I think everything you said there is perfectly reasonable but there are a few points I do want to contend somewhat. Starting to see a clear trend is Hi-STG bias which is fine and understandable, but it’s worth remember the mode that introduces difficulty by just spamming specials at you is naturally gonna favour maniac damage when a good number of the special roster is maniac. Part of why I don’t particularly like STG, specials are meant to be one of many threats not 90%+ of the threat.
Also I wanna say I think excluding carapace in the comparison is kind of a mistake. Zealot Ult treating carapace as Flak is extremely kind to the head hunters. It downs them extremely quickly on Zealot. You also can brute force them on Vet with bigger they are, though again worse than you used to be able to due to crucian nerf. Regardless having much higher crit chance with blessings than the vast majority of guns does mean that taking down crushers with bigger they are is at least possible, where it isn’t for a lot of other guns that are bad at Carapace. Crits confer a lot of armour pen.
So yeah for Zealot at very least frankly carapace should be included in that table, clearly favouring HH.
So I really like the Vraks Mk VII. My go to build for it has been Falter (up to +60% stagger on weak spot hit) and No Respite (up to 20% damage scaling with stagger). I pair that with +25% damage vs Flak and +10% damage on headshots. I also often run it with a Psyker that’s getting damage bonuses from both warp charges and warp unleashed.
If you can consistently hit headshots, the thing is a monster. It staggers practically everything if you land a headshot, which is enough to stop the advance of most specials dead in their tracks and make a second kill shot easy. You have to somewhat mindful of ammo, but it itsnt bad. It can clear out flak gunners really nicely.
Of course. Honestly, I’m not afraid to bring a Headhunter into anything easier than Hi5-STG, aka any other difficulty/modifier combo in the game. However, it’s also true that the higher the difficulty is pushed in general the more important Maniac damage is, therefore the more the Headhunters fall off in terms of effectiveness. While not the only weapons that experience this phenomenon, I’d personally still rather see them perform more equally across all difficulties.
This is actually precisely why I didn’t include Carapace in the table. Without any way to modify the damage or crit chance, they all do comparably ineffectual damage to it. Infantry Autoguns are also quite effective when used by Zealot. I wanted to avoid niche cases such as these to give a general idea of how the damage between different weapon types stack up under most circumstances. That’s not to say you’re incorrect, though.
Fair. I’d personally rather we got a higher difficulty that isn’t just tiresome special spam. I think less specials and a bunch more flak elites more like how normal difficulties are balanced and HH would be looking like a pretty good choice.
Sure. I understand that viewpoint I just strongly disagree it’s niche since my original argument was that it’s probably my favourite Zealot gun. That interaction defines what combos you can and can’t afford to bring on Zealot weight giving up carapace damage entirely. Yes it only applies to 1/3 classes that can use it but again Vet can brute force Carapace with it too if they want to. It’s less of a meme to run with the setup than you’d think.
Anyway I think we fairly well see eye to eye on this. I wouldn’t argue with it having its maniac weakness softened somewhat, I certainly would love the crucian nerf reverted. I think the main disagreement is with how close to fine the HHs already are. If we ignore Agrip which is genuinely bad, I think the other two are basically fine or extremely close to it.
A bit of an aside, but while I think a 6th difficulty would spread out the available missions too much and potentially run into the issue of every enemy being a bullet sponge, I do think we need something harder than what we have now without relying on frequently creating nearly unmanageable situations as Shock Troop Gauntlet and to a lesser extent having more dogs/snipers do.
I think we could make Damnation harder simply by making it more resource-starved. Less healing and ammo overall would force different (and better) kinds of gameplay, increasing the overall difficulty without introducing a new one. But I digress.
Yeah, in general the people in this thread seem to generally agree on the current state of the weapons and soft fixes to push (the Vraks’) up from maybe A-B tier to A-S tier. Like you suggest, it wouldn’t take much.
Increasing Maniac damage would help, as mentioned, and slightly increasing the unarmoured damage (7-9%) on the MK VII would drastically help it meet those all important breakpoints to start taking down shooters efficiently. Increased headshot damage on Unyielding and Carapace for all Headhunters could help too, but I don’t entirely see it as necessary. A Crucian Roulette buff would help a lot too, making a crit-centric build much more effective.
Personally, I’m just happy the weapons are getting some attention. The Vraks VII in particular is one of my favourite guns and it needs just the smallest push to make it truly competitive.
My only real feed back on the head hunter auto guns and burst fire auto guns is that they feel amazing to use when you got the full auto mod installed and bad without the mod.
This is from a zealot main who just uses brace auto gun and S auto pistol.
Ever since this thread was started i have taken the Vraks MK III into matches with my Zealot and it isn’t great, but honestly the only thing where i wish it would perform a lot better would be with Trappers. Flamers too but less so, but Trappers take way to much ammo.
Might not be a bad idea to have the Scab Flamer count as Flak armor and Drek Flamer as Maniac, just like the Ragers. I have come to appreciate the use of the Vrak MK III to delete Scab Ragers and Maulers, especially since their spawns seem to be broken and they spawn in packs of 6+ now.
