Zealot is really strong right now and ive already beat damnation on endless horde with pugs using zealot and ive clutched so many games with zealot. Zealot has the unique ability to just not give a damn about his health too much by restoring most if not all when he gets low. The charge if used right goes so ridiculously far it feels unfair and the melee damage with a good weapon is insane. Bleethrough damage is well balanced and shouldnt be changed it is a great balancing idea to make sure toughness isnt op and offer a really fun gameplay cycle making all melee hits matter when you recieve them. I highly doubt most people complaining things are too hard came from cata 3 dwons in vermintide 2. They are people with a small amount of hours in the game and just dont have the ability to play at any meaningful skill level yet. Patch 1.07 put zealot in a really good spot and it doesnt need buffs people just need time to learn how to play it.
I’m not sure you fully grasp what’s being complained about. I’m not worried about Zealot being weak overall compared to the other classes. He just has some noticeable issues that make him clunky and bad-feeling to play.
Melee chip damage is also basically perfectly designed to screw over anyone who wants to play him as a low-health melee DPS, which feels (and is!) arbitrary and poorly thought out. Melee chip damage is pointless when corruption already exists as a mechanic, but it SPECIFICALLY is really awful for anyone who wants to use the passive or multiple feats that explicitly grant buffs conditional on being low health. ZEALOT CAN BE POWERFUL WITHOUT THEM, but this mechanic makes all of those feats pointless. It is simply bad game design.
Did someone offend you or something? You seem needlessly angry at people who have no vendetta with you who would just like improvements made to their favorite character.
Zealot is indeed really strong right now, even with the bleedthrough and their bugged talents. On Heresy and Damnation, a single Zealot can solo a horde if played well. It’s entirely possible for Zealots to sit in a corner and keep the bulk of the aggro during hacking events while the rest of their teammates deal with specials and stragglers.
You don’t need to play Cata 3 DWONS to know this, though.
I highly doubt most people complaining things are too hard came from cata 3 dwons in vermintide 2
Of course they haven’t. Cata 3 DWONS is a niche selection of mods played by a small slice of the VT2 community. Why would most of the people on this forum be speaking from the perspective of a modded realm player?
None of this changes the fact that toughness bleedthrough is still unintuitive for your average player, and that the game (currently) doesn’t say anything about this mechanical interaction with melee damage. Keep in mind that the game still needs to be accessible for average players on Malice or Heresy or whatever. Melee hits going through shields contradicts what players learn in other games with shield systems, where shields always prevent damage unless it’s specifically stated not to (Toxin damage in Warframe, Chaos damage in Path of Exile, corruption in this game). Notice how the general theme here is that poisonous/toxic attacks usually are what penetrates shields in these games, not regular old melee hits. It also goes against what players are told in the Psykhanium tutorial, though I imagine that Sefoni’s dialogue will be updated to include toughness bleedthrough if it does make it to release day.
A lot of people playing this game right now either have bad gear or are new to the series, and it shows. Just gotta give it time and people will improve. Hopefully.
i notice MOST zealots don’t use their grenades nearly enough. Grenade spawns are abundant and yet they go unused because no one uses the best CC in the game… It’s very frustrating
I dont have a vendetta against anyone but it does need to be made clear that zealot is not in such a bad state as it would seem to most people. Sure there is some useless talents but if you just dont pick them then its fine. Every class has some useless talents right now. Zealot maybe just more obvious.
I’m more shock you found people to play damnation
1st of all, you are being an elitist by saying people who didnt play cata3 dwons opinions are essentially null and void. Very few people went that far, and having played a bit of it myself its not really a very balanced experince. Fun, sure, but definately not balanced let alone for the casual player. Trying to act like v2 modded difficulties should be the baseline for this game is just ridiculous imo (you didnt say this directly but its heavily implied)
The dash range isnt a balancing issue, its a neccecity as zealots’s whole purpopse it to lock shooters into melee. But none of that matters if you can get staggered out of your dash by gunfire.
As for the melee damage being “insane” this was maybe true when the ult granted a duration of crits, but as of now you get 1 boosted crit per ult, and the ult has a long cooldown especially compared to veteran whose ult is so much better it makes zealot’s look like a passive.
The health restoration when low is situational as if your passive pops at the wrong time, you wont be restoring much health if any. Acting like its some consistent thing that can save you all the time is just untrue.
I dont have a strong opinon on health bleedthrough as zealots main problems are ranged enemies.
Also, throwing people who have different opinions than you under the bus and calling them bad is very childish and makes you look bad.
Interesting take, and nice to see someone giving some counter narrative to the large number of people demanding character/weapon buffs and various reductions to difficulty. I personally haven’t played enough hours yet to get to max level and try Damnation, but honestly hoping it breaks my balls when I get there, cause without modding that is as hard as the game is gonna get, so it should be brutal.
