You also struggle against carapace. I bring a Boltgun for that. Very thick range can be a problem if it’s very open.
Knife has short range so lots of ragers can also be problematic.
I agree it’s strong, especially when paired with ability cooldown with Crit from the left keystones. But it’s very fun and requires high skill ceiling.
Well min maxed vets sniping elites and specials don’t leave a lot for me to do sometimes.
Heya, Fellow Stealth Knife Zealot here
Thought I would post here just to provide some light on the current zealot situation based on what I have seen so far in this post and my own experiences within games.
First thing first, I do not approve of knife zealots that run away and try to be the hero of the story. That is not the way the game is meant to be played and 80% of the time result in them getting destroyed by the AI director. That ends up in either myself needing to use my speed and stealth to save them, letting my team down 2 players to deal with oncoming threats or the zealot dies and we are 1 player down until we can rescue him. For the ones that are good enough to survive on their own, its only a matter of time until they make a mistake that gets them killed. One wrong input or server lag in combination to the AI direction punishing you for being away from your team will most likely kill him. To those people … inhales … THIS IS A TEAM GAME, STOP BEING THE HERO AND HELP US CLEAR THIS MISSION FASTER INSTEAD OF BEING SELFISH AND SPAWNING STUFF WE WOULDN’T NEED TO DEAL WITH IF WE HAD JUST STUCK TOGETHER IN THE FIRST PLACE. I AM SICK OF NEEDING TO RES YOU WHEN YOU ARE OF IN NARNIA SOMEWHERE TRYING TO SOLO A CRUSHER SQUAD. WE HAVE A VET THAT CAN KILL THOSE SODS QUICKLY SO STOP IT. …exhales… Sorry needed to get that out of me.
In my opinion, the role of the stealth zealot is to be mobile enough to deal with high priority threats that a single team member cannot deal with on his own. For example, if there is a horde on the front and rear and an assail psyker encounters a crusher whilst on his own, the zealot would remove the threat allowing the psyker to keep dealing with the horde. Without needing an ogryn or vet to remove their attention from the front.
Secondly, the knife. Oh boy that is a tough one to deconstruct as a lot of my friends call it overpowered too. But like every weapon in the game, it does have its downsides. The most notable is that on higher difficulties, your horde clear is not very effective. The best you can manage is being a body that can push the enemy back and hope one of the your team members comes along and helps you before you get overwhelmed. I would say that is the greatest downfall of the knife. Sure I can take down a crusher in a couple of backstabs, but throw enough enemies at me and I cannot stand my ground. I can slow the horde for my team but I will be needing help to clear it quickly.
Thirdly, the survivability. The primary survival tool of a stealth zealot is his movement (dodging and speed). Removing that would make the stealth zealot too vulnerable to do his job effectively. The zealot already takes many risks to kill a priority target when he needs to get into knife range to do any effective damage. One wrong move and splat, you are down and there is nothing you can do about it. Not only that, but if you play as a support like I do, the speed allows you to quickly support team mates that may be a little further apart, allowing you to become the perfect middle man.
Finally, the stealth ability and the overall play style. I am a firm believer that stealth zealot is to be played as a support and not a DPS. Your job is not to murder everything in sight and be a self centered person. I play stealth zealot in a way that ensures that my team has less to deal with without hindering on their roles. Is a team mate down? use invis to move fast and get them up. Is a mutant running at your ogryn that is holding the aggro of the chaos spawn? backstab that bugger before he touches your team. Most of the time, a competent vet will steal your job due to the effectiveness at range and how the plasma rifle can deal with all enemy types swiftly. But if he messes up, your next in line for that priority target kill.
I do not think stealth zealot requires a nerf as the toolkit provided allows him to support the team insanely well but the fact that most people don’t play him like I do means that it can seem like a terrible thing. I also do wish to note that stealth zealot has a high skill ceiling as timing an ability wrong or having mistakes in your positioning can very easily get you killed, so practice makes perfect.
I know that most people wont agree with what I have posted here, but I just wanted to share some insights on how I reckon is the best and most fun way to play stealth zealot.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to let me know 
While I don’t think nerfs are necessary, I find it hilarious that I can bring a knife to a sci-fi gun fight… And win.
Especially when using the zealot penal cosmetics it looks like the warp picked me out of Warhammer Fantasy and dropped me in 40K.
To be fair you basically just summed up 80-90% of the combat in 40k.
Oh, it’s another weapon’s time to complain about. I wonder which one will be next.
Yeah that’s Warhammer 40 k in general. They have to make melee viable for “cool” factors and aesthetics. But realistically in the future melee would be obsolete. And not even melee. Vehicles, drones, and air power superiority in general. Most combat would be done through space combat. Why land your forces when you can bomb them from orbit? Even if you say you want infrastructure maintained with how few civilian’s are left irradiation (Since radiation kills bacteria and viruses I don’t imagine Nurgle gets any power from this?) and poison are other options, especially with the “morals” of the imperium.
Some suspension of disbelief is expected for sure. I mean, stealth in this game is literally just turning invisible in front of peoples faces without any explanation. No smoke bombs or throwing dust in their eyes, or stealth suits or chameleon skin genes or anything. I feel like if I was a zealot, and saw another zealot just blink out of existence temporarily and show up somewhere else, I would probably kill them for being an unsanctioned psyker and meddling with powers they should not have.
I think what really bugs me about this thread in general is that we go through this EVERY. GOD. DAMMED. WEEK.
Literally we are doing a side bar thread about stealth zealot needing nerfed while the revolver thread is happening.
