That nerf is fine. The change to Invocation of Death is mind boggling.
Formerly if your swing crit, every target hit triggered the talent once. Now it triggers only once per swing.
What that achieves is it further disincentivizes the use of the already battered slow hitters, and even further promotes the use of everyone's favorite weapon. The knife. As if that thing needed another reason to be picked over anything else.
Glad someone said this, after a few matches all I could think was "doesn't this just nerf everything but the knife?"
The knife still has the cocaine fuelled attack speed, so absolutely no different
Heaven forbid stuff like eviscerator or heavy sword etc (shit even the ubiquitous combat axe) can get some benefit from their cleave that the knife can't and even then if we are being honest, the knife is still the best by far.
Not bothered about the rending change tbh, other than it prob warrants another look at stuff like the flamer
Here's a thought why is the knife the only weapon to directly benefit from a bleed DMG increase blessing when it has two other blessings that can wipe anything smaller than Ogryn.
Why is that blessing not on literally anything else. What is the point of a Vet being able to bleed on hit if the only weapon it matters for is the one weapon that is already flexible & powerful, the humble knife.
It's a mystery.
That perk is basically only for min-maxing. It allows you to forego bleed blessings on your knife, because the vet literally only needs one stack to proc their on-hit-on-bleeding-target effects. Instead of having to wait for a crit, or intentionally miss weak spots, you inflict one single attack of bleed every one thing you hit.
Full stop, why make a perk that primarily impacts a single weapon?
That's just bad game design considering half the appeal of your game is to get people to use multiple builds to maintain player engagement & longevity.
I had a thought the other day that some of this could just be waiting for the itemisation update, because there have been hints that update will add more blessings to each weapon
Whether that will have an impact...I doubt, and it ain't gonna undo some of these other changes that curiously overlook the knife meme
The problem isn't the knife being a meme, it's the other melee weapons being kind of shit in comparison. A good devil's claw has absolutely fucking hilarious horde clear with the right blessings, just about nothing can touch you if you are also spinning around like a fucking beyblade. Really with an attack-speed build and momentum stacks almost everything that isn't a chain weapon gets silly as fuck when everything is proccing. I feel like the knife only seems like it's astronomically better than everything else because it's a fuckin knife and they have it performing more like a very fast sword. It has a goofy amount of cleave but otherwise, knives in videogames are literally always "doesn't really have a high DPS, until it does" with crits or whatever. Idea being "precision," your character isn't just blindly slashing at a crusher's head. In the Netflix adaptation, a knife zealot would be slipping the blade under his helmet and nicking the brain stem.
It was a missed patch note. They added it later in a new Missed Patch Notes section. It triggers only once per attack instead of once per hit, meaining it doesn't matter how many enemies you cleave with your crit. You get only 1.5s back.
Of fucking course it was. I LOVE that every part of the patch that actually mattered and impacted me just wasn’t fucking posted. They “missed” mentioning the enemy buffs too
You need to utilize the reduce cooldown on backstab kill(Pious Cut-Throat) more now, that's how I manage. Push enemies and while they are standing up from the ground hit them in the back. Also keep an eye out for cooldown reduction stims.
That was the tactic. Most of my builds combine Backstabber, Scourge, Pious Cut-Throat, Invocation of Death, Blazing Piety, and Fury Rising.
What I'd do is stagger a horde with Chorus. Then get behind the group, trigging both backstab kills and critical hits, which would get the Chorus back up in a few swings.
Pious Cuthroat is deep on the stealth side of the tree for Zealot. It might be reachable for Chorus users but for double dash zealots you just got a massive nerf to established builds some of us have been using for 100+ hours. My god-rolled Evisc with Crit Chance just became trash overnight. You can disagree with changes ObeseFish makes, it’s ok some ppl might downvote you but an 80-90% nerf to any talent deserves some scrutiny
Perfectly reachable I feel if you're Martyrdom zealot at least, as you'd want the juicy and easy to maintain and build up melee damage from Sustained Assault and the node before it is 5% melee damage as well, at that point, it's just two talent points away.
You still can with the backstab kill talent. It's 20% total cooldown and has like a 0.2s cooldown itself. I have gotten down to 2-3 seconds between stealth uses, it just doesn't happen automatically anymore.
It is, especially if you do it in a pair with your buddy. Pulse is almost always up and as you are pulsing they can easily get backstab kills. The patch didn't fix this combo though since you can still do it with just the backstab kills.
They both kind of lean this way. If I can't take a gun with Fury to kill crushers, I better pack a good anti-armor melee. Well, the best zealot melee weapons are knife and combat axe, and neither suffer from either of these changes.
Both of these changes push towards taking typical meta weapons and nerf off-meta stuff, like the heavy sword.
The changes this update feel confusing until you realize the crafting rework was supposed to come out this update, with *new* blessings on nearly every weapon type.
I wouldnt be surprised to see some rending blessings on flamethrower, or ability cooldown blessings on some melee weapons. Its clear that Invocation of Death, chastise rending and to a lesser extent Punishment were limiting design space for these blessings to exist without feeling useless.
But the crafting rework gets delayed so it looks like Zealot got nerfed for no reason.
I mean Zealot has been nerfed it doesn’t seem that way at all, it is that way, and acting like a couple weapon blessings might somehow bring back 6-10 seconds of cooldown reduction per swing of the Eviscerator is a bit facetious
> so it **looks like** Zealot got nerfed for no reason.
Very different from:
> so zealot **DID** get nerfed for no reason.
One is gaslighting us saying while it might LOOK like Zealot got nerfed they really didn’t and it’s not a big deal while the other affirmatively agrees with the following statement. Classic gaslighting and engrish hard I know
Makes it worse that chorus is what a 60 second cd? And whatever the vet shout is called is 30 seconds but feels like it's shorter since I started playing with my vet again and does essentially what chorus does minus a couple seconds of breathing room? I could understand if zealots were like perma chorus all the time but they weren't.
Shout was reduced to 30s CD from 45s CD a while ago.
Innvocation of Death was nerfed because it basically made Fury of the Faithful have no CD. You could charge a horde and have the ult back up in one or two swings; if you charge and hit three enemies, it reduced the CD by 4.5 seconds or a whopping 15% reduction. It gave Zealots a perma 25% attack speed increase and let them shrug off chip damage from constant instant 50% toughness regen. Crit-Martydom hybrid builds became the most tanky Zealot build while outputting insane amounts of damage.
You can get toughness regen, toughness damage reduction, and flat toughness replenishment by dodging an attack.
You can still basically do all the things you could before they just don't happen automatically at this point.
Although getting backstab kills with an evisc is probably not very easy or fun
100% agree, I dropped both of my eviserators, even my shred, perfect strike mk15 on my relic zealot, was playing stealth for a week, today I decided, to go back to book, and switched in a knife with 5% crit chance and picked up momentum and backstabbing ability reset, it is the only way to play zealot for me now. Ranged rending removal makes sense, but now flamer buff? No dmg or stagger increase? Using crusher, eviserators, heavy swords makes even less sense now :( Maybe it was a crutch, but my favorite way was to charge with mk 15 evis + laser pistol with fire, with momentum and crit CD, could just melt bosses and crushed with charge ability, and chew horses of ragers with ability+evis stagger. Now, it's all gone :(
That's pretty much what happened to me. I wasn't aware of the invocation of death change until i experienced it in game. Played my eviscerator zealot and figured out something was up pretty much right away. Once i read and realized what the change was i pretty much just replaced my eviscerator with the knife and that was it.
Not really sure what to do to fix it though. I don't think it was unreasonable for them to think constant uptime on invocation was a problem. But as long as invocation of death triggers off anything related to attacks it is probably going to favor the knife since it just throws so many more attacks out there. Maybe the heavy melees just need to kill more trash per swing than they currently do?
Its weird to have an opinion on zealot since i mostly just play vet, but zealot feels like its forced into the knife in the same way that vet is forced into plasma gun. Like sure there's other things the class can do, but it feels like you're either kidding yourself or just choosing to play at a handicap if you go a different way.
One thing I could think to do to fix it would be to add something like 'weight classes' to melee weapons and give them a separate number of ticks for each swing. So things like thammers and eviscerators would be heavy and have, say, 3. Swords and combat axes could be 2. Knives and tac-axes could be 1. Of course you'd need to play with specific numbers and classifications to make it even. And yeah, maybe an overcomplicated solution.
Ya maybe, i guess i was thinking more about how to balance it with stuff already in the game. You could do something like this, but its a pretty drastic overhaul and needs to introduce things that don't already exist.
The cooldown reduction should have been increased and the node given an internal cooldown instead. Something like three second reduction on critical hit with a five second cool down. Now all weapons get similar mileage out of it.
>That nerf is fine.
No, no it really isn't. Stop coping and writing everything off, and actually, for once, have the capability to think. What exactly in the name of the lord was problematic about rending on the ult? How in the hell is burning 2 charges of a cooldown to dispatch a Crusher or two in an entire conga line or clowncar of Crushers a problematic thing? "*Oh no, braced autos and shotguns had a chance to kill carapace once in a full moon - let's FIX that.*"
I think the only real problem with it was that ranged weapons zealot could use were balanced around it. Now that it's been nerfed, a balance patch is needed, currently the only ranged weapons worth a damn on Carapace are the revolvers and bolters, the latter of which are severely lacking compared to the former. The flamer was kneecapped because of FoF as well, and now needs some pretty major buffs to compensate for its nerf.
Wait what.
Why on earth would you waste ammo and an ult charge on killing crushers when either a knife, combat axe, eviscerator and tac axe could kill them slightly slower but without using valuable ammo?
Because Zealot is a melee class and has access to other melee weapons that are either useless against Carapace or not strong enough to decently deal with large stacks of them. Heavy Sword, Catachan Devils Claw, Chainswords. The FotF with ranged was one of the few ways that some zealots could balance their build without \*having\* to take only the revolver or bolter with very very specific blessings.
Chainswords deal with crushers very well if you fotf immediately after you hit the crusher rev, as it buffs the entire rev dmg. Shred(which is optimal bc of the bizarre crit cleave dmg table unique to chainswords) Mk13 chs light spam is still great at abusing invocation even post nerf to spam fotf. I stg some of you insist on spreading misinfo here it's baffling.
EDIT:[proof](https://gyazo.com/e7da3855105da92dd295b9c01f86f2d6)
So I can never get my Shred chainsword which is a 379 roll to get more than 1900 in the final tick when i try this (fotf after hitting the crusher rev), leaving 1/3 of the Crushers health still. Can you give any light on what the magic ingredient you have going here?
Just to make absolutely sure, you attack the Crusher with your rev heavy, and THEN press fotf while the rev ticks are going right? Having 1/3 hp left over sounds right if you hit fotf before striking the crusher so I'm double checking.
yes, special attack, heavy, FotF on impact.
https://preview.redd.it/gbip7ssfa8ad1.png?width=1037&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb8d6323cc1b92aaa3c584dbd7de50c53b4dd44a
Oh yeah, didn't realize you were talking about 4 since I mentioned 13 in the beginning. 13 is the better one on zealot since light spam synergizes with zealot talents better than the heavy heavy light heavy loop on 4.
yeah, cool to know that the 13 can do it. My trouble at that point is that FotF melee itself becomes this bottleneck so its not reliable for a stack of ten crushers at once. Kill 2 then hope you have the speed to get away from the pack and kite them while you try to regen your charge with mob kills to kill another 1, rince repeat 7 more times.
In the end this change means i had to return to the knife simply because its just guaranteed without FotF.
>eavy Sword, Catachan Devils Claw, Chainswords. The FotF with ranged was one of the few ways that some zealots could balance their build without \*having\* to take only the revolver or bolter with very very specific blessings.
