Zealot grenades are very lackluster. Hard to justify picking up grenades as zealot due to how unimpactful they are. Throwing a zealot grenade rarely feels like you did something. Compare this to the feeling of using a shock mine, krak, or chem grenade - it’s night and day.
This usually results in one of two things: I just end up using throwing knives AGAIN because they’re obviously the best zealot blitz; or I end up taking stun grenades and only using them for pickups or clutching, and otherwise they don’t get used at all. Either way, very boring, not fun.
The immolation grenade basically has no practical use at all.
The recent skill tree overhaul did a lot to make zealot grenades more accessible in the talent tree, but it did nothing to make them more worthwhile.
Agreed. The tree reworks were a net positive for everyone, but Zealot’s tree clearly needs some work to be on par with the other classes. Zealot has “build freedom” in theory but there are still a ton of borderline useless or boring talents and strong talents locked behind tax nodes. But a rework to blitzes would go a long way and might be a quick fix to make up for any shortcomings in the rest of Zealot’s tree.
i had 2 zealots using fire nades on my team a few days ago, which is pretty rare. i was scum with tox nades, and it would have been much more efficient if they just left the grenade boxes to me since tox nades do way more damage, even more than the ogryn’s.
haven’t used anything else than knives in ages on zealot since these come so handy when boltering. fire nades are lackluster, and stuns are worthless except for a clutch, but for that you have providence + revive speed on curios.
Yeah I do wonder how much general build variety there is for Zealot now. You can definitely mix and match blitz, keystrokes, and Ults way better than before, but I have a feeling most people are working off a similar blueprint for the connecting nodes.
There were some bizarre decisions, like replacing sainted gunslinger with something objectively worse, when the problem with that talent was always just the position. Like what we have now is better for sure, and I guess there being objectively best paths between the ability, blitz, and keystone you want to use is pretty much the case for most classes. One does wonder though if the original system with extra columns added for aura, blitz, and Ult wouldn’t have net a very similar amount of real build diversity.
As much as I wouldn’t mind Zealot blitz buffs, I do wonder whether the fundamentals of how blitz work simply needs to be rethought. What % of your grenade refills on a map will come from a field improv Vet if you have one? If you happen to have the least useful non regenerating blitz on a team (often the case for Zealot) can you even justify picking up any non field improv grenades over your team mates? It’s all just a bit wonky.
Perhaps grenades being swapped to an ammo crate system, but where every team mate can only refill from it once, or some other fundamental rework is the only way we get a game state where we don’t need to worry about blitz being competitive across classes, and can just worry about them being balanced in the context of their class’ kit. In any case competing with your team for the same resource just doesn’t seem like it’s working out great for blitz.
It’s hard to compete with blitzes that just do damage. For all the “utility” or unique niches a blitz could fill in theory, nothing is as useful as just getting rid of threats quickly. Shock mines get away with not dealing damage since they regen and don’t eat up the resource economy of other blitzes. Similarly, throwing knives and rock are also good picks because they fill a crucial role in a class’s kit (special/disabler sniping) without needing grenade pickups. Other nonregen nades like Ogryn box/frag and HIve Scum chem nades/boom bringer deal wide area damage and/or stagger, so they’re worth bringing and letting them use grenade pickups for their “support” utility even if they don’t regen.
The issue with Zealot is that immolation nades and stun nades don’t regen and also don’t offer much support utility. And, even if they regened, I still honestly couldn’t think of a use for immolation grenades over throwing knives because trash horde clear which is what it currently does is the least of Zealot’s problems. The logical blitz design is for regen nades to be weaker and have less support utility but fill a consistent gap in a class’s kit/playstyle, while nonregen nades should be emergency buttons that offer noticeable support to the team but that’s not the case currently. We have some nades that are way too strong to have regen, and some nades that are too useless not to regen. I honestly think the easiest solution would be to give each blitz a conditional cooldown or timer, just make the stronger nades have a long timer or difficult conditional. At least thay way classes wouldn’t be competing with each other for a limited resource anymore. Or just make grenade pickups spawn in groups of 4 where each pickup has your name written on it or something IDK. Anything would be an improvement over what we have right now.
Zealot grenades have always been pretty medicore, they probably need some sort of buff, even a simple quantity buff could do the job.
Let Zealot carry 5 fire grenades, same for the flashbang grenades, let him carry 5 of them as well.
The throwing knives are kind of meh, actually worse then the shiv throwing knife. The zealot throwing knife should be buffed to compete.
Increase cleave somewhat (cleave 3 or 4 poxwalkers) and have it inflict 5 stacks of bleed. This would make headshots less needed (bleed) and make it able to hit specials and what not that are sitting in the horde a bit easier.
Throwing knives are probably the “best” pick, but I just don’t enjoy using them and prefer using my actual ranged weapon to snipe specials (except when using bolter or flamer). I don’t like feeling like I have to use the throwing knives all the time.
The stun grenades would be a lot better if they regenerated or if we could carry more of them (at least 5). In theory they’re great for just tossing into a pack of armor, but in practice you can’t really do that because you shouldn’t be picking up grenades when the rest of your team can make SUCH better use of them. Thus the stun grenades are relegated to clutching only, and they are useful for that purpose, but that takes most of the fun out of them.
