Issue that’s present since day 1, now over a year later it hasn’t been fixed.
Gunners, once they lock on the player, often don’t stop firing until the player is dead. Every other enemy stops firing once the player is close enough to them and switches to their melee.
This creates some really dumb death scenes, where you kill 5 Crushers, only to be melted down by a random gunner, who’s locked onto you with aimbot and doesn’t stop firing.
On Damnation, as Zealot, with the only weapon that can actually take care of heavy armored enemies - Bolter, you can’t even switch quickly from melee to your weapon to kill the gunner. The process is very slow and everytime your character must “ready up” the weapon, rather than just grab and use it like every other gun.
There is seriously nothing more provoking, than to survive nonsense wave of specialists and heavies, only to be riddled with aimbot bullets from an enemy you can’t do a thing about.
Fatshark, either improve the ready time for Bolter, improve other weapons so that they’re viable choice vs Crushers and such or FIX THE DAMN GUNNERS so that they stop firing at certain range from player.
You are complaining about anti armor range weapon on meele focused class - zealot. Take eviscerator or thammer.
Meanwhile CTW changes enemy armor type to a lower one so you can kill crushers with anything, and you can skip swap animation with throwing knife.
Relic allows you to face tank anything and slide spam provides almost invincibility against shots.
Sry but it’s pure skill issue and failed knowledge check post. Always ask yourself first - maybe, just maybe, you don’t understand or missing something.
The gun enemies need to have actual melee weapons for protocols to do this, which Gunners do not. They are Elite enemies which is why it is harder to stop them from shooting than the average shooter - you will need more stagger or suppression power. This is also why the wind up to their shooting is announced and the delay before firing longer.
And if you desire to smoothbrain all the range enemies still after so many gameplay nerfs to them and such insane toughness restocks every character can refill constantly without ever stepping into coherency, they literally made a talent for this exclusive to Zealot to fuel this melee only no brain and its easily one of the most fun loadouts in the entire game. Its called Thy Wrath be Swift. Then you laugh at how without hitstuns gunners do literally negative damage and just trigger speed boosts so you can demolish everything with 1 weapon M1x a lot gameplay.
@MarxistDictator went into this a decent bit already, to tak on to what was said there.
Seems more like a lack of understanding in the tools at your disposal, which I get. I also used to think Zealot was really annoying to play due to all the enemies with guns and being unable to get up to them properly. Then I learned a few very important things:
Blade of Faith is the absolute best thing in the game and fixes all of Zealots problems. You can use them straight up to kill gunners/snipers/even reapers with a few well aimed throws. And even if you aren’t confident in your throwing arm they animation cancel all pull out animations, allowing you to drastically shorten Flamer/Bolter pull out animations by starting to pull them out, throwing a knife, and then instantly being able to use them to do what you need them to do. Very satisfying, very worth learning.
Swift Certainty is the bread and butter perk for getting out of line of fire of gunners. even if one doesn’t want to spec into Thy Wrath be Swift (because heck Dance with Death is just right there eating a point that could otherwise be placed in an area that’s actually useful and not just a dead point slot), Second Wind + Swift Certainty just means that you can ‘force’ yourself into a sprint and just run away gaining all the toughness you lost back and get into cover to drop their aggro/otherwise pull out your gun to deal with them.
worse comes to worse, if you’re running martydom or something and can’t get to either of these two solutions relyabley, there’s always the tride and true ‘Surgical/Hand Cannon’ revolver, for dealing with armor and all your gunner problems at the same time as quickly as you need it.
Fury of the Faithful is also a soft solution as well, it can get interrupted with enough fire which is annoying, but a diagonal charge can usually get you there. To that same same effect the other two abilities for Zealot are just hard solutions to any gunner problem, invis just drops your aggro and gives you back toughness when fully upgraded, and Totem is just your ‘f I’m out of options lets just reset’ button that lets you walk at the enemy while stunning them. All are meant to help you close the distance with totem being the best ‘just stop it’ button in the game.
So yeah, you have tools, just a matter of finding the one that works best for you and using it appropriately.
The thing that bothers me the most about gunners is that they never (?) reload. They only load their weapon once they spot you and fire infinitely. Also, I think it would be cool if the aim swaying would dicrease while the player is aiming at them while crouching. It can get annoying aiming at them especially with the bolter.
you’re supposed to take cover or distract them with a grenade while your team closes or shoots them. they don’t need to balance for you doing everything solo and a melee zealot getting hosed by gunners is something that should end in a dead stupid zealot.
You can tribialize gunners via various means, suppression, evasion, melee engagements, keeping your toughness up via other means, stunning them with charges or nades, etc etc…
but ontop of that you ALSO want them to be harmless when they can freely hit you and you do none of your counterplay options? What would the loss condition be, then?