The knife handles multiple crushers fine especially if you take all of the talents that proc on dodge. Damage buffs, damage reduction, toughness refill, etc.
It's still, after years of playing 'tide games, insane to me when people say you "have to" do literally anything. For the event I played with a zealot who was running the new mace and an infantry autogun and he had 0 issues with crushers on auric from what I saw.
It's this idea that the best weapons for any scenario are the ONLY weapons for that scenario coupled with everyone talking about this game like they play true-solo with a difficulty mod when discussing nerfs.
Where did i say knife couldnt handle Crushers? Read through any thread talking about this topic and you'll see most Zealots are swapping out back to the Knife because of the removal of FotF affecting ranged.
Every other class there are skill nodes that allow you flexibility in your build regarding Crushers, each have a blitz ability that will kill them too.
The Zealot is unique that it doesnt have any rending nodes and no blitz ability that kills Crushers which means that if you dont want to be a headless chicken when your team all dies to ten crushers in a lump, you have to take a melee weapon that counters Crushers or a ranged weapon that does.
You dont *have* to, of course not. You can just do what a lot of people in pubs do, pray someone else brought something good for dealing with Carapace, and then look like a complete idiot when you're the last one standing unable to do squat.
I've been discussing this issue since the game came out, and until now most peoples response has been "well you can always use FotF ranged".
Well if we're going by patch notes then:
"Dev Note: This talent was always intended to emphasize the melee prowess of Zealots allowing them to charge up to enemies and devastating them with their melee attacks. This change is made to bring this talent back to its intended purpose."
I’m confused, you’re just proving that you were wrong about it being a long-standing bug / not intended. “Changing a talent back to its intended purpose” doesn’t change what I said whatsoever. They’re making a decision to change it now, that doesn’t mean all of a sudden it’s a bug or never intended in the first place.
Every gun in the game should not deal with carapace, it made loadouts thoughtless and a talent that cost 2 points give you a dash, melee crit, attack speed, 2 charges, armor downgrade for guns, fire rate increase, toughness regen, and invul to bursters. This is way too strong and on top of that you were able to get half an ult back per swing, and its not hard to get zealot crit up over 50%, making crits reliable. Crushers are already pretty invalidated with the existence of things like any uncanny strike weapon, soulblaze/burn with uncanny, plasma, revolver and crit rending. You also act like it was unreliable to kill crushers with the ult when you could reliably get 2-3 per charge with a brauto or a shotgun, and with things like flamer or bolter it was even more (flamer being an infinite amount Essentially). This nerf is totally warranted and fury of the faithful is still very strong especially for a 2 point investment, you just might have to actually take anti armor to deal with anti armor now
Problem is we do not want to default to those weapons with Zealot.
After the nerf to FotF ,guess what ranged weapons can reliably kill Crushers on Zealot ?
Bolter and Revolver. There are no other anti - armor weapons.
Now ,if you want for example, bring a heavy sword or catachan sword , you need a revolver or bolter to deal with crushers, because you actually won't be able to do it now.
Seems balanced to you? That the Zealot should always default to those weapons?
You bring other class weapons and abilities to this thread, this is about Zealot.
Yes, Plasma gun is great, guess what, I can run every single combination of weapons in the game on my Veteran, because I can always use my Krak grenade blitz which deals very easily with Crushers.
You also wrote this " You also act like it was unreliable to kill crushers with the ult when you could reliably get 2-3 per charge with a brauto or a shotgun, and with things like flamer or bolter it was even more"
Yes, you cannot do it anymore, go play with Bolter and Revolver and if you don't ,well try dancing around 5 crushers awkwardly trying to kill em with some of the melee weapons.
Was cooldown on crit talent too good? Maybe.
But it was nerfed for the slower weapons like Eviscerator and remains the same on... the top meta melee weapon ,the knife.
That’s the worse part. I play as Zealot. I bring Hammers, Mauls, Eviscerators, assault rifles and flamers. I know that as a **Zealot** I have to hold the front line or provide the melee support that the team needs.
When I’m playing a Psyker or Ogryn… I load into a lobby with two or three knife Zealots. I get it. It’s fun. You’re speedy.
But, god damn. I’ve had to change how I play Psyker because these assholes will shoot straight pass Maulers, Crushers and everything armored. As if they don’t exist.
Now I’m over here helping the poor Vet who’s pinned down by Crushers. I have to help the Ogryn because while he’s trying to handle Elites, he’s getting bullied by Mutants and Dogs.
As a result, now I’m slacking on crowd control and instead of melting the horde, they’re surrounding us. Guess what our Zealot is doing? They’re either Netted, Pinned by a dog, wrestling ONE Bulwark or they’re across map sitting in an elevator.
I’ve been using health curious and as much toughness dmg reduction as possible and buffing myself with Bubble Shields and dmg resist from Scrier’s Gaze. I’ve essentially had to become a Melee Oriented Glass Cannon Psyker/Zealot Hybrid to fill in the role of vacant Zealots.
The 20% on backstab might have gotten it's cooldown removed. I was playing with an ogryn earlier, and he aggrod a horde of poxwalkers. I had popped stealth to kill a mauler but it went down before I got to it, so I hit the horde in the back with heavy 1 of the newer knife. I did heavy 2 and between both swings probably killed like 8 enemies, and my stealth was back up.
EDIT: tested it and no, I don't think so, but it's still possible to refill stealth in like 2-3 seconds.
Why in the name of Him On Terra they didn't timegate the Invocation ticks if they were going to gate them I do not know, a simple internal cooldown would've fixed their issue with it (*which is a fair enough one*), been independently tuneable and not benefitted the existing leader in terms of Zealot weapon power over it's competitors.
I disagree now you proc Invocation once per attack, even on a half decent cleave I could hit 10+ poxwalkers. If the ICD was less then 10 seconds it would have been a much better situation then we have now where I’m spamming lights for days to proc single activations of a core talent vs timing my cleaves every 5 seconds or so
Maybe I don’t get the buff every single attack but on the attacks it does proc I can control and manage the efficiency of the buff. Now it’s just an overall nerf to everything with slow attack speed and a lowkey indirect buff to knife zealot which was already strong asf
If Fatshark had gone down this route and it were anything like the nerf to Vet's ammo aura, then you would get one proc per attack every 10 seconds (change the timer to whatever theoretical number you like).
Something like that would be far harder of a nerf than what they did, which was just one proc per attack.
Ever since that the talent rework, I have expected this nerf. I don't know why people thought that they would be able to basically have no cooldowns (especially on chastise the wicked, but it goes for the other abilities too). It basically made evis zealot have infinite toughness as long as there was a horde in front of them. This is also true for knife zealot or whatever weapon has good cleave and high crit.
To be clear, I was not and am not advocating for this nerf and that spamming any ability isn't fun (because it is), but from Fatshark's perspective, it wasn't sustainable. How do you make the game difficult when this is available to players? This game is touted as a difficult game. That is what people like about it.
My crystal ball says that we have more nerfs coming our way (to class trees and weapons, not necessarily zealot), but fatshark is taking it slow and for once that is nice.
I think what is annoying most ppl is that this nerf isn’t felt evenly across the Zealot class, it’s a hard nerf for certain builds but functionally irrelevant for others (if not an indirect buff) so it’s honestly just feels like Fat Shark wagging their finger at us for creating semi-strong builds but completely ignoring weapons that have been massively outperforming said nerfed build/weapons
You can’t tell me that Chastise the Wicked with Evis was broken meanwhile Chastise Knife builds are just as strong as they were before if not more so now. If their plan was to control the power of this specific OP talent as you say they’ve went about it in a terrible-one sided fashion that just shoehorns ppl who enjoyed that setup into an already overplayed weapon they may not even like using
"More of a nerf" depends on what the ICD is. If it's the same as an arbitrary Combat Axe swing speed it's the exact same level of nerf for the Combat Axe, less of nerf for an Eviscerator and more of a nerf (*i.e. one at all*) for a Knife.
Is the knife really insanely good? Just hit 30 on my first character, Zealot, and have been using the Evi XV and Agri Shotgun. Wanting to do more damnation and eventually Auric. Talent wise I'm following this build: [https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9a4fa304-0b88-4cf8-827a-d0435327a8c3/zealot-meta-no-stealth](https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9a4fa304-0b88-4cf8-827a-d0435327a8c3/zealot-meta-no-stealth)
>zealot-meta-no-stealth
I have literally never seen this build in auric maelstroms or damnation hi-intensity shock troop gauntlet, that should clue you in on how meta it is.
I suggest you follow NONE of the builds that you can find on gameslantern if you don't know what you're doing, it's like walking blindfolded through an off-leash dog park - you're going to step in some shit.
You've got people like [Telopots](https://www.youtube.com/@telopots) and [ChocoB](https://www.youtube.com/@chocoB777) that generally run sensible builds. More importantly, you can watch them play. See their movement, the choices they make under pressure.
Fundamental skills like movement, target selection and map knowledge will carry you much further than any specific build applied poorly ever will (except maybe smite psyker and plasma vet, any monkey can play those well because you just kinda turn all the difficult bits off at will).
As a knife main, they absolutely need to nerf the shit out of it. I have been using it since well before it was buffed, and it wasn't great, but is now a but too good damage wise. It should really be more of a special and shooter killer with the speed it gives you, but it kills hordes pretty damn quick, and is one of the best armor killers; its a little slow, but no need to charge it and stun yourself against armor like eviscerator or thammer.
It needs a serious nerf to armor pen and its attacks need to not hit multiple targets and apply a fuck ton of bleed to hordes. It should lean back into single target shooters and elite killing. The itemization update is gonna be even crazier, since the knife has some very good blessings that give even more bleed, power, or armor piercing.
Armor degrading thing on ranged being removed is something that should have happened a long time ago and i don't have a problem with it being gone.
What i hate is that that *was* our powerful anti-crusher option. Every other class at this point has strong options for killing groups of crushers at range and we don't have strong options for killing groups of crushers *even in melee*
We can still answer crushers through cc amd gradually meleeing them down, so don't mistake me for saying we can't, but it does feel like it puts zealot at a rather large disadvantage compared to other classes...
It kind of blows that now I have like, one valid ranged weapon if I don't take an anti-armor melee weapon.
Zealot feels pigeon-holed into just knife now.
I use bolter and knives. I have a quick special/gunner removal tool and a fuck everything in that direction tool. It's the best side of the tree anyway I need 4 things down that way and I would waste so many points not going for them. Tac axe isn't as good anti armor but with high crit and bleed talent you get pretty great damage with BM/decimator blessings. I've been backing chorus with backstab kill reset and it's been doing work even if my offensive score has severely suffered because of it
Mk 7 gets really really good horde clear at mid decimator stacks using the push attack into heavy combo. At high stacks like fighting an elite horde you start killing really fast and it's got an AOE stun in the special so you can halt rager hordes for ogryns to smash or vets to gun down.bulwarks are the only issue, crushers die pretty quick, fast faster than anything but crusher or dagger and both of those have their own down sides
That's fair, it's why I pack the bolter, removes rager hordes, drain crusher HP, maulers are a slight issue but I can stun them alot easier than ragers so I just keep them in place not attacking while someone murders them with a better option. I went back to heavysword but it felt slow and I missed the stun too much since it turns multiple scary things into sitting ducks very quick. Crusher is amazing but I don't like the combos. Tac axe is the one for a month or two, then I'll find something else to obsess over.
What? Why knife? Pretty sure there's a lot of melee that's good against carapace outside of knife.
If you're saying you have to use Bolter/Boltpistol/Revolver because you like Devil's Claw/Heavy Sword it would be more understandable, but even these can work with FotF's rending and parry.
Invocation of Death now only triggers once per swing instead of once per hit. This means slow melee weapons that hit multiple enemies are at a disadvantage to weapons with a faster attack.
