At the advice of the unsurpassed @Reginald, I decided to try Damnation for the first time on my best-kitted class, the thammer Zealot. Yes thammer is a meme beyond monstrosity hunting, but I’m not good enough at clutching as vet to be confident at taking him into damnation.
I ended up yeeting into a HISTG mission by accident. I thought there was not one on the board when I hit the quickplay button. I was wrong.
I now fully understand the balance complaints about the oppressiveness of shooters, the ridiculous underpoweredness of the thunder hammer, and the unbalanced nature of the classes in general.
Use your ult? You are immediately surrounded by a dozen scab stalkers who shoot you at point blank range despite your melee being out, and you die.
Try to pick targets? You hit a random poxwalker from the endless hordes and die during the thunder hammer stun.
Try to use your ranged weapon? You get focused down and die.
That being said, it was exhilarating, it’s just I can very easily see where all of the enemy/weapon balance complaints are coming from. When ranged enemies invalidate all but 1.5 out of the 4 classes (all but vet and maybe a ranged/BB equipped psyker) via hitstun and suppression, all the while you’re dealing with a constant stream of new enemies and disablers, and your weapon is suddenly not capable of doing nearly as much damage in order to kill those enemies…yeah, I see where everyone’s been coming from.
Now, obviously, part of this is I need to git gud and all that. No disputing that. And I’ll be trying more Damnation maps because the rest of the team was absolutely better than the Malice and Heresy bunch I’ve usually encountered. Just…probably avoiding HISTG. At least until I level something for horde management/general use.
A lot of what you’re describing will disappear with experience. HiSTG can be challenging even for people with a lot of vanilla T5 experience, and by the sounds of it you’re fresh out of T4.
T4 does absolutely zip to prepare you for T5, mostly thanks to breakpoint changes. Even on vanilla T5, you can’t play the way you do in T4 and reliably succeed. As a zealot, for example, you need to be a lot more selective about when you use your charge. Cover and positioning are also infinitely more important in T5.
Also, don’t sweat too much about class balance, there are differences, but it’s pretty overblown for the most part. I’ve seen every class dominate in T5, and thammer zealots are basically mandatory for the monstrous special maelstrom mod.
Edit: One thing that can be really challenging when making the T4-T5 jump is learning to trust your teammates. In T4 and below, you never really know what your teammates are going to do. In T5 they tend to be pretty predictable and can generally be trusted not to die in stupid ways.
I’d say the class balance is less ‘class balance’ and more ‘oh god there’s twenty guys with rifles and they’re shooting me point blank’ balance.
Looks like I need to go through the Meat Grinder again.
Unfortunately that’s how we wiped. I was trying to clean up a wave of shotgunners and ragers and
nobody dealt with the other flank and we got horde-buried.
I WILL beat that mode with my slaughtletter chaxe one of these days.
Absolutely true. Damnation is this strange game mode where suddenly you die like a karking loser super easily. At least until you learn a bunch of kinda poorly explained mechanics.
I hope you keep playing! Once you adapt to the challenges you will figure out how and when to aggress, even against shooters. Its very fun in damnation land. Let me know if you ever want to try and get a game in.
Your feedback on your experience is helpful not just to fatshark IMO. I was actually gonna put together a guide on how to play damnation for newer players. I guess I need a section on dealing with shooters.
The most noticable shortcoming of the average pug I come across doing HI-STG and above is the complete lack of understanding about the fundamentals of melee aspect in the game, for which we have nothing but the difficulty curve to blame. You can shoot your way out of anything even on vanilla T5.
When they are forced to get down and dirty point blank, most zealots and oggys will just fold in half, not understanding the very aspect of their survivability is coming from BEING melee range to begin with. The closer you are, the safer you are, but is hard when you lack the prior experience on how to handle such situations. A mandatory 100h VT2 session would do wonders regarding the completion rate of the hardest auric missions. Or you can just train by apeing into everything head first, than figuring it out on the go on the easier missions.
Shooting is easy, you point and click, learning how to sustain your toughness in melee range is harder, but goes a long way.
Super true. People get this mindset from fighting ranged in lower levels that being near a poxwalker horde is dangerous, which it is. But it is also a key resource for zealots and ogryns. The mob of chafe enemies is a resource. Learning to use the enemy to body block shots, manipulate dodge dance timings to avoid fire, approach from covered angels, only hit packed groups of enemies with melee charges not spread out ones. Learning how to distribute stagger to keep shooters pinned, managing toughness, etc. All skills that aren’t really taught in earlier modes where you can tank quite a bit of ranged fire with your face.
I understand this, really I do. Sometimes shooters still catch me out in a bad position and eat my lunch. But its actually the case that the zealot is easily the most survivable class of the lot. Able to clutch and solo far harder than anyone (ogryn is a good second choice). And that includes shooters point blanking you. Ironically the hammer is probably one of the best at surviving a situation like the one here:
due to its incredible stagger sweeps and shoves. You can just knock everyone over and play clean up after. Watch my healthbar, I never even drop to 1 and do not even proc my Until Death. Admittedly some of the guys are just shooting the ogryn but some are shooting at me.
