Consistently finding PUG games where zealot/veteran who run into a room, assassinate what special/elites they can and leave a bunch of other stuff for the rest of us scattered in little pockets that make it very hard to keep up; they go faster than we can keep up clearing everything because we keep getting shot in the back if we do manage to keep up.
Then, of course, they’ll go in and start doing these things into a room that they didn’t fully scope, and now they’ve bitten off more than they can chew and then cloak and dump aggro on us.
So, how do you guys play around such mechanics? I’ve considered going stealth to just dump aggro once their aggro shield ends. Just to watch them melt.
I mostly use stealth for assistance, survival and objective. However i will also use it to assassinate if needed.
For example stealth and then run an objective. Stealth revive. A group of crushers abused the psyker in the backlines and they are struggling i can probably down one or two.
Or if i KNOW i am out of position and am going to die if i stay here. I will stealth to return to the group safely and without dragging half the map along with me. With my veteran i will also stealth sometimes to get in a better firing location to lay down some ranged fire if the situation is appropriate. Or line up a difficult ranged shot without being stabbed while doing so. I treat it largely as a utility.
Fineally if i (mostly due to my own stupidity) have fallen a bit too far behind. I use stealth to return to the group a little more safely for myself.
Edit: forgot one. If i hear a trapper/dog i will sometimes stealth if i have absolutely 0 idea where it is.
Also to bully snipers…f those guys
Edit 2: i try to avoid using it to shift agro onto unsuspecting team mates if at all possible. IE: stealthing so the ragers run right past me to the back of the veteran who is holding the other side of the hallway. If you do this your a traitor and should be dealt with as such
I play as tanky Ogryn, so I’m used to being somewhat of a lynchpin (follow the big man, easy as). If there’s a rogue player out there I try a little extra to corral the rest of the team with pings and words of encouragement. If there’s two rogue players then I’ll cover the remaining squaddie extra – bonus if they are a psyker or vet.
Usually the strays are at least killing stuff, and they’re definitely looting. In a pub game you aren’t relying on perfect teamwork anyway so a smattering of shooters n’ things is the norm – let them eat lead!
I don’t try to keep up, or go out of my way to help them unless they’ve been trapped or dogged. Even then, unless I can reach them safely I don’t hurry and abandon the cohesive group. They know the risks!!
Veteran stealth encourages you to stay near your team, so I don’t mind it. Like you get next to no benefit from camoflauge without coherency, stealth tossing frags requires underhand throws ie again being close to the action. Looping cooldowns requires them to kill a lot of specialists in short order if they’re running 2 charges.
Its the Zealot stealth that still has too little cooldown and thrown in with how impossible Zealot is to pin down anyway is just obnoxious and degenerate. There’s nearly negative risk involved before they start unloading aggro on other players. The gulf between ‘no hitstun’ and ‘hitstun’ is massive enough before the speed really.
Having played a zealot stealth build in an effort to clear some of the penances, I really don’t see how people can enjoy this play style. For one you basically have to run off and abandon your team to find ranged enemies to stealth backstab. Sure stealth can be used to help your team, but the way it’s designed in game just goes against the teamwork aspect of the game (the loner passive is the biggest offender here). As for how I deal with them on my team, I won’t risk the rest of the team to save them when everything goes wrong.
How to play with a stealth teammate? Like I do with every other teammate. I try to kill everything.
Have at least one answer for every enemy type and learn how to dodge / kite. Let the vet / zealot can pull and dump as much heat as they want. I will kill the enemies presented to me.
Personally I don’t expect the rest of the team to do anything. Every enemy everywhere, every loot, everything is up to me. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way as a complaint, most teams do fine enough on T5+ after all (even if there’s always a few who clearly aren’t ready for it).
I mean it as a mentality thing: With how quickly the dynamics of the game change, and how incredulously opportunistic the AI is, you can never expect anyone else to have your back. A single second is enough for that teammate to go from “I’ve got these elites” to “I’m taking cover bc something else came up”, leaving the elites to attack your back instead. And every mob from trash to elite will guaranteed hit you 0.5s after you turned your back on them, even when you saw 100% they were focusing on someone else and not you. Even if your zelly is happily wailing on a group of ranged a 100m away, at least a few of them will gladly trade their lives to get a few pot shots at you over there on the other side of the map while the zelly is about to cleave their heads in.
And so, I assume every single enemy is after me personally at all times. Even if they’re not focused on me now, they’re always waiting for the briefest opportunity to do so the moment I have my guard down. So range and cover are my defense. I move in a way where I don’t take on more than I can handle while panning around the field as I fight, constantly making threat estimates based on how long it would take for each enemy to get to me. Then I keep attacking the most immediate threats while panning around to check the status of everything else so they can’t surprise me. If things start to look bad, I pull back or reposition regardless of whatever my team is doing.
As for how I use stealth, it depends on the build and class but mostly it goes like this and in this order:
Zelly
Main offense: With my Crusher build or Kantrael Scattershot & Man-Stopper shotties, the 2 finesse-buffed autocrits instantly deletes any groups of anything other than oggies, dealing heavy dmg to them too.
