This. You’ll never take my shovel-y goodness from me. It is an excellent weapon for facing hordes and stunning specials/elites and I will happily shepherds hordes with it. WIth a heavy swing pattern you can dominate with sideways dodging. You can even fight two separate enemies by swing at one side, turning and hitting the other, and the stagger will stop them from fighting back. I’ll happily wade into melee with any of my three Guard builds (1x support, 1x ranged, 1x melee) and hold my own.
The bigger problem from my perspective are the people of all classes who get ahead on their own and then get very upset at the rest of the team. Had a guy telling the team in one match how bad we were after he’d rushed ahead and been downed by Crushers. Also people running past ammo crates/medikits and then spamming about being out of ammo or needing a health kit.
The class is not “Veteran”, it’s “Veteran Sharpshooter”, and in fairness, recently some players need to be reminded of that. There’s a reason that Guardsmen are widely renowned as being ****ed when enemies close to melee in the 40k universe, arms reach is not where Guardsmen are at their best, and the Veteran Sharpshooter isn’t going to consistently match the overall melee performance of other classes in Darktide no matter what some people want to tell themselves about their meme-builds. If a Veteran Sharpshooter is meleeing through the whole match without taking care of shooters and disablers at range for the team, they are bad, simple as. They produce bad game outcomes, bad forum posts, and should feel bad for not playing a class that will do whatever they’re trying to do way better.
That said, Veteran Sharpshooters engaging in melee is a necessary part of the game that everyone will spend lots of time doing, there isn’t enough ammo or time to engage everything at range, especially for bosses where melee damage often hits twice as hard as ranged damage.
The Karnak Twins for example have a universal 2x melee damage multiplier over the 1x ranged damage multiplier on all hit locations, with the shield having a 3x melee multiplier vs a 0.6x ranged damage multiplier (e.g. a melee hit for 100 damage will do 300 damage to the shield, a ranged hit for 100 damage will do 60 damage to the shield). Boss fights in this game are very explicitly designed to be mostly be melee affairs, and your shooting should be for clearing anything that isn’t a boss.
Clearly you haven’t tried the new Melee vet, because he is an absolute unit.
Couple the melee build with a strong melee weapon, such as Combat Axe or Claw Sword, add the Teamshout with all upgrades but the revival.
I’d wager you make a better team melee support than the Zealot.
It’s insane how good Vet in melee can be now and people who don’t appreciate them don’t know what crazy fun they miss out on.
Off your high horse there, we are just Veterans now, not Sharpshooters. That is only 1/3 of the tree and they ditched ‘Sharpshooter’ from the name before Patch 13. You can claim that we should be standing at the back shooting gunners etc all you like, but that is a dull way to play a Veteran for some of us. My ability to knock down foes, boost toughness with +temp or replenishing it whilst marking targets and helping to shoot them down between assisting in handling hordes with the central tree is way more useful than pretending to be a sniper in a fast-moving game like this. I’m much more adaptable and useful, and frankly I get way more fun out of it. Recently I played with the left-hand tree to do the ‘keep Volley fire active for over 20 seconds x5’ and I was so glad to ditch the range build to go back to my comfy supporting role, where I can alternate and be very useful regardless.
Indeed.
A Veteran can be a Veteran of anything. A war veteran specifically can be a melee warrior, too. It’s very unspecific and suitable, considering you can make up to 7 different type of builds with the new Veteran:
Assault
Grenadier
Melee Warrior
Quick Swap Space Cowboy
Sharpshooter
Shock Trooper
Support Unit
Often, a few of those blend in together as you have to navigate the skilltree anyway.
You can claim that we should be standing at the back
I never said people need to be standing in back.
shooting gunners etc all you like, but that is a dull way to play a Veteran for some of us.
Vet is the single best class for handling ranged threats and disablers, and is one of central roles of the class. If handling those as a priority is not something people like doing on the class, I’ll refer to my statements in the previous post.
My ability to knock down foes, boost toughness with +temp or replenishing it whilst marking targets and helping to shoot them down between assisting in handling hordes with the central tree is way more useful than pretending to be a sniper in a fast-moving game like this.