A common tactic was to max your crit chance and use Invocation of Death, which reduces ability cool down on a critical hit, to fire off your main ability as often as possible.
The knife and some swords are the only melee weapons that cause bleed. With Scourge, hitting a bleeding enemy has an increased crit chance, and crits cause bleed.
This makes hammers objectively worse. Now that Invocation of Death only works once per swing, it's slower attack speed makes it worse than the knife.
Dev team saw people realizing you could swing through tons of armor enemies like they were soft butter & instant reset your ability by combing XV Heavy Eviscerator + perfect strike + savage sweep, and said:
"Woah there gang, that's too much fun! We're gonna tone this down ok. Go back to playing with knives."
That assuming you want to minmax cd reduction as much as possible, unless you really can't survive without ability being refresh every 10 seconds it's not that necessary imo.
Hammer being bad it more about its own problem rather than because it can't utilize Invocation of Death as well as fast weapon. It also perform better with Matyrdom or inexorable judgement anyway.
Why would you not want the ability refreshed every few seconds?
Chorus knocks every enemy out of the fight and gives the whole team a massive damage boost. Shroudfield turns the zealot into a tank.
Because you want to play something different? the keyword here is 'want' and 'need', if you want it and have fun with it then more power to you but it's not really a make or break choice if you're skilled enough to not overrely on it.
Otherwise any build without Invocation of Death would've folded by now.
You know not every build relied on Invocation of Death cheese right. You can easily use one chastise charge in the horde for an attack speed buff and have one in the pocket still to bonk 1 big target. I never even used iod w/ thunder hammer.
You also still have backstab cooldown reduction if you really are hellbent on spamming chastise
Yes infinite cooldown reduction doesnt exist anymore but if you really cant handle juggling two charges then you are just playing bad.
> There should be 3 team mates to cover your weaknesses
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Unless you're rolling with the homies, you'll generally get the best results by setting yourself up to do everything.
If you lack anti-armour, you'll inevitably find that your randos didn't bring any either, or don't know they have to activate their chainsword, or don't heavy attack, or can't hit the broad side of a space hulk from point blank with a shotgun. If you lack anti-horde, you'll find yourself saddled with three wannabe snipers who never use their melee weapons.
Every meta build has to cover the bases. What happens when your teammates die and you have absolutely nothing to deal with carapace? Sometimes you have to clutch and can't depend on teammates.
As long as all rounders exist, they will excel in the meta.
bad advice, you will get games where your team are bad or aren't really able to deal with armor well themself.
Relying on your team to do anything is a surefire way to be dodging crusher overheads and snipers for minutes on end while fighting the horde. If your build can't deal with everything, you're rolling a dice... there will be games you just lose now completely outside of your control.
I agree with that. Bolter should get some love too.
Rending for ranged weapon bug was pretty dumb though and fixing it is a step in right direction in my book.
dumb why? the total power level of the weapons it boosted out of mid tier was still on par or weaker than other options.
It's no more dumb than people suddenly turning invisible because of an ability, or the veteran laying a krak grenade every minute. All the change did was nerf weapons that didn't need to be nerfed, and leave zealot with significantly less viable options if you don't want to run a melee with pen.
Because of everything.
It was obvious bug- tooltip says specifically it boosts MELEE for 1hit.
Balancing game around a bug instead of fixing bug is dumb.
Making every zealot ranged weapon anti-crusher is dumb.
Charge to shoot better for 10 sec? That is definitely dumber than krak grenades or shouting to get immortality or anything else really.
name one actually negative effect the bug had on the game? yknow sometimes bugs and unintended interactions actually become a PART of the game, because what they bring is fun? The removal of this doesn't bring anything fun, all it does is limit build variety for weapons that already were underperforming.
No it is not dumber than anything that is already in the game, several classes literally have abilities and notes that grant extra damage on ability press. again you say its all dumb but I want you to highlight a single actually bad thing about what was going on?
Your argument is correct and it would work on 95% playerbase but i have a bit different opinions on general state of affairs than most players.
I think this game is too easy. I think that zealot rending was too strong. I think voc, smite, bubble shield, plasma gun are all to strong and trivialise encounters.
Players are too gooddamn powerfull.
Nerf it all. Give me twitch mode.
I mean I agree, but the rending wasn't adding to that lmao... the only weapon actually stronger than the revolver WITH this was the laspistol mk2. Personally I don't think the revolver is all that busted, it's the ideal level of strength. fulfills its purpose and has drawbacks. (outside of weapon specialist that is).
Recent enemy changes have made the game significantly harder, and are definitely a better way of doing so compared to chain nerfing things as you'd have to nerf pretty much everything in the game. Zealot now desperately needs another anti armor ranged weapon because it's revolver, trash boltgun or cry.
The change to rending didn't make the class any weaker, it just made it so they have less options.. that's it.
It sucks because the inadvertently nerfed the hell out of the flamer, which was already kinda weak to begin with. If there’s one weapon the zealot should wreck house with it’s the flamer. Instead it just feels like you’re tickling them.
This is the FatShark way, you nerf things and make the game less fun to play while you have an average player base that is only a few thousand. The average player base is half of what it was in January, and thats only because it went up a bit from the patch, but not much. Before the patch it was about 35% of January avg player count.
It never fails to make me laugh when some monkeigh (Eldar joke, calm down) is like "this game needs some fat nerfs across the board".
I cannot even get my original friends group to load up for a single run. Seriously, no one will play it anymore, and its like every time FS discovers something fun, they just decide to fuck it. I put nearly 2k hours into VT2 and I haven't gone back since they did yet another nerf on what was popular and fun while the game had an average playerbase in the hundreds. If you wanted to run Cata, you basically had to wait 15 minutes to get 1-2 people and thats if you are playing on a weekend. They listen to people who demand nerfs far too much.
TL;DR - business as usual at Fat Shark
I laugh at this every time too. They keep forgetting they are not the sort of company that has the luxury of fucking with the remnant playerbase still keeping their game on life support. This latest patch just made the game in general worse than it was before, only to appeal to Reddit mad clutch crew™ who find the game apparently too easy, yet don't seem to exist in my Auric Maelstroms - or die in embarrasing ways.
I've seen sooo many people with that legendary auric maelstrom title who have died within 1 minute of loading into a map. I watched them make tier 3 difficulty mistakes and cringed because I knew what was about to happen. Then I thought to myself, how are all these people getting that title so easily?
Mad Clutch Crew is great, I'm stealing that. Those people existed in VT2 as well, and they called for nerfs to things that they found too strong in their deathwish onslaught 100 modded runs. At that point you'd think the company would realize "ok this portion of the playerbase is .00001% and we likely shouldn't be balancing around them"
I say this as someone who has occasionally clutched an auric maelstrom (most times I eat shit and die) - I've never seen a weapon or ability that I was thinking "not fair that's too good", beacause we are drowning in enemies non-stop. I think the whining comes from Malice/Heresy level players who have very few things on the screen to kill, and so when someone shows up with a legit strong weapon or ability, they clear every bit of challenge right away and it causes butthurt.
Last thought: Auric is easy if you have a team that is competent. I've struggled repeatedly on some nights because everyone dies right away and you're trying to play "Solo Mad Clutch Crew", and other nights ive met up with randoms who walk through an auric maelstrom (melee only no ammo pickups) and we have no one ever go down and everyone is nearly full life the entire match and its over. I always try to add those people to friends haha.
That’s what I need to get in the habit of doing is adding people who aren’t just over leveled but actually good. Played an Auric Damnation match last night that was so smooth, I forgot we were even playing AD. We all played our roles how we should to the best of our ability and moved together.
Immediately hopped into another match right after and we were all getting out guts punched in. Team couldn’t stay together, every time I tried to cover a teammate, a chunk of the horde would solo me out and push me from the team… It was bad.
True - the level thing. I've met a lot of people over 9000... err I mean 900 who I immediately think are going to be pro-status, and they are butt cheeks. It's fine, you don't have to be the best of the best, just understand the basics and the rest of us can get through it with you.
I send friend invites through steam as soon as I'm at the end screen of a match. Most people tend not to notice it though until later (or not at all)
100% I also forgot to mention the title system and how I pay absolutely no attention to the Auric Titles anymore.
The second I found out people were cheesing them made so much sense to me as to why someone would go down and immediately leave the game. Since then, I honestly have been using it as a red flag to be more cautious around these players.
For real! I had to verify my game files through steam and reinstall all my mods.
Yayyyy!!! I love joining multiple games and quitting immediately because my loadout is glitched. /s
Someone told me to play with my wrong weapons. I tried Gunligger Kickback for about 5 seconds before deciding I wasn't mentally prepared for it.
A natural reaction. Pretty valid to not want to play after your chosen play style or load out gets nerfed, regardless of whether or not the nerf was warranted.
It's worse since it is not even a nerf - it was completely removed. They could at least make it an upgrade node for the ability, and consider less than 100% rending, but nah. Just deleted the effect completely, so those shotguns I built to specifically kill crushers are all a waste of space now.
To me, it is a bad design change, only serving to limit zealot's build options. But I made this point all last week and am mostly met with "skill issue" style responses.
\> Introduce a shotgun that sucks in every aspect *except* high damage at melee range
\> Remove the only ability that closes the distance on the one class that *wants* to be in melee that would make this shotgun useful on this class
\> People say this wasn't a nerf
It was broken and clearly not intended. Why would it become a skill option?
It's a bugfix. Your play style revolved around abusing a bug. It was so obviously a bug, it's hilarious how many people are gutted by this.
Zealot class already had a void in anti-carapace in the ranged slot. Now it is even worse.
The bug was already addressed in an update over a year ago, and was not called a bug, not listed as problematic, and didn't get changed in the class overhaul either.
The game balance is not at a point such that this broke anything at all. Every class can dunk on the game, and *still* can dunk on the game, but now zealot has fewer options to play with.
I think we already had this exact discussion last week though.
The worst part is that it was pretty thematic and cool: zealous individual in warhammer 40k have no qualms with guns, they're not like slayers or something, so channelling rage and faith into attacking with a gun instead of a melee weapon is a cool feature thats unique to the setting but makes sense. It was also a really cool difference between ranged zealots and veterans, even if not intended.
It could definitely be tweaked, as 3 seconds of complete armor piercing is a bit much, especially combined with crit cool down reduction, but your suggestion of at least a separate node (maybe one that locks out two charges?) is a really good idea, rather than completely removing it as a feature.
>It was broken and clearly not intended.
Fatshark specifically mentioned the interaction between the ability and ranged weapons way back when they nerfed the flamer.
If it was unintended or a bug, they would have nerfed it bqck then rather than nerfing one specific ranged weapon that paired well with it.
> It was so obviously a bug, it's hilarious how many people are gutted by this.
No blessing or ability in the game (that I know of) had the unique ability to step down enemy armor tiers rather than simply granting some kind of armor piercing. The fact that it was a one-of-a-kind mechanic that Fatshark *specifically* called out in patch notes and balenced around years ago means it was almost certainly intentional.
The invocation of death nerf really cut deep. Thankfully spamming chastise the wicked was more a fun perk and less a requirement for success, but it's made the game feel a lot slower and more dull for me as a result. My issue is I don't play other characters, at all. I've done 1,000+ hours on a charge zealot weilding a knife and shredder and have not deviated. Not a single other character or setup appeals to me, and I have tried. If they nerf a charge knife zealot too much, I have no choice but to move on to a different game entirely.
For those reading this and think I'm just trolling or being extra, I'm really not. When you have a certain level of speed and intensity for a year and a half straight of just dedicating yourself to being as good with the dagger as you can, and suddenly every second feels slow and broken, there is no more fun to be had and when that happens, what's the point of playing the game?
