Oh wow… moar katana discussions 
It used to be really good for crowd control, it still kinda is since on agility your other alternative is the short sword that has a very narrow hitbox. I think you should go and to the Yuggoth event at Scavenger’s Berth with nothing but a katana, that is currently one of the hardest PvE content on EL, especially if you don’t beat around the bush and pull the ones from the back as they only ever seem to come 4-6 at a time.
I would’ve been happy with even a compromise.
Here’s the thing, the katana was too strong indeed, but not because of a few PvP players getting randomly killed because of it, but because of it’s sustained DPS potential if people min-maxed for it.
If you max both Str and Agi to get all the finisher bonuses and small bonuses from the STR tree as well, put on some skelos master armor with both consumable buff and have a high damage katana - essentially min-maxing for that. While at the same time focusing on trying to execute just the finisher dash as fast as possible… the katana could get up to just shy of 1k DPS sustained even over several thousand damage points
Typically though if people don’t min-max it was still hovering around 400.
After discovering that, I also changed my tune and said that maybe it needed some change even for PvE…
To put that in perspective a max damage voidforge gladius with the special stabby combo can barely keep up to 400 and you run out of stamina much sooner and most other weapons when used very very well hover around 200-230.
However I still strongly disagree with what they actually did, which was making it the same as the dash without combos.
The combo system is still in place though just like it was… and that supports damage multipliers…
So in order to buff the weapon so that it does a bit more damage after doing a dash following 3 other hits, all they’d have to do is edit a number… and I think even PvP players would be happy with that version since it would arrive in a single hit and thus countered by perks and armor.
Oh well 
anyway I do have a mod that reverses the change completely should anyone want the old dash back in their single player game