This has been bugging me for a while now and cannot imagine I am the only one feeling this way.
The inclusion of so many vanilla weapons - like Taxe, Caxe, Catachan - and making them shared across three of four classes available, creates a situation in which you have to balance a bunch of weapons, that most people - I assume - find aestically uninteresting within the setting and have them be viable among the ensemble of weapons for every class.
This heavily limits the amount of creative freedom at one’s disposal - if you want to make weapons feel authentic - as vanilla weapons usually do not come with special features that are either particularly cool or useful (looking at you catachan parry).
Furthermore the need to balance these weapons for every class in combination with the low count of class unique weapons results in the same weapons being run across 75% of characters - barring class specific standouts/OP weapons - and thereby diminishing the potential gameplay variety immensely.
Suggestion:
Way more class unique weapons. Stop trying to keep vanilla weapons up to speed with class unique weapons. No more vanilla and or shared weapons.
Shared weapons are lore accurate. Balancing them across classes is fine. But i strongly agree with you. The framework i have proposed in the past is similar to yours:
More special weapons
Special weapons are generally stronger but harder to use than mundane weapons
Mundane weapons are weaker but have easy swing patterns and can be used with low player effort
If a mundane weapon gets super popular, supplant it with a special weapon
Knife → power blade
Antax → power axe
I know they are lore accurate, but balancing them in a way that they are viable for all classes will always come with limitations as to what you can do.
For instance - I am a player that pretty much detests using all weapons that offer low mobility. Yet it happens to be the case that most vanilla weapons have decent mobility, which means that inversely this cannot be the case for almost any other class unique weapon (Psyker being the exception here so you can guess who I main).
Honestly I really don’t want Fatshark trying to balance these weapons against class unique weapons, because having 75% of your classes draw from the same weapon pool is god-awful variety-wise and that will go doubly so if they are meta picks.
I think the Mundane weapon deserve to be there and it’s normal that they are here from base, as adding them in the future is less interesting than adding more special weapons.
Because shovels, axes and common swords are ubiquitous in the imperium.
I think Arthadaw has it right. Having the mundane stuff in now gives room to grow (up and away) from upjumped prisoner to true acolyte as the game develops in time. Assuming we actually see a decent pace of content releases. I think its very likely that end of May will be the deciding vote on if Darktide will succeed as a liver service or not.
No and this also does not follow from my complaint. I mean look at V2 - and I hate having to make this comparison all the time - it is possible to have a decent ensemble of unique melee weapons per class with differing movesets and properties.
I imagine this should be even easier with W40K being Sci-Fi - barely an inconvenience if I may venture so far.
I get that they are lore accurate and maybe present everywhere in the lore, but having them available to every class means you have to balance them with every class and its remaining kit in mind. This reaches a point at which gameplay variety should supercede lore-accuracy.
Sure launch the game and give each of the classes 2 vanilla weapons if you want, but make them unique to that class and follow up with more interesting stuff after the fact. The game launching while the same vanilla weapons - that are also shared - make up 80% of the melee kit for 75% of the roster is plain and simply unacceptable. Furthermore the studio’s previous title proves the opposite is possible.
Don’t get me started on bloating the equipment roster with marks.
I think its a fair criticism, just to be clear. But i believe we will see a lot of genercising as a multiplier for effort to content ratio. That said we do actually have a lot of specialist weapons actually. If you take out all the unecessary fluffing via marks you basically have:
Not Shared: 15
Heavy sword (removed from psyker and vet)
Eviscerator
Power Sword
Crusher
Shovel
Thunder Hammer
2h Chain Axe (planned, assumed zealot)
Force sword
Dueling sword
1h Power Maul (planned. Assume Zealot)
5 Ogryn weapons
I imagine the veteran sergeant class will favor melee a bit more and gain access to heavy sword and dueling swords. So you can subtract 2 if you want. But the veteran is definitely a ranged class so having less specialist melee makes sense. He makes up for it in gun kit.
Edit, i just remembered that 1h power maul is also planned. Its even visible hanging at Brunt’s.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti
Sure, but VT2 has lore reason to not do it (Both Elf and Dwarf) and story reason to not do it (Different origins). And tbh, there are plenty of weapons that I’d have loved to see on different characters (Like Kruber and Sienna getting 2h Axes, or Kruber getting a Flail and Shield…).
Why though, it give more build options, if you don’t want to use them, then don’t.
Most of the Marks are different enough that you end up with one that you like, while in VT2 there are weapons that I never touch.
Making a new weapon or making a new weapon with multiple variants is not a lot more work, but it end up with more stuff to build with
I assume power maul, with shock maul being a future weapon. I have little basis for this other than the most recent imperial guard codex listing power maul as a preacher weapon.
I find it pretty meaningless to make a summary for all classes, as this neither tells you exactly what that looks like for each class individually, it does not account for the amount of marks and which playstyles the unique weapons support.
Veteran:
12 shared melee weapons at his disposal/ 6 if you only count one mark each
3 unique melee weapons/ 2 if you only count one mark each
That looks pretty abyssmal if you aske me.
Zealot:
12 shared melee weapons at his disposal/ 6 if you only count one mark each
7 unique melee weapons/ 4 if you only count one mark
Zealot seems better, but when you look at what kind of playstyle his unique weapons offer, you will see it is almost exclusively low mobility and only differentiates between horde cleare or cc.
Ogryn:
The cheatcode in this debate.
Psyker:
Admittedly better, because the class has unique weapons that can entertain a similar playstyle compared to the shared ones while bringing something unique.
Either way I’d like both, but I really hope the Shock weapons end up being fully for electric DoT, kinda like how Sienna has Fire Sword and Fire Flail
That doesn’t matter to me as to me the gameplay-variety reason reigns paramount in this discussion.
This
and this is effectively the same. Some marks never get touched as they are straight up worse, while at the same time bloating the weapon arsenal.
Still the reason why: “Just don’t use them” doesn’t work is again that they have to be viable/ fullfill a niche for all classes as they are available for all of them (leaving Ogryn here out specifically).
Some weapon will be off meta for the full duration of the game, it’s not a big deal, they will sometime get slight buff to make them better (if the problem isn’t on the move pattern/combo). And some people will use them over other weapons.
Like take for example the Evicerator, i want to see it buffed, and I know a lot of people want to see one with a different move set, but I like the current one, so I want to keep the current move set. And for a variant to be introduced with a new move set
You are not wrong, but this misses the point. We are talking about weapons that are shared between 75% of classes and if you balance them to viable or even happen to make one of them meta, then you will see this weapon a disparagingly amount of runs. Real talk I see way more people running around with either taxe or caxe than power swords.
Unironically try out the Chain Axe. It takes getting used to but comes with high mobility (4 dodges, sprint speed and efficiency) and can get to great damage heights with slaughterer and headtaker. Or if you want to go faster i have found Rev It Up doesn’t detract from my damage too badly.
I’m not trying to downplay your concerns about variety and interesting weapons as i am also dissapointed by the selection right now. But i think your posts have highlighted a specific playstyle you feel is not being adequately catered to with specialist and bespoke weapons: e.g. high mobility, finesse based, specialist weapons. I think the class makeup of darktide isn’t designed around that play style (yet). Zealot very clearly has a 2h weapon specialty. Ogryn is slow. Veteran is not a melee class and has backburnered melee weapons. Psyker is the most finesse oriented but isn’t really a melee class either.
What you want to play (and what i want to play for that matter) is a Death Cult Assassin. Aka kerillian shade in 40k. Which could either be an archetype or a zealot class, either would work. Power blade, dual power blade, power short swords…etc.
