I think prayer is too powerful but it’s more obviously team positive while locking down the Zealot. Where as the stealth is more widely seen as a negative increasing team pressure (short / frequent periods) in play besides saving / events… and the need for saving may be because of stealth aggro.
I always hated the Handmaiden stealth on boss fight for same reasons it was even more frequent then boss would flip to ally for surprise attack.
Zealot needs rebalancing all around for better coop and less solo player (loner aura what a jab) and to fine tune some of the other too powerful, abused talents too.
Stealth was a mistake. Bad gameplay mechanic that barely adds anything meaniningful and also completely lore-breaking. Invisibility (for humans) is limited to either very high tech stuff, such as the Assassins use or to Warp sorcery. Kinda hilarious seeing lorelets arguing against adding Autocannon for Ogryns or Inferno Pistols for Zealots because of “muh complicated technology”, but going invisible every couple of seconds is apparently fine.
I barely see stealth players in Auric Damnation nowadays, I don’t know what this thread is about. Every Vet other than me runs only Voice of Command, and Zealots either run book in Havoc or FOF in normal games.
There are. But that’s not the majority.
Seen these days 4 combat blade zealot.
1 excellent, 1 good, 1 i don’t remember (so not impressive obviously) and 1 toxic…
He has run away and did not care of the group… then as always… he has fallen far away ahead… and he died.
We have not taken any risk to even try to follow him. He was very unlucky cause this was one of these rare games were I have met a team… so the guys were not speed running… ( I suspect in most games, normal players try to follow such players… so they don’t change their behavior as most often it works)
My biggest issue with knife/stealth combo is it causes literal c*ncerous type playstyles that enable these individuals to thrive because its damn near impossible to kill something with that much utility and movement speed.
Yes, there are good stealth/knife users that know how to properly play and contribute to the team but they are so far and few in between - majority of people using this type of build only use it because they just can’t survive properly otherwise.
I get it to a point, having something that enables them to res the team and get out of any situation at the drop of a dime is better than them 10 times per match right? I guess, but they are also perfectly capable of learning the game without stealth or sacrificing team mechanics all in the name of… whatever their thought process might be
I’ve seen toxic people with all kinds of builds, so for me it never was the question of “using certain ultimate is a red flag”. I’ve seen Voice of Command Vets who only use when THEY are injured, seen Psykers who run soulblaze builds and say how they are best on the scoreboard, even though it’s the easiest class to rack up big damage stat, I’ve seen Zealots who don’t play stealth but spam their ranged weapon all match long, wasting all the ammo as the supposed melee class.
So it doesn’t really matter, just playing with a certain ult or build doesn’t mean anything.
I always thought stealth would be a much better fit on Psyker.
Not only lore wise, but also because Psyker is less durable in a fight. It would lean more into the glass canon stealth builds.
Compared to Shade in V2, Zealot gets to be tough and do insane burst damage ans stealth very frequently. It’s a broken build.
That sais, I enjoy it and believe it can serve the team well by taking out high priority targets. I like to use it to get behind enemy lines and then move back to the team.
I don’t agree, I think Stealth has no place in this game in general. It’s a boring, generic mechanic and better belongs to other Sci-Fi games like Mass Effect, etc.
As for taking out high priority targerts… For Zealot it’s basically a worse version of FoF that requiers zero skill to use and allows you to grief your team by dumping aggro on them. I wish both Stealth abilities are taken out of the game and replaced with something that promotes teamplay instead of insta-clutch button.
In one of my latest Havoc runs (I think it was level 25~), I’ve seen a Zealot with Braced Autogun who magdumped into Bulwark’s shield at the very start of the mission, then almost died to him. Then he died during the first horde and quit. Dead game, lmao.
I agree it would be better if it wasn’t in the game.
I keep thinking about Shade and while the same problem existed in V2, it didn’t allow the player to survive on higher difficulties.
The problem is indeed that it’s a get out of jail free card with insane uptime due to CDR talents. Combine that with high survivability and it’s a cocktail for teaching bad teamplay.
But just because the majority of stealth players forget it’s a team game doesn’t mean it can’t fit in a team. As long as Loner is skipped.
Here’s what I would do if I could change it:
Loner aura should be replaced by an actual aura and increase crit damage (not chance ) by a small percentage for the team in coherency.
Shroudfield ult could be replaced by guaranteed crits on all attacks for a few seconds with higher CD.
It would still allow burst damage and the benefits from crits but without agro dump.
For veteran… I don’t know. The smoke grenades and stealth just need to go. Keystone on bottom left is awful too.
Don’t touch Loner aura. This is the most useful thing to play with randoms.
They never wait, they always want to run to their death…
I often use loner with random as I know that I will be behind in most of the games.
Of course, sometimes you get a good team… but the majority of randoms run with movement speed bonus, never wait, never check a chest, always pushing even when we have aggroed an entire army…
Loner aura has its utility…
Must say that the only place I don’t pick loner is in maelstrom. Here, the pressure is so intense that the players can’t push too much and have to stick with the team. Or maybe it is just cause these players are a little smarter… don’t know.
Seen yesterday a team and I was surprised… all the players were checking chests. As a result we have found the 4 crates and got a little more than 1000 plasteels. We have even wasted the medikits (i wanted to put it in airlock, and someone deployed it near the chest… moebian mission and we had the 3 scripts)… and still we completed the mission (assassination mission). Such team is so rare…
I don’t even bother talking about the dueling sword because anyone with half a brain would know the decision to give the single most overpowered melee weapon in the game to anything other than Psyker was braindead on every level imaginable.
Psyker having the dueling sword and it being extremely overpowered meant absolutely nothing because Psyker’s skill ceiling prevented the majority of players from taking full advantage of the weapon.
Psyker is the squishiest class AND the only class requiring real game knowledge to have an actual chance at surviving the harder difficulties. Therefore the weapon MIGHT of been very over tuned but having it on a class that requires damn near perfect gameplay, that’s fine.
In all the time playing this game, I have seen maybe five REALLY good Psykers. When I say good, I mean they can survive alone, without a team for an extended period of time. Majority of Psykers I play with go down the second the rest of the team starts crumbling.
Dueling sword change should 1000% be reverted back to Psyker only. Maybe the real solution for combat blades is to remove stealth. Majority of time the only issue I have with combat blades is when they are paired with a stealth user.
