The Obscurus suffers from a lack of reason-to-pick, Illisi is better than it for most all things, but Deimos is the superior version of the two “sawing” force swords.
Here is my easy-to-implement fix:
Change Combo to be: (light 1 ->) heavy 2 → light 1. This way it is more fun to use against horde. Other combos are fine.
This can be implemented because the Eviscerators use this type of functionality where certain activation-charged attacks cleave and do not get stuck.
Then: make it so that Warp Charged attacks for light 1 and heavy 2 behave like Illisi charges, and all other attacks behave as they currently do.
If you want to, you can also make this combo: light 1 → Warp Charge → Heavy 2 → Warp Charge → light 1 also be a thing, like how you made it work with Power Sword, where the Power Charge does not reset combo always to 1.
This way Obscurus becomes the middle ground between Deimos and Illisi, then the numbers should be tweaked so that Obscurus is slightly worse for horde cleaving than Illisi and that it is slightly worse than Deimos on the Single target functionality. This way Obscurus has a place as a versatile tool jack-of-trades pick.
I can make Obi work in melee for sure for the challenge / “something different” alone, but it’s just not fun for various reasons: mobility, lack of cleave damage, and poorly fleshed out combos. Illisi is rather boring. Deimos is fun, even if it still has clearly unintentional amount of stagger on H2.
Not sure about all your specific ideas, but those would bring Obscurus to feeling like a complete weapon. Force swords need some (re)work in general. A unique psyker weapon class has been left to rot. First change which should affect force swords (with the exception of Deimos, that one is fine) is mobility. I’m tired of being forced to stand there blocking to reset the dodge counter. All because of the half as…ed change which removed the infinite dodge count, but has done nothing to address the issue of poor mobility.
I wouldn’t mind some changes to cleave damage values also, all force swords attacks with few exceptions have virtually zero cleave damage.
I do have to question your paradigm, since psyker is the only one who can do things like “just block to regain your dodges”. That already is a unique ability and re-adding infinite dodges, whilst “convenient” really is not balanced at all contra other weapons.
I have to disagree about dodge counts, but dodge distance could be boosted for the swords you mention to lack mobility. That is something one of my friends mentioned about the swords, so maybe that would be a better balancing angle.
Nice suggestions, and the activation mechanic certainly leaves much to be desired.
I’d also make the light 2 have some bonus damage of some sort.
Some uppercut attacks on some weapons already have this. E.g., the uppercut diagonal sweeping light on the 13g Chainsword has mildly better damage than the other overhead diagonal sweeping lights.
(And maybe a new animation that doesn’t look as limp-wristed and is slightly more diagonal but still very vertical to make aiming for headshots a bit more reasonable with it).
Similarly, I’d give the heavy 1 a different damage/cleave/blah blah profile than the heavy 2. It’s quite unusual that two attacks that are quite drastically different in animations have the exact same profiles.
In terms of mobility, they’re still good since they belong to the category of melee weapons with a fast consecutive dodge cooldown. Because of how the dodge “i-frames” linger, I much prefer weapons like htis.
The removal of infinite dodges is in itself not half-assed. In fact, I would say the fact that they had infinite dodges is quite half-assed. It was peak degeneracy back when it existed.
Force Swords are primarily a category of finesse weapons, so it makes sense for them to have whatevs cleave damage distribution, but their cleave damage distribution is actually quite good. For example, compare the force sword sweeping heavies to chainsword sweeping heavies, and you’ll find that they are not that far apart. (I’m using the chainsword as a benchmark since that is a weapon that I know to be at the top end for trash clear, though it also has access to 200% cleave blessings and a certain other degenerate property).
So, further considering these offensive stats and others, it makes sense from a balancing perspective why their mobility (which is still very good) is still below that of the more degenerate mobility weapons like duelling swords and combat knives.
Personally i would like force sword variant that just applies stacks of soulblaze without having to perk for it. That would be unique enough feature by itself. Balance some faster attacking attacks / different special for it.
I’d love a DoT heavy weapon, like Sienna’s Fire sword, but I think they realised in VT2’s life span that it was very difficult to balance cause it uniquely was affected by the various talents.
