At this point it’s basically known Vet deals better melee dmg (on finesse weapons) than Zealot, but why is that?
Well for starters, the obvious one being that Vet’s skirmisher and agile engagement can give him +25% melee dmg each for doing trivial things
He also has +25% finesse at all times due to Desperado, and +30% weakspot dmg due to precision strikes
Meanwhile Zealot has… +15% dmg for dodging, +10% dmg for killing an elite. Only decent one seems to be sustained assault, and that’s even less than skirmisher
Oh yeah, and while Veteran, Psyker and Arbites have the “+20% Dmg against Monstrosities and Ogryns”, Zealot is stuck with “+20% Dmg against Unyielding and Infested” (no one cares about Infested, and Unyielding alone doesn’t cover Crushers)
This simply leads to Veteran clearly having an edge over Zealot on finesse melees
Solutions? Well considering what I said it shouldn’t be hard
Make “Purge the Unclean” work exactly like “Being it down”, and revert the Riposte nerf. If you’re feeling ballsy, also buff “Abolish Blasphemers” up to 20% because it already has a tax node above
The reason why zealot feels “low damage” is because the current meta promotes one shot set ups so much. If you don’t kill things quicker than Inferno staff / SB stacks, you are just feeding the flames. Pick up a right build, and zealot doesn’t feel low damage at all. You just cannot afford flailing at the air too much.
Zealot doesn’t need damage buffs, nor doe other classes, Inferno staff and SoulBlaze stacking need a nerf.
Zealot doesn’t need straight damage buffs, he needs more reliable and consistent damage buffs. Zealot gets a single flat 10% damage node, 15% elite damage, and 20% against infested/unyielding spread across the tree, with reliable damage buffs locked to the keystones. If you go through the tree, zealot has no other sources of reliable damage or crit chance. Every damage node is something like 10-25% damage that takes multiple conditional triggers to stack up. The only finesse bonus is duellist, which is useless when your team slightly staggers anything you fight and breaks your dodge trigger. Because the only reliable crit chance in the tree comes from BP, duellist is essentially useless unless you use BP or weapons with huge finesse buffs build in like knife. Zealot feels great when playing solo because duellist and your other buffs are up constantly, but when the team is thriving you start to struggle to hit breakpoints because none of your damage conditions are activating. Zealot relies on dodging and kiting to keep damage and survivability buffs active, and this is the exact opposite of how every other class tends to play with massive CC and keeping a stable frontline which is why Zealot feels strong solo, but weak in a strong team comp.
TL;DR Zealot needs more consistent damage buff conditions that aren’t so heavily affected by other players, not just straight damage buffs to existing talents
When it comes to the rest of this “zealot lacks consistent damage buffs” narrative, I’m not entering into a longer convo about this again. There is a recent thread about this somewhere. I can agree to disagree.
To me zealots feel low damage and do low damage relatively to other classes is because in havoc they are forced to use chorus, which even with its damage subnode just don’t give even half of effect of both fury and stealth.
Last time in auric using regular build with "worst"weapons like heavy sword and shredder i did 998k.
Other classes don’t have to rely on ability spam for damage. Vet can dish out insane damage and most people are using Voice of Command. Ogryn and psyker have long lasting damage buffs/output on ability use. Arbites does great damage even when their abilities don’t do any damage. Why does Zealot suddenly fall off so hard when using chorus and after the CDR nerfs? There are deeper fundamental issues with Zealot’s talent tree IMO that are contributing to how Zealot feel right now.
That and other classes can make use of their ranged weapons to accomplish something. Zealot ranged weapons basically exist to get you to enemies faster (Heavy Laspistol, Shredder) or to mulch the horde (Flamer) and with zero support and no functionality, it means that the class ends up with half a toolkit.
Edit: Also they have 1 blitz. Stumm grenades are barely functional and fire grenades might as well not exist in a game with the Flamer and the Pyrokinetic Staff.
Wow I have so many problems with this post as any kind of semi serious analysis.
You talk about bonus damage and exclude the +50% from Martyrdom, as if that isn’t a huge bonus with the most consistent condition of any even vaguely comparable bonus.
