Honestly overall I think zealot needs a rework, it seems like it was originally designed around running at low health and using your toughness and until death to keep you up, but at some point they introduced damage that penetrates toughness. As a result I feel like you are almost forced to take the talent Holy Revenant because without it Until Death is basically useless. Because you always have a chance of taking health damage being left at 1 hp almost always results in death,
So I suggest that holy revenant be just combined as part of Until death and a new talent be made to replace it. disregard
Honour The Martyr is just straight up worse than Rising Conviction, why would you take a +15% damage at nearly half health over a +20% damage increase damage that only takes a second or two to ramp up, The damage boost for red lining needs to be worth it.
I suggest increasing Honour the Martyr from 6 to 8 max stacks (or even 10 stacks) , then at least it is actually potentially worth it. Higher risk will gain higher reward.
Let me know your thoughts, or if you have some alternative suggestions.
It sounds like there is a lot of disagreement on this topic, but I at least have been convinced that holy revenant is not universally used and therefore probably shouldn’t be combined with until death.
Yet all of like 3 feats in the entire tree interact with low health.
Not really. Thy wrath be swift is at least if not more popular among the Damnation zealots I’ve talked to. Better to avoid damage in the first place than plan around until death.
Ehhhhh, holy revenant would need to be nerfed a bit if you get to have it at the same time as thy wrath be swift. Zealot needs some feat reworks not a straight buff.
Ah yes, 8 stacks, for when you’re at -20% HP. I jest, but yes honour the martyr does need a rework or heavy tuning. Not convinced more stacks in the answer.
Here’s my take regarding low health shenanigans from another thread:
While I agree that the concept of a Zealot trading health for strenght does not work entirely in Darktide, I also believe that standard Martyrdom with 3 stacks is not that dangerous, when you consider that Zealot has 200 hp.
The real issue in my book is Honor the Martyr, which I’d never pick, because getting to 6 stacks is quite dangerous and the competition in that row to strong.
I run Faith Restores All because playing around some active self-heal seems like a chore to me. 25% damage reduction is head empty and lets me focus on gameplay instead. As a consequence I find Until Death to be quite useful since there’s high odds I’ll take single source damage that then restores me to a survivable ammount of HP and even better odds I won’t take damage again for the next 90s. Since I mostly avoid damage in most cases anyway I rarely even trip Until Death except in some pretty servere circumstances.
It says that melee hits can’t stun you anymore
Well, ranged neither at the moment, which makes it very very good as ranged enemies can easily stunlock you/cancel your ult
There are 2 ways to go with the Zealot. Get high crit from blooding enemies and high blood stacks from crits to boost the cooldown reduction of your ult. Or play without the bleed and around attack speed bonus and weapons that benefit from more AA.
And the Zealot is not build around running around with low health. He is build around boosting your damage output when your health is low.
so you are able to regain your health over Holy Revenant.
or get movement speed and melee stagger immunity, to combine it with attack speed to get max dps.
or get 25% health reg over 5 sec to trigger Holy Fervours (+20% Power to allies in Coherency for 5 seconds. On gaining a stack of Martyrdom.) more often, so you get a stack matyrdome, buff the team mates in coherency, loose the stack by healing up and get the stack again. That way you get 2 times 5 sec boost for the team in coherency out of every stack, if you are able and well skilled to dictate WHEN and HOW MUCH dmg you let an enemy do to you. If you time it right you can even get more then 2 times of that buff out of the 25% health regeneration and matyrdome stack juggling.
That only happens, if you get shot right as you are about to dash not during your dash. Personally I’d like to change it to where the dash ignores already existing range stun, so you do not get it canceled by one lonely stray bullet taking a stroll across the map towards you.
Possibly, but how much aggression in the face of ranged enemies is allows makes for IMO the most exhilarating Zealot playstyle so I think many of us would riot if it were changed.
As a result I feel like you are almost forced to take the talent Holy Revenant because without it Until Death is basically useless.
That I disagree, I think Until Death is more of a safe guard so you can play with higher risk, when it’s triggered, it’s time to regroup and play safely until a med pack or station.
imo Holy Revenant doesn’t really help since most of the time it only heals about a quarter, meanwhile you still have to be in the danger zone, it rarely makes a change to the situation.
From my own experience, zealot is a class with very high power ceiling (personally it’s the-most) but not friendly to players that are not familiar with this playstyle (say, vermintide)
So I would like some feats that makes the class easier to play, while not making it more powerful as it is.
Just throwing some ideas, like “making player able to pass through enemies during Until Death, also get a free ult when it’s triggered”, or “+x% dmg reduction for 1 second during animation locks” (chainsword, eviscerator, chainaxe, thunderhammer, stuff like that)
More survivabilty so players can get familiar with the aggressive playstyle, also wider options especially when ppl are still on the way to their “god-roll w op bless builds”
Let me come out and say first that I am no fan of range stun/stagger in this came as it pertains to normal riflemen outside of maybe cultist-/renegade-/ogryn-gunners.