I’m not seeing how boosting toughness and marking targets and the like is mutually exclusive with engaging important targets at range. It sounds like we play a lot alike. I’ve been running my Vet with the PG and Rending Autoguns almost exclusively, with VoC and no Keystones.
I never said anything about trying to be a sniper or needing to take Volley Fire, I said if they’re just meleeing everything without taking care of those targets, they’re bad. These are very different statements. Handling ranged threats the other classes can’t (or can’t do well) doesn’t require you to sit in back with a Lasgun trying for careful headshots looking down your sights, but it does mean you can’t play a Vet like a Zealot and expect to perform as well.
Zealots know how to disengage from melee and make space to whip out their ranged when needed right?
Exactly the same applies for a Vet, if you arent shooting elites or specials you should be helping control and clear hordes, and if elites and specials start filtering into that horde, you back up into that space youve been helping to maintain to filter them out. You dont need to be as efficient at it as the zealot to put the work in.
Fair enough, from reading your previous post it sounded to me more as if you were advocating for Veteran’s to be handling all the ranged stuff from the back, hence my reply. I’m sorry that I misread it. Having re-read that post after having read this one, we are of the same perspective more or less. You do have to keep your eyes open as a Vet for those pesky ranged fellows and crack off a shot or two when you can, which I love the newer Kantrael laspistol for.
You’re absolutely right, going full melee is a bit of a bad thing to do as a Veteran and would be a most peculiar choice of thing to do. I mean, you could do it with the shovel, chainsword or power sword but the big question would be ‘why?’ I suppose there are strange people out there. It would be like a Psyker trying to play only with a gun and without their blitz, a force sword or staff.
Fair enough, and I can see how my initial post may read that way. Mostly it was aimed at a couple heavy right-tree build players I’ve run into who never shot at anything that wasn’t immediately in front of them before swapping weapons again for the Specialist buff, and that’s awful to play with and makes me spicy
Ranged play works fine most of the time, but generally speaking it doesn’t fare well in arena scenarios because enemies just stream in from every direction.
Still don’t get the point of Braced vs regular Autogun. Autogun is more DPS other than point blank (in which case use a melee) for slightly more effort since you can actually chain weakpoint hits…or hits in general.
I’m assuming you’re a zealot though so you should probably be using a revolver anyways if you want to be safe from specials without relying on teammates which if you are a solo queuer then that’s on you.
You have no control over what other people do so you have to build for potentially incompetent teammates. That, or you can use throwing knives, but I don’t like poxwalkers doing the “Get down Mr President!” on flamers/trappers so a revolver is going in the loadout anyways with throwing knives being a critical redundancy.
As for those vets being derps? Iunno. Melee is safer, and easier right now with the exception of maybe crusher packs since the servers are very laggy atm. Doesn’t excuse them from not pulling out their gun to shoot the dangerous thing, but yeah. Don’t assume your team is going to be good, and build for self reliance within reason (no stealth).
because veteran doesn’t get toughness for throwing out bullets like psyker can with crits and every interaction they have with peril. so in order to stay alive you do need to melee a lot.
My Power Sword is good for horde clear and it’s got decent armoured damage; my Plasma Gun has a significant lack of ammo, even though I use Survivalist. In short, I use my Power Sword to compensate for the Plasma Gun’s lack of ammo and as a horde clear tool for when I’m in a frenzied state of panic.
Agreed, I learned early on to look at the team’s kits and adjust accordingly. I rarely ever find people who don’t go after elites though (in response to OP). I often encounter groups that collectively clamor for kills to show up in the feed and they’ll just completely abandon managing the horde all around us to do so.
the new shovel which has great horde control/clear with decimator and skullcrusher.
You know what makes a good veteran? One who melee’s and kills ANY specialist with his range before it can be a danger to the team. (While staying inside the horde)
This is how you make the veteran exceed in DMG output of melee and ranged.
VoC is currently the strongest ULT you can have as a vet especially with silent poxburster.
Essentially my team has the whole time golden toughness on auric missions since I get so many specialist to get my ult back before the golden toughness buff goes away
