Should Brutal Momentum be Nerfed or Changed, and if so how?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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First off, LMB is your attack button. It doesn’t matter what you do in the game, you will always “LMB spam”.

Secondly, “look how cool you are and what you can do with something I consider to be bad”. :wink:
Seriously, though, you need to be a little more careful with the nuance in language. I never said these things are outright bad. I said they are undertuned to various degrees, which means performing mediocre, not being especially good.

I can list of the top off my head a big con with every of these items, but if you are a veteran of course you can make them work with the right investment, a godroll and good Blessings. And no, the others that perform better than them aren’t broken.
You’re tired of the bandaids and buffs, I am on the other hand tired of elitists and their mindset of “if I don’t need 3 hits to kill the most basic, weakest enemy, then it’s too easy a game”.
Anyway, what is undertuned with each of these weapons in my book:

Chainaxe → Slow and cumbersome to use, gets stuck in enemies making it even slower. has no meaningful difference to the Chainsword other than being a straight downgrade to it

Clawsword → Too weak in damage, needs many hits to even down Poxwalkers, it has issues dealing with specials already

Eviscerator → Lacking in cleave. It’s a slow, heavy-handed two-hander. It should cleave more.

Helbore Lasgun → Should have some extra penetration against Poxwalklers / Infested. It is a laser sniper gun that charges it’s shots, the player should feel the impact

Infantry Autoguns → Runs out of ammo way too quickly and has too small magazines - For that fact it also comes with weakish damage and no armor piercing. FeelsBadMan.jpg

Recon Lasgun → Low ammo pool diminishes a fun weapon in concept into something worthless in practice. The damage is also weakish, but that’s fine. It just runs out of juice far too quickly. As it is a Lasgun variant, it should pierce armor a tiny little more, if just by 5% points.

Shovel → Similiar to Clawsword. It’s weakish and also lacks cleave, both. It’s a fun defensive option, so it shouldn’t grow in strength. Make it cleave more or give it more push strength.

Slab Shield → Should be God-Tier of CC or Cleave for how cumbersome it makes you and for how little damage it has, but feels strangely limited in this regard.

Surge Staff → Too few Max Targets at full charge. Make it possible to zap even more enemies, maybe at the cost of increasing charge time further.

As for the game being too easy: It would be a start if things like Poxhounds and Muties and other enemy types wouldn’t get a nerf just because people demand it. Unnerf Poxhounds and Muties first.

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104

IIRC Brutal Momentum only allows Mk II Caxe and Tac axes to not be terrible against hordes, Mk V Caxe doesn’t need it quite as much. Everything else gets like no mileage out of it.

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The Chainsword outperforms the Chainaxe with the right Blessings, purely for it’s attack speed and cleave. It’s way more comfortable to use.

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I’d like to point out that you are infact not alone and do have a group helping eachother out. So many weapons that are… less then optimal can still be used to complete Damnation by having some of the “slack” being picked up by another player and their loadout. And as you say they do require more effort to use for best effect.

I think alot of people will have different ideas on what they consider to be the skill-ceiling or how much depth that combat needs to have, and only looking at attack patterns or damage output on melee weapons does not give the whole picture on how combat works in darktide. While some weapons can lend themselves to have a fast paced LMB spamfest and others don’t, trying to find a middle ground is going to be hard.

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107

Which blessings? If you can advise me on how to build it I will dedicate some time to learning the weapon considering I am running a thread on how much I hate the current implementation of chain weapons. I don’t see how the chainsword, with such poor base damage, is going to outperform a weapon with similar damage and two top tier + power blessings. The light swings on the chain axe are actually really strong and can hit 3+ targets once you stack +power and they deal great damage.

As the preeminent Chaxe connoisseur I don’t even feel bad in this case for plugging my tutorial on using the thing considering its directly relevant to the discussion.

Hel, I even have several different scoreboards where I outperform the C.Axe and others where I outperform the Heavysword. This one is my most recently saved with the updated scoreboard for better damage numbers comparisons.

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108

Brutal Momentum not only shouldn’t be nerfed, rather buffed. Make it also disable target caps on all weapons.

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Is that a mod that shows you the loadout everyone was running at the top or is it just edited?

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I just use MS paint.
Man it would be a good feature though wouldn’t it?

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No, because we already see the reason Scoreboard was disabled - People jumping to conclusions based on numbers.
For reference your scoreboard doesn’t show me that the Chain Axe is better than the Antax or the Thunderhammer.
What it does show me is that the player with the Chain Axe outperformed the Antax and the Thunderhammer players.

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112

I’ll never understand why people keep making the arguement that confounding variables somehow invalidate the usage of statistics. There are reliable methods of generalizing data in a quantatative fashion.

But I don’t need to go that far to draw reasonable conclusions considering I am not just using one scoreboard for reference. I am using an array of scoreboards collected over time and compared to my own gameplay with a godrolled antax. I can also watch the other zealot all game long and ascertain their relative skill (in the above board that player was quite good). Beyond that I can compare their damage in this game to other games where players used combat axes and get a rough average for normative damage values.

The chain axe can compete, as I said it is a 3rd stringer choice compared to the Heavy Sword or Combat Axe. But it can compete.

What was the proposed build for the Chainsword so I can spend some (additional) time on it or just check to see that I don’t already have that one in my game time records.

