The general consensus is that loner promotes bad gameplay.
My proposed change is that loner has a temporary effect of maintaining the coherency bonus for 15 seconds once you’ve left coherency.
This allows the gameplay style that people have said they use loner for while discouraging the “kark the team, I’m going to speed run this” mentality.
IMO a better fix is to change Loner from “You always count as being within at least 2 coherency” to “You and ALLIES always count as being within at least 2 coherency”.
This shifts the skill from being a selfish “F*&(&# the team” skill to one that ALWAYS benefits the team. Maybe it might help teammates if the director throws a curveball that splits up the team. Maybe it provides an extra safety net when the team splits up to search for plasteel.
I’ve been working on a very similar idea. 100% support this, not only would it teach newer players how to use Loner well with the team, it also makes Loner much more valuable for people who already know the Loner play pattern well by giving full coherency and Aura effects.
One thing I’d add is to make it a true aura this way and provide the effect to everyone, which would both give your coherency to the rest of the team while you’re out flanking, and let the team get slightly separated in bad situations without immediately dropping coherency.
At the end of the day, speedrunner Zealots will be speedrunner Zealots whether they have current Loner or not, in part because Loner is a pretty terrible “aura” anyway. A change like this would make Loner an actually useful aura outside of point efficiency without compromising team play.
Everyone else with Loner: (uses Loner to run ahead of the team and gets killed)
Meanwhile me: (uses it as a last resort in case the rest of the team goes down and Shroudfield isn’t charged yet)
This is why we can’t have nice things.
That doesn’t exactly fit the name loner though…
That doesn’t strike me as being particularly important.
Isn’t that just nerf rather than fix?
And it probably not gonna stop people from leaving coherency anyway, that behavior is not exclusive to loner user.
It’s going to discourage it
I run Loner on all of my Zealot builds. It’s the second best aura in the game behind Survivalist, and much like Survivalist, I don’t think it should be confined to an aura. I think both of these abilities should be baked into the game mechanics universally, and these auras should just buff the effects.
Every special enemy kill should give back ammo, and everyone should get some base level of toughness regen outside of coherency.
I’ll 1-up you even further:
Loner —renamed to—> Self-sufficient Fighter
Effect: You now count as 2 players towards coherency.
You still have a baseline coherency bonus while alone. But while being with the group, everyone else gets +2 to coherency bonus rather than +1. Meaning with Loner Zealot, you can now breach the previous coherency cap of 4 by getting 5 stacks.
Everyone is social engineer this days.
So, i’ll be one too.
There are disablers in the game, they teach importance of staying together, much harsher than anything else.
The only thing that “loner” teach, is that it’s not good enough to be a rogue. Its not enough to willingly leave coherency, just to get this buff.
Also, it’s so funny to me that people consider anything that suggesting stepping out of coherency is fine, is promotes people to be on the other side of the map.
Learn to see something between two extremes.
I actually wonder why people direct those complaints into loner, instead of invis ults.
It much more beneficial for a rogue player to prevent disablers from catching you,
rather than small, tiny, little ticks of toughness regen, that doesn’t even work, if you get damaged.
That is why I’m suggesting it be something in-between
Firstly, I think Loner is fine and healthy for the game.
Secondly, I think “consensus” is people posting on the forums and isn’t representative of the community at large.
Lastly, I think a lot of forum folks are more interested in controlling other player’s behaviors instead of adapting to certain playstyles and improving their own play.
If they want to make it work the way (I think) it’s supposed to work, all they need to do is add a “when you are the last teammate standing” condition.
I said it before and will say it again. Nerfing loner in any way (and yes, this is not a rework, this is a nerf) will not encourage the “speedrunners” to stay with the team. It will encourage them to just pick another aura (like toughness dmg reduction) and still go do their thing.
Proper rework will look like “you can leave your team and be fine. But you will get more/better buffs if you stay in coherency”
Is this issue region specific?
Actually, 4 Zealots with it should provide 8 stacks then 
You’re smoking crack if you think it’s “healthy” for the game. Especially when one of your top rated threads is you asking your auric teammates to stay as a team, because positioning is important.
This aura enables zealots to speedrun certain missions, on maps like Enclavum Baross they might even trigger final event early and finish it halfway while the team hasn’t even reached the Bridge of Many Martyrs.
This ability’s design is really toxic and anti-teamplay, and at the very least in needs of an internal cooldown which resets only if you spend some time in coherency with other players again.
If you see a zealot leaving his team behind or doing god knows what during firefights, while Psykers and Vets in his team have to facetank melee enemies, there’s a very high chance he’s Loner user and not anything else.
Changing it might not fix the problem of people running ahead, but giving such tools to bad teamplayers surely doesn’t make the game better.
That’s what I use Loner for. It’s a last resort for if my Shroudfield isn’t charged and I’m the last one alive.
Loner presents a very unique playstyle. The whole backstabbing tree is all about getting into an enemy’s backline and taking out valuable targets. It’s like the old Zealot rushdown builds, but instead charging in screaming like a maniac, you go all sneaky beaky like.
Only it doesn’t work fully at the moment because the way threat works you’ll instantly be surrounded wherever you pop out.
That said, a lot of people don’t even seem to entertain that playstyle here. You exhibit precisely their argument.
Contrarian postion here, but:
While Darktide does promote fighting as a team, it was actually not designed with the intent of having you sit on top of each other 24/7.
There is so many level design schisms present clearly encouraging people to split off temporarily alone or in 2-man-groups - Either to explore the maps for resources faster or to achieve an objective.
If you play for effective cleartime, you’d constantly be 2x 2-man-teams.
I don’t think the same aura type stacks, Fingeris. But I’m not certain on that.
He has a point. It’s situation dependent. In some cases splitting off is beneficial. In some cases it is not.
Knowing when and when not to is part of the skillset a great player should have.
Also Psyker and Vets shouldn’t expect to have a frontline 100% of the time. This isn’t a tank-dps-heal MMO like WoW. This is a fluid combat game where you’re asked to bring melee prowess and ranged accuracy to the table at the same time.