Guard seems broken. According to the tutorial, health shouldn’t be damaged unless guard is broken. It happens all the time that health gets damaged (a bit) when Guard is far from broken. This is a huge bug, but if it’s intentional: a severe issue for the Zealot.
The Zealot is built around keeping low health, much like Vermintide’s Zealot. However, in Vermintide the Zealot can survive because of a thing called Temporary Health. Temporary Health didn’t count as actual health, which is why a Zealot in V2 could have all the benefits of having 1% health while having an extra 99% Temporary Health.
Also, the Zealot skill (Until Death) that has you not die at the killing blow is only delaying the inevitable if there’s no way to regen health in the meantime. Again, just Guard isn’t enough because of the current chip damage. The only way to avoid this is picking up the talent called Holy Revenant. But if that’s the only way to make this class work, it isn’t really a choice but a necessity.
So Fatshark: I’d suggest you’d either remove “chip damage” that has you lose health while having Guard, or find another way for at least the Zealot to regen health.
It’s a players choice to sit at low health and take that risk, just know incoming melee damage will always do a bit of health damage through toughness.
Holy revenant can get you up to full health if you go full RIP AND TEAR, yes. But that doesn’t address the issue at hand; zealot as a class is designed to get stronger as its health gets lower. However, as it stands the risk/reward of running a zealot in that manner is absurd to the point of uselessness.
At present, this is the zealot’s iconic skill, Martyrdom. It incentivizes staying at a lower health level in order to gain a power boost; when you’re down 45 health, you get +15 damage total, and at level 25 you can pick a talent that doubles your potential Martyrdom stacks, letting you gain +30 damage when you’re down 90 health. Sounds great, except that the current impotent nature of toughness means you’ll be running with no real buffer from a stray traitor guard downing you. It feels like utter garbage to play, and you’ll notice ingame that almost all zealots are just ignoring this mechanic as a result. The risk of dying even with a full toughness bar simply isn’t worth the paltry damage boost.
tl;dr it doesn’t matter if zealot has ways to restore health, considering that the class itself is built around the idea of staying low on health. You can make a build that emphasizes being hard to kill–that’s what I’m running–but doing so ignores half of the class.
I always thought that the “stay at low health” playstyles was bs anyway, you will get down to lower health where the perk will gradually become more useful because of the chip damage so I’d rather embrace it as it is. It’s not like the Zealot is bad at full HP now.
I find it really annoying when a Zealot is running super low health, avoiding healing, charging ahead of the group, running past a ton of trash mods, getting downed in one hit by a mauler, and bitching that the rest of the team couldn’t save them in time.
Personally I hate the ‘low health gives bonus’ game mechanic in co-op games. I would much rather have a timed buff after taking damage, so take damage and get +X% power for Y seconds or something… make them both proportional to the amount of damage taken too.
The “running low on health” tactic is bs indeed, in case of Darktide (case in point). Not in case of Vermintide. In Vermintide, the Zealot was the same but he practically had full health. The only difference is that most of the healthbar was temporary health.
Anyway – unless this thread gets zerged with “Zealots should play it safe” – the main issue here is the chip damage while having Guard. This shouldn’t be the case. It’s literally what the tutorial says: no health damage when Guard is up.
I agree with this post 100% as a Zealot i love to play the full build and that means half hp to maximize damage along with my cleave
having my Hp getting chipped through toughness for not spam abusing push mechanics is a big feelsbad for the playstyle of the class
while i agree with you on principle, its not the players fault.
the player should be able to use the mechanics of a class without fundamental problems.
fatshark put the class in now they gotta make it work, i mean you could rework it but FS never went that far.
While I am not terribly excided about toughness bleed through, but c’mon bruh. Even if you take Martydom talent - you still are maxed out at 60% HP. You don’t HAVE to run at 1 HP or something silly like that.
The 1HP thing isn’t something I’d do as a Darktide Zealot. I used it as a V2 example, where such a method is possible due to Temp Health.
I feel like Fatshark copied (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense) much of Vermintide’s gameplay but kinda pushed themselves into a corner when they added new mechanics to it. In this case, it’s melee classes having no more proper survivabilty due to health chip damage. Look, if having Guard up means you wouldn’t take health damage, Guard would effectively be the new form of “Temporary Health” V2 had. Fatshark could very easilty fix this huge issue by simply removing chip damage! Otherwise, Medicae Stations become an absolute necessity for classes and playstyles like the Zealot.
Allow me to reiterate that V2’s “Until Death” ability only made sense because in the window of that invulnerability, the Zealot was able to regenerate (temporary) health so after that he wouldn’t be one-shotted. Currently in Darktide, Until Death is just delaying the inevitable one-shot unless you have specific talents picked – which, again, removes the concept of choice when we’re talking about necessary talents.
I think they pushed themselves into a corner when the development of whatever character progression system they were trying to go for imploded and they had to hurriedly copy a chunk of V2’s system across. A lot of the perks/passives/abilities works at cross purposes with the class, some were too strong with them throwing numbers around randomly and in general there are tons of interactions, some edge cases but a lot with their fundamental systems that break as soon as something in a seemingly unrelated system is changed, tweaked or breaks.
That and how they try to ‘balance’ (sweeping changes on multiple things at once, changing fundamental systems instead of targeted changes, etc.) convinces me that they are trying to fit square class design pegs into a circular mechanics hole by sanding them down.