Curious though, you’ve defended that Zealot is strong, but what do you think of their talent/weapon variety at difficulty 4 and 5? Have you found multiple build paths that work well? Are there some weapons you would just never use? Similarly with feats?
Yeah I really don’t sense any anger here TBH. Condescension sure, but most likely they’re (especially as a modded V2 player) just reasonably concerned that with the amount of complaining on these forums currently, overall difficulty of the game will get significantly reduced. Personally I was a base Cata player and I still share that concern too. Looking at the posts around here, frankly if FS balanced around community majority opinion the game would become a joke difficulty wise in no time at all.
You found my meaning perfectly. Yea i really want to avoid any reduction in difficulty without modded options to improve it. If the game gets to easy then its dead to me. As for meaningful talent choices and weapons id say zealot is good with most high damage weapons like axe hammer and chainswords and talent choices are not bad but there is some useless ones like every talent on the row with the health return on lethal damage (why would you not pick that). the talent that add 6 stacks to martydom is pointless cus you dont want to play at low health if your passive is down and the level 30 talent pretty much has to be 2 charges of the ultimate.
Dude it means nothing that you beat Diff 4-5. I beat it when I was level 20 on Veteran with some green boltgun and chainaxe. It’s more about me than class.
Zealot has issues and his best build right now is exploit with Lacerate combat knife and bleed build that doesn’t even use his class weapons, becasue they are not that good right now.
Zealot has issues. You beating with it anything doesn’t matter. It’s like playing MOBA where you have 150 heroes, there are 5 worst heroes and you say “I can win a match with it on Diamond, it’s fine”. No, it’s not. You can win with it because you are good enough. But you would have much easier time playing a better hero, no?
All calsses suffer from lack of builds variety (typical of Fatshark) due to a lot of filler talents that do nothing. But Zealot suffers becasue:
- His Matryrdom is still broken
- He has only one good build now and it’s bleed/crit build
- His class weapons which are supposed to be best, are meh (Evi) and dog shite (hammer). He runs with kitchen knife.
- On Diff 4-5 he still suffers from tons of range enemies spawned on map and one Flamer/Grenadier is deleting his whole build.
- Chip damage in melee will still kill him so running low HP even on bleed build is idiotic, so core mechanic doesn’t work.
Hm, you’re right. This post is mostly condescending but not really angry. I’ve played plenty of Cata as well, not that that makes anyone an expert.
There is a lot of complaining but that is to be expected and encouraged. This is a beta, after all. And Fatshark should be more than seasoned enough to listen to players who really know what they’re talking about in relation to balancing and difficulty. I say should, but it’s Fatshark lol
I do expect them to take majority opinion seriously when it comes to how fun things feel and how intuitive the game is, because those apply to everyone. But the assertion that “most people who think Zealot has issues are just bad” is not only condescending, it’s stupid. Why make a claim like that when it will just dilute your point?
Edit: difficulties 4 and 5 are pretty difficult. With pugs it’s nearly impossible to guarantee a complete unless you’re good enough to solo the mission, in which case my opinion doesn’t matter. The jump from 3 to 4 is probably excessive though.
Serious question. What exactly is lost if the highest of 5 difficulty levels is too hard for the vast majority of the player base. What’s the problem if even very good players level out at Heresy level and Damnation is just super brutal for the really hardcore players? I say this as a V2 vet who has decreasing time to play games and would myself be fine with heresy being the realistic cap to how far I climb (and even then fine if my win rate isn’t great). The whole point of difficulty levels is to give as many different players as possible something they find enjoyable.
Please note I’m not accusing you personally of this, but I’m seeing this bizarre take all over the forums that only 2 weeks from this beta launching, Heresy and even Damnation should be pretty accessible to beat. Not said directly, but certainly implied. Even seen people complain that Malice is too difficult (though to be fair the current level requirement is misleading there). I dunno, I’d just be perfectly happy if there’s something there for the super hardcore players to enjoy for more than a few weeks.
Yes, there’s useless talents and so people would like that to be changed. This is a beta forum and this is the place where people are meant to talk about this kind of thing. Again just because Zealot is powerful doesn’t mean he couldn’t use many improvements to his design. Calling people bad for talking about it is both untrue and gruttin silly.
That’s not the argument they’re making. They’re saying balancing the game around the top 1-2% of the playerbase is bollocks game design.
Sure, I agree calling people bad is uncalled for and unhelpful, I just do understand their frustration, especially when the complaints about Zealot have some pretty widespread juvenile tone/comments too (“toughness is useless”, “devs hate fun”, “Zealot is trash” etc). Tone tends to degrade quickly in these arguments unfortunately.
Not making excuses, just saying I’m sympathetic to both sides here really.
