The first paragraph is valid - ill start with the “pigeon holed into crit part tho”.
You are already! On damnation you cant actually play anything else with reasonable success solo. I did kinda say that as well in my OP stating that its required to deal with ranged trash/special damage - if you dont run this youre dead or hugging a wall at which point youre a worse vet.
But dont misunderstand - i think zealot is very strong with crit, he just takes way more skill and way more risk to play and thats what ultimately makes it engaging to play. And thats how a videogame should be designed. There is nothing more boring than spamming surge in the general direction of enemies and knowing youll win with little to no effort.
In fact i think crit build is too easy to play against melees in particular which is why i think its worth addressing - you effectively dont get punished for playing poorly as long as the effect is up by anything other than disablers and while thats fine against ranged since the difficulty there comes from actually getting on top of them its really not for enemies that just walk to you.
As a compromise i think it would be totally fine if the ult could give you 1 guaranteed ranged crit (giving a solid burst of damage). But as it is right now it just completely ignores armor for the entire duration of the ult which is just silly.
good call - thanks for pointing it out - wasnt aware of it
Unfortunately that doesnt change anything about the number of people i actually find when queueing for damnation (which is literally Me-and-the-Bots for a good part of the map) even if i eventually get 1 or 2 people.
I mean, you aren’t wrong about anything else you have said. Definitely all strong points. It pains me to see the stuff about Surge staff but again, it’s all true.
“Melee Trash” is extremely deadly, since they can easily swarm and overwhelm you. Your Melee Weapon can only take out a few of them (yes, even Power Sword), yet the Flamer staggers and burns everything in front of it.
Hordes become so insanely easy thanks to it. It is easily one of the most powerful Weapons you can bring.
Not every Weapon has to be good against everything. Flamer excels at taking out Hordes, against single big Enemies it is a waste of Ammo and a Bolter would do a better job. Take a Hammer and you are good to go, now you have a Loadout that can deal with both.
If everyone brings Anti-Special and Anti-Armour Weapons, then no one can deal with a Horde fast enough. If everyone brings only Horde-Kill, then no one can deal with the big ones.
The biggest issue with the power sword isn’t it’s cleave potential. It’s that it’s free, you aren’t wasting stamina or peril it’s a completely free special attack that is insanely good.
Make it cost something or have a cool down, you should be able to feel powerful some times but being able to have infinite cleave forever is the broken part.
All the people thinking that other stuff needs to be power sword level are insane. Damnation isn’t that hard and if every weapon gets buffed all the difficulties are going to need to be made harder.
Shock staff is good, the target limit makes it weak in horde if you try to pick specials off but in small engagements it’s strongest. Could probably do with diminishing stagger effect on hitting the same target over and over not sure how you do that without it feeling like it doesn’t work though.
Flamer another thing that makes most hordes pointless and easy to clear same with Purgatus staff, they should just not stagger enemies well because the damage is already great but you can rely on it in melee range because of the stagger.
Yes, make everthing clunky and weak, instead of feeling good…
The Game is hard enough on 5, maybe you are just good. Most weapons do need a buff, power sword just feels like a tool up for the challenge.
edit: horrible grammar, my bad
Cant headshot/weakspot hit at all, relatively mediocre time to kill/ammo consumption as a result.
The knockdown is very 2 sided. Sometimes it helps you stun things, other times it knocks the thing you really need to kill down in a way where its behind cover and you cant shoot it anymore.
Worst part is the relatively long reload and pretty damn long animation when swapping to it.
Having to shoot specials while being in melee is common, not being able to quickswap back and forth is a pretty huge downside.
Great against groups of armored melees specifically.
Okay weapon overall. Just not as good as some seem to think.
edit: for some reason i cant properly tag you with this post and i cant be bothered to figure out why.
Congratulations op, you’ve informed fatshark in your post title that you are in the extreme minority and therefore have irrelevant game feedback in regards to the majority playerbase.
Ok, I guess from a “solo” point of view I dont really have an opinion as I dont play solo, nor do I necessarily think a game like this should be balanced around solo. that’s neither here nor there.
All I can say is I’m playing zealot non crit build and getting through damnation (not 100% true, I do have the toughness crit feat, but thats only for a temporary damage reduction on demand, Im not using my crit weapons to keep it up, nor the crit bleed feat…Im using unstoppable because I tend to heavy swipe dance hordes and on the chance I miss time my dodge I don’t get interrupted. (focusing heavily on ranged close quarters) Lets just say I dont like using the cookie cutter or most popular builds.
As for having 1 crit on ranged I guess i find that a little meh, mainly because it wouldn’t really be that much benefit (and completely uselss on certain weapons), it would only work on the mob types your particular weapon destroys anyway. Even on damnation my agripna mk1 shreds elites (crusher is the exception). It would have to have a secondary effect to make it interesting.
I don’t think surge staff needs any sort of nerf. You often have no control over what it targets, despite who you look at. The damage is also very mediocre vs non armored enemies, serving almost purely as a CC stick vs unarmored on high difficulty. Not calling the weapon bad, but it is somewhat niche compared to many other weapons and has very clear weaknesses.
