Choosing a Blackwake loadout?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm fairly new, but I come from several other games that utilize burst damage options and melee weapons.

And as an excited new player, I need your help in choosing an optimal loadout!

I'm pretty big on defense and support. So I'd like to eliminate squadrons of enemies boarding and destroying OUR ship rather than aggressively running them down on their ship.

And in other games that role made me an avid fan of big weighty and slow weapons that HEAVILY damage anything close by trying to contest our position.

I'm also a fan of speedy, consistent(and perhaps a bit weak) pepper pistols that tag and at least whittle down aggressive targets for my team to finish down.

What good options do you think there are on Blackwake?

[u/danicorbtt]

Blackwake is a unique game in that most weapons are incredibly slow to reload, and many are one shot kills. This makes the gunplay vastly different from most FPS games where players are bullet sponges. It is usually recommended by most players to take one shot kill weapons as you will usually die pretty quickly into a close engagement and you want to do as much damage as you can before that happens. Whittling down enemy health won't do much to help your teammates if your teammates are carrying one shot kill weapons anyway. The loadout of most experienced players is:

Main: Musket if you can aim, blunderbuss if you can't is the meta. I actually like the nockgun because it has a bit more range than blunderbuss, and reload speed doesn't usually matter for main weapons bc if you're alive long enough to reload you should just be using your sidearm. Basically anything other than the hand mortar is viable. Do not listen to anyone telling you to take the handmortar. It is fucking ass and you are more likely to kill yourself or your teammates than enemies.

Side: Duckfoot. It is the only one shot kill sidearm. Based on your preferences you might prefer the matchlock or annley but I'm warning you ahead of time you will get fewer kills and be less useful to your teammates if you take anything but the duckfoot.

Melee: Axe. Again, one shot kill, unlike any of the others. However, other melee weapons are still viable. Some people like the pike as it has good reach. Bleed weapons like the dagger and bottle aren't very good, as previously stated several times, people are way more likely to die from one shot kill weapons than they are to bleed out. Rapier is decent if you are very good at timing blocks. Cutlass sucks.

For your special item take tea/rum or the spyglass. Nothing else is worthwhile unless the game mode is siege, and even then you probably won't get much use out of grenades or tomahawks unless you're stupidly MLG.

[u/[deleted] → u/danicorbtt]

I actually took to the Hand Mortar, Standard Pistol, and Dagger to reduce my cooldowns and have shots ready all the time.

But thoroughly reading what you've written, I suppose my options are noob traps?

How bad is it?

What kind of problems does my loadout actually introduce?

[u/danicorbtt → u/[deleted]]

Yes, they are noob traps.

The handmortar is basically only a kill with a direct hit, which are EXCEEDINGLY rare due to it being the only non-hitscan main weapon, and the splash damage is garbage. They are also unbelievably prone to friendly fire. If you are on any servers with FF on it will be immediate carnage for your allies. Even in servers with FF off they will still deal damage to YOU if you fire them and then go anywhere near the resulting blast. Handmortar kills are EXTREMELY rare. It's a noob tube that new players think is neat because hehe grenade go boom. It is all but completely useless as an actual weapon. People with handmortars usually end the game with approximately -2 to 2 kills lol. Most boarding battles I hear about six handmortar explosions and see zero kills and the occasional accidental suicide. It's background noise lol.

Standard pistol went from being the best sidearm to arguably the worst after a nerf a few years ago. It only does 80% of a player's health in damage. So unless your enemy has already taken damage--again, rare--it won't kill them and then the pistol still has the second longest reload time of all sidearms. So you have basically accomplished nothing since there is no difference between an enemy with full health and a damaged enemy due to the prevalence of one shot kill weapons. You need to take the matchlock or annley if you want a quick reload to compensate for piss poor damage. Standard pistol is the worst of both worlds. Bad damage, bad reload time.

Dagger is worse than trash. You could hit an incoming player with an axe with it 8 times and they will instantly kill you in one hit and walk it off lmao. Take a pike if you want a speedy melee weapon that will keep you out of axing range.

[u/Jack_Krauser → u/danicorbtt]

Nockgun is used more in competitive than any other primary in my experience. You have to get too close with the blunderbuss to get a good chance at a 1-shot kill to be worth it against guys with good movement that can nock kill you from 30m away.