Power Melee Weapons . .

EDIT: Tried to clarify some points.

All seems to need some changes. On the one hand, you had the Power Swords, which many consider meta, top-tier weapons. On the other you have 2-Handed charged bonkers, the only one of which is considered good being the Crusher. The others feel terrible to use, their charged ability feels bad to use and promotes boring gameplay, and they have their damage poorly balanced between uncharged v charged states. The hammers are too extreme, though on the Power Swords I think the uncharged state is at least usable. Mobility on all of these is pretty poor, notably, aside from the Crusher that handles like a much lighter weapon (and probably is just fine in its current state - I am not including it in this conversation).

My thought is that Power Weapons need an inherent rework. Perhaps the “charged state” for some of these could be a variant form of it, with it being their default state, and they have good power and cleave. They have limited energy, though, and have to be recharged by holding the special attack key, or even reload. Then they could get actual third attacks! Like imagine a quick thrust with the head of your maul, a good stagger option also with good weakspot damage potential, but has a long recovery. The uncharged states (for the hammers, at least, minus the Crusher) could be the terrible weapons we have now! Obviously, with the hammers you’d have to tone down the charged state and turn it into something that just gives increased damage/cleave/stagger as opposed to one giant explosion. Giving them good control AND damage by default could be balanced, owing to the recharge needs and their bad mobility.

If you went with a full charge being required to have any charged attacks at all once you hit zero, you’d sadly encourage people to be having to recharge after every attack to prevent hitting that burnout point. If you went with even a slight recharge being able to trigger it, then you’d get people in a pinch having to charge - attack repeating. This probably would be the better option, since at least having an option in a pinch would be better than no option, and people would have to be skillful to get their charge refilled under pressure.

Power Swords have another issue, though, of just having pretty boring movesets. To me this is worse than a weapon being kinda bad, because boring ones just aren’t even fun.

Now, I don’t use the Power Swords much - maybe many love their current movesets. But given the style of sword blade these have, I think that each variant should be like the 1H Swords in VT for Kruber and Kerillian. Kerillian’s 1h sword basic moveset is two horizontal(ish) slashes and then a thrust. Everyone likes a good stab! And if you make the first heavy on it be the same overhead chop Kerillian’s 1H sword has, then you can give it that fun combo of H1 → L3 for single-target AP damage! I always loved using that to pull off quick two-hit kills against Stormvermin.

The Kruber variant, meanwhile would have L1 horizontal - L2 horizontal, and L3 being an overhead slash at a jaunty angle (yes, it’s jaunty). I dunno what to do with the heavies, as Kruber’s sword had the same problem of having a kinda boring moveset. I’d say get some variety in here, just not as much as the wild flailing in the 1h Chainswords, please.

These ideas could be way off-base for most people. I just think I’d really like to see these weapons get a bit of a rework - I want to enjoy them but right now I find them very unfun.

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In the TTRPGs (Dark Heresy, Only War, etc), power weapons are pretty much just a pure upgrade over their non-powered variants, the “low-tech” weapons. As one would expect, of course; It’s an energy field made to slice armor plating like butter. The only downsides were their relative expense and scarcity, negative modifiers to stealth (from the energy field glowing and crackling), and a limited energy source. You either had a short span of use out of it or a very expensive and heavy backpack that could keep it powered long-term.

In this game, to keep them on the same level as other weapons and keep everything usable and avoid one thing taking off and becoming the meta head-and-shoulders above everything else, they kinda have to gimp them.

I get why they chose the model of nerfing that they did but if they were to do anything else, I think the limited energy is probably the only viable one. They are already expensive and kinda scarce but it doesn’t matter how expensive you make them; if they are powerful enough, people would spend any amount on them so it’s not a real barrier or method of balance. And stealth isn’t much of a concern in game but you could have it affect the stealth ults if you like for extra realism, I guess? Another downside was their poor suitability for non-lethal takedowns -an important step in DH’s detective work- but REALLY not an issue for us.

Plenty of energy types have been suggested from an unreplenishable battery that starts full on each map but once it drains, it’s a regular sword, to having a separate “ammo” counter that is consumed by each time period of activation. I think I like the moonfire energy bar idea that weeping.moon mentioned the most. On the other hand, that mechanic was insufficient to balance that weapon in it’s original state and it had to be nerfed into the ground to avoid overshadowing every other weapon (and they left javelins as they were for how long, lol).

So, I guess I don’t know a good answer. As much as I would like a proper eviscerator that’s a mix of chain and power weapon that slices through a fully-armoured space marine terminator with the same ease it pops a pustule of Nurgle snot, I have to admit that would kinda ruin the balance they have going on here.

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Yes, Power weapons in general are a failure in terms of weapon design.
In particular, Power swords, while being very high tier weapons, are polarizing because of their great difference in offensive power between charged state and uncharged state.

– meaning you have to spam the weapon special (even with Power Cycler IV, it gets old pretty quick); this applies to the Illisi Force sword too.
— making Power Cycler IV mandatory to make it a top-tier weapon
– their only weakness always being terrible dodges. Their sprint speed is not even that bad.
— but if this weakness is compensated for (say hi to Vet’s keystone Weapons Specialist ) then the Power Sword is instantly miles above everything else.

A better idea of making this kind of weapon feel unique would be to enable (via the weapon special button) a mode-switch so no spamming is required.

  • like suggested before, either a moonfire bow-style battery gauge.
  • or the mode-switch completely changes the attributes of your weapon ; unpowered would have better mobility etc. Powered-on would be slower but better penetration, stagger…
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