Because I refuse to just use what they have given up on. Other things I don’t agree with they are still working on but this? They just gave up and didn’t even properly give up, I mean the entire reason they gave for lowing the max stacks was you couldn’t get them on higher difficulty anyway but you still cannot get max stacks anyway (6 is the actual max, you can only get 7 on malice and below) so not only did they give up, they still managed to f- it up. Their “fix” wasn’t a fix and it didn’t even fix it. THAT is what I am mad about.
Nerfs are just a thing that I have to accept but whiffing a change this hard takes an exceptional level of ineptitude. Honestly I wouldn’t even be mad if they had just reduced it to 6 max when they gave up, then it would just have been “oh it is old martyrdom but slightly stronger and with optional stuff you can add to it.”
When they made the change, I could have accepted it if they had made max stacks obtainable, but they didn’t. So in essence they didn’t fix anything and that tells me they wasted development time on it that they could have put elsewhere. Did people like that you couldn’t get max stacks? No but nobody really cared because it was new and we assumed they would change it, but they technically didn’t change it. It is exactly the same for all intents and purposes.
If anything I do agree that it is strong, too strong with certain weapons? Maybe, but I don’t agree that 2 more stacks would be somehow broken, I mean it is risk vs reward at 9 stacks an 9/10 wounds missing you would be at 10% health and since you would need 3 +wound curios your health would not be propped up by health curios so it would be like 15-20 health maybe? One-shot by basically anything, that is very high risk if that cheat death is on cooldown. I would rather them have balanced out 9 stacks than give up and still not even let us get max stacks.
That looks good to me for an Evisc build. I wouldn’t ditch double charge imo, being able to guranteed kill 2 ragers or Maulers in a row is too valuable, as well as the toughness and attack speed it gives you.
For T hammer I’ll get back to you, but I think the stun resistance is essential with ANY T hammer build to make sure you can get your max thrust heavy attack off (although like I mentioned before you could play risky and hope the stagger from Fury and the actual attack is enough). I wouldn’t suggest running it on Ironhelm until they fix it. I know peoppe who run Marty on Crucis and do well, but I despise the Crucis so I can’t really advise you on that front.
I agree. That’s why my first build included it, but I’m getting really stretched thin here. I am currently using the ironhelm with a crit build to great effect.
Thinking about this more I believe I understand why they did that. I assume internal testing or whatever is able to get 100% rolled weapons, or at least curiors. If each Curio gave you +2 wounds you would be able to reach 9 stacks.
So I believe I may have been right when I said it was “future proofing” for if we ever get Red level curios, or was just a mistake by the dev team.
Honestly, I kind of wish martyrdom wasn’t a keystone at all. I wish it was plastered (in a weaker form) somewhere else in the tree on the way. I feel like they kind of just ripped it out of the zealot core features pre patch 14.
Accessing the zealots melee potential is really really toxic game-play wise. The veteran can access his melee damage by killing with his ranged weapon and using his special ability and sprinting. A lot of control built in and all behaviors you’ll execute while in the normal course of a mission. Ogryn can access obscene levels of heavy damage by just doing what he does and heavy spamming. He even has a thrust talent built into his tree. To reach rough parity to ogryn heavy damage buffing as zealot you’ll need to be down to one wound with max marty stacks out of stamina, cleaving 5 targets at a time, and backstabbing.
I know we are getting off topic from the thunderhammer, but I wonder if it’s more the zealots mechanics are clashing with the thunderhammer and thats why we aren’t seeing high enough numbers to reach elite breakpoints?
yeah really hate that they took a thing that was just a nice thing to have when you were getting beat up to keep you in the fight (or build around if you are fine with the damage). Instead you have to take it over one of the other two which while less powerful are much less risky and are not that much less powerful.