If they do make one, I think they’ll try to make it so that it’s not tied to Soul blaze (affected by most of the tree) but rather bleed (but wouldn’t be “Psyker” themed), or better yet, Electricity (which is already present with both Surge and Smite, but with Surge not being affected by the tree, saving that it get bugged interaction again)
Biomantic Swords, like in Inquisitor Martyr/Prophecy, with using the Fire Sword as base, incorporating Bioelectricity and Hammerhand/Steel Arm
Yeah it definitely does not need to be tied to soulblaze, but thematically i really like some sort of debilitating/dot effects to come out of psykers weapons. Electricty also has lots of potential.
I always thought force swords were a channel-when-you-hit thing as opposed to activate then hit. If the game wasn’t so wonky with the netcode/latency, it would be neat if the force sword channel worked like Final Fantasy 8’s gunblade where you can tap the trigger/special at the right time when you hit to do a burst of damage.
I personally don’t like weapon activations. They’re clunky and feel like unnecessary busy-work.
Could work with a new force sword where instead of one large power up attack, activation gives a minor damage buff but a large crit chance increase for like 5 seconds. Would rather play into the existence of blazing spirit than make it irrelevant.
Heck that could just be a rework idea for obscures to differentiate it. Would need a more cleaving moveset though.
Or could have a “State”/stance special, with the key activating or deactivating it.
Obscurus would lose the current special (which is shared on Deimos), and instead have a passive (current) and a new active stance, where it would increase it’s crit rate, but lower damage, or apply a more stable soul fire source
I would personally just rather remove the blessing and make a own mark out of it. Its obviously problematic blessing to balance and because every force sword can use it there can be some unforeseen interactions if its ever changed. So would rather just make 1 weapon and make it function properly.
Bleeds have already proven that they can be quite tricky thing to balance.
I’m not totally opposed of having crit based weapon either, but i feel like it would be problematic in its own way.
What i can agree is that Obscurus probably needs some other job just than just being the midline sword.
2 hander force sword would probably be cool as well but that probably would need to be its own weapon type.
Yeah obviously there’s more than one way you could reasonably go about it.
I don’t really see enough crit interactions in this game for it to become problematic. I mean yeah it would pair well with DD but that can be kept in check by having mid to bad baked in finesse mods. Shouldn’t really be hard to keep in check.
This might be a hot take? But I don’t think there’s really much wrong with bleeds at this point after their multiple nerfs, with the possible exception of benefiting from rend/brittle, but since onslaught frags are gone and there aren’t any good AoE ways to apply brittle without outright killing what you’re hitting before getting benefit from the debuff I’m struggling to think of any cases where it’s an issue besides maybe knife. And honestly all you’d have to do there to reign it in is decrease the stacks its bleed blessing apply, and/or nerf uncanny numbers
Its not the crit interaction per say, i just don’t really like the idea of creating weapon mark just to make certain blessings feel less bad. I don’t have issue just creating crit based mark in general if its interesting in its own way.
I’d personally just would like a weapon where i can have have that dot stacking/spreading something akin to firesword without having to rely on blessing which is honestly outshone by slaughterer and other damage increasing things if you want to make soulblaze more damaging. (Balance oversight on its own)
Not sure if its much of an hot take. Yeah bleeds are mostly fine right now but we got to remember for long time they were either giga bad or overturned. The special action bleeds are still arguably either ok or bad not to mention what you said about the interaction with rend/brittle being a thing.
It doesn’t require much to tweak them to 1 way or a other again.
There is no disagreement here, I don’t want the infinite dodges back, my problem is with how poorly that nerf was thought out and tested (lets be real here, it was NOT tested at all). My problem is with dodge distance. Anticipation talent makes Obscurus feel better, but I rather have actual proper dodge distance.
Anticipation has nothing to do with dodge distance. You can look at the lua to see that it only gives +1 dodge and improves the “i-frame” linger time against melee attacks, or experimentally verify with the MovementAnalyzer mod.
Illisi/Obscurus have an average dodge distance. It’s ~2.15m at 80%, in the same vein as the Rashad/Dclaw/Chainsword/blah blah.
I think your perspective is just significantly skewed by the Deimos (2.2m and faster dodge, taking 0.27s instead of 0.3s) /Duelling Swords (3m)/Combat Blades (3.5m) .
