After having wasted 45k plasteel and 3 mil dockets experimenting with shock maul blessing combinations I can proudly say, that I’ve managed to get 2 shock mauls Iike out of it.
The entire ordeal took 2 hours without playing a single run and made me loose the will to play.
Great system fatshark. Much retention. Very wow.
The bolt pistol is but a worse revolver, will be an alternative option once they finally nerf it (right Fatshark?)
The pickaxes have insane dmg rendering the folding shovels all but redundant, but too slow to be top tier with how DT plays on the highest difficulties. Often you have to cancel your attacks before they land to dodge the nonstop disablers.
The light one has a shitty pushattack that does the same as your special without proccing torment, apart from that is prolly the best simply because it swings the fastest.
Middle one has the best moveset, but hard avoiding taking chip dmg without confident strike.
Heavy is completely pointless. It has way too much dmg and is insanely bloody slow, making you eat copius amount of chip dmg hordeclearing.
Double shotgun is a CQC gun in a game with dedicated melee weapons, fun but rather pointless. Goes well with throwing knives.
Both mauls are excellent and probably the best all-rounder melees in the game, picking yours comes down to preference mostly.
The bolt pistol is a nice option for my SG psyker, considering I never liked how much worse revolver feels on them compared to vet and zealot. Got one with bleed and toughness regen on it and it felt good.
Bonk stick and shotty is great on vet, felt like I was playing Doom with a weapon specialist build, always swapping, never reloading.
Im surprised anyone said “better revolver” its clearly a worse revolver in almost every way. IMO its way out of line with the fantasy of the weapon and its balance is way off of good design. The bolt pistol is in desperate need of bug fixes and buffs on day one. Feels bad. I will be using it instead of the revolver because i’m here for a 40k game.
Power mauls are great.
That’s all i have tried yet.
I still hate the idea of the Revolver being as good as it is. I had wished the Bolt Pistol would leave room for the revolver to get a few nerfs (honestly, on the style, for my taste nerfed into oblivion because it’s silly)… But no, Bolt Pistol is just not fun to use.
The Karsolas pick is very easy to use, but doesn’t feel particularly good. It’s a bit mix-and-match, and likely is going to be VERY powerful as we play with more tricks. My friend with the Branx pick really found it powerful while we deleted mauler packs together with push-pull-bonks, and enjoyed the heavy rhythm (they were a Bardin main back in VT2).
They also said the Shock Maul is overpowered. However it’s just not fun to use. It feels gimmicky, and a little cheap. More to come as we play more tomorrow (probably).
bolt pistol can’t aim straight, the recoil is fine
it would be if it had the Hand Cannon perk, which it doesn’t
i’ve been playing with Shock Maul and its very good, the special attack can deshield bullworks, the heavy attack do fair damage, and the lights spam is A tier horde cleaning
been playing with gun psyker
I found the Karsolas pick the best, then again I threw some serious billhooks out. Being able to access the overhead when you want after a special (or the push attack that includes the pommel bash I was asking for thanks Fat Shark) means it isn’t suffering to make space the rest of the time. Like most ogryn melees you want your crowd heavies most of the game even on smaller elites.
Double barrel shotgun is completely awful vs Kantrael to me, unless you like one shotting (for 2 ammo) mutants I guess. Feels a lot worse the rest of the time.
Bolt pistol is not Zarona but still a lot stronger than most weapons for me. Definitely will use this for minimizing the biggest weakness of the bolter while also giving good mobility. Zarona just needed nerfs 8 months ago.
Shock mauls are a bit like shovels for all, very fun and probably the ones I’ll end up getting the most use out of. Kinda wish tasing staggered muties though.
I’ve only tried it in the meatgrinder thanks to that whole “you have to work to eat” garbage, but I think it’ll be pretty fun in a weapons specialist build. Unfortunately I don’t think it has enough ammo to pull off full doomguy (much to my dismay).
It’s nice to have a shotgun that actually kills things without needing to dedicate half your build to it. The hollywood-style knockback is pretty awesome, I love that part.
