Really interested to know which weapons got a new lease of life in this new patch?
I’ve been stockpiling random oranges for a while. It seems the catachan sword has moved up the rankings. Anything else?
I’d gotten in to a groove with the old regulars; butcher 3, turt 9, antax 5, illisi, gorgonum and ripper 5 for example. What’s new and worth trying now?
The chain weapons are a blast now. Headhunters are great as well, provided you can land those weak spot hits.
In no particular order (of the things I’ve played and can think of right now)
This is all from the perspective of Vet:
Vraks7 is now very much on par with the Vraks3 too, it’s really good, especially in a vet executioner’s build, but it also works very well with commando.
Bleed knife and shovels went from A to S tier for vet too. Both go very well with executioner/deadshot builds if you’re using a low mobility primary. Make sure the shovel has high mobility or at least sprint efficiency if this is the use-case.
Blessings-wise All or Nothing is godlike when coupled with Limb Splitter, for executioner’s + Deadshot, and hybrid Deadshot officer/commando builds.
Helbore 3 was already strong, but with executioner’s + Deadshot you can one tap everything but bosses, maybe mutants (haven’t checked the maths here yet), and ogryns with the right investments.
Infantry autoguns work very well DMG-wise, Columnus and Graia have gone fron NO to B tier, and the AG1 should have gone from A to S tier if it wasn’t broken. They’re all unusable due to the current ammo economy anywhere beyond Vanilla Auric T5s though.
DoT builds, whether fire or bleed based are very much viable, esp for commando vet. Flechette is still useless unless someone has figured out a way to get more crit on shotguns beyond the perk and what the tree gives without relying on scattershot (only viable, barely, on agrip7 shotty). Do note, that even deadshot isn’t enough to get it to reliably proc for some godforsaken reason.
Agrip7 shotgun is now a 50cal sniper rifle on Executioner’s + Deadshot builds, it’s ridiculously good, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it gets slapped with a nerf down the line. You can both snipe, and delete stuff close up with it. Alternatively it’s pretty spooky with rending talent stacking too.
For Oggy:
the Mk4 knife is very strong now with a new moveset
Rumbler has improved quite a bit as well, being able to stick to ogryn is pretty big. I can 2 shot crushers in addition to the CC it creates.
Grenade Gauntlet with pinfire or whatever it’s called is also crazy good now.
Shield & shovel are good now because of the brutal momentum changes & bleed builds. Shield is also very good because of the talent where blocking causes taunt - so if you taunt gunfire, they stop shooting and will close in for melee.
Wouldn’t count those two, they were already A-Tier and most of the community just skipped over them because “iTs NoT tHe AuToShReDdEr / CoMbAt AxE”.
What nobody mentioned in this thread but deserves a gigantic mention:
Recon Lasgun absolutely melts now. If you make a crit / dmg hybrid build and get the Vet’s talent for Lasgun Specialization, you essentially get 30-60% enlarged clips, depending on how lucky you crit.
With all the new ways to achieve more damage you break into breakpoints more easily.
Well, Voidstrike turned into a frigging railgun. With Surge, I think it can one-shot any elite or specialist (except maybe Mutant). It also opens up Bulwarks when you hit their shield, which is new AFAIK.
I’d only recently come to really like the Evis; it was decent, but it took a bit of time to get things done. Now, it’s just chunks everywhere, especially with crit builds. 250 damage (at 80%) on every attack is… wicked. I think it was 200/100/100/200 for lights and 200/200 for heavies before. Those middle cleaving lights are insane now 
New lease on life, maybe not, more akin to they’ve grown up and are no longer recognisable
It always did that, but it required a fully loaded shot and a second before. The new stagger value pushes it over the edge of that breaking point.
That one talent that let’s the recon do that is strong enough to count as a Keystone.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it actually was, but when devs decided to remove keystones from vet, someone got cheeky and stuck part of it right back in.
Man, imagine if combat shotties had a talent that juicy in the commando tree
It’s funny.
They didn’t want gun specializations, but me, a D&D RPG game enjoyer always found these small, inconspicious but powerful weapon specializations an interesting design choice.
Imagine if every gun type had a different special making it unique and only the Vet could tap into it via Weapon Specialization. They called it a sort of talent point tax, but with stat nodes we got those anyway.
Weapon Specializations could have been a unique Vet thing. Missed opportunity, especially since W40K table top does have weapon spread sheets like D&D does.
I heard they were doing weapon specialization as keystones, but it was scraped due to bad balance.
The balance will never be 100% perfect either way. Should have braved it out, sticked with it and then balanced it in retrospect.
This big patch was going to be bonkers regardless. Most people enjoy the fun, so it’s all good.
Weapon Specializations would have fit the Veteran in terms of both, gameplay and story narrative. That they had this idea at first and then scrapped it is really sad, they had exactly the right idea, at least in my opinion.
Ogryn heavy attacks in general received a massive boost in survivability. Taking both the Smash 'Em and The Best Defense talent (replenishing 25% toughness on hitting one or multiple enemies with a heavy attack) confers outstanding survivability. Together with the Implacable talent (15% damage reduction while charging heavy attacks) and the No Stopping Me! talent (Heavy Attacks can’t be interrupted by anything but disablers like Trappers, Muties and Dogs), it allows the Ogryn to duel even Daemonhosts 1v1, face-tanking through all of their attacks while constantly attacking without ever needing to retreat or block. Club is especially good for dueling Daemonhosts and Chaos Spawns.