I appreciate that, and I do intend to keep trying - it was genuinely fun and having good teammates rather than watching everyone immediately do a Scooby Do ‘lets split up gang’ impression like in Heresy more than compensated for the difficulty of enemies - just the constant rain of disablers was hellish. We made it as far as the Magistrati Obliette before we got completely buried, and honestly if I had been better (aka, not lost my nades to death) or a vet had brought grenade regen, we probably would’ve made it even with me not being very good.
I will say that I’ve been able to do this pretty well as zealot on Heresy, it’s mostly the disablers that set me up for a problem so to speak. Like, thammer is good at crowd control, but if there’s three shield ogryns in the mix with that horde you kinda run out of options.
This is fair, my problem was mostly stuff like the run-up into the structural supports where the giant shooter/gunner mix appears to suppress you from an unreachable distance while a mixed ogryn/rager horde ties you up in melee…
Wondering if I should mess with my feats. I’ve got the ‘doubled toughness on kill’ one, with thammers cleave should I pick the one that procs when I hit 3 enemies?
Try kantrael shotgun with hammer, special works perfect vs bulwarks (so you don’t need to open their shields up/waiting or circling for a backstab), gunners blobs - just spam some fire attacks at their direction, aswell as regular shots good vs specials and elites. Both Th and evi needs some range weapon in pair that you can swap on and kill nasty trapper or dog fast.
You definitely want to do the toughness regen on proximity to 3+ enemies.
It is a simple and effective passive that you will almost always be able to take advantage of and directly benefits you when pushing into groups of anything. It is precisely what turns poxwalker hordes into a resource and gives you staying power against shooters in melee. The hammer tends to be slow at killing so you’re hurting your toughness regen since you’re only killing 1 dude at a time with a hammer typically.
As to blessings the best hammer build is:
Slaughterer or Headtaker + Thrust
BUT in your early forays into Damnation try out Momentum + Thrust. Ideally with a +25% maniac perk to quickly onebonk muties.
A godrolled Ironhelm can help with that specific scenario since you can always cleave a few guys to hit the bulwark shield then 1tap the bulwark.
Also what do you run for ranged? Flamer is a good pairing but you might look to the agripinaa shotgun for quick swap precision work against trappers and the like or the lawbringer if you like never having ammo.
Do you use your grenades?
It seems that around 90% of the players (even on HI+STG damnation) do not make use of their grenades.
Regarding class balance, it does seem like the zealot is currently the overall weakest when it comes to damage output.
It would be reasonable for the eviscerator and thunderhammers to be buffed in their horde clear capabilities (which could potentially also be helped by melee power/dmg/cleave bonuses from the class itself), but we will see what happens with the upcoming update.
Its fairly easy to dispatch bulwarks with the combat axes, as the H1 does signicant unyield dmg. If you are using anything else and / or there are too many of them, I just zealot nade em. If you have shredder / braced agri, you can wait for the opening and just shoot em point blank in the face, as the stagger will ensure they can’t reshield.
Another option is to use the fire shotgun, which will 2 shot bulwark / reaper with at least 20% unyield on, at any distance. Since the special attack on it has unlimited cleave, you can dispatch any number of em lined up proper, hunkered down or not. Having all that said, I would still not recommend using any of the shotguns, they are rather bad generally speaking, and will most likely be a liability on the hardest missions rather than a help.
Oh and also, never ever use the +50% toughness feat.
First of all, it’s +50% not double, meaning 7.5% toughness per kill, whereas the proximity one gives you 8.33% instead of the 5% in the description, because server tickrate or something.
Having that said, crit DR is still far superior if applicable reliably by your melee weapon, as ranged weapons can also proc it, proving to be by far the best protection against ranged enemies.
Purify in blood was buffed long long time ago, it’s +100%, basically 10 toughness points per mob vs 5 without this feat, works fine with horde clearing weapons like heavy sword. While 3rd one works with evi or Th cause you are dancing around elites blobs killing mobs one by one or kiting.
Trash shooters are extremely obnoxious i agree, losing all your toughness and 1/6 hp because a single trash looked at you funny can feel very demotivating
But just so we’re clear, in 99% of the cases this is due to poor team wide coverage
People who press on without clearing, leaving some trash behind that will shoot you in the back
Veterans with Plasma Gun and Shredder who do absolutely nothing to help against non-elite shooters enemies, and there’s a lot of them
Or the ever so popular Surge and Purgatus dead weight Psykers whom, as a Psyker myself, I absolutely despise because of how much work they demand to carry their ass off from one end of a mission to the other
And you, yourself didn’t say what ranged weapon you used
If I have them, yeah, problem was by the time we got the shield conga going I’d already been killed and revived, so no nades and no drops. Basically it was a whole mess.