Repositioning / reset from a bad spot
Objectives, helping & rezzing teammates
Just having it available lets me do high risk plays
Generally I use it aggressively and rarely sit on it, #1 ofc means I deliberately chase and face down the biggest groups whenever it’s off CD to make the biggest plays with it
Vet
Repositioning / reset, occasionally lining up big cleave shots I can only make from risky positions I need that stealth to get to
Objectives & helping teammates
If I have the dmg buff talents for it / ults in general, then same as zelly’s #1 as both stealths can fuel 2 attacks
Unlike with zellies, with vets I generally specifically DO sit on it, and only use it when needed. I virtually always pick the double charge talent and use the first charge more liberally, reserving the second for near-emergencies only.
Note that the vet’s Surprise Attack & Close Quarters Killzone (+30% dmg / +15 close dmg after leaving stealth) actually start ON stealth, not after. The timer until they run out just starts after the stealth deactivates. So between those and Longshot you can do stuff like stack burns & bleeds or throw a few nades → stealth → sit it out or do something else while it all does a ton of extra dmg. It’s niche but it’s there.
if you que into a coop public game and you expect the other players to do anything you are in the wrong
you are the only one accountable for your needs, you have two options, refuse to adapt and complain about it or adjust your skills or builds to overcome your problems
i’m extremely autistic in my games, i just hover to one lootcrate to the next minding my own business 100%, if the squad encounters resistence i eventually reach the frontline and help them, but if not i just let them do their things
often happens that enemies spawns behind and i get overrun, so i hardly ever feel like i’m slacking or anything, my playstyle led me to fill the anvil role in the team
i think understanding what role you want to give to yourself helps coping with what now you perceive as toxic behavior
Absolutely agreed. I won’t do those penances for the reasons you’ve listed along with other replies to this thread. I’ve been trained and conditioned since Left 4 Dead to work with the team in this format of game, to keep them up and alive as they will do so (theoretically) for me. To be instructed to abandon that completely genuinely prompts an emotional response in me of “this is wrong” and I feel it. It cuts so hard against the grain.
I can see why they added stealth, but I wish they had gone for something else. I’m sure there are people who love using it on their Veteran/Zealot. However, even when I’ve tried to use it in a group environment (doing Vet penances) I’m nowhere near as useful as when I’m shouting with VoC or pulsing enemies away from the team as I show them my shiny relic with Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude.
IMO Stealth Zealot should still be a frontliner when it calls for it, and shouldn’t be picking off ranged enemies when he has better things to do. It’s best to pop stealth to deal with heavy armor and thne get a couple backstab kills to instantly recharge it and backstab kill another heavy elite.
I still take Loner to save on points, but after completing Behind Enemy Lines, I rarely, if ever break too far away from my team. Using a gun is far better than a piddly little knife to shoot enemies from afar.
The CD increase from Perfectionist doesn’t matter much with how much CDR Zealot gets just from doing Zealot things, both from Invocation of Death and Pious Cutthroat. For that reason, I usually run Shroudfield with the Blazing Piety keystone. However, I still find it weaker than my FotF build.
Veteran stealth is pretty mid ATM and the only good add-on is Low Profile because it’s essentially 10 extra seconds of stealth to do whatever you want with.
I had a stealth knife zealot totally derail a pub game like that once. He rushed forward, getting 2 of our blueberries killed and dumped with stealth a lot of elites on me. When he stealthed all that stuff somehow aggro’ed on me and teleported to me from 100s of meters away. He obviously pushed the player respawn forward also. My Deimos psyker had a field day. When I eventually caught up to him, the map pacing was all f…and nothing spawned. I think I remembered to add him to the block list, which is rather rare for me.
In general stealth is terrible for the game, if Fatshark intends to keep it, it needs a rework. You should not be able to just stealth with enemies few meters away from you, or at very least entering stealth should apply suppression to ALL units so players left behind have a chance to react. AI instantly redirecting on the players left behind, often mid swing is a terrible design.
I ran the zealot stealth skill with loner in an attempt to start clearing penances last week.
I lasted 2 games before reverting back to FotF. And I’m a knife with backstab blessing noob!
Pros:
You get another get out of jail free card, on top of “Until Death” (left side of tree)
You can use it to pick players up / complete a hacking objective unhindered*
You get one almighty crit hit from behind
You can stealth behind enemies and come back at them towards your team mates
best thing about it, imho.*
Cons
You get ONE crit from behind, then you’re back on it
3 seconds is a bit **** let’s be honest; you likely need the 6s node, and another to get the toughness boost which is a bit poop also.
Do you want to be surrounded by all the enemy? How many times do you urgently need to remove a single crusher?
You lose out on the group stagger the other two give you
You aggro dump
The left mid-tree is better
I’m going to admit now that this was a lunchtime post and I’ve not thought these through fully, but I was just annoyed at how much I didn’t like it. Especially the penance; ffs, I can just shoot a special/elite from in front. I don’t need to creep round the back. It’s not natural game play.
I played maybe 60-70 hours of Shade in VT2 and was my highest time on character alongside Ironbreaker:- the skill resetting your timer on kill is paramount to an assassin build, imo. Maybe that’s what it needs so you can chain a pack. Lose Loner too.
That’s why I dislike Veteran’s stealth because it’s more defensive while Zealot’s is more aggressive and incentivize player to attack enemy after using ability.
Either way, there are still people using it to escape or bail because they’re a wuss.