It’s always because it goes like this:
people assume a play style / weapon / skill set is trash
Someone on YT, Twitch, or some other platform does really well with it
more people start trying the build, some people are good, others do badly with it
someone finally gets irritated and makes a thread about it. Points get brought up good and bad, usually it gets argued till everyone either gets tired and stops, changes their view, or stops replying
FS dev on their lunch break sees it, goes hmmmm and thing gets nerfed out of existence
The cycle continues with another weapon / talent / skill set
Im just so tired man, considering how much unusable stuff there is in game I just want to see stuff buffed amd not just get nerfed because someone is unhappy that don’t get to hog all the kills.
planetary defence forces are very much needed in 40k, as space travel between systems can take weeks, and tavel between sectors upto years
also many objectives for the imperium are valuable infrastructures, like manufactorums wich can be turned against them, or houses technologies are production lines that are irreplaceable
also for some reason orbital bombardment exposes your fleet to counter fire,
(even when realistically you should be able to calculate trajectories for at least the border of the solar system with just one gravity well they should be able to calculate that easily)
Not quishy, if you stack +21% (+5 % + 5% toughness) health curios.
Works well with stealth/loner + axe + bolter + flame grenade.
However, right now I’m working on an 3 Times +3 Extra Stamina (+ 9 Stamina) Build
Plus a Chainsweapon with
" Rev it Up +20% Movement Speed for 2s on Weapon Special Activation."
and maybe “Bloodletter” or “Bloodthirsty” Blessings
and a new Bolter with
“Shattering Impact” and “Gloryhunter”, though neither is necessary for speed.
Each with the Perks:
Overall that should come down to:
But I only intend to use this Build for low difficulty speedruns,
to clear “8 Mission” Contracts more quickly and for the fun of SPEEEEED!
Knife horde clear genuinely sucks and it’s also not a weapon your team will generally feel or appreciate. You don’t create space for your allies, you live mainly through mobility so you don’t hold a position well with it, if anything it encourages you to abandon your team whenever there’s too much heat to kite for your own survival.
I feel like people forget that by far the most broken thing in Tide games is good teamwork. You don’t particularly play a role your team wants or needs besides clutching, and there’s a decent chance you wouldn’t have to clutch if you brought a build that supports your team rather than encouraging abandoning them.
I’m not saying it might not need tuning down but I’m sick of seeing effectiveness of builds measured in a vacuum. Yes it’s a very very strong solo build. In the context of playing this game effectively as a team I think it’s kinda whatever TBH.
I mean yeah, no duh. That’s what the flame thrower is fo- oh wait that’s another weapon people have a problem with, never mind.
I think you misread what I wrote.
I think it should be squishy as hell, currently it’s the absolute opposite. Instead of giving an Assassin its own class, they shoehorned it into Zealot which is a melee/survival/mobility powerhouse. Of course, it turned out can… ebola.
I don’t think anyone has an issue with current flamer. It’s a very fair point you can cover some horde clear weakness with it, though it still doesn’t do much in terms of elite/special CC so I still don’t see that loadout countering anything I said about it being a mediocre at best team loadout.
Works pretty well tbh.
Sure single bleeds or fire doesn’t do much on its own but double dots with crit knife clears surprisingly fast.
Thrown knives kill specials in 1-2 hits which you get from ammo anyways so your team can just have all the grenades they want.
Flamethrowers server double duty with overpressure and fan the flames to stagger groups or troublesome elites.
Generally speaking I can handle most things the game throw at me pretty well and can deal with specials that are out of reach of even the sharpshooter because of the horde being in the way.
Again if I’m running off so far ahead that i can’t quickly return, put the hurt on things, and cover the special killing aspect then I’m doing it Wrong, never mind being able to reposition from front to back line at speed to intercept disablers and AOE specials become a problem.
As a note I built this as a direct response to being irritated that Psykers or vets I paired with kept failing to kill run ending hordes of gunners, bombers, and snipers.
Ok fair points, you’ve convinced me you can make a knife build that does play reasonably nice with the team. I haven’t personally seen many (any?) Knife Flamer Zealots so that’s all kinda news to me.
I’ll have to grab the build when I actually get home because the one I threw together from memory still doesn’t look right and I can’t remember all the features off the top of my head.
I do know I would regularly open with a backstab on a sniper and torch a whole group of gunners either killing then or sending them running.
I saw 2 that were good. Both were just running around as usual knife things (like they were at least 1 room ahead) and didn’t use the flamer on hordes (if they were even there during hordes). Mainly used flamers against elite blobs for some reason, and have to say they melt the shotgunners really fast.
I’m still not sure what’s so strong of stealth knife Zealot. Always feel like I did better with IndyCrusher or Heavy Sword on the same build
When I see one in my match they’re not that particularly great either, or just straight up die to some minor stuff like mixed horde or Ragers.
Tell the truth shotgunners blob enough and move at a slow enough pace that the stream + the dot tends to catch them. If you are using fan as well you can knock some over and essentially make them into a bleeding, burning pile.
I wish I could have recorded or streamed more Darktide but one of my ram sticks died and I haven’t had time to replace it so any recording or streaming is extremely choppy.
Edit: as a note I’m surprised there hasn’t been more flame + knife combos with stealth since it seems like one of those pairings that makes a lot of sense, it allows you to actually get into a position where you can use the strength of the flamer but also allows you to run a knife or a very single target focused weapon without sacrificing horde clear that much.
I can understand why throwing knives don’t get taken much though, they require a knack that you only get from dealing with source game grenade physics for over 2 decades.
Makes a huge amount of sense with flamer though not only covering quick mid range special deletion but also letting you skip the draw time of flamer which really takes the edge off one of its bigger issues.