The problem for me personally are the Trappers. Expectation and reality do not concur, when you have to empty half a magazine into the Trapper to kill it.
Except it isn’t a Braced Autogun. A braced Autogun outperforms the Vraks III by a country mile in any department but its ability to reach out and deal with Snipers. Don’t get me wrong, i do appreciate the weapon on my Zealot for its ability to do a little of something and be able to “full auto” into someone, but to be fair other weapons do that job better. The Anti Flak attribute is what it has going for it and i very much appreciate it for that… but its not in a good place compared to the alternatives.
No, i am not, and i am also using it on my Zealot. I would never use it on a Veteran too, because it doesn’t have the ammo.
Why you’d think i am shooting hordes with it is beyond me, especially since i explained earlier in the thread that i consider the headhunter family as the alternative to the Infantry Lasgun when it comes to being able to deal with shooters at a distance.
I mean, i am glad you don’t run into ammo problems, but i am frequently down below 100 shots on that thing. Or in the red, especially when we are playing something like High Intensity Damnation or Shocktroop Gauntlets. And i am almost exclusively using the weapon to fight Gunners, Shooters, soften Ragers before going into them with a melee weapon… or deal with Flamers, Trappers or Bombers as they are coming in from a distance.
Are you the arbiter of the one true way to play Zealot? Where can i read your gospel so i can know what i am doing wrong?
As i said before, it isn’t about its ammo capacity as a Veteran. It is about the ammo capacity on the other two Classes. The Psyker and the Zealot. And when you need half a Magazine to kill a Trapper, something that would require an increase on its anti maniac power, then you burn through a lot of ammo when you happen to be the guy on the team that tends to notice the specials.
Ammo isn’t a big issue, but it is an issue when you have teammates with Bolters, Autopistols and Stubcannons. Giving it a very slight boost would increase the headhunter’s workhorse attribute despite the poor maniac performance, which as i understand it none of us wants to truly eliminate and on which all seem to agree that it is okay for the gun to have this weakness.
They are always underwhelming. At the current time, i really don’t see much of a reason to carry one. I really want to carry one, but there is no reason to carry one. Its outperformed by the Revolver, one to two shotguns, arguably the Infantry Autogun and definitely the Infantry Lasgun, and i am not even talking about the MG XII here. I am talking i’d rather take the MG Mk IV with a mouse macro or the full auto mod than take the Vraks MK III. All weapons i would pick before i picked the Headhunter Family.
Most definitely not a HI-Shock Troop Gauntlet on Damnation. But i have played and did reasonably well a standard Damnation Gauntlet with it, in its current state. But it most definitely would not be my choice of weapon. I really would like to use it, but there is just no good argument to use it.
That is the wrong argument to make and the wrong way to approach this. This thread, at least to my understanding, never was a “this gun is unusable” but a simple “this gun underperforms”.
Sure, you can take this gun into any mission and with a good enough melee weapon compensate for pretty much any fault of the gun. The question isn’t “is the gun servicable”… the question is “is the gun competitive with the alternatives”… and the answer clearly is “no”.
Just the chart what it is good at, side by side with the penetration chart, should make it very clear that the Headhunter Family is underperforming compared to the alternatives.
So let’s not get bogged down by what we can and can’t compensate for. I wouldn’t have an issue bringing them into a HI-STG Damnation run… it’d suck major balls, but a good melee weapon and a Teammate can make up for all the blindspots this gun provides. The question is “Why would you?” It’s strong point isn’t enough to make up for its weakness.
In addition to the above… in terms of ammo usage. It also makes a huge difference which blessings you use. If you build the Vraks MK III entirely for crit and use Crucian roulette, then ammo usage goes way down. But if you do not build it for crits then its ammo pool is to low.
No, I was saying if you’re not a vet and need precise fire that does good headshot damage that meets breakpoints for pretty much everything non-carapace, then a kantrael is far better than a headhunter in every single way, and a bolter better than that if you don’t mind the time to swap or reload. Hell, the heavy laspistol also has a great headshot mod, and completely wrecks face compared to headhunters (pun intended). The agri brace isn’t horrible long range either. I snipe snipers with it all the time, albeit not as effectively (the vet ult btw makes it very easy to snipe snipers with the agri brace).
This is true. Something obvious but still to keep in mind is that any damage increase will also have the knock-on effect of decreasing your ammo usage, make the gun more ammo efficient and your ammo pool go further.
No, I fully agree. I enjoy the gun enough (on Veteran at least) to use it on even some of the higher difficulties, and it certainly isn’t unusable, but I don’t think anyone has been defending that it isn’t underperforming.
Using the format of my chart above, I’d personally like to see the Headhunter perform like this:
Anyways, I don’t have much more to add here. I hope this thread brought the gun some attention and people continue to share their experiences with it. Fingers crossed we’ll maybe see something in the upcoming patch.
