Sanctic Sword of Faith is something special

[Marec]

After messing around with it for a bit I had some curious findings.
Your ranged flamer attacks count as melee and your actual close combat melee attacks are spells that degrade the veil with every attack.
No idea if this is intended or just the usual buggy mess but it got me thinking.
A ranged melee build ? After trying a bit more I found some amazing synergies:
- Pyromancer Orchestrate Flames (additional fire dmg with melee attacks) always triggers
- Blade of Light aswell if a force weapon was equiped
- Warrior Abilities will also work
- melee item effects aswell (Malpian Shroud - temp wounds as bonus dmg)
- Exampler Lethal Thread combined with Malign Influence

The dmg itself is also weirdly calculated.
Every attack has 3 dmg instances 1x Direct Dmg (Sword of Faith) + 2x burning (Orchestrate Flame) No idea why 2x the burning effect or why every single instance has all dmg modifiers applied. Anyways we are talking about an insane amount of scaling.
3x Purge Souls Dmg (1 + (psyker's psy rating + 1) × resolve / 4)-(4 + (psyker's psy rating + 1) × resolve / 4), 3x Blade of light (+psy lvl dmg), 3x Reckles Strike, 3x versatility bonus dmg.

[Blarker]

Yeah, some on hit stuff is calculated....weirdly in this game. I would think that randomly doubling the damage you are doing *should* be a bug, but then I turn around and see Argenta being able to do similar or more damage in a single burst with minimal setup and I just shrug. I'll care about this more if they ever get around to balancing burst weapons, I think.

Also, more fun stuff for duplicated melee on hit damage: Backdraft, Psy focus amulet, and a force sword's Psychic Force attack. 2 instances of damage from smacking with the sword, 2 instances of orchestrate flame, 2 instances of psy focus bonus dmg, 2 instances of backdraft. One melee swing, 8 instances of damage, and when I tested this at the very start of act 4, I was getting about 500-600 damage from all of that on one swing.

The sanctic sword stuff can still make things fun, though. Provided you have enough resolve to make the base sword damage good, you jsut get to apply all your on hit bonuses in an aoe cone. And the cool thing about the orchestrate flames double hit stuff, is that all your bonus flat and percent damage modifiers get applied to each instance of damage, so you are dipping into the same bonuses multiple times over on one single attack. It's pretty great.

[wei270]

Sanctic Sword is really good, the only down side is that now it can be complete negated by indestructable cover. you just have to keep that in mind.

and you kinda need to go arch militant if you are building henrix because archmilitant cna give you the BS you need

[Marec]

Originally posted by Blarker:

Yeah, some on hit stuff is calculated....weirdly in this game. I would think that randomly doubling the damage you are doing *should* be a bug, but then I turn around and see Argenta being able to do similar or more damage in a single burst with minimal setup and I just shrug. I'll care about this more if they ever get around to balancing burst weapons, I think.

Also, more fun stuff for duplicated melee on hit damage: Backdraft, Psy focus amulet, and a force sword's Psychic Force attack. 2 instances of damage from smacking with the sword, 2 instances of orchestrate flame, 2 instances of psy focus bonus dmg, 2 instances of backdraft. One melee swing, 8 instances of damage, and when I tested this at the very start of act 4, I was getting about 500-600 damage from all of that on one swing.

The sanctic sword stuff can still make things fun, though. Provided you have enough resolve to make the base sword damage good, you jsut get to apply all your on hit bonuses in an aoe cone. And the cool thing about the orchestrate flames double hit stuff, is that all your bonus flat and percent damage modifiers get applied to each instance of damage, so you are dipping into the same bonuses multiple times over on one single attack. It's pretty great.

I have to agree, there are many bugs and balancing problems atm. Burst fire beeing the most known right now. Funnily enough, every single class has some broken builds. Almost to the point where you can say if it's all broken, it's actually all balanced.
But I disgress, your melee psyker build sounds like a work of art. Guess I´ll try it myself and use it together with my beloved Sword of Faith. As far as I can tell, all of your interactions mentioned should also work there.

[Marec]

Originally posted by wei270:

Sanctic Sword is really good, the only down side is that now it can be complete negated by indestructable cover. you just have to keep that in mind.

and you kinda need to go arch militant if you are building henrix because archmilitant cna give you the BS you need

Are you sure about that ? As far as I can tell, cover should be irelevant, simply by the fact that those "ranged attacks" count as melee and are affected by WS not BS.
Sure archmilitant is good with its free bonus attacks and stacking versatility ws bonus, but Vanguard with its stacking temp wounds or Master Tactician with its insane resolve buffs work just fine aswell

[x_equals_speed]

What's ranged and what's melee seems buggy as hell right now. The life drain from the biomancer staff - the one that works like a ranged weapon, provoked attacks and can be used on a target that's far away - is considered a melee attack (At least by the knuckledusters and by versatility stacks)

I'm a bit afraid to build around it because it coudl get fixed in any patch, but on the other hand maybe it's intended behaviour.

Sometimes they did such a bad job with the ability descriptions it's hard to tell how bad a job they did with the implementation.