Loner can be easily healed by it being changed to:
“Your coherency radius is ten times larger. Allies in your coherency have their coherency radii and coherency toughness gain increased by 50%”.
Or for a more reasonable toned down counterpart of this idea:
“Your coherency radius is extended with a tenfold radius. You can only gain the benefit from Coherency 2 from the Extended Radius.”
Another Idea:
Change the name to not be unfitting to the bombastic names for the other auras:
Righteous Executioner:
“Your coherency presence lingers for 20 seconds for you and your allies after you leave coherency from them. Allies in coherency gain 10% more backstab damage.”
Dare I say this would be overpowered. Now you’re effectively always in coherency with your teammates and they receive a buff equivalent to Ogryn’s Lynchpin.
One can tone the numbers for sure, and you can always remove the 50% increased radii or toughness gain from coherency parts, and then you can limit that YOU only gain max 2 coherency from using your extended coherency area.
Point is that the Loner should be able to still use the coherency mechanic in this TEAM GAME. This just keeps the idea of the design intact.
The best way to make Loner a beloved pick for the whole team is if it just wasn’t the third aura. It can be a talent somewhere else, like maybe it could replace one of those other useless ones they have that people only take because they’re on the way to something better. Then the aura can be something that’s actually an aura. I think Dodge Distance or Dodge Efficiency or Dodge Recharge Speed would fit the Deathcultist Zealot tree, since they have a whole bunch of “on successful dodge” skills.
Far superior as a solution to the issue as a whole. I just gave something that would comply with the developer intent. Of course one can and should question developer intent in a case like this. Your take is far more reasonable than whatever the developers thought. Zealot has a lot of “point tax”, and arguably always having a minimum coherency of 2 is quite worthless as coherency regen itself is so weak.
The ability is fine. The teamplay aspect of loner is that it allows you to engage shooters before they can pressure your team. This is a massive boon to the team.
The expectation isn’t that you stay gone, the expectation isthat you use your high mobility (all over the tree and zealots weapons that synergize with that half of the tree) to come back to your team should things get dicey. A timer on loner would enforce this principle, but it’s already sort of enforced by how someone who just stays gone eventually makes a mistake and needs team help.
There’s also the hidden aspect of it changing the way special spawns work, since the game spawns specials differently when a teammate is out of coherency. With Loner, you are not out of coherency, so the game doesn’t change the way it spawns specials.
I think the genuinely only issue that Loner suffers is bad optics. People who are tilted easily get tilted out when they see it because the above principle isn’t understood fully. I think thats a real issue, but I’ll be entirely honest: If the buff was named “Emperor’s Presence” or something instead it would probably stop most of this. The name “Loner” just evokes a certain reaction from people. Logic gets turned off and emotions take over, there.
Sorry but this is just mistaken. Benediction is far superior to Loner in this regard, allowing you 15% toughness damage reduction.
And again, for solo gameplay, Global 2 Coherency means nothing compared to a 15% toughness damage reduction.
And again, for the tactics of hit and run, 15% toughness damage reduction is better than loner, loner is NOT going to give you more than, let’s be generous 20% of your toughness to you during one “flanking maneuver”/“forerunning bout”. Compare that to the toughness you gain from melee kills/abilities/talents, and 15% toughness damage reduction gives you more value for flanking/forerunning if you do it as you describe it: Leaving team and then entering back.
To add insult to injury, Benediction is also better if we consider toughness regeneration from coherency with this tactic in mind contra Loner, since you effectively have a “larger tank” of toughness with benediction, and you go out, and return to 4 stacks of coherency.
As such, Loner does not give value in the situation one would hope it gives, it only gives value in poor gameplay where the Loner is alone for elongated periods of time.
Even then, if I would play something like that, I would not pick Loner, I would pick Benediction, Loner is just not worth it for even solo play.
Not to mention the fact that Benediction gives your team the 15% damage reduction when you are in coherency with them, Loner not doing similar.
All the points in discussion had me think of another way to make Loner actually team-oriented:
Change the name to not be unfitting to the bombastic names for the other auras:
Righteous Executioner:
“Your coherency presence lingers for 20 seconds for you and your allies after you leave coherency from them. Allies in coherency gain 10% more backstab damage.”
(You can switch and tweak around the 20 seconds if you want.)
I don’t think it’s mistaken at all. Coherency 2 regen is pretty substantial with toughness regen curios. I admit I didn’t consider how the curios interact with it since I just slapped toughness regen of all of mine but whenever I play loner zealot I often just dip behind a wall real quick to get a full toughness recharge solo if I get pressured. It allows you to skip over some other toughness gen options. Definitely more than 20% toguhness if you consciously make use of it, and if you don’t, of course you shouldn’t really pick it.