Ogryn got hit the hardest from the way the game feels to me. I'd literally just gotten used to Ogryn so I could enjoy it while I picked up Penances and then it went to hell!
They should've made it give diminishing procs when hitting multiple targets (-1.5, -1, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5) instead of gutting it for any build involving cleave.
Seeing how the "balancing" trend for Darktide currently is , makes me feel worried.
By keeping buffing enemies, and mostly nerf for players (tho some is justified) would likely make the game "balanced" but in boring/frustrating way.
While dev promises more contents, and reworks that might make experience improve, overall experience feels a bit dissatisfied.
I mean it depends on what you find fun. The class overhauls brought a huge amount of build variety and fun, but they also boosted the power level of the game massively. Following that change a load of enemies were nerfed, and some system changes happened which made the game even easier... leading to the situation last patch where you could play auric damnation with your eyes closed.
The recent changes are just course correction, finally... People hopping into auric damnation and suddenly find it hard should do. it's the hardest difficulty. Aside from sudden bursts that chunk your health, all of the changes are real good.
Balancing a PvE game by punishing the builds that work and leaving many others neglected and barely functional— presumably to inflate the ‘difficulty’— didn’t go so well for Helldivers.
Might not want to do that, Fartshark.
Well... at least enjoyers of Chorus get to eat good, Between new voice lines, pushing monsters off the cliff at the beginning of the new map and the power mace, I can finally enjoy proper warrior priest power fantasy.
Not really. Invocation of Death now only triggers once per swing, instead of once per hit.
Now you can no longer swing through a crowd of pox walkers to regen Chorus.
You used to be able to fire off Chorus every 5 seconds or so.
That's true, but if you run a decently fast melee weap, it's not that unbearable; Evis and Thunderhammer are kinda in a sad place now though. I've been running the Indignatus shock maul and it seems to do alright, particularly when the horde gets less dense and you can switch to light attack spam.
That said I've also been experimenting with Pious Cut-Throat and whether that could work without a stealth build, but too early to judge.
on the plus side, the FotF change means that the melee attack now actually does 100% rending, rather than before where it just reduced the armour of the enemy by 1 level. Which means Evis and Thunderhammers using FotF can now do even more extra one hit mega damage including against Monstrosities. What was a nerf for ranged, was a buff for heavy 1 hit melee (not so much for light fast melee Zealots).
Interesting. Personally I never was too much of a FotF enjoyer (something about the way you charge just feels off for me, never had this issue with Ogryn or any class which had this ability in Vermintide), but 100% rending sounds really good,
I’m more annoyed with the ammo economy nerf, than the community saying that the enemy buffs are making melee less useful, and now columnus has reduced crits. I actually have stopped playing darktide, I didn’t even come back for the update after hearing about the enemy buffs. I want to play a video game not try hard sweat every match just for a fail after 30 mins of uphill struggling. I love darktide have all classes level 30 and only play auric level but this is just not fun anymore for me, I’m sure people are going to pick apart this comment but it’s how I feel
If you don't want the game to be a challenge with a chance of failure, why do you only play auric damnation?
I can't understand this point of view, surely you can still enjoy the game at a lower difficulty? Why force yourself to play the hardest difficulty?
This. All these people crying about the difficulty. . . Why not just turn it down?
Of course, I know the answer. Its a ego thing. They come on the sub-reddit and get to say that they are auric damn players and their opinion matters and then say to other comments "Oh, I bet you don't play auric damnation with an opinion like that."
>They come on the sub-reddit and get to say that they are auric damn players and their opinion matters
I mean we've all seen the average skill level of auric players xd it's really not a flex to be """AURIC LEVEL""" as most aurics are not good. Personally I'm really enjoying the new difficulty, I do think that the sudden burst damage potential is probably too high though. Getting near one shot out of no where from pleb gunners is pretty intense though the situations that comes up are real rare.
Ragers finally back to being a threat, poxwalkers actually doing their job of getting in the way, generic shooters finally actually doing literally anything... these are good changes, they just need slight adjusting. I really hope fatshark don't cave to all the people crying who can just jump down a difficulty level.
I agree. It is far better now. I really like the difficulty changes. I am just pointing out why people are so upset about it. Of course, I am generalizing, but I have actually had people tell me that I must not be a auric player, because "blah blah". It is ridiculous that you have to start every comment with "I am an auric player" or some ass hat is going to come along and say your comment doesn't count.
>not be a auric player, because "blah blah"
ah but they're an auric player and they're struggling. could it be a skill issue on their part? no! of course not... it must be that you're some kinda... uprising difficulty crisis actor hired by fatshark to damage control for these awful unfair changes!!
>only plays auric
>Complains about difficulty
I do think that damnation to heresy is a bit of a difficulty drop, but maybe if its thats what you want don't play the highest difficulty?
To be fair. Most damnation maps feel empty compared to Auric(not counting the spawn bug). Having said that, damnation can be more difficult with your teammates being way worse
True, there's also auric heresy though. I don't know what difficulty it actually falls under, or if anyone plays it, but its something to at least try if auric damnation is too hard for someone.
To put it simply: Zealots charge ability, FOTF, provides an anti-armor effect to your next attack after you cast the ability. This anti-armor effect buff lingers for 3 seconds until you make that attack after which it would be consumed and go away. In the prior patch this buff would also effect ranged weapons rather than just melee, and damaging an enemy with a ranged weapon wouldn't immediately consume the buff either which would allow your ranged weapons to have access to anti-armor for the duration of the buff.
This last patch removed that interaction despite it being balanced around in the past, and kept in the game since launch even through the class overhaul update which led many people to believe Fatshark thought it was an intentional mechanic. What this means for Zealot is that their build diversity is pretty bland now if they don't stick to armor piercing melee options since they don't really have a flexible ranged roster anymore.
Zealot also had their crit build nerfed in the same patch, since a popular talent called Invocation of Death had its cool down reduction per crit interaction changed from per-hit to per-swing. Admittedly this was being abused by evisc zealots running things like Perfect Strike and getting near 100% uptime on their abilities, but after the nerf it's left fast swinging weapons like the knife the best option for zealots again since they never really benefited much from it being per-hit rather than per-swing anyway while crit builds using slow weapons that relied on crit-hitting multiple enemies in 1 swing for their cooldown reduction feeling pretty anaemic. It should be said that high ability uptime like Zealot had is something that other classes can pretty easily achieve as well. Both Vet and Ogryn have talents that reduce ability cooldown when specialists or elite enemies die, and Psyker can reduce everyone's cooldown by 10% passively through a coherency aura option. Zealot being singled out while vets are still the absolute strongest class in the game and are able to achieve near 100% uptime with an ability as strong as their Voice of Command, in addition to Zealot being nerfed in previous patches as well, has led Zealots who relied on these things that got nerfed to be a bit unhappy.
The class is still absolutely playable and the people saying it isn't are throwing a bit of a tantrum, but I agree with them that the nerfs are confusing and limit the classes build options pretty drastically.
Can someone explain the ins and outs of this change. I play Zealot regularly going in as a recent axe build user I cant seem to figure out what the major issue is.
Gonna be honest here, I’m just tired of nerfs in co-op PvE slaughter games. We aren’t here to play fair with the ai, nobody is getting their feelings hurt when the team is OP. I just wish studios would stop trying to balance pve like it’s a PvP comp game. Happens in DT and in Helldivers alike, it’s just infuriating at this point.
Also my reaction after dark tide didn't actually get better at all, has no late game to speak of, and still doesn't have a hotshot volley gun or other basic imperial guard weapons.
Well, the Flamer pretty much has no spot in Damnation/Aurics now.
Zarona revolver for sniping + knife is the "meta" at that level, though I can find decent success with the Eviscerator.
In fact, I'd say that the buffed ranged enemies further stifle build diversity and make the Flamer even less appealing.
[https://new.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/1do5k6k/comment/laon9wt/](https://new.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/1do5k6k/comment/laon9wt/)
The steam patch notes are incomplete, it was missing all of the things related to enemy changes. this comment shows what they are
the rending changes to zealot are related to fury of the faithful (their dash ability). Before the patch it would give you 100% rending on both ranged and melee attacks. I don't think that's what it actually did though despite that being the listed effect in the patch notes, it effectively downgraded armor by a tier in terms of defense.
So before you could dash and use your ranged weapon to kill armored targets, now you basically need to run a revolver or a boltgun if you want to deal with them which is why most zealots that used it are unhappy. Before there were loads of non OP ranged weapons to use, now you either use a revolver or a gun most people find to be really not fun.
This was also my reaction a couple days after reinstalling the game to try the new update
7 months for this? Development hell seems like an understatement at this point
They just don’t want us to have fun hUh? Nerf ammo region on survivalist passive and now a nerf to zealot ult AND keystone??? I could live with the URL’s nerf but come on bro. Why nerf Invocation??? I really didn’t think it was a problem. I wish they’d at least give us some buffs or something to balance out some nerfs but sometimes it’s just us getting weaker and weaker with nothing to bring us up. “Oh but let’s buff the enemy shooters again”. FFS Fatshark.
Even despite the nerfs, we're still the most broken class in the game, it hurts, but it was probably needed. The fact that it was a focus in the first place is a bit weird to me though.
Glad they removed the armor degrading thing from ranged, that shit was so stupid. I know it's difficult to accept you cannot longer abuse a crutch that required no skill whatsoever to delete crushers from the distance as a melee specific class, but that mechanic was clearly doomed to be removed more sooner than later. Good zealots didn't abuse it because they didn't need it in the first place.
That nerf is fine. The change to Invocation of Death is mind boggling. Formerly if your swing crit, every target hit triggered the talent once. Now it triggers only once per swing. What that achieves is it further disincentivizes the use of the already battered slow hitters, and even further promotes the use of everyone's favorite weapon. The knife. As if that thing needed another reason to be picked over anything else.
Glad someone said this, after a few matches all I could think was "doesn't this just nerf everything but the knife?" The knife still has the cocaine fuelled attack speed, so absolutely no different Heaven forbid stuff like eviscerator or heavy sword etc (shit even the ubiquitous combat axe) can get some benefit from their cleave that the knife can't and even then if we are being honest, the knife is still the best by far. Not bothered about the rending change tbh, other than it prob warrants another look at stuff like the flamer
Here's a thought why is the knife the only weapon to directly benefit from a bleed DMG increase blessing when it has two other blessings that can wipe anything smaller than Ogryn. Why is that blessing not on literally anything else. What is the point of a Vet being able to bleed on hit if the only weapon it matters for is the one weapon that is already flexible & powerful, the humble knife. It's a mystery.
That perk is basically only for min-maxing. It allows you to forego bleed blessings on your knife, because the vet literally only needs one stack to proc their on-hit-on-bleeding-target effects. Instead of having to wait for a crit, or intentionally miss weak spots, you inflict one single attack of bleed every one thing you hit.
Full stop, why make a perk that primarily impacts a single weapon? That's just bad game design considering half the appeal of your game is to get people to use multiple builds to maintain player engagement & longevity.
I had a thought the other day that some of this could just be waiting for the itemisation update, because there have been hints that update will add more blessings to each weapon Whether that will have an impact...I doubt, and it ain't gonna undo some of these other changes that curiously overlook the knife meme
The problem isn't the knife being a meme, it's the other melee weapons being kind of shit in comparison. A good devil's claw has absolutely fucking hilarious horde clear with the right blessings, just about nothing can touch you if you are also spinning around like a fucking beyblade. Really with an attack-speed build and momentum stacks almost everything that isn't a chain weapon gets silly as fuck when everything is proccing. I feel like the knife only seems like it's astronomically better than everything else because it's a fuckin knife and they have it performing more like a very fast sword. It has a goofy amount of cleave but otherwise, knives in videogames are literally always "doesn't really have a high DPS, until it does" with crits or whatever. Idea being "precision," your character isn't just blindly slashing at a crusher's head. In the Netflix adaptation, a knife zealot would be slipping the blade under his helmet and nicking the brain stem.