This bug completely ignores any of that, which - when looking at class balance - is absolutely busted, as everyone else has to dealt with it. It allows you to completely ignore stray shots that might interrupt you from going into your next slide, because now enemies cannot stun you while you are sprinting.
No matter how much of a melee class zealot is supposed to be, we always talk about how every class is supposed to try and close gaps.
Not getting stunned out of your slides or sprints makes that so much easier it’s not even funny.
I also now believe that a good chunk of players, who think that range enemies and especially shotgunners are too easy, are just zealot players who always use this talent. Like ofc if you nerf the damage of shotgunners, while you can just walk towards them - no sh*it they gon be trivial.
I disagree but I’ll be honest it’s hard for me to disentangle how much of that is just how much I enjoy it, and how it makes diving shooter groups with low mobility weapons feel far more feasible. In the end the feat helps discourage stale cover shooter mechanics when facing shooter groups and frankly I’m all for that.
I don’t quite disagree it’s probably over powered but considering how many people still rave about holy revenant it doesn’t seem to be fundamentally breaking the row it’s in either. Even amongst experienced players holy rev is not lacking its own camp of sworn fans. If it is fixed I frankly have little trust in FS to balance the feats properly so I guess generally I see more net positive in the bug existing than negative.
So I do absolutely see where you’re coming from but frankly I’d rather seen it left alone for now lest Zealot build diversity gets cut down even further. As it is I pretty much have the exact same feat selection for all 5 Zealot builds I run with holy rev vs TWBS and Punishment vs Bloodletting vs Retribution being largely the only 2 columns that get swapped around.
In hindsight of my previous message:
When I play Zealot, I pick my perks and gear because they feel mandatory.
Without thoughness DR, it just breaks every 2sec and my hp is bare.
Without Bloodletting, I lack the crit chance to sustain the DR
Without a high mobility weapon, I can’t get the speed I need to avoid/duck enemy firepower
Without TWBS, my mobility is randomly compromised
Without ult CD on crit, I can’t sustain ult cooldown enough to be mobile/regen lost toughness
Those are all personal impression, that leave the class in a comfortable and fun spot to play the game.
But there isn’t really any real build crafting in DT. And Zealot doesn’t have anything that really screams “Synergy” between perks and blessing ( except the crit perks).
That’s kinda ironic because while crit build still exists I think it’s gone pretty far out of general favour. I pretty much exclusively run EWEW and I’ve seen experienced crit build fans even say you should still run EWEW with crit build.
Double Ult also seems to have become pretty broadly defaulted to though crit CD is definitely still powerful with certain weapons (it almost single handedly keeps Claw somewhat relevant on Zealot).
Obviously bloodletting is good but it’s not terribly compatible with a lot of weapons.
That is true, but I’d also say that historically, this is something Fasthark has always been bad at. Your playstyle usually is determined way more why your weapon loadout than anything else, while your talents only see bare adjustments. Hence this is something I’ve grown accustomed to.
I agree and I also hate cover shooter parts in this game. My gripe is that the most fun way to play gets siloed into one class and one talent only, because we somehow need to make clear it is a melee focused class.
Having this talent in place the way it is, also makes stuff like balancing aggro ranges from shooters and their damage much more difficult - similar to Veteran being able to make every range weapon infinitely better makes balancing ammo amounts harder.
I wouldn’t say I rave about it, but it is definitely more of a team option, as it allows you to tactically pop your passive to save healing supplys and therefore my default pick.
I get made fun of for abusing the dagger.
Which is the only weapon with high enough crit rate to have a consistent perma uptime with thoughness DR. And providing ult cooldown.
It’s a funny thing:
You want to kill enemies in as quickly with as many hits as possible to critfish, so you don’t want to deal too much damage at once, else you find yourself without your important buffs.
Enemies essentially become a resource, and that makes the game fun.
I agree and I also hate cover shooter parts in this game. My gripe is that the most fun way to play gets siloed into one class and one talent only, because we somehow need to make clear it is a melee focused class.
Having this talent in place the way it is, also makes stuff like balancing aggro ranges from shooters and their damage much more difficult - similar to Veteran being able to make every range weapon infinitely better makes balancing ammo amounts harder.
A friend of mine who got to the zealot business after the ranged nerfs do not understand the pain of ranged enemies.
They nerfed ranged enemies to a point where they pose virtually zero threat to a Sharpshooter (which is himself a balance issue). Damage and accuracy dropoff means that the further you are from them, the better you are.
Sure, but being able to ignore range stun at the same time compounds hard with these nerfs.
It’s true that Veterans have also profited immensly from these nerfs, considering their effectiveness at range and high amount of toughness, even though they were already pretty safe before.
These changes I believe however were mostly for Ogryns and Psykers, who both got lambasted by range fire before.
Psyker escpecially had it the worst here, because they also have a low hp pool, which basically made it so one shotgunner completely took out their toughness and a decent chunk of their hp plus heavy stun, which most of the time resulted in getting insta-downed.