Also the 15% TDR isn’t actually 15% TDR since zealot has many other sources of TDR and there’s diminishing returns. Just one thing to factor in. At some point having more avenues of regen is vastly more important for effective toughness.
Also, this isn’t the main appeal for the aura at all, but having coherency regen makes solo clutching completely trivial. It’s a nice side effect of loner. You can just take your time and keep recharging your toughness and you’ll be fine.
I’m not really saying I would be opposed to changes or a buff though, I’m really just saying on principle the aura is working for what it wants to do and people just have to get over themselves and stop taking offense with the idea of engaging shooters early. It really isn’t rushing, it’s good for the team. I think there’s far more offensively bad auras, like the psyker 5% damage to elites aura that actually never has to be picked, you can ALWAYS pick the 10% CDR aura instead, the only passive you miss out on is the one that gives you 20% toughness when an ally dies. Meanwhile veteran gets 5% all damage just like that
Funny, I do not view TDR stacking being multiplicative as a reason to say that stacking is not worth it. Sure you do not get the additive increase, but you do get absolute performance.
Stacking DR is better due to this mathematical reason: think of the inverse of your toughness, hits-taken/seconds under fire.
With a theoretical effective TDR of 90% you get effectively 10 s in fire, assuming that with 0% you get 1 s in fire.
Now, we add a 50% DR to that. That means from 0% to 50% you get 2 s under fire. Not much, does not unlock new tactics or avenues of strategy.
At 90% adding the 50% DR you get a multiplicative total of 95%, that means you go from 10 s surviving under fire to 20 s. Surviving 20s, which is 10 more seconds in fire contra the 10s from just having the 90%, you unlocked a vast amount of new viable options. And any toughness gain you get is multiplied by that inverse of 1/(100-95%) which is x 20.
10 more seconds BECAUSE you stacked the “badly stacking” TDR.
See the point?
But that is a digression. I hold my own view that stacking TDR = good and that toughness for zealot mainly comes from ultimate, or killing + momentum + dodge toughness talent. Ultimate often is enough for clutching, since you can farm backstabs from all enemies with bashes and angular dodges rotating around enemies. But your style may differ, but this is to explain my point of view using a rather crude and simple theoretical case, but the laws it displays are present in the game.
I didn’t say it’s not worth it, I’m just saying it’s got diminishing returns so that 15% doesn’t actually have a value of 15%. It’s important to keep that in mind because it lets you weigh the pros and cons better. You’re not actually calculating it how the game does btw, you’re assuming linear gain which isn’t how the DR works in darktide.
The reason it’s relevant ina real world scenario and why your calculation is totally irrelevant is because a zealot will already move around with like 40-50% effective TDR to begin with, even if he’s loner (probably ESPECIALLY with loner since that usually means he’s going for the backstab route which has great TDR talents in it). Getting another 15% to push him from 45% to 50% and some change doesn’t actually do much even if it did work like that (again you get a little less in practice because Darktide does some weird calcs you can check in the code, published on github)
In the end it’s preference for sure, I’m just saying Loner isn’t really outperformed much. When it comes to actual real effective toughness I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins out heavily, especially if allies die or during certain events.
My personal experience speaks against this still, coherency toughness regen is a vastly smaller source of toughness compared to every other option. So that is nothing to write home about, even when playing solo. Plus I would not go through the loner aura side due to it not being the side that allows you to generate health via death resistance, which is another thing that is not concerned here but in a “real world scenario” that has to be accounted for, since death resist and healing from there are the real selling points of zealot compared to melee veteran anyways, in my view.
And, again, the value of stacking damage resistance in any form in any game increases the more you stack it, 5% from 0 means nothing (you still most likely die to the same amount of mistakes/hits taken, etc.) but 5% at 90 doubles your effective health.
So, that 8% that one can claim to be worthless from 45% to 53% may not be good in a void, but when accounting everything else it begins to shine. It is either stack or don’t stack, and I am in camp stack due to the new tactics it purchases me contra the ability to sit in a corner during a clutch, since I already get toughness by sitting in the form of my cooldowns, or by killing enemies without taking damage.
I do not think there is much more to discuss about the merits of the current iteration of loner and its effects on gameplay, feel free to continue about it, but I would rather focus on how to improve the ability to be more uniform with the rest of the auras the game has, since it is an outlier.