Hello 
I just posted on the FS official thread but I can provide alternatives to contribute or share additional thoughts
As I mentioned over there… I think that adding new guns is a mistake until specialties can be added. Specialties would not only make certain things better but it would also make it easier to balance the game
For example… If the Veteran had a Marksman specialty that focused on the Hot Shot Las sniper then that would give the Veteran a way to use their Las passives in a way that makes sense… Because now you can penetrate carapace armor
That said… I agree with the comments in this thread about the Bolt Pistol. It isn’t a great weapon by itself and I think it is made even worse by not having more sync with the user (if you will)
As for the Shotgun… I could see a specialty being made for the Zealot that would focus on Fire… Flame thrower and perhaps shotgun slugs filled with it. I think that would be more useful than some shotgun you can’t aim with
That is just me though
I think all the new weapons are a bit under-performing.
Bolt Pistol basically is junk without abusing Surgical+Deadly Accurate, which then turns it into a more efficient Zarona.
Pickaxes are all worse than the 3b mace at literally everything. Their attack speed, damage, and hit-boxes all kinda suck. Their boss dmg is incredibly bad, which is weird for a strike-down weapon.
New power mauls are actually very strong at horde clear and melee special problems. Carapace damage is above average. The problem is their boss dmg is non-existent, which is a real problem given the classes that would use a power maul don’t have any boss damage to begin with. Like why would I use the new mauls over a Crusher, or an Eviserator, or Power Sword? Those other options clear better, have boss damage, and generally are all more efficient.
Edit for the shotgun I forgot. It’s super fun, very DOOM memey, but it’s not good, like all shotguns. Low ammo, slow reloading, low range are all unacceptable when playing on high difficulties. For a shotgun to be good it needs to basically be an AA12 that does Plasma gun levels of damage, which is probably never going to be added to the game.
Fatshark has a problem of introducing more weapons that have no reason to exist beyond being new. It’s kinda like Riot when they make more League of Legends champions. Meanwhile we have so many forgotten weapons and blessings rotting on the shelf.
I wish the shotgun was better. I main the mk9 combat shotgun and its just better in everyway. The double barrel does so little damage in comparison but its fun to use coz it feels like its hitting hard but cant one tap gunners and weak specialist consistently. Unfortunate
Borovian and Krasolas Pickaxes vastly outperform the Clubs in horde clear, Borovian basically oneshot or two shot any elite, if anything is outclassing picks it’s shovels.
you specifically want deadshot and determined perks because it removes all the sway and supression effects and turns it into a sniper that one taps everything, without it the gun is a very janky mess and i strongly recommend against firing from the hip ever unless you can help it
Honestly, best new weapon of this update is the VId Recon Lasgun. Feels like an entirely new weapon, between shock trooper and the new mag capacity, you can paint fire onto targets for nearly 15 full seconds before needing a reload.
They do have playtesters, and many of them are long time players of 'Tide games. It’s just that FS ignores feedback from them half the time.
Shotgun: feels amazing in it’s range but it feels like you’re shooting birdshot and tickling enemies past 5m or so. I feel like the reload blessings are either not doing enough or bugged and not really doing anything. Could probably do with slightly more range and a bit tighter spread.
Shock Maul: fun, strong, and comes with good move sets. Blessings feel interactive and enhance certain properties of the weapon which gives it a lot more variations.
Bolt pistol: I can’t really see a niche for this weapon. The revolver outclasses it in single target deletion. Trying to play it like a light Boltgun feels horrible due to its recoil animation and terrible aiming experience.
The shotgun isnt a ranged weapon, it’s a “ranged” weapon. Take it so you can whip it out mid-fight in order to absolutely ruin some big, stupid, stunned target in front of you.
Once I score a good one, I wanna run it on my Zealot for precisely that purpose.
It doesn’t do nearly enough damage to fill that role. It’s a close range chaff remover, which is exactly what the game doesn’t need.
IMO, it needs to remove both the special you’re aiming at and all the chaff in-between. It needs to beat a Kant SG specced with Scattershot and Manstopper.
It’s ranged in the same way ‘close range’ is the same as ‘melee range’?
I’m genuinely excited to try out the VId. I have one with T4 Stripped Down in a crit build on my vet so I’m looking forward to being immune to ranged fire.