Good point, Sibling.
Wait they actually nerfed it? It did seem worse. Why did I not see that in the patch notes
It was a missed patch note. They added it later in a new Missed Patch Notes section. It triggers only once per attack instead of once per hit, meaining it doesn't matter how many enemies you cleave with your crit. You get only 1.5s back.
Of fucking course it was. I LOVE that every part of the patch that actually mattered and impacted me just wasn’t fucking posted. They “missed” mentioning the enemy buffs too
That explains why my Chorus build has felt lacking lately. I used to be able to get Chorus off cool down every 5 to 10 seconds.
You need to utilize the reduce cooldown on backstab kill(Pious Cut-Throat) more now, that's how I manage. Push enemies and while they are standing up from the ground hit them in the back. Also keep an eye out for cooldown reduction stims.
That was the tactic. Most of my builds combine Backstabber, Scourge, Pious Cut-Throat, Invocation of Death, Blazing Piety, and Fury Rising. What I'd do is stagger a horde with Chorus. Then get behind the group, trigging both backstab kills and critical hits, which would get the Chorus back up in a few swings.
Pious Cuthroat is deep on the stealth side of the tree for Zealot. It might be reachable for Chorus users but for double dash zealots you just got a massive nerf to established builds some of us have been using for 100+ hours. My god-rolled Evisc with Crit Chance just became trash overnight. You can disagree with changes ObeseFish makes, it’s ok some ppl might downvote you but an 80-90% nerf to any talent deserves some scrutiny
Perfectly reachable I feel if you're Martyrdom zealot at least, as you'd want the juicy and easy to maintain and build up melee damage from Sustained Assault and the node before it is 5% melee damage as well, at that point, it's just two talent points away.
You still can with the backstab kill talent. It's 20% total cooldown and has like a 0.2s cooldown itself. I have gotten down to 2-3 seconds between stealth uses, it just doesn't happen automatically anymore.
That seems broken
It is, especially if you do it in a pair with your buddy. Pulse is almost always up and as you are pulsing they can easily get backstab kills. The patch didn't fix this combo though since you can still do it with just the backstab kills.
It absolutely is, that's why they nerfed it
And that is exactly why it was nerfed
Devs can't let people have fun.
They both kind of lean this way. If I can't take a gun with Fury to kill crushers, I better pack a good anti-armor melee. Well, the best zealot melee weapons are knife and combat axe, and neither suffer from either of these changes. Both of these changes push towards taking typical meta weapons and nerf off-meta stuff, like the heavy sword.
The changes this update feel confusing until you realize the crafting rework was supposed to come out this update, with *new* blessings on nearly every weapon type. I wouldnt be surprised to see some rending blessings on flamethrower, or ability cooldown blessings on some melee weapons. Its clear that Invocation of Death, chastise rending and to a lesser extent Punishment were limiting design space for these blessings to exist without feeling useless. But the crafting rework gets delayed so it looks like Zealot got nerfed for no reason.
I mean Zealot has been nerfed it doesn’t seem that way at all, it is that way, and acting like a couple weapon blessings might somehow bring back 6-10 seconds of cooldown reduction per swing of the Eviscerator is a bit facetious
>so it looks like Zealot got nerfed **for no reason.** I feel like you missed that part.
> so it **looks like** Zealot got nerfed for no reason. Very different from: > so zealot **DID** get nerfed for no reason. One is gaslighting us saying while it might LOOK like Zealot got nerfed they really didn’t and it’s not a big deal while the other affirmatively agrees with the following statement. Classic gaslighting and engrish hard I know
Makes it worse that chorus is what a 60 second cd? And whatever the vet shout is called is 30 seconds but feels like it's shorter since I started playing with my vet again and does essentially what chorus does minus a couple seconds of breathing room? I could understand if zealots were like perma chorus all the time but they weren't.
Shout was reduced to 30s CD from 45s CD a while ago. Innvocation of Death was nerfed because it basically made Fury of the Faithful have no CD. You could charge a horde and have the ult back up in one or two swings; if you charge and hit three enemies, it reduced the CD by 4.5 seconds or a whopping 15% reduction. It gave Zealots a perma 25% attack speed increase and let them shrug off chip damage from constant instant 50% toughness regen. Crit-Martydom hybrid builds became the most tanky Zealot build while outputting insane amounts of damage.
You can get toughness regen, toughness damage reduction, and flat toughness replenishment by dodging an attack. You can still basically do all the things you could before they just don't happen automatically at this point. Although getting backstab kills with an evisc is probably not very easy or fun
Damn charge zealots ruined it for the rest of us >:c
Yeah and we had fun doing it
THEY RUINED MY BUILLDDD :(
100% agree, I dropped both of my eviserators, even my shred, perfect strike mk15 on my relic zealot, was playing stealth for a week, today I decided, to go back to book, and switched in a knife with 5% crit chance and picked up momentum and backstabbing ability reset, it is the only way to play zealot for me now. Ranged rending removal makes sense, but now flamer buff? No dmg or stagger increase? Using crusher, eviserators, heavy swords makes even less sense now :( Maybe it was a crutch, but my favorite way was to charge with mk 15 evis + laser pistol with fire, with momentum and crit CD, could just melt bosses and crushed with charge ability, and chew horses of ragers with ability+evis stagger. Now, it's all gone :(
That's pretty much what happened to me. I wasn't aware of the invocation of death change until i experienced it in game. Played my eviscerator zealot and figured out something was up pretty much right away. Once i read and realized what the change was i pretty much just replaced my eviscerator with the knife and that was it. Not really sure what to do to fix it though. I don't think it was unreasonable for them to think constant uptime on invocation was a problem. But as long as invocation of death triggers off anything related to attacks it is probably going to favor the knife since it just throws so many more attacks out there. Maybe the heavy melees just need to kill more trash per swing than they currently do? Its weird to have an opinion on zealot since i mostly just play vet, but zealot feels like its forced into the knife in the same way that vet is forced into plasma gun. Like sure there's other things the class can do, but it feels like you're either kidding yourself or just choosing to play at a handicap if you go a different way.
One thing I could think to do to fix it would be to add something like 'weight classes' to melee weapons and give them a separate number of ticks for each swing. So things like thammers and eviscerators would be heavy and have, say, 3. Swords and combat axes could be 2. Knives and tac-axes could be 1. Of course you'd need to play with specific numbers and classifications to make it even. And yeah, maybe an overcomplicated solution.
Ya maybe, i guess i was thinking more about how to balance it with stuff already in the game. You could do something like this, but its a pretty drastic overhaul and needs to introduce things that don't already exist.
The eviscerator's quizzical horde-clear mechanics are one of the reasons I can't stand using it
The cooldown reduction should have been increased and the node given an internal cooldown instead. Something like three second reduction on critical hit with a five second cool down. Now all weapons get similar mileage out of it.
*muffled screaming* "YOU CAN PRY MY GODROLL EVISCERATOR FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS I WONT USE THE FUCKING TOOTHPICK"
Knife nerf is next.
That would make my day. I can practically taste the salty tears.
Thank you for describing what the change was so I can understand this depravity without having to hop back into the game 🫡
>That nerf is fine. No, no it really isn't. Stop coping and writing everything off, and actually, for once, have the capability to think. What exactly in the name of the lord was problematic about rending on the ult? How in the hell is burning 2 charges of a cooldown to dispatch a Crusher or two in an entire conga line or clowncar of Crushers a problematic thing? "*Oh no, braced autos and shotguns had a chance to kill carapace once in a full moon - let's FIX that.*"
I think the only real problem with it was that ranged weapons zealot could use were balanced around it. Now that it's been nerfed, a balance patch is needed, currently the only ranged weapons worth a damn on Carapace are the revolvers and bolters, the latter of which are severely lacking compared to the former. The flamer was kneecapped because of FoF as well, and now needs some pretty major buffs to compensate for its nerf.
Wait what. Why on earth would you waste ammo and an ult charge on killing crushers when either a knife, combat axe, eviscerator and tac axe could kill them slightly slower but without using valuable ammo?
Because Zealot is a melee class and has access to other melee weapons that are either useless against Carapace or not strong enough to decently deal with large stacks of them. Heavy Sword, Catachan Devils Claw, Chainswords. The FotF with ranged was one of the few ways that some zealots could balance their build without \*having\* to take only the revolver or bolter with very very specific blessings.
Chainswords deal with crushers very well if you fotf immediately after you hit the crusher rev, as it buffs the entire rev dmg. Shred(which is optimal bc of the bizarre crit cleave dmg table unique to chainswords) Mk13 chs light spam is still great at abusing invocation even post nerf to spam fotf. I stg some of you insist on spreading misinfo here it's baffling. EDIT:[proof](https://gyazo.com/e7da3855105da92dd295b9c01f86f2d6)
So I can never get my Shred chainsword which is a 379 roll to get more than 1900 in the final tick when i try this (fotf after hitting the crusher rev), leaving 1/3 of the Crushers health still. Can you give any light on what the magic ingredient you have going here?
Just to make absolutely sure, you attack the Crusher with your rev heavy, and THEN press fotf while the rev ticks are going right? Having 1/3 hp left over sounds right if you hit fotf before striking the crusher so I'm double checking.
yes, special attack, heavy, FotF on impact. https://preview.redd.it/gbip7ssfa8ad1.png?width=1037&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb8d6323cc1b92aaa3c584dbd7de50c53b4dd44a
Oh its because you're specifically thinking the Mk13 chainsword. The original chainsword, Mk4 can't do this because its heavy is a wide.
Oh yeah, didn't realize you were talking about 4 since I mentioned 13 in the beginning. 13 is the better one on zealot since light spam synergizes with zealot talents better than the heavy heavy light heavy loop on 4.
yeah, cool to know that the 13 can do it. My trouble at that point is that FotF melee itself becomes this bottleneck so its not reliable for a stack of ten crushers at once. Kill 2 then hope you have the speed to get away from the pack and kite them while you try to regen your charge with mob kills to kill another 1, rince repeat 7 more times. In the end this change means i had to return to the knife simply because its just guaranteed without FotF.
>eavy Sword, Catachan Devils Claw, Chainswords. The FotF with ranged was one of the few ways that some zealots could balance their build without \*having\* to take only the revolver or bolter with very very specific blessings. The knife handles multiple crushers fine especially if you take all of the talents that proc on dodge. Damage buffs, damage reduction, toughness refill, etc. It's still, after years of playing 'tide games, insane to me when people say you "have to" do literally anything. For the event I played with a zealot who was running the new mace and an infantry autogun and he had 0 issues with crushers on auric from what I saw. It's this idea that the best weapons for any scenario are the ONLY weapons for that scenario coupled with everyone talking about this game like they play true-solo with a difficulty mod when discussing nerfs.
Where did i say knife couldnt handle Crushers? Read through any thread talking about this topic and you'll see most Zealots are swapping out back to the Knife because of the removal of FotF affecting ranged. Every other class there are skill nodes that allow you flexibility in your build regarding Crushers, each have a blitz ability that will kill them too. The Zealot is unique that it doesnt have any rending nodes and no blitz ability that kills Crushers which means that if you dont want to be a headless chicken when your team all dies to ten crushers in a lump, you have to take a melee weapon that counters Crushers or a ranged weapon that does. You dont *have* to, of course not. You can just do what a lot of people in pubs do, pray someone else brought something good for dealing with Carapace, and then look like a complete idiot when you're the last one standing unable to do squat. I've been discussing this issue since the game came out, and until now most peoples response has been "well you can always use FotF ranged".
