I feel like the katana is really weak compared to the other weapons.
Katana’s are two handed swords, with slightly faster animations. With the damage of a one-handed sword, and a very weak bleeding effect. It has no access to shields paired with it, and you rarely really get to finish your combo properly, because enemies often have the ability to knock you out in the middle because you cannot combine a heavy combo to knock them back with your light combo. You’d have to kick them which breaks the combo.
The damage is also not up to standards either. It should be more balanced out. If you compare a katana to a pair of daggers, a greatsword or a 1h sword, to the same standard, the katana always comes out last and here’s why:
A pair of daggers stacks a lot of bleeds, repeatedly with every hit. Not just with the finishing of a combo 1 bleed, no, it stacks up with every single hit. It’ll tick damage very quickly along with the fact it has a heavy combo.
A greatsword does more damage in general, and also stacks debuffs constantly. It also has a heavy combo. It’s damage output has so much more damage.
1h swords have the same damage comparison to katana’s, a little less armor penetration and generally speaking it has no debuffs. But it does have access to a shield, or a throwing axe to add a combo or defense. Which makes it incredibly powerful.
A katana has only a light combo, the heavy attack does a lot of AoE damage but it feels very stiff and unimpressive. It doesn’t tie in really nicely with the overall flow of combat either. Along with that, it does less damage than a greatsword, has about the same armor penetration, is still a 2h weapon like the greatsword, but it kills less fast. Why? It only applies 1 bleed per finish of a combo, which is too low. The overall damage is also quite low compared to other weapons, and the heavy attack isn’t really fun or even comfortable and fun to use. Unlike other weapons, the katana has too many flaws, tolittle damage and the combat doesn’t smoothly flow from light to heavy combo, and there’s no way combining them.
My suggestion: Either increase more bleeds to the katana, and make the heavy attack more able to flow into the combat… for instance, by not making it a charge but rather a dash with one single button.
Give katana a proper heavy combo attack, that flows in with the light combo attack. So it becomes whole instead of two seperate things. And add more debuffs to that, instead.