I can do 400-500k ranged damage with kickback without really trying on a melee build with Ogryn, that’s the same I do with a Hybrid build on Vet when I have to carry (that has half the health pool and half the DR). Kickback is stupidly strong. If Vet would have access to that it would be an instant top pick.
Of course, if you are playing gunlugger better take Ripper II for the boss/elite deletion.
It’s nowhere near pre-nerf psyker Voidstrike… Nowhere near that. Believe me I played patch 13 voidstrike a lot, and it doesn’t even come close.
The bottom line is it isn’t an outlier among strong things currently which means it’s in a good place as a class-specific option. There is enough reason to pick other strong weapons, or even weaker ones for specific jobs.
Statistically maybe, but from the numbers I’ve seen some folk put out, and the feeling of having stuff constantly atomized in front of you even if you engaged it first? It’s dangerously close to being there, at least when it comes to damage potential, and experience for the rest of the team.
Though the only reason I still haven’t made up my mind on it is that I don’t see people perform to that extent all that often relative to how common it was on psykers when the God Emperor was still actively channeling his will through them.
Not even close. I easily did 50%+ of team damage with Voidstrike in every game, sometimes even up to 70%. This would include comps with patch 13 Ogryns with their 6 bleed/heavy and +30% rending still going.
1-2 scoreboards are very unreliable in this case. Depending on the teamcomp, premade teams, and bad players you can do some ridiculous damage with even weak weapons. Volume and reliable output are key.
That can be done with a lot of stuff and it’s just bad practice on players part. I regularly run into this problem when there is something like Surge, Revolver, Kickback, or a trigger-happy Gunlugger on the team, and it can happen with any ranged heavy build on your team actually… Or just with a trigger happy Ogryn.
What might help the plasma to delete enemies in front of allies (similar to Revolver) is how it can penetrate allies, while something like Columbus V cannot (but could be a whole lot more oppressive if it could).
Edit: Playing with an Assail psyker that prioritizes the targets in front of you in the same way still feel more oppressive than a plasma Vet doing it, even tho I think Assail is now fine after all the nerfs power-wise.
I don’t personally mind things dying before I get there, just so long as all the other stuff is also dying. If everything dies, I don’t really care who did the killing. I adjust my playstyle to fit whatever randoms I am with. If they are just ranging everything and I am on a melee build, I’ll just focus on keeping the melee that slip through off them. If I wanted to just blitz through everything I wouldn’t be playing higher difficulty. On high difficulty I care about completing the mission, not about my own personal stat sheet at the end. As long as that “coherency eff and damage taken” reads high and low respectively and the materials collected is all good I don’t care about the rest of the numbers.
I say what I said because I’ve seen people put out that much. Though nowhere near 70, definitely close to 50 (30 to40ish).
Obviously, which is why I opened with the “statistical” bit. and it goes both ways mind you. Though tbf I was only responding to his comment in a vacuum and not in relation to our comments. People seem to hate on the right things for the wrong reasons. There’s plenty of reasonable motivations to not want scoreboards, and “people just obsess over the numbers” is not one of them.
I’m aware of the caveats. It’s part of why I’m still on the fence, and not on the “nerf plasma” side. But that doesn’t change the fact that when it comes to it’s DMG potential you can’t really deny that it can get pretty oppressive in the right (wrong?) hands. Same for most of the things you mentioned. The real question is, relative to how frequently its used (very) does it happen often enough for it to be a concern (eg pre-nerf god emperor psykers)? IDK tbh, though most people don’t seem to do that well with it so it doesn’t bother me too much that some can.
I don’t think damage potential means oppressive. Oppressive is when you are denied fun/gameplay.
That said I’m in no way denying that Plasma is a strong weapon. I’m mainly arguing the point that I don’t think it’s oppressive and I don’t think it’s an outlier. The fact that there are alternatives to pick from an efficiency standpoint is also something that strengthens the point that there is no problem with it (it doesn’t strangle weapon diversity).
Really good players will make weak weapons/classes look extremely strong and good weapons/classes feel ridiculous.
That’s just average for me playing basically any build. 30-40% is basically what I would consider to be balanced if you are playing a damage-focused build instead of a tanky/CC-focused one.
If you are a good player, picking a damage-focused build and you can’t do 30% of the team’s damage at least there is some kind of a problem with game balance.
Edit: Unless all builds in the team are damage-focused or something…
These are not mutually in- or exclusive. It’s a factor in determining whether something is oppressive, at least IMO. Ofc there’s other factors to be considered besides this one that also goes into trying to determine whether something is “oppressive”.
