Yep the stun immunity to ranged is by far the best feat in the entire game. Especially if you use the dash to target and triple its distance, unless they feel like fixing this for real and not 1 hotfix. The other stun immunities are good too, but the gunfire one is like playing a totally different game.
I get what youre saying. Zealot fits like an old glove for me on Damnation, and is my preferred choice over Veteran and Psyker for it.
That being said, this is about Zealot on 4 and 5 diff. New players should be sticking to lower difficulties. I don’t know how you’d change the class for new players and not have it be boringly OP for experienced players on Damnation
I just hope Fatshark doesn’t bow to pressure from all unexperience whinners, it would ruin the game for the V2 vets used to playing on Cata and higher.
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Also this is good guide and I have been considering that combination of weapons for some time now. Wasn’t able to get good ones though 
Still, how many weapons are as viable a knife and shotgun?
The roster is quite big, but I feel like more than half of it will be close to unusable on extreme difficulty.
To be fair Vermintide also had a lot of probelms with weapon balance. It had gotten at a decent place only very late in.
I used to ease though Cata on Vermintide, but on Damnation on Zealot if I want to play effectively, I find that I am just standing behind Vet for most of the game time, waiting for him to clear each zone one headshot at a time form a distance beyond my possible engagment range.
Its not really IMO… You can spec for 2 charges of chastise and Zealots take zero damage in slide… Pair them two up and you’re golden…
Disclaimer: Your results may vary 
Despite what a certain datamine says you can take damage in a slide. Though perhaps that depends on a particular frame.
I think that’s prob the easiest part… Getting in with three other players that know their roles as well is the biggy.
I don’t think that’s a Zealot balance issue as much as an enemy balance issue. Shooters and shotgunners are kinda overtuned, it’s a bit silly how much more threatening they are than any specialist. Zealot can kinda circumvent the very high pinpoint accurate damage they do with the crit build, hence why it’s so popular (though by no means the only viable option), you can dive into way more risky situations and get away with it.
That is true. The combination of their damage and absurd accuracy makes any other playstyle than what I mentioned exponentially harder. And ruins the whole cover system on heigher levels. Since they seem to be perfectly capable of hitting a single pixel of your body that happens to be out of cover.
But being forced into a single situational build isn’t a good state for a game to be in. If I remember correctly same thing happens to the veteran.
A lot of the blame comes down to how toughness works. Since it doesn’t negate damage completely (it should), it’s only a matter of time before you die, no matter what you do. Zealots absolutely should have more aggressively baked in mechanics that keep them alive as long as they’re doing their jobs.
Assuming their role is to entangle mobs and engage with ragers and the like, it makes sense that they’d be basically invincible against mobs as long as they’re in there swinging at them. That’s not the case. They should also be able to shrug off most ranged damage as long as they’re doing this, but not all. Against ragers and bulwarks and so on, being near them should mitigate damage as long as they’re not taking direct hits from those targets.
In other words, as long as zealot is dealing with the front line of enemies, it should be unstoppable. The moment ranged enemies start plucking at it or it starts to take hits from larger melee units because it’s not blocking or dodging, then it should also start taking direct damage. This isn’t how toughness nor how zealot’s feats work, at the moment.
Right now it’s designed to take lots of health damage all the time, get stronger as it gets weaker, but then die and recover all of that health in very specific circumstances with a specific feat. Not only is that incredibly stringent, but it also does not work at all when damage values start to exceed the design’s ability to mitigate them. That’s the issue.
Even two people who know what they’re doing can drag people kicking and screaming through the map. I’ve had to do it many, many times already with a friend.
Shotgunners are my biggest pain point with the game overall. Regular shooters can be dealt with with toughness management (mostly), shotgunners (and snipers to a lesser degree) just take all of that and smear it all over the wall. The fact that they can totally delete your toughness and hurt you while blending into regular swarms of enemies/spawning in groups is obnoxious as hell.
Almost feels like shotgunners should have been the special while bombers were the elite or something, or snipers nerfed to only delete toughness but deal no health damage while shotgunners were the special. (Though honestly I think snipers already shouldn’t do the stupid amount of damage they do)
If toughness worked like a full overshield/temp health the game would be obscenely easy. While it definitely needs some tweaks (see above)
What? The most popular build literally focuses on minimizing health damage by maximizing the value of your toughness, AKA damage reduction. While I think there should be better alternatives for this (Largely that the two zealot toughness regen feats are underwhelming), that’s… not how the class works.
I’d rather see something like the kill increase regen being changed to apply to a certain amount of damage dealt (EG: For every 300 damage dealt, recover 10 toughness or whatever, obviously just throwing the numbers out) while the “Be within range” one is expanded to include elites/monstrosities. Numbers again might need tweaked if so.
See that particular bit is why Psyker is nice… It gets some flack, but getting eyes on for just 1 second then hiding behind anything nice and safe for a couple of secs is nice. BB needs some love though, but thats for a million other threads.