Furthermore you’re talking about damage rather than DPS (incredibly bizarre starting point), then accordingly fail to mention the war crime levels of bonus attack speed Zealot gets as if that isn’t a huge contribution to damage dealt over the course of a mission (attack speed is usually functionally its own DPS multiplier mind you, though I doubt it’s a 1:1 correlation in Darktide).
I’m not sold at all on this whole “Vet does more damage” thing, and if analysis like this is how people are coming to this conclusion it seems like the safer bet is that people pushing this narrative are just innumerate. Please note your conclusion may be correct, I’ve not done a detailed comparison myself, my point is just that this is a truly dreadful way to try to make that case.
Furthermore Zealot is much more survivable, so it seems reasonable on paper that would come with some DPS loss. So I kinda don’t see the issue even if that is the case.
That’s without even getting into a conversation about how safety nets like Until Death can absolutely be leveraged into a DPS increase in practice.
Edit: As a side note if extra infested damage isn’t useful that’s an enemy design issue, not a talent design issue. Hitting better breakpoints on some of the most common enemies ought to feel impactful.
50% damage from Martyrdom eats up 2 of your Trinket Slots and requires a specific, niche, risk-heavy playstyle. Compare that to ‘+25% damage for 10 seconds upon sliding’ which Veteran gets for functionally just existing. No gameplay changes, no curio cost, no risk-taking. Practically 100% uptime.
(Although not TOO risky given Until Death and the puny wimpy near-useless post-nerf ‘restore HP from damage you deal after Until Death triggers’. )
That’s true, and Skirmisher is an extremely stupidly designed talent that should be nerfed.
That aside, your comparison in no way makes failing to mention such a huge bonus seem any less dishonest. Higher skill floor does not nullify the potential DPS it lets you reach.
I’m not sure it’s dishonesty but people certainly fail to consider the skill floor, skill cap, effort:reward concepts when talking about things like this. There can be a low skillfloor class that performs well without much effort (psyker) while there’s also a high skillcap class that performs more the more effort you put into (also psyker). I’m not sure where I was going with this but maybe Fatshark should balance Psyker before doing anything else because I’m pretty sure it’s one of the main reasons people ask for buffs on all other classes.
Yes, zealot is more survivable in melee. Zealot is “forced” into melee because of a lack of ranged buffs, which makes sense for the “melee” archetype. Vet can stay back and never be threatened by any melee elite as long as they have ammo, so they don’t need as much survivability, they are always at lower risk. Zealot will run out of ammo after the first elite horde if they try to avoid melee. Melee is inherently more risky, and the extra survivability compensates the extra risk zealot needs to take. If survivability=less dps, what does zealot get for having little to no ranged buffs that every other class has? So, because zealot is more survivable in melee they need less melee damage in addition to limited ranged damage too?
By that logic because ranged combat is less risky than melee combat, all ranged-focused builds should do less damage than melee-focused builds.
I think you’re being extremely reductionist about the pros and cons of Vet and Zealot. For that matter about melee vs ranged combat as well, especially when you consider toughness generation methods.
That feels like you trying to side track me though. Let’s focus on the first hurdle here. The part where I questioned the assumption Zealot is lower damage output in the first place and how incredibly lacking the comparative analysis given here has been thus far.
Yes, the passive nature of Chorus is part of the problem. It’s the only ability in the game which makes you just stand there unable to do anything else. Nothing outside the ability redesign is going to change that.
Vet has trivial talent proc, sliding or killing 1 trash mob, or just hitting the ogryn
Meanwhile Zealot has to Dodge, backstab and all that. He only gets 1 big free pass being sustained assault and that’s still slightly worse than skirmisher when refeering to finesse weapons
I don’t know how these score board calculations work but my biggest guess is that vets high melee damage comes from grenades. Pretty sure a FotF zealot with any weapon cannot be out-DPSed.
Aside from that I am absolutely pro vet dealing more damage than zealot. This game has more to it than deAling damage and vets deserve to be at least being good at dealing damage
