You want to preclear a bunch of ranged units with throwing knifes? Really?
That‘s not happening.
This is made up bs.
The only way to clear the gunners, before they start shooting at your mates, is to preclear them in melee. That is what i suggested you do. Dying in the process is a you-problem.
Getting cut off by a horde and dying to it, requires massive overextension and incredibly bad plays.
If you had agro reduction, you could not preclear shooters… Because they would not be trying to attack you in melee. You having their agro, is the whole point. And again, if you can get cut off by a horde, you have to make a terrible misplay and overextend to an extreme, for a long time (while also not having any awareness for the horde spawning).
You understand nothing about the situation.
Preclearing ranged units by rushing them down, then returning to your team, is a functional playstyle. And it only becomes relevant, if you are playing at a decently high difficulty. If you deem it unviable, that is due to your own inability to make it viable.
I did not suggest that the loner aura itself is good.
@Sno
The zealot’s role is to rush into melee and deal heavy melee damage, not rush in and waste time circle dancing an enemy that’s actively dealing damage to you. Why do that when you could have simply removed their head immediately once you closed the distance?
Not only does zealot get stealth, the stealth attack benefits from a hefty backstab damage modifier. He also has a backstab modifier outside of that, and can get CDR via backstabs with certain builds. It’s actually crazy that you have moved your goalposts so far that you’re now suggesting that hitting enemies from behind while dodge dancing them anyway is the issue now. You know you can attack while dodging, right? Is this really the hill you want to die on?
I do that with eviscerator and charge. I do the other with knife and stealth. Both have been very effective at basically the same thing, really well balanced in my experience even.
I made the exact same point in my original post, nothing has changed. I will highlight it for you.
“The backstab penances encourage you to break off from squad coherency and get riddled with bullets and die isolated, or pinned by a special, most if not all combat is head on and when you’re on your own in CQC enemies will continuously rotate to face you making it take longer to kill as you have to circle dance to reach their back.”
You could argue that stealth allows counterplay for the turning, but stealth is not always available (think of the numbers we face), and the time spent going behind time is wasted when you can simply run up and one shot them in the face.
It’s fine if you manage to enjoy this playstyle. I’m not here to dump on it for the sake of dumping on it. I personally think it is flawed design for the reasons stated in the original post that’s all.
i totally agree with this! rushers really kind of don’t wanna play and contribute to other ppl actually playing the game. I just got out of a match with 3 rushers, i died because they ran past all the director’s spawn points and i got absolutely swamped with specials and minions. I was dumb and got angry , told them not to rush since that isn’t the point of the game, got told i lacked skill because i died XD. It’s like a tank aggroing the entire map, and not using taunt to actually tank the mobs but instead continue to run off to aggro some more mobs while i proceed to die, fast. And its true, rushers can be any class in this game, and they WILL blame everyone else and call them skillless if you die to everything they are aggroing and not helping to kill…
i disagree on your statement that zealots have enough mobility to rush shooters/gunners and kill them. Let a veteran pick them off or an ogryn draw their fire from a distance, you shouldnt be rushing at shooters/gunners in any situation, with any class in my opinion. First of all you would block or otherwise interfere with ranged attacks that are much quicker at killing them from a distance, in a much safer position. Secondly, you’re taking risks that are unnecessary, messing up coherency for other players and therefore reducing their buffs/stats and weaking your team.
And, I won’t contradict these statements cause this is absolutely true.
Fury the faithful is the best ability for this. But even without this ability, that’s still your job. You’re less efficient with ranged weapons than the veteran or the psyker. So, if you start waiting that you’re in contact, you will just waste ton of ammos and so you will potentially create a pressure on your vet(s).
To avoid gunfire you can use stripping down blessing (you need a lot of stamina), use hit and run blessing, swift certainly talent node. If you don’t use these blessings or talents, you can dodge (yes, you absolutely can) or slide (you still need toughness or you get hurt, but if you have toughness you don’t get hit).
If you success to get in the melee range of shooters, they will stop firing and engage you in melee (lesser enemies) or try to go away to fire again on you (gunners). That’s how you can kill them.
