I main Vet/Ogryn, so I may not have tried a few of the other charged weapons, but I have to say that nerfing the power sword is not the correct answer here.
The power sword is fun. I enjoy using it not just because it kicks ass, but because it is a simple, reliable weapon. If I charge it and I swing it, it will do its job.
On the OTHER hand, I have chainswords, chain axes, and the Ogryn’s power maul…
I charge those, and… it MAYBE kills one target before needing to be charged again. It MAYBE hits what I’m aiming for instead of the trash mob in its vicinity. It MAYBE let’s me charge it in time to swing it and tear the face of whatever is trying to tear my face off BEFORE it tears my face off.
It isn’t that the power sword is too powerful, it’s that the other charged weapons f@#$ing suck and are a pain in the neck to use.
Darktide has very erratic design philosophies on combat. Some weapons are designed to kill large numbers of enemies quickly, while entire classes are designed around the idea of being near or constantly hitting enemies that are still standing. So there’s a bit of an identity crisis on what the melee combat wants to be from one class to another. It’s why Zealots get grumpy when you kill enemies too fast, they don’t get to build their damage or keep their survivability buffs going if they don’t have anything to hit. (Plus it’s obviously more fun to get to kill stuff yourself.)
Sounds like a Zealot problem. In every game that I’ve played with “berserker” buffs based off missing health, they usually have some sort of vampiric/heal-on-hit to offset it, and this game doesn’t really give Zealot the luxury of running around with missing health.
Chainsword is actually the most functional of the ‘power up’ melees because that rev animation can be interrupted at any time. I don’t know why the other melees can’t be, did they forget how grindy this game is? Its entirely more exhausting to my desire to replay if I need to constantly watch slow ‘by the power of grey skull!’ animations all game.
And the new slowdown ‘mechanic’ of these 2 new power weapons is absolutely wretch inducing. Yes, I love the hit stun effect so much I’ll just do it to myself. Really feels like you’re getting trolled by the devs most days.
I do not think weapons need to be as strong as the power sword, only more usable. You should be able to block cancel chaining, and the thunderhammer needs that ‘single target priority’ mechanic they made for VT2 that ensures melee attacks land on the target in your crosshair even coming from off screen. And that hit lag for hitting something removed, what a lovely reward for actually landing a hit with the zap - almost a second of hit lag where you can’t even block.
the fact that the power hammer loses cleave when you charge it makes it just not feel very good. i can see it not cleaving specials/elites but it would be really nice if it cleaved squishies still.
It feels weird, but in practice I like how the hammer functions. The powered hits are a good chunk of damage and a sure stun on the target, and if you time your hit while you’re dodging away from your enemies, you’ll be carried to safety while you recover from the self stagger from using your special.
I don’t want more cheese weapons like the power sword but can I have a weapon that isn’t suicide to use its functions? This game feels like it was made with different schools of thought. Some devs designed feats and weapons around the idea that a game might have several hundred enemies in them. Other devs knew the reality while others were probably left inbetween.
I feel like early on the idea of this game was that there were going to be more versions of the same enemies. We see this in the scab and dreg versions of elites/specials. But what clued me in was in the testing grounds, different parts of the enemy count as different armor types but it’s not super consistent. The human enemies seem pretty detailed where a shoulder, body, and arm will have different armor types. Ogryns on the other hand seem to be pretty loose in their armor sections even though with their size and role you’d think it would matter more to distinguish them from the mooks. Maybe because of time or because of feedback, they scrapped this idea and I think that’s why we got scabs and dregs - maybe there were varieties inbetween that were planned/implemented.
My belief is further supported because there are no “+X% to Dregs/Scabs” perks which would be logical considering we had skaven/chaos in VT2. In fact, I don’t think scabs and dregs are ever brought up anywhere except for weeklies and a couple mission descriptions. To me, they seem like a last minute add.
There are very few melee weapons that feel as good as ANY VT2 weapons except imo the combat knife. As much as I love the Tactical Axe, there’s something not quite right about it and I can’t place my finger on it, melee just doesn’t flow as well as I’d expect. It’s weird that the shovel doesn’t feel like an improvised weapon, it could be reskinned as anything (mace, sword, axe) and probably fit yet in VT2 if you used a sword, flail, mace, hammer, axe, spear you could feel the distinction and it made sense. I think Ogryn melee really blends together more than anyone else’s.
The problems with weapons doesn’t feel like it’s from devs being lazy, it feels just disorganized. I think they did painstakingly (for the most part) balance the weapons and then multiple compromises were made and we have al these questionable weapons in our arsenal. Charge weapons as they are currently with half the number of enemies but if those enemies were twice as hardy and threatening seems a lot more logical in the way they are implemented. If you’ve played the game at Malice with weapons under power 180, the game feels really good. That is the game I wanted to play at Damnation, because it’s quite hard if the AI puts the heat on you. But at Heresy+ it’s just a non-stop torrent of enemies. I know it’s suppose to be a TIDE but that wasn’t suppose to be the game I think. More than that, it doesn’t fit the scale of who we are, acolytes are best, penal legionaries at worst, yet we’re fighting numbers on part with Space Marines. The atmosphere gets completely drowned out with those numbers and the level design just becomes geometry to navigate and you don’t see the thoughtfulness put into cover placement.