As for more specific weapons:
Ogryn’s Mark VI Cleaver.
The attack speed of its heavy attacks was improved. With +damage against Maniac/Flak/Carapace perks, as well as the Unstoppable Force and Thrust blessings along with going down the left talent tree (with some dips into the middle tree here and there to pick up Payback Time, Hard Knocks and Soften Them Up), it can cleave through shields, carapace and stagger multiple Crushers and Maulers out of their overhead attacks with fully charged Thrust + Crunch! heavy attacks. Bull Butcher is still better against trash hordes, but a heavy attack-focused build with Mark VI (and probably Mark IV, while Mark IV’s heavies have weaker cleave, they do come out faster) can grind down entire Crusher patrols on its own, even with Bulwarks mixed in due to simply cleaving through the shield.
Then there is the Shovel.
Finally, with the damage cap removed, it can conceivably damage everything its attacks cleave into. Meaning that bleed applications become quite potent. Its general versatility just works all around well, though it struggles against masses of Maulers, Crushers and Bulwarks a bit more than the Club and the Unstoppable Force cleavers.
More interestingly, I’ve been trying some crit builds.
By foregoing the Hard Knocks, Dominate and Health Boost talents, you can dip into the right talent line for the toughness damage reduction and Massacre (Killing an enemy grants +1 critical chance, stacking up to 8 times). Along with critical chance perks and the Perfect Strike blessing on club/shovel, it can be interesting to try out. Results have been mixed on my end, and it’s probably not all that great at all, but it can definitly be fun. I’ll keep experimenting with it.
The biggest winner out of all is Mark VI cleaver which can now take on absolutely anything in the game. I am quite happy with it.
Buffed Shovel is a wonderful weapon though, that is for sure 
Thrust, Crunch! and the second heavy makes for some fantastic waves of decapitation!
Maybe I’m imagining it, but does the shovel’s punch feel weaker? In the Psykhanium, I was only able to lightly stagger Scag Ragers; previously, it could toss them around.
I’m curious to here how this turns out; I’d only tried Perfect Strike on the Eviscerator (I think) in the past, and it wasn’t very useful because (1) sticky attacks were fixed to no longer cleave through elites, (2) the hit mass from armored non-elites was never that high AFAIK, and (3) Savage Sweep existed.
Since (1) and (3) don’t apply to the club, it may have a use? 
Punches from the shovel and slaps from the clubs all feel weaker. Before the update, they were both able to stagger crushers with their special attacks. Now the slaps from the club can no longer do that.
Slaps never worked on any of the ogryn elite enemies, but they don’t work on Chaos Spawns anymore either. This is an actual thing I would like a Fat Shark answer on, since these mechanics are very obtuse and changing them every update is making me not bother keeping current. Shovel still does it.
But don’t rule out the club even with the super over buffed shovel, you no longer need Carapace Damage at all with the left side of the tree, and you can also one shot mutants. They also seem to have that cleave cap lifted despite the lack of update note, but the heavies still don’t hit as many targets as that hit mass would suggest. And MK3B is still really slow/horrible on maniacs so don’t use it.
Probably the biggest winner for me is duelling sword, legit better than force sword atm for me. Best mobility in the game and very great damage on all target types, from Uncanny Strike.
It’s incredibly stupid what they did to it. Seeing the Mk IV 2-3 shot crushers with the quick heavy stabs makes me want to bleach my eyes. Meanwhile Mk V got half the buff the other two did so has fallen into irrelevancy, unless you really really care about giant dodge range, regardless it’s the one that feels in about the right place while the other 2 are just incredibly dumb.
IMO nerf the stab damage back down a good bit then give DS Thrust, that would be appropriate and fun, and somewhat replicate the old full charged heavies of old Saltz’ rapier.
Personally, I loathe the idea of being forced to use a specific weapon by the talent tree. I get that the available talents are always going to be stronger for some weapons than others, but actually naming weapon sets and saying “you must use this if you want to go anywhere with this class” is just monumentally restrictive. I’m so glad they dropped it. The fact that they’ve added something purely for lasguns and nothing else seems to fly in the face of their realisation around this. Puzzling.
Now, if there was a way to give all of the different classes of weapons something, like what exists only for lasguns right now; That I could get behind. Assuming it didn’t force you down a build path full of nodes you don’t want to get it, of course.
L3 on Mk5 was definitely forgotten. With the new finesse curve scaling of the regular light attacks, its actually a worse follow up attack on maniac and unarmored on head shot (also expected with this weapon for good damage).
But the Mk4 is just a big stronger than it should be, and then it would be great. Mk2 should have one slightly stronger stab for the inconvenience of its combo, and then they would all jive fine. Certainly better than before, when the stab special wouldn’t even stop a Scab Shooter’s bayonet.
My experience with Voidstrike made it not reliable enough at killing shooters before the buff to be viable. I’ve had orange markers and no kill, which was damn annoying to make it mainstay.
