I find the current Loner aura to be the worst in the game. 2 coherency barely amounts to any regen and barely if ever nullifies damage from melee and ranged chip.
I suggest adding an additional effect: for each player you are out of coherency with, you gain -15% Threat. This will make ranged enemies more frequently target teammates while you do your work, while still having them focus on you if you’re out of LoS of your team.
It’s decently noticeable if you build for toughness regen on curios. Honestly your suggested change sounds like it would just make people get mad about it even more, and we’ve had plenty of misguided threads suggesting loner somehow single handedly lets and encourages Zealot to play solo away from the team. I find that take extremely questionable but frankly I’d rather not play into it by buffing the aura in any way.
Genuinely think it’s absolutely fine as is.
I never use Loner, but I’m not a very stealthy Zealot. My build has more chainsaw and screaming. As far as I can tell though, coherency is almost a dead mechanic at this point. I feel like regenerating toughness is done via talents, not staying near allies, and it’s actually a thing I wish they’d change so staying as a group is more important.
But yeah, honestly feels like Loner is just a worse version of that Veteran talent that gives him 5% toughness regeneration if no enemies are nearby. And of course, it’s the only aura in the game that doesn’t directly help the team, so it shouldn’t even be measured as “Always 2 Coherency” compared to, say “15% Toughness Damage Reduction” because it’s actually being compared to “15% Toughness Damage Reduction for everyone” so it’s actually much worse. Not only is Loner not very great on its own, but you’re also missing out on 15% Toughness Damage Reduction for everyone, or corruption healing for everyone. Oof.
I said in another thread about how Loner feels unimpressive that I’d change it to be called something like “Kinship” or “Brotherhood” or “Together in Spirit” so that whether or not it encourages abandoning the team, it would avoid the appearance of encouraging that, and changing its function to include something like the Zealot counting as being in coherency with any allies who are dead, because I heard that some people get use out of Loner when they’re the last man standing and I wouldn’t want to remove that functionality.
Honestly, I feel like Loner should just not be an aura, and the Zealot’s third aura should be, I dunno, team does more backstab damage, or increased dodge distance. Something. Anything.
Loner is hardly even an Aura, let alone a “fine” one. Why would one take it at all unless they PLAN on being a toxic teammate? The only situations where Loner is “good” are the ones that are created by the toxic teammates who use Loner, it is a VERY vicious cycle. One must unironically abandon their team to get ANYTHING out of taking Loner.
Benediction is just straight-up superior to Loner at this point.
I was ridiculed for saying this a while back in a similar thread about loner. On higher difficulties the need to consistently dodge and block melee attacks is far more important than being near one other person. Toughness from dodging or crit strikes are also huge boosts.
You need it to build to certain nodes with some builds, same with throwing knives.
Yeah the coherency toughness only seems to recharge out of combat now which makes it much less valuable, but the same applies to loner. You have to be alone, and not fighting.
Yet you still ONLY get anything out of it by abandoning your team. I sacrificed a Point for Survivalist on my Veteran even though Fire Team was going to save me that one silly Point. Loner needs to be changed so that it’s not basically just one big waste of a Point.
Alternatively… rework blitz tree so that blitz choice doesn’t aggressively inform the builds for people trying to go for a specific blitz and trying to optimize their path.
Either way, I took one look at Loner and thought it was counter-productive for a team-based horde-shooter. The fact that the designers of said game didn’t have the same thought with that and smokes continues to confuse me.
I still take critpath with knives on certain builds and always ignore Loner because I don’t like it and I don’t find it useful.
I’ve never used Loner, and the horrible Penance they designed for Loner has assured that I never will use it.
The point of loner is that it changes enemy spawn behavior. Digging into the games code reveals that there are special spawns tied to being out of coherency. Disablers like trappers and dogs specifically. Loner directly “disables” those “you’re alone, get back to your team!” spawns by literally making sure you are always in 2 coherency, so the game never considers you to be alone.
This is actually a pretty huge benefit when your strategy when playing zealot is to run ahead and eradicate gunners, which is a great help to the team and due to huge mobility he can be back with the team in a split second. It ensures that doing so doesn’t spawn extra specials for you or your team to deal with.
Obviously the aura does not convey these facts at all. It probably should
Came onto the Forums (after a long needed hiatus) to simply gripe about this exact point.
Every other change they did from what I can tell is pretty great. I’m sad about the Ogryn nerfs but haven’t felt them to much and the buffs seem to off set them a decent amount, but beyond that this by far has annoyed me to the point of wanting to make a ‘return’ just to yell about it.
In a game so heavily skewed toward team synergy and team play in general (mainly for dealing with disablers, but still), this ‘Aura’ is just actively a terrible addition to the team. If this was a solo pip off in the corner I wouldn’t care AS much, but this being a AURA and still being one even after all these changes, and not only that having a penance associated with it literally telling people ‘grief your team it’s worth it I swear’ is just so friggen bad. You can’t even get it done quick either, you HAVE to get backstab kills instead of just kills away from your team so you get people like myself that want to get the funny class penance number back to full marks actively just trolling their team running away from them to try and get this penance finished and it’s like bro this playstyle of play died off like so long ago why is this my AURA?!?