I mean they’re somewhat interlinked. Besides the game already isn’t even nearly balanced around the top 1-2% and OP is just defending the status quo, not asking for increased difficulty. I really do think some people are objecting to some mechanics based on an expectation of consistently winning higher difficulties in PUGs this early into pre release. Not saying all the criticisms come from that place at all, TBC.
Anyway it’s a needless tangent, so I’m happy to just drop that point regardless.
I love this idea so much. Damnation should feel impossible unless you have absolute baller op gear and a super skilled team of 4. Or just add a difficulty higher then damnation for that purpose. Either way i feel like it shouldnt be beatable yet since most of my gear is meh except my melee weapon. Currently the most fun i have is when 1 or more people are dead and i get to try and clutch but in vermintide with all 4 people alive on cata 3 plus whatever modifiers you want it feels like you have to clutch the whole game but as a team
Re: healing from the anti-death save: that being as easy as it is is bad balancing on FS’s part, it’s only as good as it is because toughness bleedthrough exists and toughness bleedthrough is bad and should be redressed. Melee hits always “matter” because you take damage from them. I want to actually have a viable choice on my tier 4* perks.
Level 30 Zealot here. I can only successfully play up to malice 3, and the ranged nerfs are the only reason why I can. I never went above Veteran on VT2, but my problem with 4 and 5 is not the difficulty itself but how it’s presented. Ranged units are abundant and spawn in huge packs. Given the stat increases and how much damage you take, your toughness is shredded even with ranged nerfs. So you are forced to take cover, and the cover system doesn’t work well, and enemies can sometimes shoot through objects/floor (the railing for example.) Not to mention your teammates soak up bullets, and the heretic’s teammates do not.
From a design standpoint, Zealot fails to accomplish the class identity of “go low hp and do tons of damage” because chip damage exists. If ranged units pop your invuln and you don’t heal a ton in the very few 5 seconds, a stray random mook can one shot you with full toughness if you get it back. And considering the amount of times they spawn random amounts of units to your back while you are fighting a horde at your front, getting hit once in a while isn’t uncommon.
Zealot is not in a bad place in terms of being able to beat difficulty. If you can abuse the dodge mechanic and blocking to its fullest, sure you can do any difficulty. But that isn’t because of the class, that’s because of your skill. A class should have options that synergize with it. You can see that plainly in Veteran’s feat tree over many other classes. They have options to help their team, and help themselves equally. Most Zealot talents are selfish. Their coherency bonus is bad. Being staggered out of your only option to get to ranged units doesn’t help the class either. The zealot right now is best at dealing with monstrosities because of their high damage output.
And like someone said earlier, the best build right now (since fatshark love giving each class/subclass only one build) is a crit dagger build that requires a certain weapon that has a chance to randomly roll in the shop. I’m not using the hammer, or the flamer because the hammer is situationally useful and bad at dealing with hordes, while other classes have ranged options that are better at dealing with specials. Zealot gets locked to horde clearing duty until a monstrosity comes along most of the time. Which ogryn can do, and ogryn has other talents that help the team.
I’d prefer Zealot to lose some damage and in replace, get some utility. Drop the low HP talents because they don’t do anything if chip damage is staying in. I like having more options to be a team player outside of one feat which is giving my allies 20% toughness bonus. My grenades do help, but I already didn’t have an issue clearing hordes. I’d also prefer if they stopped nerfing the ability to rework it to be an actual gap closer since they’re deadset on making it the most useless one in the game 
Also gonna say, you can’t compare VT2 difficulty to Darktide. Darktide has ranged enemies, VT2 had specific ranged enemies that were the only thing doing knockback at a range. The fact that any ranged enemy can knock you back and they made quite a bit more than VT2 doesn’t exactly compare well when examining how difficult it is. Also, VT2 didn’t have bleed through damage, it had THP management. Which is another big factor on why the difficulty is so skewed right now. Especially when that chip damage because oh god why damage at higher difficulties.
All your saying is that these design decisions are bad without offering any viable replacement for them. The current loop of go in the middle of all the enemies while killing stuff taking some damage and healing to full is such a fun gameplay loop that even if there is no better talent options it doesn’t mattsr right now. They can rework some of the talents but completely removing what makes the current zealot a zealot would be a huge mistake
So first of all this idea that zealot can only use the crit dagger is trash. I use the axe and its so strong and also has good crit ( i do use the crit build) second of all if you want to be a team player you should play ogre. Zealot should be a selfish player and go aggro all those ranged units and specials and if you dont have a mastery of the mechanics then you will die.
Also no offense to you but anyone who is hardstuck on malice shouldnt be offering game mechanic advice. The class talents are not there to carry you. They are there to give you a playstyle. Currently zealot has 1 very fun playstlyle that also makes it unique. Martydom playstyle cant really exist like it did in V2 but the 3 stacks you can get by default do fit into the way zealot should be played. You will take damage and you will get a little stronger for playing your role and then you will heal and the cycle repeats.