The Zealot Penance Behind Enemy Lines asks players to leave coherency to get behind ranged enemies and backstab them. To achieve this with any regularity, the Zealot has to be keeping consistently ahead of their teammates, because they need to remain out of coherency while not letting their allies deal with the ranged enemies themselves, either by shooting them or coming back into the Zealot’s coherency to melee them.
Completing this penance requires either your team to play badly and lag way behind you, intentionally hold back in most rooms and let you deal with all the ranged enemies, or you to rush forward alone in this game about teamwork where a significant chunk of the enemy types are designed to instantly stun you until you get help from an ally.
I would say that Behind Enemy Lines should be limited to private games, but I think that all the private game penances should be removed or reworked so they can be done in normal games.
I would say just remove the backstab requirement entirely. Right now you basically have to cheese pushing and rushing to get backstab kills, which is a PITA.
Loner is meant to be an aura to make it easier to temporarily break from your team to go deal with an isolated pack of ranged enemies, but the penance doesn’t really signify that.
No it does not.
A lot of people claim that this is the case, but it is simply a skill issue if you think that this is the case.
Coherency range is pretty small and you can absolutely just push ahead a little bit, when there are a bunch of ranged units. You clear them, then regroup. This is what a good zealot player does anyway (at least when using a mobile weapon).
That said, it is very strange, that this penance requires backstab kills.
This requirement should be removed.
Aside from that, the penance is completely fine.
The issue is that I have to play with the terrible Loner ability equipped if I want to make any progress on this challenge. There are actually useful auras I could be using if I wasn’t stuck in to Loner to progress this. The point of these penances is to encourage you to try other playstyles, and the playstyle this one encourages seems to be avoiding my teammates and exposing myself to pointless risks, which is bad design in a cooperative horde shooter.
It also teaches that Loner is enough to go alone without being in coherency, which isn’t actually the case. Just using Chastise The Wicked teaches getting in close to ranged enemies to melee them, and it’s the default Zealot ability.
The issue is that Loner tells you “split up from the team, and use Shroudfield or pushing and dodging to kill these squishy enemies in this specific way”, which doesn’t actually tell you anything useful about how to play the game that isn’t taught better by other abilities and penances earlier, and it does ask you to engage with enemies in a way that makes you more vulnerable to them and any other spawns that show up. One dog or trapper doesn’t do much to a grouped up team, but if the Zealot has gone around a corner so the ranged enemies they’re after don’t get blown to bits in seconds by their teammates, then they’re gonna take a much larger chunk of damage before their team can get them back up.
It is totally the case though, unless you’re playing Havoc 40 you can push shooters alone just fine and it’s advantageous to do it in pugs because you can often get at them before someone else aggros them this way. Loner or not doesn’t even factor in. Rushing shooters is generally safer, faster and less resource intensive than dealing with them any other way, so it’s actually a pretty good thing to teach the high mobility class to do.
The penance never at any point encourages you to never come back, so I don’t think any of this is an issue
Yea sure, in a team based game where the main incentive is to stick together, one “achievement” requires you to do the polar opposite. It should be private games only.
You’re totally fine breaking off for a bit, the game doesn’t require being glued together and it does reward engaging shooters before they’re aggrod. It’s not a griefy playstyle whatsoever
Most games are team based games, many of the times the team is also built around their strongest player/s like how some fighter jets are built around it’s radar/guns. So at the very least, there is an i in cooperation. No i am not saying I am the metaphorical gun of a fighter jet. What I’m saying is that it’s better for one person to split off to try and make the clutch play, rather than everyone botting around each other and then wondering why they lost/chalking in up to pugs as a whole being bad.
Here’s the thing too. Pubs are bad, that we can all agree on. But we all play pubs at least once every sitting. In a way we call ourselves bad, which wouldnt be wrong for some. But if we focused on ourselves more, maybe then one by one we all improve, and pubs actually improves by itself. TLDR ; focus on yourself.
