword up to your face to turn it on constantly looks just plain goofy. The coolness factor would be way better if they just had a battery that drains while they’re turned on and recharges when not. Then you can have a minute or two of cinematic, bad ass and immersive carnage. It would be more fun and look more cool and probably be way easier to balance because you could just shorten/lengthen the battery life as needed and it would be a way more subtle adjustment than it is now.
Chain Weapons aren’t as bad but they could still be way more fun if they just acted like a chainsaw instead of like an old lawnmower that you have to constantly crank-start back on.
Same thing with them, you turn them on and they are extra powerful for a minute or two and then they run out of gas/battery for a while.
The most iconic 40k melee weapon, chain weapons, are in my experience the least popular melee weapons, because they just aren’t that great.
TL;DR: Just give them a recharging bar like the Moonfire bow.
On Power sword, I totally agree with you. But I would say more something like 30 seconds of carnage and 1 minute to reload the special
On chain weapons, the only one that I would have wanted to use, cause it is an iconic weapon of the zealot, is the evis.
But the attack chain forbid me to use that… thing.
As a result, unless they give us an interesting evis, well… I don’t care of what happen to these weapons.
Others already suggested it and while some battery sounds good on paper, it’ll never be in its execution. It’ll either be useless or to broken and here’s why:
The game will throw different circumstances at different difficulties on the player.
Lets say the up and downtime is 2 minutes. So you can freely slay through enemies for 2 minutes and just load it while no enemy is available. But since such downtimes rely on the RNG frol the AI-director and are probably never a thing on high int, the weapon needs to be useful without the special aswell.
So you’ve automatically 2 issues in its design… if the weapon is good in its core without the special, which is needed in dowtimes, you’ve to exeggerate the special ib its strength and so far its gonna be broken af.
The other possibility would be, that the special is balanced, but to keep the gap normal attacks would be not that great.
And this lasts in the next issues… playercontrol.
No matter which of both might happen, some players will spam the special and then moan about the downtime, while others will use it even less since they’re often like “maybe we get worse spawns… then i’ll need those 2 minutes.”
Experience might help, but the issue based on the AI director will always be a thing.
In kind of FS or chainweapons it would actually be more clunky to play aswell. You would always need to turn it off to not to stuck into enemies. Ofc this could removed, but that’s actually part of balance and skill-ceiling, so those weapons would need another drawback anf damage-nerf.
Not to mention that all those weapons would feel and actually play pretty much the same like a PS then.
Seriously no. This weapon should’ve never be a thing so long in V2 aswell.
Ya 30 seconds might be more reasonable, they can fine tune the specifics of it, i just want them to be fun to use and not like a payphone you have to look down and put a nickel in every other second.
And ya im not a fan of the evicerator’s chain either, im sure they’ll probably add another mark that has the more classic side to side sweeps like Kerillian’s greatsword, that would be an almost perfect weapon even with the system we have now
I think if we instead had always had that system and someone recommended the system we currently have people would say very similar things, like:
“you would either have to power up the sword for every single swing which would make it awkward, or use it unpowered most of the time and it would be too weak unless you made it too strong, and you wouldnt always have time to turn it on between each swing so its power would be wasted in high intensity moments when you need it the most.”
…Or something like that.
The current system is extremely lame, we might as well make the animation our character inserting a nickel every couple seconds like a pay-phone, it doesnt play naturally or smoothly, even when it was really powerful it was still really dumb looking.
Its also not how chainsaws or powered tools work in real life or in 40k lore, if i had to rev up a drill for every single rotation of a screw i would just use a screw driver and it would be faster.
The chain weapons getting stuck is already a problem right now, thats why no one uses the chain axe, at least with the on/off switch you could use the heavy and light attacks on any chain weapon without getting stuck, if you accidentally let out a light attack with the chain axe now you’re gonna get slapped around for the longest second of your life.