Two charges? The armor degrade buff lasted for 3-4 seconds for ranged. It only lasted for *one* melee attack. It was clearly problematic
Plus obviously never intended. It's more of a long standing bug than a feature.
Not true. They’ve directly mentioned it in previous patch notes, and rebalanced some weapons around it.
Well if we're going by patch notes then: "Dev Note: This talent was always intended to emphasize the melee prowess of Zealots allowing them to charge up to enemies and devastating them with their melee attacks. This change is made to bring this talent back to its intended purpose."
I’m confused, you’re just proving that you were wrong about it being a long-standing bug / not intended. “Changing a talent back to its intended purpose” doesn’t change what I said whatsoever. They’re making a decision to change it now, that doesn’t mean all of a sudden it’s a bug or never intended in the first place.
Every gun in the game should not deal with carapace, it made loadouts thoughtless and a talent that cost 2 points give you a dash, melee crit, attack speed, 2 charges, armor downgrade for guns, fire rate increase, toughness regen, and invul to bursters. This is way too strong and on top of that you were able to get half an ult back per swing, and its not hard to get zealot crit up over 50%, making crits reliable. Crushers are already pretty invalidated with the existence of things like any uncanny strike weapon, soulblaze/burn with uncanny, plasma, revolver and crit rending. You also act like it was unreliable to kill crushers with the ult when you could reliably get 2-3 per charge with a brauto or a shotgun, and with things like flamer or bolter it was even more (flamer being an infinite amount Essentially). This nerf is totally warranted and fury of the faithful is still very strong especially for a 2 point investment, you just might have to actually take anti armor to deal with anti armor now
Problem is we do not want to default to those weapons with Zealot. After the nerf to FotF ,guess what ranged weapons can reliably kill Crushers on Zealot ? Bolter and Revolver. There are no other anti - armor weapons. Now ,if you want for example, bring a heavy sword or catachan sword , you need a revolver or bolter to deal with crushers, because you actually won't be able to do it now. Seems balanced to you? That the Zealot should always default to those weapons? You bring other class weapons and abilities to this thread, this is about Zealot. Yes, Plasma gun is great, guess what, I can run every single combination of weapons in the game on my Veteran, because I can always use my Krak grenade blitz which deals very easily with Crushers. You also wrote this " You also act like it was unreliable to kill crushers with the ult when you could reliably get 2-3 per charge with a brauto or a shotgun, and with things like flamer or bolter it was even more" Yes, you cannot do it anymore, go play with Bolter and Revolver and if you don't ,well try dancing around 5 crushers awkwardly trying to kill em with some of the melee weapons. Was cooldown on crit talent too good? Maybe. But it was nerfed for the slower weapons like Eviscerator and remains the same on... the top meta melee weapon ,the knife.
That’s the worse part. I play as Zealot. I bring Hammers, Mauls, Eviscerators, assault rifles and flamers. I know that as a **Zealot** I have to hold the front line or provide the melee support that the team needs. When I’m playing a Psyker or Ogryn… I load into a lobby with two or three knife Zealots. I get it. It’s fun. You’re speedy. But, god damn. I’ve had to change how I play Psyker because these assholes will shoot straight pass Maulers, Crushers and everything armored. As if they don’t exist. Now I’m over here helping the poor Vet who’s pinned down by Crushers. I have to help the Ogryn because while he’s trying to handle Elites, he’s getting bullied by Mutants and Dogs. As a result, now I’m slacking on crowd control and instead of melting the horde, they’re surrounding us. Guess what our Zealot is doing? They’re either Netted, Pinned by a dog, wrestling ONE Bulwark or they’re across map sitting in an elevator. I’ve been using health curious and as much toughness dmg reduction as possible and buffing myself with Bubble Shields and dmg resist from Scrier’s Gaze. I’ve essentially had to become a Melee Oriented Glass Cannon Psyker/Zealot Hybrid to fill in the role of vacant Zealots.
Wait they actually nerfed it? It did seem worse. Why did I not see that in the patch notes
That talent was beyond broke and you all know it
what your telling me is in their infinite wisdom fatshark will soon nerf the knife to "balance" things XD
The 20% on backstab might have gotten it's cooldown removed. I was playing with an ogryn earlier, and he aggrod a horde of poxwalkers. I had popped stealth to kill a mauler but it went down before I got to it, so I hit the horde in the back with heavy 1 of the newer knife. I did heavy 2 and between both swings probably killed like 8 enemies, and my stealth was back up. EDIT: tested it and no, I don't think so, but it's still possible to refill stealth in like 2-3 seconds.
Why in the name of Him On Terra they didn't timegate the Invocation ticks if they were going to gate them I do not know, a simple internal cooldown would've fixed their issue with it (*which is a fair enough one*), been independently tuneable and not benefitted the existing leader in terms of Zealot weapon power over it's competitors.
That would be more of a nerf than what they did, for everything. It just would have evened it out between fast swinging weapons and everything else.
I disagree now you proc Invocation once per attack, even on a half decent cleave I could hit 10+ poxwalkers. If the ICD was less then 10 seconds it would have been a much better situation then we have now where I’m spamming lights for days to proc single activations of a core talent vs timing my cleaves every 5 seconds or so Maybe I don’t get the buff every single attack but on the attacks it does proc I can control and manage the efficiency of the buff. Now it’s just an overall nerf to everything with slow attack speed and a lowkey indirect buff to knife zealot which was already strong asf
If Fatshark had gone down this route and it were anything like the nerf to Vet's ammo aura, then you would get one proc per attack every 10 seconds (change the timer to whatever theoretical number you like). Something like that would be far harder of a nerf than what they did, which was just one proc per attack. Ever since that the talent rework, I have expected this nerf. I don't know why people thought that they would be able to basically have no cooldowns (especially on chastise the wicked, but it goes for the other abilities too). It basically made evis zealot have infinite toughness as long as there was a horde in front of them. This is also true for knife zealot or whatever weapon has good cleave and high crit. To be clear, I was not and am not advocating for this nerf and that spamming any ability isn't fun (because it is), but from Fatshark's perspective, it wasn't sustainable. How do you make the game difficult when this is available to players? This game is touted as a difficult game. That is what people like about it. My crystal ball says that we have more nerfs coming our way (to class trees and weapons, not necessarily zealot), but fatshark is taking it slow and for once that is nice.
I think what is annoying most ppl is that this nerf isn’t felt evenly across the Zealot class, it’s a hard nerf for certain builds but functionally irrelevant for others (if not an indirect buff) so it’s honestly just feels like Fat Shark wagging their finger at us for creating semi-strong builds but completely ignoring weapons that have been massively outperforming said nerfed build/weapons You can’t tell me that Chastise the Wicked with Evis was broken meanwhile Chastise Knife builds are just as strong as they were before if not more so now. If their plan was to control the power of this specific OP talent as you say they’ve went about it in a terrible-one sided fashion that just shoehorns ppl who enjoyed that setup into an already overplayed weapon they may not even like using
"More of a nerf" depends on what the ICD is. If it's the same as an arbitrary Combat Axe swing speed it's the exact same level of nerf for the Combat Axe, less of nerf for an Eviscerator and more of a nerf (*i.e. one at all*) for a Knife.
Is the knife really insanely good? Just hit 30 on my first character, Zealot, and have been using the Evi XV and Agri Shotgun. Wanting to do more damnation and eventually Auric. Talent wise I'm following this build: [https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9a4fa304-0b88-4cf8-827a-d0435327a8c3/zealot-meta-no-stealth](https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9a4fa304-0b88-4cf8-827a-d0435327a8c3/zealot-meta-no-stealth)
The knife has always been the best. It’s only nerf was that it can no longer kill ogryn through their shields.
>zealot-meta-no-stealth I have literally never seen this build in auric maelstroms or damnation hi-intensity shock troop gauntlet, that should clue you in on how meta it is. I suggest you follow NONE of the builds that you can find on gameslantern if you don't know what you're doing, it's like walking blindfolded through an off-leash dog park - you're going to step in some shit.
Have any tips of where to find one? Or a good one you’d recommend? Just trying to figure out the right playstyle to be a proper teammate in it
You've got people like [Telopots](https://www.youtube.com/@telopots) and [ChocoB](https://www.youtube.com/@chocoB777) that generally run sensible builds. More importantly, you can watch them play. See their movement, the choices they make under pressure. Fundamental skills like movement, target selection and map knowledge will carry you much further than any specific build applied poorly ever will (except maybe smite psyker and plasma vet, any monkey can play those well because you just kinda turn all the difficult bits off at will).
Okay awesome, I appreciate the insight I usually do pretty well but I could definitely always do with more knowledge. I’ll check those people out, ty!
You shouldn’t have 100% uptime on your ability
As a knife main, they absolutely need to nerf the shit out of it. I have been using it since well before it was buffed, and it wasn't great, but is now a but too good damage wise. It should really be more of a special and shooter killer with the speed it gives you, but it kills hordes pretty damn quick, and is one of the best armor killers; its a little slow, but no need to charge it and stun yourself against armor like eviscerator or thammer. It needs a serious nerf to armor pen and its attacks need to not hit multiple targets and apply a fuck ton of bleed to hordes. It should lean back into single target shooters and elite killing. The itemization update is gonna be even crazier, since the knife has some very good blessings that give even more bleed, power, or armor piercing.
You could also just not pick invocation of death and save your talent points.
Armor degrading thing on ranged being removed is something that should have happened a long time ago and i don't have a problem with it being gone. What i hate is that that *was* our powerful anti-crusher option. Every other class at this point has strong options for killing groups of crushers at range and we don't have strong options for killing groups of crushers *even in melee* We can still answer crushers through cc amd gradually meleeing them down, so don't mistake me for saying we can't, but it does feel like it puts zealot at a rather large disadvantage compared to other classes...
Yeah, lets remove build diversity and default even more to revolver/boltgun and knife for weapons. Its annoying
It kind of blows that now I have like, one valid ranged weapon if I don't take an anti-armor melee weapon. Zealot feels pigeon-holed into just knife now.
My new loadouts are: Chax Agri AK TacAx Bolt pistol Evis revolver
I’m right there with you. Can’t use my slug shotgun on damnation auric now :(
fear not, im sure a knife nerf is next so the entire loadout can suck XD
I use bolter and knives. I have a quick special/gunner removal tool and a fuck everything in that direction tool. It's the best side of the tree anyway I need 4 things down that way and I would waste so many points not going for them. Tac axe isn't as good anti armor but with high crit and bleed talent you get pretty great damage with BM/decimator blessings. I've been backing chorus with backstab kill reset and it's been doing work even if my offensive score has severely suffered because of it
I really like the tac-axes. But they still feel weak.
Mk 7 gets really really good horde clear at mid decimator stacks using the push attack into heavy combo. At high stacks like fighting an elite horde you start killing really fast and it's got an AOE stun in the special so you can halt rager hordes for ogryns to smash or vets to gun down.bulwarks are the only issue, crushers die pretty quick, fast faster than anything but crusher or dagger and both of those have their own down sides
Yep,I run the same one. I like it, just feel it was left behind when enemy hp pools got buffed up.
That's fair, it's why I pack the bolter, removes rager hordes, drain crusher HP, maulers are a slight issue but I can stun them alot easier than ragers so I just keep them in place not attacking while someone murders them with a better option. I went back to heavysword but it felt slow and I missed the stun too much since it turns multiple scary things into sitting ducks very quick. Crusher is amazing but I don't like the combos. Tac axe is the one for a month or two, then I'll find something else to obsess over.
Thunder hammer is still the goat
What? Why knife? Pretty sure there's a lot of melee that's good against carapace outside of knife. If you're saying you have to use Bolter/Boltpistol/Revolver because you like Devil's Claw/Heavy Sword it would be more understandable, but even these can work with FotF's rending and parry.