Naw the TH is missing breakpoints exclusively because of the missive HP buff they gave elites (particularly the ones it should be the best at taking out fast). The TH is a high risk high reward weapon, or rather it was in patch 13 and prior when it could 1-2 shot everything but leave you vulnerable. Now it can only do that under very specific circumstances and certainly not as safely as other, better, options. It still one-taps mutants with a charged heavy special, still one-taps shotgunenrs, scab gunners (dreg gunners have unreasonable HP and terrible hitboxes), all specials besides the odd hound that decides to take half damage for no reason, and can (sometimes) take out scab ragers with one hit to the face. Crushers take 3 (up from 2), maulers take 2 or 3 (up from 1 or 2), dreg ragers take 2 (up from 1). This means you are left vulnerable far more often where before if executed properly you would not be.
To top it off they of course nerfed shroudhammer into the dirt which would one-shot any enemy but had a long cooldown and you had to make serious sacrifices if you wanted to get things to reduce that cooldown. Now it is just not worth it and frankly shroudfield in general is not worth it with the gimmick gone, not over fury or chorus at least.
So yeah the changes to the surrounding game with no buffs to keep it at the same breakpoints has caused the TH to fall short unless you run very specific builds and even then you tend to need crits to make breakpoints.
This is what I ran with my Ironhelm (and will hopefully one day run again!) You notice I don’t have Thy Wrath be Swift. That’s because I forgot something else:
At max stacks Punishment gives you Uninterruptible. While certainly less consistent than Thy Wrath, it worked well enough for me and didn’t cost this build an extra 3 points.
I might try to ditch it and see how punishing it feels sometime. The build looks very interesting. I do wish the stacks from punishment lasted a bit longer.
Additionally you could probably drop the extra toughness on heavy attack kill for the backstab damage if you like it more.
Can you explain and show what build you’re using? I believe you could only get around a 50% crit rate at the best of times, and while good I don’t trust a coin toss to get my kills.
I like Inexorable and Marty more becauae they both give consistent damage (Inexorable maybe isn’t as consistent but I usually have at least 10 stacks so I consider that a baseline, and anything over a nice bonus), and also importantly attack speed. It’s hard to go back to Blazing Piety with the base attack speed.
Away from my pc but I take knife, benediction, fury, and crit aura.
Good toughness DR, easy access to thy wrath. You’lll be surprised at how well you brawl
I’m sorry to hear that. I used it very well in patch 13 but ever since they’ve changed the attack pattern on the Ironhelm I haven’t really touched it, which means I also haven’t tested it against the new buffed elites. Rumor right now is that change mught be reverted in the upcoming patch, and if that is the case when it happens I’ll play it again and let you know how it feels against the tankier elites.
If you have chance today I would still love to see your Crit Ironhelm build.
Additionally I did a small amount of testing and thr corruption healing aura does seem very good with Martydom, so I’ve altered my Marty Evisc build but I do want to test it mkre before giving it my full approval. It is nice to change Punishment for Hammer of Faith so Fury always staggers Crushers.
In that vein, I would love to see something like Shock and Awe get a rework to be something useful and unique. I would like to see it suppress enemies around the player on special hit instead of being the absolutely useless blessing it is currently. Other ideas could be something like increase the amount of stacks Skullcrusher gives on heavies as a pseudo-cleave effect. Make Thunderous apply Brittleness to enemies in an area around the target on special hit. Thunderstrike increases impact of special attacks by 100-250% (I-IV).
And yeah, the hammer itself just needs some tlc as well. Ironhelm needs to be less awkward and Crucis needs to deal more damage if they are planning on keeping the self-stun and whack-a-pox mechanics as is. I shouldn’t need Thrust to kill a Rager. Especially when there’s 4 more of them that will instantly kill me before my self-stun ends.
Not arguing against the rest of this but have you actually used T Hammer post patch 13? I find it odd you’re talking about self stun this much when it’s been reduced in duration down to being basically negligible at this point.
I exclusively use it actually and I am aware of the reduction. It is negligible on light attacks, not heavies, especially after a pox eats your special and you get counterattacked by the elite you were about to kill.
I have no problem witb the very slight self stun. It is to emphasize proper positioning and skillful play to help balance (what should be) and extremely strong attack.