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113

Ideally I’d just like the scoreboard mod to also store the teams loadouts, so that you can at later dates refer back to the data with more context. Also I think it would be nice if the name under which it gets saved were to include the weapons you yourself were running in order to make cross referencing easier.
But I wish…

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114

I think it should be capped on targets by tier; 2, 3, 4, 5. That makes it not useless while making it slightly less absurd in high intensity missions. Sort of like the nerf to the powersword (which is still ~best in slot) - don’t wreck it, just tune it down.

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115

I still think you misunderstand me on this point. Going into making this thread I was under the impression most people thought it was too good etc, and I still asked in the title if people did actually want a nerf or change for it. I’m not championing for a BM change, just saying I find it very strong and if it were to be changed I’m not sure how it would be.

Also I did make a mistake on my last post, I meant to say I feel compelled to use it on my Veteran, not my Zealot. For reasons you mention later I prefer the Tactical axe on zealot, but I do think the Antax is still really good on vet for good horde control with little stamina cost. I use both on both classes and that’s how I end up feeling. As for Zealot I think my favorite weapon is the Ironhelm.

Last thing is that when I say I’m a “lore guy” I’m not advocating to make this game a 40k simulator. It’s not an Arma type game so concessions to lore to make the game more fun, playable, and balanced are absolutely necessary and welcomed. It just hurts a bit seeing the iconic weapons not being more top tier (Force Swords pass this bar at least).

Also I find the Evisc really hard to use effectively on Damn, just doesn’t seem to hit hard enough or cleave hard enough. I’ll stick with my Ironhelm for now!

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116

Watched your tutorial, and while I definitely feel you have an amazing understanding of the Chaxe and how to use it, at the end of the day it’s still just your anecdotal evidence and I don’t think it can be fairly applied as fact to the game as a whole.

I’m going to be honest I don’t really understand what you 2 are arguing about (is it whether chaxe or chsword are better?) but even if you do really good with the chaxe I feel it still needs some buffs, similar to pre buff T Hammer.

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Okay, I guess I misunderstood then.

Well Power Sword was also top tier. It sort of still is if you ask some. It’s really just the Chain Weapons not being top meta. Although Deisu argues in this very thread that the Chain Axe is insanely good. I don’t know.

Most definitely. As I said, it needs a little something. It’s damage is fine if Cleave were to get a boost. But as it stands it has trouble competing with top tier options and is merely “okay”.

Maybe invalidating it does go a bit far on my part. But yes, I do find them less conclusive because they’re not an isolated test (which would be hard to do tbh).
I don’t know who was who in your screenshot, but since it’s you advocating for the Chain Axe I will just go by the assumption that you were the guy on the right side and you were the guy who scored best with it.

There is two big things that make it less conclusive:

  1. We don’t know the total setup. What were the Blessings and Perks on everybody’s equipment? We know yours, but there is no way to know what the Thunderhammer and the Antax guy had. Since Blessings are big and so is item level, we don’t know how much of that made an impact here.

  2. We don’t know what the entire playstyles and the game was like. We only see the scoreboard. If you for instance clutched at someone point because everybody else wiped or was downed repeatedly, that would catapult you to Nr. 1 in damage and kills automatically. And that is just one example.
    Another example would be you frontlining, players 2 and 3 being in the back and the 4th player running around like a headless chicken to get all the Plasteel. That impacts performance.
    Which is exactly where skill level comes in and me saying that a good player can make any piece of equipment shine.

Higher sample size would of course work in your favor, although I’d still be of the opinion that you being a good, experienced player pushes your numbers up. And there is a lot of randoms who don’t know how to survive or clutch. It happens way too often I see people enter Damnation games with all +Wound curios, clearly of the mindset that they can “suicide their way through the mission”.

That the Chain Axe can compete I agree. I never questioned that. I said it’s undertuned and I stand by that.

I don’t have a real build for the Chainsword. I just tested a White version against another White chainaxe in the meatgrinder and then thought to myself:
“mh, I can cut through a lot more chaff with the chainsword and the damage seems mostly even.
Chainsword > Chainaxe”

I also had to use a Chainsword a few times while leveling my first Psyker and it performened decently. But that’s just more anecdotal observation.

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Datamined weapon crit chance (weapons with a range have an actual crit% stat, I’m not sure why revolver is listed with -2%):

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This doesn’t list the Combat Axes, though. Just the tactical Axe and that doesn’t have it’s critrate hidden, it’s an applied attribute that scales (currently up to 12.00% at 80).

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If it’s not listed, it has 0% base crit, not counting crit from archetype.

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121

Off course you can

However, sure it is not saved in the scoreboard

Here I agree…

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It’s just a conversation about whether or not the Chaxe or Chword (shword? chshshshsword?) are better. I took exception at the following statement:

But I also genuinely wanted to know what blessings he meant. Its not like I’ve spent 100 hours on every weapon and I am trying to make chain weapons better as a matter of personal investment. So if there’s a build I don’t know about that makes chainsword better than Chaxe I want to know.

I’m highly open to being wrong so I don’t want to call it an arguement, precisely, though its accurate in the classical sense. I was just trying to provide earnest evidence for my position.

I agree with you both. But after using it for so long I struggle on exactly how it should be buffed.

I wouldn’t say insanely good, just able to compete. I believe I said something like “third string choice” which puts it around thunder hammer territory

I’m going to accept your complaints but say the following. Of the games I have played while comparing weapons this is probably the closest I have come to a real-world 1:1 example case. Neither of us downed or died. We practically played side by side for the entire mission. The veteran and TH user can be safely disregarded since they died a lot (I edited that into the stats). Without spending a bunch of time building data tables and leveraging reporting talbes I wouldn’t be able to provide better data.

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