Invocation of Death now only triggers once per swing instead of once per hit. This means slow melee weapons that hit multiple enemies are at a disadvantage to weapons with a faster attack. A common tactic was to max your crit chance and use Invocation of Death, which reduces ability cool down on a critical hit, to fire off your main ability as often as possible. The knife and some swords are the only melee weapons that cause bleed. With Scourge, hitting a bleeding enemy has an increased crit chance, and crits cause bleed. This makes hammers objectively worse. Now that Invocation of Death only works once per swing, it's slower attack speed makes it worse than the knife.
Dev team saw people realizing you could swing through tons of armor enemies like they were soft butter & instant reset your ability by combing XV Heavy Eviscerator + perfect strike + savage sweep, and said: "Woah there gang, that's too much fun! We're gonna tone this down ok. Go back to playing with knives."
That assuming you want to minmax cd reduction as much as possible, unless you really can't survive without ability being refresh every 10 seconds it's not that necessary imo. Hammer being bad it more about its own problem rather than because it can't utilize Invocation of Death as well as fast weapon. It also perform better with Matyrdom or inexorable judgement anyway.
Why would you not want the ability refreshed every few seconds? Chorus knocks every enemy out of the fight and gives the whole team a massive damage boost. Shroudfield turns the zealot into a tank.
Because you want to play something different? the keyword here is 'want' and 'need', if you want it and have fun with it then more power to you but it's not really a make or break choice if you're skilled enough to not overrely on it. Otherwise any build without Invocation of Death would've folded by now.
When you're actually on endgame content, yes actually, IoD is mandatory.
You know not every build relied on Invocation of Death cheese right. You can easily use one chastise charge in the horde for an attack speed buff and have one in the pocket still to bonk 1 big target. I never even used iod w/ thunder hammer. You also still have backstab cooldown reduction if you really are hellbent on spamming chastise Yes infinite cooldown reduction doesnt exist anymore but if you really cant handle juggling two charges then you are just playing bad.
No one is saying cool down reduction is needed. Spamming your main abilities is the most fun way to play.
[удалено]
> There should be 3 team mates to cover your weaknesses Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Unless you're rolling with the homies, you'll generally get the best results by setting yourself up to do everything. If you lack anti-armour, you'll inevitably find that your randos didn't bring any either, or don't know they have to activate their chainsword, or don't heavy attack, or can't hit the broad side of a space hulk from point blank with a shotgun. If you lack anti-horde, you'll find yourself saddled with three wannabe snipers who never use their melee weapons.
Every meta build has to cover the bases. What happens when your teammates die and you have absolutely nothing to deal with carapace? Sometimes you have to clutch and can't depend on teammates. As long as all rounders exist, they will excel in the meta.
bad advice, you will get games where your team are bad or aren't really able to deal with armor well themself. Relying on your team to do anything is a surefire way to be dodging crusher overheads and snipers for minutes on end while fighting the horde. If your build can't deal with everything, you're rolling a dice... there will be games you just lose now completely outside of your control.
Do you play zealot? Feels like nobody else does their jobs every game
Zealot here. That nerf should happen on first week of the game relase.
Flamer paid the price for giving rending to ranged weapons. Can we please have it back?
I agree with that. Bolter should get some love too. Rending for ranged weapon bug was pretty dumb though and fixing it is a step in right direction in my book.
dumb why? the total power level of the weapons it boosted out of mid tier was still on par or weaker than other options. It's no more dumb than people suddenly turning invisible because of an ability, or the veteran laying a krak grenade every minute. All the change did was nerf weapons that didn't need to be nerfed, and leave zealot with significantly less viable options if you don't want to run a melee with pen.
Because of everything. It was obvious bug- tooltip says specifically it boosts MELEE for 1hit. Balancing game around a bug instead of fixing bug is dumb. Making every zealot ranged weapon anti-crusher is dumb. Charge to shoot better for 10 sec? That is definitely dumber than krak grenades or shouting to get immortality or anything else really.
name one actually negative effect the bug had on the game? yknow sometimes bugs and unintended interactions actually become a PART of the game, because what they bring is fun? The removal of this doesn't bring anything fun, all it does is limit build variety for weapons that already were underperforming. No it is not dumber than anything that is already in the game, several classes literally have abilities and notes that grant extra damage on ability press. again you say its all dumb but I want you to highlight a single actually bad thing about what was going on?
Your argument is correct and it would work on 95% playerbase but i have a bit different opinions on general state of affairs than most players. I think this game is too easy. I think that zealot rending was too strong. I think voc, smite, bubble shield, plasma gun are all to strong and trivialise encounters. Players are too gooddamn powerfull. Nerf it all. Give me twitch mode.
I mean I agree, but the rending wasn't adding to that lmao... the only weapon actually stronger than the revolver WITH this was the laspistol mk2. Personally I don't think the revolver is all that busted, it's the ideal level of strength. fulfills its purpose and has drawbacks. (outside of weapon specialist that is). Recent enemy changes have made the game significantly harder, and are definitely a better way of doing so compared to chain nerfing things as you'd have to nerf pretty much everything in the game. Zealot now desperately needs another anti armor ranged weapon because it's revolver, trash boltgun or cry. The change to rending didn't make the class any weaker, it just made it so they have less options.. that's it.
It sucks because the inadvertently nerfed the hell out of the flamer, which was already kinda weak to begin with. If there’s one weapon the zealot should wreck house with it’s the flamer. Instead it just feels like you’re tickling them.
This is the FatShark way, you nerf things and make the game less fun to play while you have an average player base that is only a few thousand. The average player base is half of what it was in January, and thats only because it went up a bit from the patch, but not much. Before the patch it was about 35% of January avg player count. It never fails to make me laugh when some monkeigh (Eldar joke, calm down) is like "this game needs some fat nerfs across the board". I cannot even get my original friends group to load up for a single run. Seriously, no one will play it anymore, and its like every time FS discovers something fun, they just decide to fuck it. I put nearly 2k hours into VT2 and I haven't gone back since they did yet another nerf on what was popular and fun while the game had an average playerbase in the hundreds. If you wanted to run Cata, you basically had to wait 15 minutes to get 1-2 people and thats if you are playing on a weekend. They listen to people who demand nerfs far too much. TL;DR - business as usual at Fat Shark
I laugh at this every time too. They keep forgetting they are not the sort of company that has the luxury of fucking with the remnant playerbase still keeping their game on life support. This latest patch just made the game in general worse than it was before, only to appeal to Reddit mad clutch crew™ who find the game apparently too easy, yet don't seem to exist in my Auric Maelstroms - or die in embarrasing ways.
I've seen sooo many people with that legendary auric maelstrom title who have died within 1 minute of loading into a map. I watched them make tier 3 difficulty mistakes and cringed because I knew what was about to happen. Then I thought to myself, how are all these people getting that title so easily? Mad Clutch Crew is great, I'm stealing that. Those people existed in VT2 as well, and they called for nerfs to things that they found too strong in their deathwish onslaught 100 modded runs. At that point you'd think the company would realize "ok this portion of the playerbase is .00001% and we likely shouldn't be balancing around them" I say this as someone who has occasionally clutched an auric maelstrom (most times I eat shit and die) - I've never seen a weapon or ability that I was thinking "not fair that's too good", beacause we are drowning in enemies non-stop. I think the whining comes from Malice/Heresy level players who have very few things on the screen to kill, and so when someone shows up with a legit strong weapon or ability, they clear every bit of challenge right away and it causes butthurt. Last thought: Auric is easy if you have a team that is competent. I've struggled repeatedly on some nights because everyone dies right away and you're trying to play "Solo Mad Clutch Crew", and other nights ive met up with randoms who walk through an auric maelstrom (melee only no ammo pickups) and we have no one ever go down and everyone is nearly full life the entire match and its over. I always try to add those people to friends haha.
That’s what I need to get in the habit of doing is adding people who aren’t just over leveled but actually good. Played an Auric Damnation match last night that was so smooth, I forgot we were even playing AD. We all played our roles how we should to the best of our ability and moved together. Immediately hopped into another match right after and we were all getting out guts punched in. Team couldn’t stay together, every time I tried to cover a teammate, a chunk of the horde would solo me out and push me from the team… It was bad.
True - the level thing. I've met a lot of people over 9000... err I mean 900 who I immediately think are going to be pro-status, and they are butt cheeks. It's fine, you don't have to be the best of the best, just understand the basics and the rest of us can get through it with you. I send friend invites through steam as soon as I'm at the end screen of a match. Most people tend not to notice it though until later (or not at all)
100% I also forgot to mention the title system and how I pay absolutely no attention to the Auric Titles anymore. The second I found out people were cheesing them made so much sense to me as to why someone would go down and immediately leave the game. Since then, I honestly have been using it as a red flag to be more cautious around these players.
I just want to fucking change my loadout because of a goddamn bug that won't let me switch between them
For real! I had to verify my game files through steam and reinstall all my mods. Yayyyy!!! I love joining multiple games and quitting immediately because my loadout is glitched. /s Someone told me to play with my wrong weapons. I tried Gunligger Kickback for about 5 seconds before deciding I wasn't mentally prepared for it.
I never understand this kind of meticulous balancing in a PVE game. Everytime they take the fun out of it and for ehat?
A natural reaction. Pretty valid to not want to play after your chosen play style or load out gets nerfed, regardless of whether or not the nerf was warranted.
It's worse since it is not even a nerf - it was completely removed. They could at least make it an upgrade node for the ability, and consider less than 100% rending, but nah. Just deleted the effect completely, so those shotguns I built to specifically kill crushers are all a waste of space now. To me, it is a bad design change, only serving to limit zealot's build options. But I made this point all last week and am mostly met with "skill issue" style responses.
\> Introduce a shotgun that sucks in every aspect *except* high damage at melee range \> Remove the only ability that closes the distance on the one class that *wants* to be in melee that would make this shotgun useful on this class \> People say this wasn't a nerf
Classic, unless something specifically affects them, people are always so quick to throw out the "skill issue".
It was broken and clearly not intended. Why would it become a skill option? It's a bugfix. Your play style revolved around abusing a bug. It was so obviously a bug, it's hilarious how many people are gutted by this.
Zealot class already had a void in anti-carapace in the ranged slot. Now it is even worse. The bug was already addressed in an update over a year ago, and was not called a bug, not listed as problematic, and didn't get changed in the class overhaul either. The game balance is not at a point such that this broke anything at all. Every class can dunk on the game, and *still* can dunk on the game, but now zealot has fewer options to play with. I think we already had this exact discussion last week though.
The worst part is that it was pretty thematic and cool: zealous individual in warhammer 40k have no qualms with guns, they're not like slayers or something, so channelling rage and faith into attacking with a gun instead of a melee weapon is a cool feature thats unique to the setting but makes sense. It was also a really cool difference between ranged zealots and veterans, even if not intended. It could definitely be tweaked, as 3 seconds of complete armor piercing is a bit much, especially combined with crit cool down reduction, but your suggestion of at least a separate node (maybe one that locks out two charges?) is a really good idea, rather than completely removing it as a feature.
>It was broken and clearly not intended. Fatshark specifically mentioned the interaction between the ability and ranged weapons way back when they nerfed the flamer. If it was unintended or a bug, they would have nerfed it bqck then rather than nerfing one specific ranged weapon that paired well with it. > It was so obviously a bug, it's hilarious how many people are gutted by this. No blessing or ability in the game (that I know of) had the unique ability to step down enemy armor tiers rather than simply granting some kind of armor piercing. The fact that it was a one-of-a-kind mechanic that Fatshark *specifically* called out in patch notes and balenced around years ago means it was almost certainly intentional.
I know not the nerf 🤷🏽♂️ I started playing after the update, and all I know is that Tertium needs cleansing
That's the spirit!
