Arelith

The assasin specific super katar feels weak. The weapon doesn't really grant anything on top of the +4 enchantment, keen, an additional 1 magic damage and a fairly weak massive criticals feature on top of a really mediocre crit range.

I am by no means a powergamer, and plan on taking the weapon through exotic weapon focus and UMD purely because katars look so cool. I don't believe we should expect the dev team to make sure that every single +4 weapon is perfectly balanced against all others. However, this weapon still stands out as almost unjustifiaby weak due to the shortcomings of the base weapon and the mediocrity of its added bonuses. Most top tier weapons either do great damage, provide fun/interesting abilities or grant bonuses to skills. The final blow does none of these things.

The last I've heard about katars -- and it was awhile ago -- they've been situated purely as a style option at this point. There's not a lot of good reasons to opt for a katar, and even classes that -get- access to the katar for free usually have much better and more preferable options.

The final blow is a decently expensive weapon as well, requiring two bars of adamantine and dragon's oil. It is a DC 51 craft and has a requirement of 573 crafting points. For a set of two, it's at least two hundred thousand gold right now before labor.

I think it's a perfectly usable weapon, but I cant think of a single build that makes this weapon shine, so I have to agree with Waldo here; it's not good. I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing, but it does dissuade me from using katars, even for style. If the weapon isn't enhanced in some way, it should, at least, have its cost reduced significantly in my opinion.

Edit:
It occurs to me to mention that although katars are a weapon that nu-monk gains access to for free as a monk weapon, katars seem to have -no- interaction with any of the new monk feats. It would be nice to see them get some love on new monk.

The premium katars are also class and alignment locked, so only a LG monk can use the Verdant Growth, which is an oddity in itself.

On the wiki page for weapons, katars are listed as being an 'unarmed' weapon, so I had always thought the point of katars was that they can be wielded but still let a monk use unarmed abilities and other class features. I was surprised when I tested in PGCC that it doesn't, so I dropped the idea.

God_In_Action wrote: Sun May 07, 2023 8:01 am

On the wiki page for weapons, katars are listed as being an 'unarmed' weapon, so I had always thought the point of katars was that they can be wielded but still let a monk use unarmed abilities and other class features. I was surprised when I tested in PGCC that it doesn't, so I dropped the idea.

It was the case for a very short while that katars and shurikens kept Ubab (along with kama, but that was a hardcode limitation at the time, and was supposed to lose ubab as well) before everything but fists lost ubab, including katars. I wonder if katars will count as unarmed again through the new unarmed feats.