Now, I played the entire weekend of the Beta for Darktide, and it was incredible! But, I did have a minor issue with the Chainsword. I found it a little, underwhelming.
The thing felt more like a club on the normal swings, and it never seemed to engage the chain at all. Not only that, but the rev didn’t serve me as much as I would have liked. I found the rev would often leave me more exposed than making me feel like a maniac tearing through heretics. And so, I have some thoughts on how I may go about fixing it!
These are rough ideas, but I do hope they are taken into consideration!
I feel that the Chainsword should for sure have at least a minor version of the special attack on every swing. Give it more horizontal attacks, and the powers should be verticals that cut deep and do increased damage. But, the special should be a thing you can use for more lone enemies. If when you connect, you press the special attack key, you should saw into them indefinitely, basically keeping them stunned and constantly doing damage. And if not indefinite, make it consume a resource like stamina, and call it jam or whatever. My two cents from someone who used this thing pretty much the whole beta test period.
If these ideas don’t work for game balance, I am sure Fatshark will find something to make it great, I have faith in the team and am beyond excited to get to play on release!
It would be cool if the default small swing while revved could “catch” and shove enemies around with the whirling teeth. That would give the chainsword a niche for crowd control where you can shunt enemies to the side as well as back with push.
After all, the moving blade is almost like a flywheel which releases its energy when the teeth bite
Chainsword just didn’t feel well, it felt weightless with little impact on hit. The low damage was adding to that impression. It felt like swinging a plastic toy.
I put quite a lot of information on swords and chainsaws in this thread, but the TL:DR is Swords NEED to be fast out and fast back to be viable. ChainSAWs aren’t, and while dangerous, suck as weapons.
I believe the Chainsword needs to be a sword with extras, not a chainsaw with a swordhilt.
Best extra would be yank or hurl, (enemy or enemy weapon) with the chain reversed by the special.
It’s possible they work against soft tarets primarily like the giant spinner blades on Battlebots - you “charge” the rotating mass with kinetic energy which then gets released when the teeth hit a target. As a secondary utility, if you get it to stick into something harder, then you can rev the blade to actually saw though things.
In-universe, the justification for the chainsword would be that it’s an anti-armor weapon that’s cheaper than a power sword, along with its devastating effects on unarmored targets. A regular sword would of course work fine against unarmored enemies but wouldn’t be able to penetrate armor, especially in an environment where full coverage carapace armor and power armor is common. It would also be useful for sawing through bulkheads, walls, and barricades during boarding actions or urban warfare.
Also, considering how bulky the chainsword model is, it must be made of space-age ultralight materials if it’s meant to be used in one hand.
Was thinking the meat slicing machines in sandwich shops might be a better basis for a weapon then a wood cutting implement. We can still say it’s chain, but it’s still oriented to cut something other then wood.
Most armor plate like in tanks etc is made of plasteel, which is probably a very strong plastic-based nanomaterial that is not super hard. If so, then a diamond-tipped chainsword makes sense in that it will be able to chew and remove material when cutting through armor plate
Real world materials science is just extraordinarily complex. We can put a few things down to the use of unobtanium/wonderflonium, super strong/light materials, etc… and thereby assume the chainsword is super light. The lore says the teeth are crazy sharp and auto-sharpened. If they break completely they aren’t too hard to replace.
Still, they are often presented in art as a thing that wouldn’t work, because the outside would create a shelf that would obstruct the blade passing through the cutting medium. Real blades have more or less almond/boat shaped cross sections so they can push the cutting medium to the sides as they go through.
Real chainsaws use a bar that is thinner then the chain running over it to avoid this problem, but still include ‘sideways clamping pressure’ as a thing to watch out on.
Also, blades cut on the slide much more then the straight-push. Most of the time the impact of a sword is going to create a slide no matter how you do it as long as you follow through, but if you made an effort not to slide it. it wouldn’t cut well.
So, if you made your chainsword like a sword with a serrated-moving edge, you could get a massively deeper slice for the same movement of sword…