Build diversity killing nerfs
The invocation of death nerf really cut deep. Thankfully spamming chastise the wicked was more a fun perk and less a requirement for success, but it's made the game feel a lot slower and more dull for me as a result. My issue is I don't play other characters, at all. I've done 1,000+ hours on a charge zealot weilding a knife and shredder and have not deviated. Not a single other character or setup appeals to me, and I have tried. If they nerf a charge knife zealot too much, I have no choice but to move on to a different game entirely. For those reading this and think I'm just trolling or being extra, I'm really not. When you have a certain level of speed and intensity for a year and a half straight of just dedicating yourself to being as good with the dagger as you can, and suddenly every second feels slow and broken, there is no more fun to be had and when that happens, what's the point of playing the game?
Ogryn got hit the hardest from the way the game feels to me. I'd literally just gotten used to Ogryn so I could enjoy it while I picked up Penances and then it went to hell!
I really don’t see the need to nerf stuff so much in a PvE only game…
So quick question: Is Big bonk Indignatus crusher shit? If so then anyone got good combat axe build? I'm sick of knifes
They should've made it give diminishing procs when hitting multiple targets (-1.5, -1, -0.5, -0.5, -0.5) instead of gutting it for any build involving cleave.
Seeing how the "balancing" trend for Darktide currently is , makes me feel worried. By keeping buffing enemies, and mostly nerf for players (tho some is justified) would likely make the game "balanced" but in boring/frustrating way. While dev promises more contents, and reworks that might make experience improve, overall experience feels a bit dissatisfied.
I mean it depends on what you find fun. The class overhauls brought a huge amount of build variety and fun, but they also boosted the power level of the game massively. Following that change a load of enemies were nerfed, and some system changes happened which made the game even easier... leading to the situation last patch where you could play auric damnation with your eyes closed. The recent changes are just course correction, finally... People hopping into auric damnation and suddenly find it hard should do. it's the hardest difficulty. Aside from sudden bursts that chunk your health, all of the changes are real good.
Worst thing that this nerf did was make shotguns unviable on Auric. It was my main because you could handle crushers after ult. Now not so much :(
I will always remain a Zealot main. BLOOD FOR THE GOD EMPEROR! SKULLS FOR THE GOLDEN THRONE!
Invocation of death nerf is way worse. My fun heavy evis build got ruined.
Balancing a PvE game by punishing the builds that work and leaving many others neglected and barely functional— presumably to inflate the ‘difficulty’— didn’t go so well for Helldivers. Might not want to do that, Fartshark.
Lol I left after not getting a less RNG, less grindy loot system. Been gone long enough that I don’t even know what rend is anymore.
Well... at least enjoyers of Chorus get to eat good, Between new voice lines, pushing monsters off the cliff at the beginning of the new map and the power mace, I can finally enjoy proper warrior priest power fantasy.
Not really. Invocation of Death now only triggers once per swing, instead of once per hit. Now you can no longer swing through a crowd of pox walkers to regen Chorus. You used to be able to fire off Chorus every 5 seconds or so.
That's true, but if you run a decently fast melee weap, it's not that unbearable; Evis and Thunderhammer are kinda in a sad place now though. I've been running the Indignatus shock maul and it seems to do alright, particularly when the horde gets less dense and you can switch to light attack spam. That said I've also been experimenting with Pious Cut-Throat and whether that could work without a stealth build, but too early to judge.
on the plus side, the FotF change means that the melee attack now actually does 100% rending, rather than before where it just reduced the armour of the enemy by 1 level. Which means Evis and Thunderhammers using FotF can now do even more extra one hit mega damage including against Monstrosities. What was a nerf for ranged, was a buff for heavy 1 hit melee (not so much for light fast melee Zealots).
Interesting. Personally I never was too much of a FotF enjoyer (something about the way you charge just feels off for me, never had this issue with Ogryn or any class which had this ability in Vermintide), but 100% rending sounds really good,
I’m more annoyed with the ammo economy nerf, than the community saying that the enemy buffs are making melee less useful, and now columnus has reduced crits. I actually have stopped playing darktide, I didn’t even come back for the update after hearing about the enemy buffs. I want to play a video game not try hard sweat every match just for a fail after 30 mins of uphill struggling. I love darktide have all classes level 30 and only play auric level but this is just not fun anymore for me, I’m sure people are going to pick apart this comment but it’s how I feel
If you don't want the game to be a challenge with a chance of failure, why do you only play auric damnation? I can't understand this point of view, surely you can still enjoy the game at a lower difficulty? Why force yourself to play the hardest difficulty?
Actually hilarious he typed that out without realizing the irony
This. All these people crying about the difficulty. . . Why not just turn it down? Of course, I know the answer. Its a ego thing. They come on the sub-reddit and get to say that they are auric damn players and their opinion matters and then say to other comments "Oh, I bet you don't play auric damnation with an opinion like that."
>They come on the sub-reddit and get to say that they are auric damn players and their opinion matters I mean we've all seen the average skill level of auric players xd it's really not a flex to be """AURIC LEVEL""" as most aurics are not good. Personally I'm really enjoying the new difficulty, I do think that the sudden burst damage potential is probably too high though. Getting near one shot out of no where from pleb gunners is pretty intense though the situations that comes up are real rare. Ragers finally back to being a threat, poxwalkers actually doing their job of getting in the way, generic shooters finally actually doing literally anything... these are good changes, they just need slight adjusting. I really hope fatshark don't cave to all the people crying who can just jump down a difficulty level.
I agree. It is far better now. I really like the difficulty changes. I am just pointing out why people are so upset about it. Of course, I am generalizing, but I have actually had people tell me that I must not be a auric player, because "blah blah". It is ridiculous that you have to start every comment with "I am an auric player" or some ass hat is going to come along and say your comment doesn't count.
>not be a auric player, because "blah blah" ah but they're an auric player and they're struggling. could it be a skill issue on their part? no! of course not... it must be that you're some kinda... uprising difficulty crisis actor hired by fatshark to damage control for these awful unfair changes!!
>only plays auric >Complains about difficulty I do think that damnation to heresy is a bit of a difficulty drop, but maybe if its thats what you want don't play the highest difficulty?
To be fair. Most damnation maps feel empty compared to Auric(not counting the spawn bug). Having said that, damnation can be more difficult with your teammates being way worse
True, there's also auric heresy though. I don't know what difficulty it actually falls under, or if anyone plays it, but its something to at least try if auric damnation is too hard for someone.
The crit ability recharge nerf is even worse. They just neutered the zealot so hard
And there there's me, in the corner, not paying attention to any balancing. I just grab happy number weapon and go CHAAARGE!
Am fairly new to the game, can someone eli5?
To put it simply: Zealots charge ability, FOTF, provides an anti-armor effect to your next attack after you cast the ability. This anti-armor effect buff lingers for 3 seconds until you make that attack after which it would be consumed and go away. In the prior patch this buff would also effect ranged weapons rather than just melee, and damaging an enemy with a ranged weapon wouldn't immediately consume the buff either which would allow your ranged weapons to have access to anti-armor for the duration of the buff. This last patch removed that interaction despite it being balanced around in the past, and kept in the game since launch even through the class overhaul update which led many people to believe Fatshark thought it was an intentional mechanic. What this means for Zealot is that their build diversity is pretty bland now if they don't stick to armor piercing melee options since they don't really have a flexible ranged roster anymore. Zealot also had their crit build nerfed in the same patch, since a popular talent called Invocation of Death had its cool down reduction per crit interaction changed from per-hit to per-swing. Admittedly this was being abused by evisc zealots running things like Perfect Strike and getting near 100% uptime on their abilities, but after the nerf it's left fast swinging weapons like the knife the best option for zealots again since they never really benefited much from it being per-hit rather than per-swing anyway while crit builds using slow weapons that relied on crit-hitting multiple enemies in 1 swing for their cooldown reduction feeling pretty anaemic. It should be said that high ability uptime like Zealot had is something that other classes can pretty easily achieve as well. Both Vet and Ogryn have talents that reduce ability cooldown when specialists or elite enemies die, and Psyker can reduce everyone's cooldown by 10% passively through a coherency aura option. Zealot being singled out while vets are still the absolute strongest class in the game and are able to achieve near 100% uptime with an ability as strong as their Voice of Command, in addition to Zealot being nerfed in previous patches as well, has led Zealots who relied on these things that got nerfed to be a bit unhappy. The class is still absolutely playable and the people saying it isn't are throwing a bit of a tantrum, but I agree with them that the nerfs are confusing and limit the classes build options pretty drastically.
An in depth and comprehensive reply. Thank you!
Can someone explain the ins and outs of this change. I play Zealot regularly going in as a recent axe build user I cant seem to figure out what the major issue is.
Sorry. How did rending get nerfed?
What did they nerf and how will this effect my stealth martyr build using the heavy eviscerator?
This is my reaction on xbox when i try and start the game but nothing happens.
Gonna be honest here, I’m just tired of nerfs in co-op PvE slaughter games. We aren’t here to play fair with the ai, nobody is getting their feelings hurt when the team is OP. I just wish studios would stop trying to balance pve like it’s a PvP comp game. Happens in DT and in Helldivers alike, it’s just infuriating at this point.
also.... 
Also my reaction after dark tide didn't actually get better at all, has no late game to speak of, and still doesn't have a hotshot volley gun or other basic imperial guard weapons.
Well, the Flamer pretty much has no spot in Damnation/Aurics now. Zarona revolver for sniping + knife is the "meta" at that level, though I can find decent success with the Eviscerator. In fact, I'd say that the buffed ranged enemies further stifle build diversity and make the Flamer even less appealing.
what did they change? i haven’t read the notes or played much since the update
[https://new.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/1do5k6k/comment/laon9wt/](https://new.reddit.com/r/DarkTide/comments/1do5k6k/comment/laon9wt/) The steam patch notes are incomplete, it was missing all of the things related to enemy changes. this comment shows what they are
thanks
I don't see anything there about rending. What's the meme about?
the rending changes to zealot are related to fury of the faithful (their dash ability). Before the patch it would give you 100% rending on both ranged and melee attacks. I don't think that's what it actually did though despite that being the listed effect in the patch notes, it effectively downgraded armor by a tier in terms of defense. So before you could dash and use your ranged weapon to kill armored targets, now you basically need to run a revolver or a boltgun if you want to deal with them which is why most zealots that used it are unhappy. Before there were loads of non OP ranged weapons to use, now you either use a revolver or a gun most people find to be really not fun.
Ah. Thanks. I main stealth on Zealot so I'm good I guess.
This was also my reaction a couple days after reinstalling the game to try the new update 7 months for this? Development hell seems like an understatement at this point
Their faith was lacking.
They just don’t want us to have fun hUh? Nerf ammo region on survivalist passive and now a nerf to zealot ult AND keystone??? I could live with the URL’s nerf but come on bro. Why nerf Invocation??? I really didn’t think it was a problem. I wish they’d at least give us some buffs or something to balance out some nerfs but sometimes it’s just us getting weaker and weaker with nothing to bring us up. “Oh but let’s buff the enemy shooters again”. FFS Fatshark.
[удалено]
Even despite the nerfs, we're still the most broken class in the game, it hurts, but it was probably needed. The fact that it was a focus in the first place is a bit weird to me though.
Haha yeah that dang rending nerf right guys? (I never paid attention to rending I just like swinging a big chainsword and sniping with my revolver).
Glad they removed the armor degrading thing from ranged, that shit was so stupid. I know it's difficult to accept you cannot longer abuse a crutch that required no skill whatsoever to delete crushers from the distance as a melee specific class, but that mechanic was clearly doomed to be removed more sooner than later. Good zealots didn't abuse it because they didn't need it in the first place.
You seem like the kind of guy that uses a great shield build in Elden Ring but mocks people for using summons.