At high level of difficulties, I use to kill more gunners than the other players…
Here it is the Ogryn the best at killing gunners (good Ogryn this player), and the veteran is far away with only 42 gunners killed (maelstrom - 175 scab gunners in the mission - only scab faction).
So you can see this is feasible, and that it is also the right thing to do. It just needs training
So, perfectly possible, and it should be exactly what you should do. Every times you enter in the melee range of such ranged units, you give breath to your entire team. The psyker can play its artillerie role, the Ogryn… well that’s the Ogryn, the veteran can piou piou (except for the melee veteran… something I use to play).
(I will append my zealot guide with these informations as I realize this is not obvious…)
The only thing destructive for teamplay is when people seethe needlessly about a play style that does not harm them. If they’re not speedrunning, and they’re killing stuff, and they’re doing it solo, then they’re helping you plenty. Splitting aggro is an effective strategy. The deathball is not the only acceptable way to play.
This guy is soloing what is currently the hardest difficulty and modifier combination in the game. “correct” play is not what you think it is.
You don’t have to go that far to leave Coherency and ranged enemies aren’t exactly rare. Speedforce zealots aren’t a result of penances, those are just bad players being enabled by combat knife.
And 15 stacks of inexorable isn’t even that big of a deal. It’s happening whether you mim-max for it or not.
I do think needing 2 million or whatever kills with the immolation grenade is excessive, tho. Seems like the damage for those cap out at Malice because they kind of do nothing in Damnation.
No. You do not understand.
The “teamplay” means that you have to stick close together and do everything together.
When i attack a horde with my flamer staff, the zealot has to also attack that horde with his hammer (As most of them do. Great teamplayers!).
Doing something useful for your team, by peeling off for a few seconds, is toxic green circle chasing!
At least, that’s what teamplay would be described as, if you asked most of the random players that you get to play with, i think.
This is why I believe it’ll take me a very long time to acquire, it’d make more sense if there was a zealot equivalent of low profile but there isn’t.
Otherwise the momentum one I got passively by dodging regularly and didn’t pay much attention to it, the thing about many of these penances is, you’re not obliged to play awkwardly to acquire them but people feel the need to do so to “Get it out of their system” so to speak. Frankly if I were of the mind to “power progress” these I’d just set up private lobbies with likeminded individuals, I’m very averse to awkward counter-team-play behavior.
Bro what buff are you getting from a speed zealot? The piddly toughness regen? Toughness damage reduction? You think they’ll go across the tree and back for that? Corruption cleanse is useless outside of grim maps. They’re running loner and that will be mostly useless for you if you’ve got your other teammates with you. A knife zealots value is taking out threats that are in awkward spots, they can’t do that if they are staying chained to the team all the time.
That’s not even valuable, anyone with half-decent aim can do that a lot faster. Knife zealots don’t have any actual use to the team, just the one they assume they’re super good at because they feel fast. zealots are better off using their speed to make sure everyone’s in the group instead, but they won’t. whole class is just built to have tunnel vision and get the team killed.
I swear jakal posts make no sense whatsoever. How does a zealot “make sure everyone’s in the group” by “using his speed”
What on earth did you mean by this?
I’ve played eviscerator and thunder hammer zealot almost exclusively since launch. Last week I decided to suck it up and run infiltration / loner / blades of faith to do the penances. I never intended to like this build but I’ve come to really enjoy it. I might even love it.
Even doing the penances I didn’t ditch the group, repeatedly get myself into trouble, train enemies back with me, or any of the stuff I’d heard about “knife” zealots.
Instead I found I’m able to orbit around the group, clear the flanks, remove hiding ranged specialists, thin herds of elites from behind, and use cloak to get teammates up in the most dire circumstances. Getting people up might be the biggest advantage to this type of build, as I’m able to clutch situations I’d never make it out of with a fury build.
I still love the face-first run into the fray play style of crit / fury, but infiltrate can be played in an extremely useful group-oriented way and I hope anyone who thinks otherwise is able to group with a zealot who plays that build as I do and sees just how heretical they’ve been.
