"Tiny" weapon & skill tweaks to shake up the meta

Hello again, if you remember me from my Psyker takes, please forgive me, I have no idea what I was smoking that day, however I still think smite should be nerfed a bit, but that’s for another time.

Here’s some tiny tweaks (some a bit bigger) to a handful of weapons & skills/blessings so maybe some people who were always using one weapon, maybe could try another weapon, without needing to because their baby didn’t get nerfed to the ground.


  • Bolt weapons
    Up the damage, enough to at least one-shot poxwalkers, and give it the same-ish properties as the Plasma Gun (Ignoring limb multiplier damage in favor of always prioritizing torso/head damage) excluding the bulwark shield, but it’ll be much easier to stagger it with bolt weapons.

  • Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub Revolver
    When cancelling the reload with ADS, it now plays an animation of closing the revolver cylinder, this also counts as a staged reload, so you can’t bypass it by quick switching.

  • Columnus Mk V Infantry Autogun
    Increase spread slighty, so it’s a bit more unlikely to ADS & beam a full health Scab Gunner with one mag from across the room.

  • Recon Lasguns
    They’re a tad overtuned, just bump down their damage to flak a bit.

  • Axes
    Now all axes can cleave at least 2 poxwalkers (Antax Mk V will cleave more given the cleave target stat).
    This buff will make sense later down the line, I know they’re already strong with brutal momentum.

  • Pickaxes
    Thankfully, Ogryn weapons are pretty well balanced, all I think this needs is to have it’s dodge limit reduced from 4 to 3.

  • Thunder Hammers
    Knock the Crucis Mk II’s activation damage WAY UP (excluding monstrosity damage), enough to oneshot all elites with minimal preparation. And give the Ironhelm Mk IV a knockback AOE, similar to the Crusher or Power Maul, but not as much radius.

  • Power Swords
    The Munitorum Mk III Power Sword should also have an extra overhead added to the push attack light chain.

  • Obscurus Mk II Blaze Force Sword
    Heavy 2 should chain into light 1, not light 3!

  • Brutal Momentum
    It no longer gives weak spot damage per blessing level, instead, it will increase the amount of enemy heads you can ignore the hit mass of, starting from 1 up to 4, for example, when using an axe, you’ll be able to kill 2 enemies with headshots with the 1st level blessing, and 5 with the 4th level blessing.

  • Smoke grenade
    Uhh… Make it so ranged enemies are highlighted in the smoke, maybe?

  • Close and Kill
    Instead of 5% movement speed, instead gives +10% close damage.

  • Tactical Awareness
    Instead removes 5 seconds of your cooldown instead of 6.

  • Grenade Tinkerer
    This skill is removed, replaced by the passive Field Improvisation. Frag grenades however are given more damage so they can at the very least one-shot full health groaners and poxwalkers in the epicenter, without needing the bleed stacks to finish the job.

  • Demolition Stockpile
    Smoke grenades instead generate every 40 seconds.

  • Focused Fire
    Now upon tagging an enemy, resets stacks to 0 instead of 1.

  • Marksman’s Focus
    Melee weakspot hits let you move without losing stacks for 2 seconds, so you can now maintain stacks outside of ranged.

  • Telekine Dome
    The dome is now hollow, allowing shooters, gunners, and shotgunners to shoot inside, also muties and hounds will no longer bump on nothing inside the dome when you’re dodging, they’ll still bump on the dome itself, however.

  • Go Again!
    Alongside replenishing 2.5% cooldown on stagger, now all gunner enemies in the AOE will be suppressed for the duration of the taunt.
    Going Taunt Ogryn without shield always felt like a death sentence if you go Big Lungs in large open spaces to me, hopefully you can’t get lit up with this change as easily.


  • WARNING: Here be Rinda!
    The next tweaks are a bit more involved and certainly require some extra brainstorming from others, so take them with an extra grain of salt.

  • Plasma Gun
    The Plasma Gun will now explode on overheating light attacks as well as decaying heat slower (enough to make you want to deliberately vent during tense situations more often), however, the original light attack cooling mechanic will now always save you from one overheat, regardless of the type of attack you use, whether it be charged or normal, for you to regain this coolant, you simply have to go back down to 0%. You will know you don’t have a charge for surviving a overheat when the fire image for the overheat icon switches to a larger animated flaming skull, basically signposting “hey, don’t overheat again!”.
    A less complicated plasgun rework could be so you’re affected by suppression lol

  • Voice of Command
    The unmodified version of Voice of Command now replenishes 50% of max toughness to all teammates and you in it’s shout radius. Also, Duty and Honor now no longer replenishes 50% of you or your teammates’ toughness, only adding the +50 overheal toughness to you and your teammates in the coherency radius, however, when the 10 (from 15) second timer runs up, the 50 over-toughness will now slowly decay within the process of 5 seconds instead of losing it all, and reduces the shout’s stagger strength enough to not stumble mutants and monstrosities. Another vet rocking this ability modifier will now only refresh the timer and not stack like it originally does.
    The unmodified version of VoC will now be incentivized to be used during a tense situation, where all your teammates got hit once or twice.
    DaH will now be cemented as making VoC more useful used right before the big horde hits.