Throwing knives having innate bleed would actually be peak I like that idea. After playing Hive Scum I much prefer the blackout grenade + chem dot on blitz use combo over throwing knives.
It’s power creep. The Immolation grenade is great at what it is supposed to do. Does a huge amount of damage against hordes and most elites/specialists. It just doesn’t deal with carapace.
Most grenades can deal with mass-amounts of carapace way too good.
Carapace armored enemies should be there to pressure you and make it harder to get into the enemies juicy gunline. They are suppossed to not be gone in one second. But with the amount of easy damage some classes /especially their blitzes (looking at veteran and scum) can put out the gameplay has fallen flat on it’s face. You shouldn’t two-shot Crushers with a flimsy sword and you shouldn’t kill multiple of them with regenerating grenades that are good vs everything.
That powercreep is whats causing havocs’ ridiculousness.
Agreed, power creep is the main problem. Many things about zealot have been power-crept by the other classes lately. An ideal solution would be sweeping nerfs rather than more power creep, but I think Fatshark is afraid to do that. The culture is very anti-nerf right now and they know they will face blow-back and possible review bombing if they do any more than minor nerfs.
People don’t like nerfs because Fatshark always goes overboard with nerfs and take months if not years to correct their mistake. If FS had a more consistent update schedule and balance patches weren’t less frequent than actual tabletop 40k dataslates it wouldn’t be so poorly perceived but everybody who has played this game for more than a few months knows that if something gets overnerfed or overbuffed it will stay in this state for months unless it is so blantantly overpowered that FS has to hotfix it (dog pounce dealing morbillion bleed damage)
Yes, the extremely slow update cycle exacerbates all balance problems. I remember Fatshark saying something about intending to include smaller balance changes with hotfixes in the future, but that hasn’t happened yet. I hope it does, but I kind of doubt it…
Fatshark actually did do a small Balance Pass between the September 2025 and December 2025 Updates. Hotfix 80, in October 2025. Darktide getting more of these small inter-Update Balance Passes in the future would be greatly appreciated.
I mean, yeah you are absolutely correct. The thing is Buff/Nerf, that’s all relative. Buffing the enemies would nerf our ability to deal with them. If its balanced around “powerlevel A” or “powerlevel B” doesn’t really matter if the parts are balanced against each other.
The problem I see is that the game has lots of different enemies that could be meaningful but aren’t since we’re dealing with them the same way. (apart from the outrageous silent bursters/trappers. I personally deal with them with a tactic called “paranoia”
Now, I wish you all a happy Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension
I don’t like this recent trend where Fatshark overtunes weapons, talents and classes, and people set an expectation that everything else should be brought up to that level of broken.
Zealot fire nades feel fairly pointless to me, but this hardly means they are weak. Stuff like chem nades and Boom Bringer just need a downward adjustment, instead of increasing power of everything else around it.
The game is slowly turning from an engaging melee heavy horde brawler into “press X to win” power fantasy outside high Havoc. Then Fatshark goes into this silly loop of catering to the few perecent of the playerbase who wants a challenging difficulty back in the game…only to power creep eveything again to cater to the demands of the remaining part of the playerbase.
Powercreep is definitely slowly killing the game in some ways. A lot of “buff only” players don’t understand that Darktide is not just a generic horde shooter like HD2 where the combat gameplay loop turns into kill more=more dopamine, so let’s give players bigger damage and increase enemy health and spawns to compensate.
The magic of tide games is in the intricate melee combat. It’s fun to take your time dodge dancing around hard to kill enemies while weaving in attacks and combos. If you can kill everything instantly you don’t get to engage with the melee combat which is dumb because that’s the whole point of the game. Darktide is starting to lose that intricacy and deliberate melee combat that makes the game unique. If you let everything be killed instantly and refuse to nerf players where it’s deserved, you naturally have to increase spawns and health to compensate for any semblance of challenge, which just further reinforces powercreep and gamebreaking mechanics that pause the game and instantly delete the screen. If Darktide is heading in the direction of becoming a “kill more for more fun” game, the devs are killing what makes the game special. IMO killing stuff in tide games is about quality over quantity, it’s much more fun and more rewarding when each kill is hard fought, not when I click a single button and see a block of text in my kill feed.
I wouldn’t mind the blitzes on any class if nonregen blitzes weren’t limited by a shared pickup. Instead of my blitzes being a bit weaker than my teammates blitz, but we both get to throw a similar number of nades, you have to compare blitzes and the strongest blitz usually gets pickup priority. So if I bring a “weaker” nonregen blitz, I end up with 3 grenades for the whole game while the Ogryn or Hive Scum hogs pickups. Essentially, if a class has a “weaker” nonregen blitz, they’re either deciding to nerf themselves or the team by bringing it onto a team comp. I think the better solution without pushing any direct buffs would be individual grenade pickups or customized regen mechanics for each blitz so Zealot isn’t stuck with throwing knives or limited to throwing a grenade 3 times.
