As all chadlots can attest to, the most hated enemy is not beastmen, or plaguemonks, or even a splitting sack rat- it’s green health.
NOTE: I do not want zealots to be “better” lord knows they are good enough. I want a clear oversight in how their HP works to be fixed, so their allies don’t constantly have to friendly fire them to keep those bodies good and ravaged.
Currently, zealots who want to run low HP for a level (I would assume most of us) either need to have their allies shoot them, or befriend a pink rat and have him bring your health down. This is fine, if a bit inelegant.
The problem is there are increasing numbers of things that can screw this over for you. It used to just be waystalker elves with their heal talent- but now there is grail knight, and good luck having a game without him in it. The worst is when you get the regen buff AFTER you have a full bar of temp HP. Now you need to have your hard work erased to get your own buffs back.
And as of Chaos Wastes, we now have umpteen NEW random buffs that can grant HP regen, plus the resetting of HP to 50% at the start of each level.
So I propose two possible solutions to let zealots continue riding that fine line between death and godhood:
Give the talent “Castigate” (the one that increases attack speed while on low HP) another effect- any HP gained is gained as temp HP. This would be a natural fit, since all low-HP builds use this talent.
Give the zealot a self-flagellation button- have his career skill sacrifice some green HP on use. This would help zealots keep the green HP down as long as they are constantly fighting and gaining ult charge.
I thought about other options like a version of the natural bond trait, but whatever the solution, it needs to be available in Chaos wastes (where there are no traits from gear to start) and should honestly be available to anyone regardless of their gear level.
ALSO please stop having bots heal us with medkits when we are on full temp hp. Thanks for listening to my ted talk
You can surely play around this.
Though, that really doesn’t explain why you or your team should be handicapped. It’s obviously a flaw in the design and something should be done.
Manual control of bots is needed, especially how to use the PRECIOUS medical supplies.
Bots always use med kits and healing potions in the worst possible way.
Especially in the Chaos Wastes of, where I cannot give my bots a trait at least somehow controlling their mad mania for wasting healing.
Zealot needs a major rework anyway since he is extremely boring in the current version and has a zero risk high reward playstyle.
I am not against the introduction of a “only THP gainage” talent. However, I am completely against tacking it on Castigate. IF people want an easier time managing their health it should be in competition to the good talents. As such a new talent for eased health management should be in replacement of the current “Unbending Purpose” OR “Armour of Faith”.
The whole Zealot design has sucked from day 1. Having 179THP + 1 green HP shouldn’t give you 6 stacks because there is NO risk, especially with the Heart of Iron. Getting THP instead of green HP from waystalker or GK buffs would just give zealot an even bigger safety blanket and make playing him an even bigger snoozefest.
If we need a quick fix then I would favour “zealot receives no health (THP or green) from other party member’s traits and ults” - not from waystalker or GK or UC bomb balm or Merc Ult. That way you never get unwanted green HP and you can only get THP from melee kills or healing pots/kits if you run natural bond. To compensate for the loss of these healing sources, I would basically either buff the rate at which zealot gains THP from melee kills by giving him a boon of shallya-like passive (+30% thp from melee kills) or nerf the decay rate THP on zealot (zealot loses THP at 70% the rate of everyone else). The former change would favour cata players the later would make zealot more viable on Veteran where enemies/THP is sparse.
You could maybe think about giving him 1 stack for each 20 missing health instead of each 25, up to a max of 6 stacks. That way a 180 health zealot could have 60 green health and still get 6 stacks. The 60 green and Heart of Iron would provide a reasonable safety buffer for difficulties or early Wastes maps where THP is in short supply.
I actually think the best long term solution would be to tie stacks to TOTAL health (thp+hp). That way green health from other sources would be welcome. To make the zealot more risky to play, I would decrease his base hp to 100 (from the current 150), and give him 2 permanent stacks plus 4 more stacks for each 20 missing health. To compensate for the lost health, I would make Holy Fortitude (15% extra healing per stack) a passive. This way the zealot is more likely to get downed if he takes multiple hits in quick succession because he has 50 or 60 less total health, but he regenerates health way faster and the stacks he has are a lot more dynamic and are actually tied to the amount of danger he is in (which is lacking with the current 179THP zealot). To make things a bit safer, the cool down on Heart of Iron could be reduced from the current 90 seconds to 60.
If you really wanted to go crazy. After you have moved Holy Fortitude to being a passive skill, you could create a new talent where " zealot’s total health is reduced by 20 permanently but he gets 2 permanent stacks". So, you’d have a 96 health zealot (80 base + 16 from +20% health trinket) with 4 permanent stacks, which could rise to 8 stacks when his total health drops to 16 or below), so he’d be absolutely bonkers in a clutch situation.
The only changes I recall to zealot stacks was when they changed grim curse to not remove stacks plus when they made it so that necklace health property would allow you to get the 6th stack. And those are the only changes that appear when I search for ‘Fiery Faith’ in the patch notes.
That’s stupid. ‘High, risk. High reward’ is a philosophy that doesn’t work in Vermintide career design. Players just avoid that career in favor of ones that don’t have to give up anything for their power increases.
If you want the ultimate expression of that fact, look at Unchained and how many outs they’ve had to hand her over the years to make people actually want to play her.
I think lowering his overall health pool would be bad for him. There are some people that play him as a tank, and I don’t want to destroy that for that.
Overall, I think his kit is a very well designed one- he doesnt receive a full bar of temp hp without work.
Compare his “tankiness” to sienna unchained, with her 360 effective hp.
To be fair though, Sienna might be able to endure more hits than zealot if neither are doing anything but if we are talking soaking damage across a run without losing effectiveness? Zealot is undeniably superior.
He doesnt have to worry about something like overcharge to keep his melee power up which may or may not blow him up on a single sneaky hit + FF clipping. So if looking at who will be standing infront of that horde mashing away and trading hits without a care then he´s ontop.
Back in the day his stacks had a cap and were affected by total health rather than just green health.
I’m not fond of the risk to reward mindset but I think FS could turn Zealot into a full fledged Flagellant. Maybe draw inspiration from Darkest Dungeon; a bleed focused class.
Thank you, that’s exactly what I wanted to say.
I can’t play the way most people like it. Because in my solo games, if I die, it’s game over, time is wasted, it’s always a tragedy.
I seem to vaguely remember it now. I think I conflated it with the curse change. Since it used to be the play to just forego curse resistance to get 4(?) stacks while having full green health, yeah?
Suffice it to say there’s lots of ways they could go about it. They could just make 29 his maximum green health and everything past that to the cap is temp only. Wouldn’t even need stacks at that point, he would just have +30% power at all times. Would suck for bots, but zealot bot is already fairly lame.
I have about 600 hrs in zealot and can firmly say he isn’t boring! He is a high octane berserker class akin to slayer, but has replaced slayer since the tankiness of that class was removed.
He doesn’t need buffs or nerfs (and i doubt FS are looking at large changes to classes at this point anyway), he needs QoL. Zealots have mandatory picks on those two talent tiers with castigate and crusade/holy fortitude.
Nobody would choose those talents even if they offered the THP conversion, so it would be wasted.