The Hammer does not feel right

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Some of the weapons make no sense and are not fun to use anymore after the enemies were made stronger especially the thunder hammer.

The crucis mk 2 thunder hammer feels like it got left behind.
With the Melee only scab faction modifier the crucis thunder hammer is vastly inferior to the combat knife and shovels. Scab crushers and maulers take very little damage from uncharged thunder hammer attacks but if your charge hit them the self stun can leave you open to get hit by the other group of crushers and maulers, or get netted by the trapper, or sniped. The charged thunder hammer attacks cannot even knock crushers to the ground anymore, but deimos pokes can…
Scab crushers can also ignore stagger from charged heavy hammer attacks now and zealots cannot consistently interrupt the scab crushers over head attack with fury of the faithful.

The combat knife can just quick kill them while dodging with bleeds and face stab builds. It kills faster and has less risk and can solo monstrosities and the hordes at the same time.

Also the way the collision and hit boxes work ruins the crucis mk2 in higher difficulties. Smaller enemies can hide inside monstrosities and ogryns or directly behind them and absorb the hit when they shouldn’t have. Even when playing around it’s weakness there is just to much rng and risk.

the crucis mk 2 hammer also struggles to hurt maniacs. Trappers take 4-5 heavy swings of thrust 4 hits to the head and mutants can take up to 6. Bladed weapons only take 1-2. The problem is darktide spams mutants now. without fury of the faithful it takes a long time to kill them, even longer when nurgles blessing and crowds causing hits to do less damage. The self stun also makes it impossible to dodge grabs during mutant waves. Groups of ragers is just stupid and unfun to deal with, especially with crowds of bulwarks.

The higher difficulties spam disablers and elites and the most optimum way to win against that is mobility which the hammer sacrifices. The thunder hammer is so situational that it seems pointless to use. Almost everything it can do the other melee weapons do better.

10 Likes
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Thunder hammer was the game’s signature weapon (or at least, it was), it should be far more powerful then it is now.
Even if they would buff it to a completely overpowered state that would still be better then what we have now. Its a PVE game after all.

5 Likes
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Stealth Hammer Zealot is a build that is only used to kill bosses in one hit. Other than that it’s completely useless.

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too slow too weak too short power too short range too little stagger/impact too old

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It is now well-known that the game designers at Fatshark pay only lip service to the lore in favor of the elusive goal to make everything balanced and equal. That’s the reason why their combat knives and shovels are that strong. So asking them to make the Thunder Hammer stronger as per the lore is a futile endeavor. They will not listen to you.

That being said, asking for changes to the Thunder Hammer that would preserve the all-important balance has at least a chance. So in order to gain something, you’d have to also lose something.

In my opinion, the main issue with the Thunder Hammer is that when you hit an enemy, it should go down and never get back up. To achieve this, we should trade an increase in damage to a decrease in cleave.

In its present form, the cleave damage distribution makes it so that 6 enemies can be hit with a heavy strike. But only the first takes full damage, and the others take almost nothing. So how about we severely reduce the number of enemies cleaved down to 1, and change the damage profile so that it one-shots anything but Ogryns, Elites and carapace armor.

This would finally put the nail in the coffin of the ridiculous idea that a Thunder Hammer is a crowd control weapon. In my opinion, it should remain a slow, single-target, high-damage weapon. It should cater to players who like high risk, high reward tradeoffs.

1 Like
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In Vermintide it was more or less the same, 2 handed hammer. The big exception was you could increase its attack speed making it fun and usable on the hardest difficulties. I love the hammer for slayer Bardin with attack speed buffs.

Hopefully the rework will improve the weapon, but my hopes are slim.

1 Like
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greathammer isn’t amazing in Vermintide but its one of very few weapons that beats down heavy armor and regular armor the same. It is extremely slow goings for clear but batters down elites with ease. I would seriously go from 4000 base damage on unyielding with the crucis powered up heavy to 3000 if it meant I could hit Crushers and Dreg Ragers for like 350 damage every light.

2 Likes
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Yeah no, It’s PVE ‘multiplayer’ game. Other 3 player want to kill stuff too. I would hate to see plasma 2.0

I really wonder where ‘it’s PVE game, f the balance’ trend come from. It seem to plague every game at this point.

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it’s become a tradition from people that want their crutches to escape nerfs in PVE to cling to the idea that balance doesn’t serve a purpose for them, it’s an old thing that i heard came from xbox games originally as bitching could actually get updates avoided at one point.

