It's the only weapon I've been using and it's ridicuolously overpowered, in conjunction with the powered jump especially.
Entire camps or gang zones can be cleared in less than a minuite taking almost no damage.
Even over levelled enemies go down in less than a second, Cyberpsychos can just be stun locked to death in a few hits.

It really needs rebalancing or to find any challenge at all I'm going to have to ditch the sword and stick to guns and that doesn't seem like my cup o' tea.

I realise it's a low priority given the innumerable problems this alpha posing as a triple A has but I hope it's something CDPR looks at eventually.

Yes, refer to many other threads on this and CDPR forums on this subject. Not that fighting with katanas is any kind of fun - you just click your opponent to death.

you have a problem with it being over powered but it is the only weapon you use?
this is not a problem with the game, but with the user.

i have a few different different katanas, ranging from ~15DPS - ~1,200DPS. and a few long blade machetes that do the same 1,000+ damage per second.
so it is not the weapon itself that is over powered, only certain versions of certain weapons that may be a bit more powerful than other melee weapons.

Just don't use them? Like I avoid certain vehicles and weapons in the game because they aren't fun for me to use.

I play "Fill-In-The-Blank" game and use the "Fill-In-The-Blank" weapon/voice/spell/power. It's overpowering and breaks immersion. I totally forget to stop upgrading it. It completely sucks because there's only like 403 other weapons/voices/spells/powers i could use.

You both realize that human beings are hard-wired by nature to prefer efficiency, right? It's not an easy task to get someone to use something that's suboptimal, because it literally goes against their core instincts.
As long as the discrepancy isn't too big, it's not usually a major problem, but it's a problem has been around for ages, and devs always need to be aware of it. If the most optimal solutions are boring, most people will end up bored. Trying to mitigate this is one of the most important parts of game design, but is very often overlooked.

If you think that katana is OP, you should try out fully specced and geared quickack build. ~10 enemies in an area? Quickhack or two from behind a wall and they all lie unconscious. And in the case that one or two survives, it will go blind once it sees you anyway, so you can quickhack him again without any need to rush.

If hacking is your primary offence what do you use for the scripted boss fights?

Seems I built pretty much the same build as Naoya8. At least based on their other comments in other topics. For the boss fights and some of the cyberpsychos I used the following:

1. Strongest quickhacks
2. All the perk points to quickhacks to stack the duration and power of quickhacks, shorten cooldowns and make RAM recovery faster.
3, Get the relevant implants, like for faster RAM recovery -- get at least the .15/sec increase, the one that increases crit damage, increases RAM units, etc.
4. Make sure your Cyberdeck order is correct -- don't neglect this. First one should be your strongest (most likely to one hit kill someone) so you can just TAB - F if you are about to get discovered.
5. When you enter combat, run like hell, turn, quickhack, run like hell, turn, quickhack. When your cooldowns are short and RAM recovery is high, the bottleneck becomes how fast you can run to avoid getting hit and then turning to quickhack.

So basically, running a lot and hiding behind cover.

It isn't just limited to Katana. If you can aim and make a revolver head shot built you cant get over 1 million sneak attack headshots. Oda was a joke with time dilation, and a few well aimed shots to the head poof you died.

The game's balance in general is poor, concentrated builds can all yield over the top damage builds. I play on hard and if my headshots from stealth routinely do over 100 thousand in damage sometimes criting for over a million then it isn't Katana's that are the problem but the game balance in general and people are finding various different killing machine builds. Non stealth non crit shots can be in the thousands and when you stack perks to get you crit rate to better than even odds you can count on doing even more damage. All in all the game is broken balance wise.

Sneak damage with a Dildo kills

I did spec into pistols/revolvers as a backup (and for some variety once in a while). If boss is too tough to kill with my primary attack hacks, I'd just follow up with disabling optics or movement and just shoot the boss while it's trying to recover. Since I used crit-build for it (useful for my hacks as well) and extra headshot dmg on the Crash it worked really well - I was just shooting an enemy that stood still while my dmg quickhacks cooled down.
Upgrading my dodges definitely helped too.

Sadly, I think it wasn't possible to force enemies like Adam to commit suicide (which works wonders on gigs/NCPD stuff where you need to eliminate single target - reveal enemy interfaces, identify target even through walls, quickhack him to suicide, walk away) :(

Lawl, try quickhack build. Compared to quickhacker - any other build is pathetic. With right hacks and for example NETWATCH v5, u can just ping all enemies, use contagion trhough walls and they are all incapacitated. On HIGHEST difficulty setting. Clearing whole zones will take less than 15 secs. And u can do it THROUGH WALLS. From ridiculous distance.

And about Cyberpsychoes: - system reset - bb. Just too EZ almost bored to death

Yep even take down hide is ezmode.

Everything is OP in this game. Pistols? 30k headshots. Snipers? 10k body shots. Katanas? 30k headshots. Quickhacks? Well why don't I make everyone shoot themselves in the head why don't I?

And do you know why? because its an rpg, not a freakin' mmo.

Every single single-player game out there: Power Level Your Way To Godhood

Every single-player veteran: Let's challenge ourselves, no point allocations!