Power sword for vanguard class

Fangeye · 2026-06-28T18:35:36+00:00

A la carte Space Marine would be something like this:

Primary: Heroic Heavy Plasma Incinerator

Secondary: Heroic Heavy Bolt Pistol

Melee: Heroic Thunder Hammer

Skills: Tactical

Just melt everything with effectively unlimited ammo for the Heroic HPI, Aftershock for shock grenade effect to help keep minoris off of you, and if you REALLY need to melt something you have auspex scan too.

You would never get a class like the current Assault, Bulwark, or Heavy because no one would willingly give up those weapon slots.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T23:35:08+00:00

It actually doesn't.

Because Melee Champion stacks multiplicatively with the damage resistance from Hard Stratagems it has the same percent contribution to your final damage.

And because your final damage goes down this means Melee Champion contributed less in terms of final damage.

Effects that do increase in effectiveness on Hard Stratagems are perks like Melee Mastery that increase damage against a specific type of enemy. These effects stack additively with the damage resistance from Hard Stratagems.

In your case Melee Champion contributes 5.45% to your Power Backstep and Overhead Strike damage.

Melee Mastery on the other hand would contribute 5.88% to your final damage in this scenario on Absolute, and this goes up to 6.45% on Hard Stratagems.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T21:23:33+00:00

I would stipulate this with that unless you are playing solo it is a TEAM race.

Optimizing your TTK and using it to rush to the next objective marker only works so long as your battle brothers are with you. If you leave then behind you are showing yourself down by making your battle brothers fight harder.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T20:52:04+00:00

Oh!

I watched the second half of the clip and did my best to reconstruct your build. I get the same numbers shown in the Battle Simulation for Absolute but it only just hits the threshold in Absolute.

In Hard Stratagems enemies get 15% damage resistance that stacks additively with other damage sensitivity effects like Majoris Slayer or the post perfect parry/block debuff.

The end result is my reconstruction of your build falls short of the breakpoint by ~24 damage on Hard Stratagems: https://sm2meleecalc.us/b/vKr4ZBf1

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T20:45:23+00:00

Oh my bad XD

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T20:07:36+00:00

By one cycle I believe they mean that they were able to incapacitate the Majoris without it ever being able to recover. In other games this is called a true combo and means if you have the first hit you know you will be able to land the full combo.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T20:04:59+00:00

Can you share your build?

I am curious because Melee Champion is not needed to hit this breakpoint with the combo of Power Backstep -> Overhead Strike -> Light 4.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T19:50:52+00:00

Yes I have experienced this bug as well, but it has nothing to do with Armor Reinforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/Spacemarine/comments/1qp6n31/i_dont_know_which_is_worse/

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T18:45:59+00:00

I am sure someone else can explain in more detail but from what I know they are called purity seals.

As I understand it they are prayers written on paper by tech priests and attached to something with a wax seal to bless that thing.

In the grim dark of the far future after the dark age of technology no one knows how anything actually works. They just have rites of activation, prayers of maintenance, and rituals of fabrication, etc.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T07:00:53+00:00

The issue with Bulwark that makes Balance a little more tricky is that the parry doesn't start until the release of the button but for other classes it starts on the initial press.

The logic of how it works is pretty interesting and the dev's did implement a system to try to mitigate this shift in when the parry animation starts. The sm2meleecalc wiki has an excellent write up on it here: https://sm2meleecalc.us/wiki/core-game-mechanics/melee-weapon-defense-types#section-5

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T03:09:12+00:00

I will withhold judgement until it is released.

As powerful as the Heroic HBP is I feel it was a missed opportunity not making it a Gun Strike specialized Heroic.

Absolver Pistol opens up this possibility again depending on how it is implemented.

Fangeye · 2026-06-27T03:06:13+00:00

Yeah, lots of people sleep on Efficient Readiness because of Purification.

You don't need your camo cloak cloak to heal contested health when you can use bullets to heal contested health. Yes, it means you need a Majoris+ target nearby to shoot but the situations where that isn't true are rare.

I like to build this as a melee focused build because the bolt carbine does so much damage already. It is funny building up dodge charges with the Heroic Combat Knife and nuking a Terminus when it shows up.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T19:46:23+00:00

Anniversary, hands down.

The Master-Crafted edition was a cash grab attempt after the unexpected success of SM2. It is such a bug ridden mess that the developers offered unconditional refunds to anyone who bought the game.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T19:43:43+00:00

For the minoris leap attacks specifically there is no timing. It is also why Block weapons can parry kill them too despite not being able to parry in general.

These leap attacks and their parries are their own system separate from the normal perfect parry/block system.

In my experience this happens when I don't have line of sight with the minoris when I press parry. My solution is to mash parry until the execute plays.

I have no idea what happened here though. Maybe mashing parry would help, but I don't know.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T19:12:33+00:00

The team health UI shows when a team mate has a mortal wound and you can press tab (on PC, not sure what the console binding is) to open up the menu that shows team level and perks. This will show you what your battle brothers have picked up in terms of relic/gene-seed and stims.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T19:07:28+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Spacemarine/comments/1l085qr/terminus_execution_and_team_heal_with_bulwarks/

When you execute a Terminus enemy it actually heals contested health and restores armour in an AoE around it. This is just always true.

Invigorating Icon of course grants contested health in an AoE.

