You know what… here, I’ll show you what I mean and then you can make up your own mind 
The way weapons and attacks in Conan work is they have rules set up as to which attack can follow which attack thus creating a combo and each of those individual attacks have their animations which also control certain aspects of that swing. (Whether it provides hyper armor for example or what kind of special effect / damage it does etc).
So here’s the combo rules table for the Katana offhand:
If you look at that, you’ll see that the Katana offhand attack actually has FOUR entries (instead of one like in the case of the Great-swords overhead swing).
This means that there are multiple tiers of the dash BY DESIGN.
And if you look closely you can see that at any stage the light and heavy attacks are set up so that the next in line magnitude of the special can follow it - without breaking the combo… This is completely by design.
If you look EVEN closer, you’ll see that the 4th katana dash has something special about it. The special part is that contrary to the others, it uses a completely different version of the animation: the one ending with “c1” instead of “c0”. Again, that animation had to be created, and this is its only use, to be used when the special is the 4th hit in a chain.
Now let’s open up both of those animations… the c0 dash and the c1 dash…
It’s a really pretty animation with multiple sections, and they look seemingly identical… however let’s skip to the relevant part… what happens when you unleash the attack:
Here is the C0 one, the one that is used for the regular dash and all the chains EXCEPT the 4th one:
Those things that I circled on the timeline are calls to a sweep-attack blueprint that’s pretty much just looking for targets your collision box goes through and flags them for damage.
The C1 one is ALMOST the same… except for one tiny detail…
The is humanoid flag is removed… That distinction is made inside that Sweep-attack blueprint and that determines how it searches for things to hit, the result is basically whether every call to it will do damage or just one. The same way boars or rhinos charge and do multiple hits the longer you stay in their path.
If you check that box for all 5 of those, it will function exactly the same as the original dash animation, so this was the sole purpose for creating this copy for this 4th special hit…
I think that should be enough to make up your mind…
Or am I seriously expected to believe that somebody went through the trouble of:
- setting up 3 additional Combo table entries for the dashes…
- modifying all existing light and heavy hits so that they can be followed by a chained dash…
- creating a completely separate animation for the 4th one
- setting that animation up so that the only difference is that checkbox so that they can hit multiple times
all of that… by accident? 
Like… that’s a considerable amount of very purposeful work effort.
The only plausible explanation for this that I can come up with which puts this even remotely in the category of a bug, is if someone at Funcom did all this work on their own time for the fun of it and accidentally forgot all of this in the live build… but that seems quite far fetched as well…
Nah… I believe that they fully intended this as a feature… to try to do something special with the existing systems in place… and even though it’s been like that for a long time, they suddenly got a bunch of complaints from PvP players (probably influenced by content creators suddenly “discovering” this as well… ) so Funcom decided to just backtrack on it…
The issue is though that what they did is just check those boxes pretty much… so now even the dash following a full combo hits for less than a light attack… essentially nerfing the weapon into the ground and taking away any fun aspect of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t do a lot of damage… because it does… (it’s not too crazy either though)… if you manage to aim it perfectly against a large hitbox enemy like a dragon or a giant croc, then it can do up to 400 dps… as long as you can keep up with stamina and play it perfectly… Compared to that the short sword’s special can do around 200 and most other weapons hover around that too.
So fair enough it got nerfed… but they really didn’t have to nerf it to uselessness… they could’ve removed 3 of those checkboxes and left 2… and then you’d get at most 4 hits if it’s perfectly aimed… or something along that line… maybe then just change it back to the regular one but add a multiplier to it (the possibility already exists for that) so that it’s one slightly larger hit…
If you’re wondering what’s my agenda here and why did I bother to make this post… it’s simple…
Time and time again a few of us keep pointing out that when people would like to request changes, they shouldn’t just barge in like a bull in a china shop and demand nerfs… in an entitled manner without any ounce of consideration for the other parts of the playerbase…
I also don’t want there to be any excuses in this manner… this was whined about, by a handful of people till the devs caved… period…
As such I would really not like this to go down in history as “It was bugged! We told you so!! Now they corrected it!!!”, but rather a “We whined until they changed it” and those parties taking responsibility for it so when the next time they’re called out for inconsiderately demanding blanked changes that affect other player groups as well… they can’t use it as an excuse again and say "well… it was bugged! it wasn’t because of us that they changed it… " and have them wash their hands 
Other than that, I really don’t care… just wish people would finally learn from this… how many useless weapons and features do we have to have until someone wakes up?
Anyway, that was my last message on this subject, I hope it’s somewhat understandable what I was trying to say here…