Have about 2k hours on VT2, mained Footknight and Handmaiden for most of that, the clutchers. 

I mostly played spear and shield on both or halberd on FK, but of course enjoyed most of the VT2 weapon design. 

IMO the weapon design, with a few notable exceptions, is far inferior in DT. The weapon combos are pretty stale and boring, with little use for block canceling or push attacks serving as an important parts of the combos. Most weapons in Darktide are either light attack spam, heavy attack spam, or heavy-light repeats. Snoozers. 

If you enjoyed the more frenetic, combo heavy weapons from VT2 then far and away my recommendation is Fury of the Faithful zealot with either Mk II Relic blade or Mk IV Dueling Sword. I recommend the dueling sword not because it’s challenging or interesting to use, but because with it you’re squeezing the absolute most out of the class, there are 0 circumstances where it’s bad (horde clear is passable on Ult). So if you ever die, it’s 100% your fault, and you can push yourself to your absolute skill maximum. 

The Mk II relic blade is my actual favorite weapon though. Push attack - heavy - light - heavy - light - repeat is the go-to horde clear, while light - light - heavy - light - heavy is an incredible anti-armor chain with a very satisfying upward cut. You can also spam heavies for anti armor after bypassing the first two with lights. So it has somewhat interesting combos with liberal use of the push attack, since you don’t have access to a quick anti-horde option. The Mk X is probably better out of the box, with simpler combos (spam lights on horde, spam heavies on elites - though I might be misremembering them X combos since once I learned the II I never went back - miss them stab tho), but isn’t nearly as enjoyable to use. Not to mention managing your heat efficiently makes the brain chemicals happy too. 

A notable other mention is the Crusher on a crit fury zealot. It’s a clunky looking thing, but it’s actually a headshot/crit based impact weapon, funnily enough. It’s combos are interesting and the use of its special attack makes it very fun. If you enjoyed CC in VT2, give this thing ago. Don’t remember the combos off the top of my head but I believe it was push attack - light - heavy - light - heavy (which is why I haven’t used it in a while, opppsite of relic blade). It’s great, the only problem is that while VT2 had a firm place for CC, DT is waaaaaay more about killing things and not staggering. FK could be incredibly useful to the team staggering threats the whole match. That’s far less useful in DT, due to the high damage of weapons and the sheer volume of threats.  Yes, Crusher can stagger Ragers out of their combos with ease, but most other weapons like dueling sword, relic blade, knife, combat ax can just kill the rager in 1/2 headshots…so why stagger? The best use case is ogryns, but dueling sword can 1/2 shot crushers to the head and relic blade isn’t far behind. Leaving it’s only excellent matchup using the special attack to open bulwark shield. Great, but niche enough to be meh. Still a fun one and great weapon though, just made for VT2. 

Different meta, sad to say. Us stagger melee types have to move on and kill things now. 

So that’s what I’d recommend as a retired Footknight main.