  • Burst Limiter Override
    Reduces base chance to 6%, as well as reducing More Burst Limiter Overrides! chance to 10%.
    Now includes a “lucky reload” mechanic, depending on your gun’s current remaining magazine ammo, reloading will give you up to a 24% chance to automatically trigger Burst Limiter Override on your next shot.

That’s all I got, thanks for reading, will be changing and adding stuff, probably.

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Still weird to me that bolt weapons just do piss damage against infested enemies. I just don’t understand why Fatshark be like that. (Same with combat axe heavy vs maniac)

No real reason for that except for some arbitrary “rock-paper-scissor” game-designery logic that must exist for absolutely everything.

If you look at Bolt vs Infested flesh from a logical (and loreful, whatever you call it) point of view, it should actually be the other way around: infested, as far as I can tell, are basically mindless zombies that don’t feel pain, so theoretically conventional lacerating and piercing weapons would be less effective against them, unless they are able to dismember them. And what is the iconic feature of the Boltguns? Yep, they explode flesh into paste. What we have now makes zero sense.

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yeah no. the game doesn’t need any more nerfs its already in a toxic meta has it is and the build variety is lacking. I’m a new player and it’s clear that the game is in a toxic state atm.

what the game needs is to have all the weapon nerfs and only the nerfs to weapons reversed.

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It is ten times better now than it used to be pre-class rework tho. Let that sink in.

The one of two times I recall getting reprimanded for not using meta was by a shout vet (go figure) for not using pickaxes on Ogryn, I was using my meme Ogryn, so it was a paul build with brutal momentum, which, if you haven’t tried, I recommend. When we started the match he proceeded to rush ahead of the the pack, out of coherency range, constantly get himself half dead, and have to use his ult to save his own ass. Every. Time.
I stayed with the team, helping them out by killing a huge sweep of enemies with my heavy attacks, and stunlocking even more. All he did was maybe once and a while give us toughness because he happened to be close enough when getting his ass beat.
The other time, I was kicked. I was a level 19 Psyker on Damnation, which is my own fault, it was my second Psyker, also a meme loadout.
I’ve played this game for 1300 hours, and leveled up 6 separate characters to 30, and 2 to 20-ish, 3 of which are entirely delegated to stupid meme loadouts, like gunlugger gauntlet ogryn.

It certainly can be called a “toxic meta” but just remember, those people who flame you are usually dogwater, and should get a wakeup call, in terms of a meta shake.

I havn’t read through all these just yet, but I like the change to lucky bullet.

why would you nerf keystones that are already bad on their own?

only thing left to nerf to old veteran, if they do i just better off quit the game, i’m still livid about the 15 second nerf this talent got from close beta to open beta, used to be 45 seconds before

already useless why would you nerf it even more

what does this even means, making it even more inconvenient? i’ve dropped power sword now that enemies move faster into melee

thats the only nerf you would do to it?

again nerfing already useless stuff and changing it to even more uninteresting stats

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things that would shake up the game in a positive way is new enemies to fight like gene stealers and dark mechanicus or some other chaos god faction.

Focus target is free damage and buffs, pair with literally any hard-hitting ranged and you are basically constantly getting free damage, toughness, and stamina, if you decided to get the keystone modifiers, that is. With it only being optimal with keystone modifiers in mind, Focused Fire could be the one that changes focus target stack resetting to 0, instead of the base version doing that.
Marksman’s focus was a buff, i added that on top of the other mechanics so you can actually maintain stacks.

Demolition stockpile is broken when combined with all the other grenade talents, and even without all the grenade talents, you are basically guaranteed one grenade before a new engagement (which, for frag grenades is pretty huge). i could’ve probably removed these nade nerfs since those were before i thought about removing the grenade tinkerer perk, but i’m lazy.

power sword is also pretty good with slaughterer, especially with brutal momentum. power cycler is overrated. so I also could’ve probably done with that blessing not being a nerf, and instead should’ve nerfed sunder, which more or less invalidates going other cleave/power blessings since 80% of power sword gameplay is activating it.

zarona’s whole shtick is high power, low mag. Which can be wholly circumvented by just ADS cancelling. Other than that, that rending blessing could be reduced further, but eh.

close damage is pretty decent IMO, and who the Hel wants 5% movement speed in coherency, rather than damage or ammo, anyway? maybe both movement speed and close damage could be combined but no other aura two stat-ups.

TL;DR, you bring up a couple good points, gonna edit some of them.

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