Right now the only viable crit build is a knife build, it goes against the principle of giving players agency and choice in their equipment.
My proposition is simple: Invocation of death could simply remove 2s to the cooldown per crit for the first enemy hit, then 1s for the 2nd, 0.5s for the 3rd, 0.25s and any other enemy hit.
So, 1st enemy -2s, 2nd -1s, 3rd -0.5s, 4th+ -0.25s.
This proposition is taking into account weapons that have a single target focus by giving them a higher cooldown reduction while also allowing horde clearing weapons to be usable with this build without making them too strong.
This is blatantly untrue. Evisc and 13g chainsword are still very strong with crits. Doubly so if you go Crit Martydom.
Fury of the Faithful without running any sort of CDR is an incredibly strong ultimate ability and doesnât need to be spammed every 5 seconds to make it strong.
The simplest and imo best solution is just have an internal timer for how much crits can proc Invocation. For example, âevery critical hit reduces ult cooldown by 2 seconds, has a 1 second cooldown.â
No need for such complexities. Game already has plenty of mechanics with internal CDâs.
If IoD simply worked like Survivalist and had an internal CD of say, 3-5s, it would both nerf the knives and buff the cleave weapons, further buffing the cleave blessings that currently go unused. This would basically address every problem in the right way, while leaving the talent in a place where it wasnât as OP as before as it should.
Also knives are far from the only viable build. The nerf is definitely noticeable but not even close to enough to just make everything else trash altogether.
Or just slap it with an internal cooldown like they were all so happy to do with Shock Trooper with the express intent to break it for Recon lasguns. Or really any other decent idea that might bring the single most stupidly OP melee weapon in the game back down to something resembling balance.
Heaven forbid that a low-grade knockoff* knife with a blade shorter than your forearm be inferior in any aspect to a weaponized chainsaw fitted with monomolecular teeth. Nope nope not happening, canât have the âI r l33t skillz!1!!â zerglings forced to make a choice between best sprint speed and dodge distance versus offense. That might upset the narcissists that comprise the entirety of their âcommunity testingâ.
*Which just proves that ObeseTubaFish has absolutely zero understanding about 40k and has never so much as cracked open as single IG codex. Part of the cannon of the Catachan Jungle Fighters is that their knives are made with a metal only found on that death world. And Catachans do NOT make those knives for outsides. Period.
^.
TBH, Iâm not sure why they didnât go this route in the first place, even on paper itâs pretty obvious the current nerf penalizes non-knives much more, which wasnât needed (the over penalization).
Who the hel knows when and if it will ever be looked at againâŚ
The only thing I donât like about having a proc cooldown is that you would no longer be able to get multiple procs on a sweep attack, which admittedly as a heavy weapons enjoyer Iâm biased towards. Maybe it can be per-attack rather than per-hit but that would make it a little more confusing perhaps.
Still better than what we got though! Alternatively, would simply lowering the CDR number be as effective dâyou reckon?
I think you misunderstood the last changes to Invocation and this topic, after they added the missing notes.
Missed Patch Note(s)
âInvocation of Deathâ
Can now only trigger once per attack.
Dev Note:While class Abilities are really fun to use and a key part of a character build, they are also balanced around their cooldowns.
However, the Abilities cannot find a healthy balance when the cooldown can vary by large degrees due to Ability Cooldown Reduction effects.
We are therefore looking to rebalance the Ability Cooldown Reduction instances which result in extremely high uptimes of Abilities.
Invocation of Death, combined with the Zealotâs crit-focused kit, led to unhealthy situations when paired with huge cleaving strikes into multiple enemies; the new version will still be a really valuable pick in the talent tree, but not as overpowering as before by normalizing the amount of cooldown reduction awarded to players when fighting elites or hordes, with single target or cleave based weapons.
I love that you point out that the Assault Chainsword and Heavy Eviscerator validly do effective work like the chain weapons should with how the skill tree abilities make them more exact in how they should work, to rip and shred better than a knife itself. Thats how it should be in Warhammer 40k, for some reason we been given the meme weapon effect of
âOooh Bolters and Chainswords!â
âNope, a knife and a revolverâ
The catachan blades in darktide are consicered in lore as knockoffs and thats how come they barely kill a crusher lol (seen source of lore on warhammer40k.fandom.com )
That literally just a side grade to the absolute bottom of the barrel approach they already took to nerfing it.
OP your approach is also just needlessly convoluted, while leaving knife way too good at getting CDR.
It just needed reduced effectiveness across the board. It proccing per enemy cleaved is essential to stop it from being a simple function of attack speed and nothing else.
Literally all they had to do was reduce the cooldown amount. Even down to 0.5 s would honestly have been fair, and had an equal impact across builds.
Having an internal cooldown would mean it is no longer a function of attack speed. I believe every weapon can get an attack out once per second. Maybe the time needs to be changed or whatever. But it would mean that a fast attack weapon and a slow attacking weapon would be on mostly equal terms, and it wouldnât scale to an insane degree with hordes and cleave
Because wouldnât you say that your change unfairly targets fast attacking weapons and favors slower weapons? Sure the knife is a very strong option right now, but I donât think making Invocation a High Cleave only blessing is the right way to go about it.
Riiiight, though I still think thatâs my biggest issue with the change. Iâd prefer it to trigger multiple times per attack, so attack speed isnât the only scaling. It was nice that slower weapons could still effectively run it, although maybe that was OP idk.
No it very literally would not. Reducing CDR amount per crit hit from 1.5s â 0.5s would be a 66% reduction in CDR generated for every weapon in every situation. It is as even a nerf as possible.
Yes I do think itâs fine if claw sword can use FotF generally more often than knife when attacking into density. That sounds extremely fair and balanced to me. AKA how it was before they nerfed it in the dumbest way imaginable. Internal cooldown sounds alright but the slower your weapon is the worse the differential becomes when you happen to get another crit just before the cooldown wears off. Faster will still end up being way more consistent even in that situation. Itâs not a good approach here.
Also you genuinely think knife wouldnât still use it at 0.5 s per proc? Genuinely lmao, it would still get heaps of value from it.
Edit: forgot that knife is also one of if not the best user of backstab CDR. Yeah Itâd be so so so very fine lmao.
Their main issue, as they stated, was the cleaving weapons proccing it multiple times per swing, like evisc+perfect strike.
However I donât see how they can reach this conclusion:
the new version will still be a really valuable pick in the talent tree, but not as overpowering as before by normalizing the amount of cooldown reduction awarded to players when fighting elites or hordes, with single target or cleave based weapons.
Itâs hardly normalized as it heavily favors high crit fast attacks i.e. knife.
There were better ways to ânerfâ it, and I feel they chose the silliest one.
I get your point but itâs an exaggeration. Iâve quit playing knife after it became giga meta (on zealot at least) since if you had another zealot in your team it was like 90% chance they were using knife as well. I mostly play Chorus with crits, Crits with crits (Fury) and wound builds, none of which use a knife.