At least if it was a pip, replace the stagger pip just before it or something (cause that one literally has no purpose), then you could say ‘ohh I use it for clutch plays when my team goes down but still play with them and try and succeed’. But this being your AURA literally just encourages the Zealot to grief, sprint ahead far past the team, die to a trapper/dog/what have you, and then go ‘gg go next’ and leave. It’s just, why? Why double down on this? Why not make it into literally ANYThing else that actually encourages you to be a useful member of your squad?
Benediction at this point + Holy Relevant is just strictly a better pick anyway, the only reason you ever pick Loner is because you want to be ‘risky’ and take more damage points, but even then half the time going down the middle for beacon will be better as at least that Does something. This Aura just, sucks. It’s playsyle is terrible. Aura’s in literally every other case are team wide helpful buffs that you AND the rest of your team get.
This ‘Aura’ only YOU can ever get the ‘benifit’ of, and said ‘benefit’ is like 1-2 toughness regen a second, woow, wonderful. That will certainly stop the 5 maulers I just ran into BY MYSELF from taking me to see the emperor, just, whyyyyyyyyy.
Breaths
Ok that’s all.
(on a side note, if they wanted to make it actually worth it to run while still keeping it an aura, calling it ‘Emperors Touch’ or something and having it read ‘you are always in coherency with your allies’ would be infinitely better and actually be solid. Maybe a bit broken to, but it would at least play into the play style of ‘I’m going to go on ahead alone’ while still allowing your team to keep your coherency, and technically allow THEM to actually get something by having it that even when THEY are alone they still ‘feel your presence’ and keep 2 coherency going. Feel that would be infinitely better.)
I love loner. So yes please buff it lol. Just dont change how it works
I like the idea of making it so that loner zealots have less threat, but then also making them less survivable.
It would encourage zealots to prioritize targets who are a threat to the team, because if the team dies, they die.
I’m fine with Loner existing. There are valid reasons to split off from the party and there’s no inherent danger to it if you know what you’re doing.
A team based game having an “aura” that is about being alone and gives abolutely no benefit to allies. Ironic.
Since knife zealots outrun everything no wonder they use it as the slower teammates will not be in coherency. Also it’s regen is pretty decent if you have toughness regen speed and other means to regain toughness via talents.
Might be a bit broken like you said, but I love this because it actually gives a benefit to the team like every single other aura in the game.
If loner ever does receive a change in the future, the biggest thing I would like for it to see is give a buff to the team.
Some of the comments in here are absurd. It’s crazy how Fatshark can:
-Design the entire game from the ground up, fundamentally, in such a way that running at shooters to melee them before they disperse is an extremely viable strategy
-Tell you in the tutorial about mechanics involved in meleeing shooters
-create multiple weapons that absolutely excel in running at and meleeing shooters
-create an entire zealot talent tree that encourages running and meleeing
-give said zealot tree and weapons such good mobility that you can be back with your team in an instant
-Then also create an aura for zealot that allows you to run into forward position without having to worry about being out of coherency
All that and some people STILL think everyone has to crouch behind cover and shoot shooters or else they’re “rushing” and griefing.
Loner is completely fine design wise. It doesn’t need to do anything different from the ground up and the design is great for a coop game, since going ahead to kill shooters is a move that benefits the team massively, considering how dangerous shooters are and how much they limit mobility. It’s designed to support that playstyle explicitly. If anything it could use a little buff to further push players in that direction, like giving them -threat as mentioned or maybe movespeed or something. Or maybe just clarify in the tooltip that it does affect special spawns positively.
These sort of takes from the community are why I’m extremely glad Fatshark mostly doesn’t give a damn about what people say. It’s easy to get mad at the crafting but in 99% of cases it’s for the better. This game would be horrid and unfun if you couldn’t rush at shooters.
None of the auras are particularly strong and I don’t think zealot needs any buffs…if anything some of the talents should be moved around as atm its too easy to grab all the good stuff.
I may be mistaken, and I don’t run loner in real matches, but from what I can tell from testing is that loner doesn’t replace the base aura (7.5% toughness damage reduction).
I tested taking one melee hit from a poxwalker common heretic or whatever the base horde enemy is and the first swing from a spawned enemy would always reduce my toughness to 27 (iirc down from 100). I set up a build that went directly to loner and didn’t invest any other points. Taking the hit with and without loner had the same result. So, presumably, taking loner is like taking half-benediction.
What I don’t know is if the base aura would stack with benediction. Not that an extra 7.5% thoughness damage reduction is going to make a huge difference for the team, but as far as I can tell loner doesn’t make your aura worse than if you didn’t take loner. Aside from the opportunity cost of not picking a better aura.