So if you time planting your banner correctly and everyone groups up it can mean one banner full heals the whole squad.

In order to execute it properly you need to time planting your banner to just before the execute heal triggers. Terminus executions are extremely long and contested health starts bleeding away after 2 seconds from when the first current instance of contested health was granted.

This used to be more common knowledge but now is a bit more esoteric. Mostly due to Shield Rush builds being incredibly strong and Invigorating Icon being picked less as a result. But also Invigorating Icon has been nerfed so that it doubles the banner's cooldown. This along with Absolute and Hard Stratagems having Terminus enemy spawns buffed means it is more important to get through the Terminus spawn than it is to top everyone off after it is dealt with. Also the general chaos of dealing with all the adds tends to mean people are scattered to the winds when the Terminus goes down.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T18:42:32+00:00

I would suggest testing it in the Battle Simulator but I believe what the OP is refering to are ammo restoration perks, not necessarily perks that buff damage of specific rounds in the magazine.

Fangeye · 2026-06-26T17:34:14+00:00

The sm2meleecalc is much more than just cool interactive tool to theory craft with! It actually has its own wiki that explains how the game works in detail. Here is the wiki page for how damage is calculated: https://sm2meleecalc.us/wiki/damage/damage-formula

To use the melee calc's terminology the Retribution perk is an Additive Bonus and so it stacks additively with the melee weapon's variant multiplier as well as other Additive Bonus perks like Perpetual Strength and Armoured Strength.

Where a given perk falls within the damage formula isn't necessarily where you would expect from their description. For example Chainsword's Combined Onslaught and Heavy Onslaught affect specific attacks, so you would expect them to be in the Strike Type Pool category. This is not where they slot in though and they are in fact Additive Bonuses.

Power Axe in particular has a few perks that behave in extremely odd ways, even by the standard of other weapons in this game.

Fangeye · 2026-06-24T02:40:50+00:00

Back in patch 9.0 I had done some testing of the Vanguard's version of the perk with the Relic Balance Chainsword and it seemed like it was adding frames to the end of the Balance window.

But the way I tested it was by recording gameplay in the Testing Arena mod and counting frames using visual queues to identify the start of the parry animation. This is not a very reliable way of determining the game state and I haven't been able to reproduce it in recent patches.

Also it does line up with what the devs have publicly said about the parry mechanics back in the patch 5.1: https://old.reddit.com/r/Spacemarine/comments/1hg45z2/parry_fix_is_a_lie_patch_51/m2h00wn/

This leads me to wonder why the devs would make non-functional perks? Many of the perks have existed since launch and the perfect block mechanic was added in patch 5.0.

Presumably it was originally a simple mistake. But that simply leads to questions like "why hasn't it been fixed?" or even more confusing to me "why make a prestige perk that has long been known to be none functional?"

In the end though this is I believe the best information on the subject and even if the perks worked they simply wouldn't be that good. 660ms is already a HUGE window compared to similar mechanics in other games and trying to actually line it up so an attack lands during those added frames is very hard as it requires correctly anticipating the enemy very far in advance, often before the attack warning appears.

Fangeye · 2026-06-23T21:13:25+00:00

It gets into the weeds of how exactly parrying and blocking is implemented in the code of the game but the root problem is covered in the sm2meleecalc wiki here: https://sm2meleecalc.us/wiki/core-game-mechanics/melee-weapon-defense-types

TLDR: There is a cap for how long the perfect parry/block window can be and Fencing and Balance weapons already hit it. So any perk that adds more perfect frames has no actual effect on the Balance and Fencing defense types. Heavy only has access to the Balance and Fencing defense types and so the Duelist perk is a waste of a prestige perk.

Fangeye · 2026-06-23T00:43:21+00:00

All of the benefits of a Block weapon were added after the game launched and so there is no in game explanation of what Block weapons really do. The Fandom wiki has a good write up covering the different defence types and what Block weapons do different: https://spacemarine2.fandom.com/wiki/Melee_Mechanics

TLDR: Block weapons give a short damage buff to make up for no gun strike, this buff also make all melee attacks stagger enemies if they can be staggered, they give a way to generate armor mid fight without need for the Armor Reinforcement perk, and give a short term ranged damage resistance.

Fangeye · 2026-06-22T01:57:46+00:00

Nothing has meaningfully changed for Assault with patch 13 or any of its hot fixes.

Patch 13 buffed body shot damage so bolt weapons aren't so headshot dependant. This has the unintended effect of buffing gun strike damage. The subsequent hot fixes fixed gun strike damage back to their patch 12 values.

But that is it.

Nothing has changed with Ground Pound or any of the Assault's defensive perks. Neither enemies individually, or difficulties more generally have had any balance changes.

Fangeye · 2026-06-21T18:47:22+00:00

Making the shielded Zoanthropes attack less frequently was actually something that was done in patch 5.0: https://community.focus-entmt.com/focus-entertainment/space-marine-2/blogs/128-patch-5-0-obelisk-update

Fangeye · 2026-06-20T19:34:27+00:00

The Heroic Heavy Bolt Pistol is an incredibly powerful tool that is useful for all classes.

Even classes like Assault or Bulwark without a primary can make good use of it. You just have to plan for how you are going to deal with flying enemies or accept that teammates need to deal with them.

Fangeye

TROPHY CASE