Different debate but all I ever see on vets these days are only Revolvers, Plasma, and maybe the odd K1a or C5 IAG, sooo. . .
It really depends on how it translates to the ingame experience, but tbh I’ve got nothing that can make a compelling argument here since I don’t have access to FS’s data so the best I can do here is a “source: trust me bro”. * shrug *
Yeah, absolutely. Builds not doing that great on damage can still feel oppressive, or come with bad experiences for other players.
Is this a counterpoint?
I think we can agree that K12 is weak, recon feels dumb and Helbore is hard to play while not being that good unless you are sweating. If you would go for braced you’d just pick Zealot…
My point was it doesn’t strangle build diversity, not that it doesn’t feel good to play (although currently it doesn’t due to the stupid ‘missfire’ stuff). There is enough reason to pick other weapons on Vet without giving up power/efficiency.
Zealot just picks Evis or Knife basically 50/50 usually with Revolver while IndyCrusher is basically the best melee weapon currently.
Pre-patch 13 all Psykers just picked Force Swords, while DS was still very much viable. Hel, even when there was just the the Obscurus people were running that and it was way worse compared to DS/Knife back then.
I could go on… The point is pick rate doesn’t mean anything unless there is some other secondary component that makes it bad/unbalanced.
PS: Sorry for my tone being a bit too combative, it’s just my style, and can’t really do much about it.
Yes. The pick rate seems to counter this though your initial statement is still true. Something about it is leading to the current pick rates despite there being viable alternatives.
I agree with the last sentence, but I still think that the argument that it may be messing with build diversity can be made. That’s all I meant to say, but I don’t feel too strongly about it. To be fair, i do feel like the best we can get to here though is asking whether this is the case because of the weapon and builds associated with it or because the other picks are that bad and /or unappealing. I’m too biased to say, I’m borderline autistic for my IAGs and can’t fathom why all other vets aren’t running only Agrip IAGs, lol.
Gut feeling, I’m inclined to agree. Realistically? Doubtful, but this is an entirely different debate. There’s too many variables tied (many of them technical too, e.g. latency, sound bugs) to answering the question as there’s a lot in place that actually mitigates mechanical skill in play. Especially when it comes to skill expression in general. It’s why some there seeems to be alot of mixed feelings here, some feel stiffled, others feel freer even though they acknowledge some of the limitations. I could write an essays on this so I’ll just stop though.
You’re good, I didn’t take any offense. You’re doing fine. And even if it did (it didn’t) feel like you were as long as you’re actually engaging with the argument earnestly I still wouldn’t be too miffed.
Kickback is in a very good place right now. It may need that min pellet hit count for damage calculation reduced from 16 to 14 but other than that minor change it is great. The blessings are still all over the place though in terms of usefulness (particularly the one that give melee damage for hitting multiple targets, you only get 2s t to use it which is not enough time at all)
Kickback can absolutely vaporize targets in front of you. Playing Zealot with trigger-happy melee ogryn can feel very oppressive when shooters you try to hit just disappear in a 4-meter radius around you.
There is also a thing if you happened to be as unlucky to have 2 of these in a group, then this also happens to elites. 2 kickback can just vaporize the whole map, seen that plenty of times.
Thankfully there aren’t that many ogryns around, so it doesn’t happen that often, or you can just dodge the q.
To go even further Ogryn ranged in general is so oppressive, that I instantly switch off ammo auro in q if I play Vet, so enemies wouldn’t just get vaporized/thrown around the whole game (depending on if it’s Ripper/Kickback or Rumbler) by the tankiest big boy sitting back and shooting the whole game.
That’s entirely different. I’d even go so far as to say this is disingenuous to bring it up.
Ogryn doing 400k-500k ranged damage with kickback on a melee build isn’t even in the same ballpark as soft little Psyker with a dedicated purge build.
Bro its disingenuous for you to bring up Kickback in comparison to the plasma gun. Kickback needs to stack surgical etc to get single target damage past 10m. If thats a problem for you as Zealot you need to play more aggesievly.
Eh, I tend to just not go after clustered enemies when I know I have a kickback spamming ogryn. It is the best weapon at dealing with massed fodder enemies. If anything I find the rippers to be more oppressive given they can shoot more and have longer effective range. Certainly not a complaint, I think rippers are in a decent place too.
It is more like 15m against massed shooters like Nish was talking about, other than that yeah. it doesn’t one-shot things like gunners and shotgunners at or past about 15m without crits. But it still knocks them around and suppresses them and will typically two-shot them.