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Plasma gun is still super powerful, and yet in the past 2 months i can count how many plasma gun users i’ve seen on 1 hand.
Knifer zealots are also still ridiculously powerful, especially with the new-ish slash knife, not as rare as plasma gun but still see them in a healthy numbers.
void staff for psyker can basically kill anything at any range with extreme efficiency and yet i see more trauma and lightning staffs.

With all the matches i’ve played since the new update i’ve seen a very very healthy variety of classes and weapons.
So people pick not what is the most powerful at the time, but what they find most fun for themselves.

and when they do pick the most powerful weapons never even once have i felt that it was disruptive to my own play.
(i play as vet, psyker, and zealot so its not like im biased because the weapons dont cover my area of combat)
(except the bloody lightning psykers that make the enemies shake uncontrollably, because then i cannot bloody headshot them… -_-)

So no, i do not believe having the TH as an OP weapon would make the game less fun for your team mates. Nor do i believe you’d start seeing it every game.
(maybe you would at first, but thats because it’d basically be a new weapon so its normal)

1 Like
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Thunder hammers are already weak from a lore agnostic perspective. there SHOULD NOT be give and take here, only buffs. Even if they are buffed to consistently 1 shot every elite (crushers included), the fact is in auric you get literal hordes of elites thrown at you. You barely get to use the thunder hammer’s special because it stops on the first elite, forcing you to use its base moveset most of the time which is lackluster when compared to things like heavy sword, eviscerators, chainswords, chainaxes, knives, hell even devils claw when it comes to dealing with bunched gunners, shotgunners, and ragers(all of which are far more common than crushers and maulers unless the mission is a maelstrom with specific modifiers).

Lets suppose the thunder hammer’s single target punch is increased so that it can oneshot eveything up to a crusher. It will still suck to fight against bunched crushers and maulers because even though the dodge lock is not long, its long enough to get you overheaded or netted if you arent clairvoyant or have x-ray vision. All of these issues are made 10x worse when using crucius.

My proposed solution is twofold

  1. Bring up thunder hammer’s single target damage to the point where with thrust 4 and a perfect roll you can 1 shot bodyshot ragers, maulers, and everything below. With a headshot you should be able to 1 shot crushers without your ult (body shot with ult)

  2. Add an aoe explosion to both variants that does something like half the damage(or maybe less, or have falloff like the rumbler explosion) with large stagger power in a decent radius to make thunderhammer more useable when swarmed with elites.

Notice im not asking for the removal of self stun, or for a further buff to its base moveset which is fine being somewat subpar. Im asking fatshark to lean into the weapon’s niches more: single target damage and crowd control.

Some additional changes that would be nice:

-buff the damage of the light activated attacks. They are horrendously weak.

-make a crit blessing available so that the only zealot build that helps the hammer isnt just martyrdom.

-crucius honestly either needs to function the same as ironhelm, or needs a complete rework tbh (maybe an overhead heavy so you can better aim the explosion?). When ironhelm is already mediocre at best, crucius is honestly garbage tier.

-some more thematic blessings would be nice too. I have no ideas currently though

EDIT: i love 2h hammer in v2, its my favorite weapon. but its clear to me fatshark is going in a different direction with the thunder hammer. Im fine with that.

4 Likes
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the reason why the hammer is not that good is because a knife, axe and other weapons do better in any way, especially the knife. in order to make hammer do some good job for example killing bosses it needs to be the only weapon that can do it, right now its not and that is a problem.

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No…
yes it is a PVE game, but not one that you play in solo… so no, they must balance this weapon.

TH feels bad as OP pointed it… I would like also that they make shock & awe somewhat useful…

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Welcome to Darktide, a faithful 40k game where:

Bolt pistol is worse than a Stub Revolver;
Thunder Hammer is worse than a folding shovel;
Chain axe is worse than an ordinary axe;
Power Maul is worse than a club made of literal scrap metal.

8 Likes
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I agree on most of the example…
CA is strong cause of BM
TH just sucks
Bolt pistol has a problem with headshots and stub revolver needs a nerf.
Power maul, I don’t use, so I won’t comment

BUT, all weapons should be balanced. And not seeing one better than one other.

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What is BM?

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Brutal Momentum

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But Chain Axe doesn’t have it…

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What I say is that latrine shovel and combat axe are really strong (but still not totally OP) cause of Brutal momentum. They changed this blessing at patch 13, but still, that’s not the right balance.
If you remove the BM blessing from the CA, it returns to a balanced weapon.

Conclusion: they don’t need to change the CA, they need to change (again) the Brutal momentum blessing

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Ah. I confused Combat Axe with Chain Axe (as CA), my bad

1 Like