Thunder hammer feedback

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Thought, in light of the recent hammer changes, it would be good to revisit this. It seems to me the new hammer invoked the key idea here. And there are some problems with the new hammer all its own related to hitmass calculations and target prioritization and swing patterns and and and. But I want to say that I think, for the most part, the cleave was a successful change.

Now, what is the problem with the Ironhelm AND Crucius? The problem is its damage blows. A big, slow, 2h weapon should not hit as weakly as the Hammer does on unpowered swings and it should be dealing WAY MORE damage on powered swings than it does considering the high commitment cost of using it and slow total DPS. To highlight this I want to show off this screengrab comparison of the hammer using a powered swing vs a deimos pattern force sword using un-powered heavy swings (which come out very quickly). I am fully aware that I could have, hypothetically and RNG permitted, built a hammer that does more damage to carapace. But this force sword could ALSO be built that way.

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I think this problem comes down to balancing around blessings rather than the base weapon. I assume they didn’t want thrust on the T hammer to be too powerful so they gimped the heavy charged damage. The problem is that now you pretty much have to have thrust to make it even slightly worth it.

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On the one hand I agree with you. On the other hand it seems like, at least for melee weapons, they don’t have a clear vision for balance. Which is remarkable considering how good the guns turned out (they have their own problems of course, but on the whole).

Why some weapons are so much better than others does not at all align with the look and feel of a weapon, nor its lore, nor its level of acquisition. The starting axe remains one of the best weapons for all classes, while the power sword is clearly the best for Veteran. Meanwhile the chain weapons for zealot and the power weapons (crusher, TH) both occupy middle/low tiers. While a plain sword is upper tier. You would think the Chain Axe might be comparable to an axe, or even better (if not in all ways, then definitely in some key ones) but it is just flat out worse. (I still think its fun).

A lot of the melee weapons fail to do effective damage to the large number of enemies in the game. I mean I see players with 300-400 chaff kills every game and there’s only like 4 of us. That’s a huge number of enemies to beat to death with handsticks and yet many weapons might only do a pittance of damage on cleaving blows. I’m not saying that’s all bad, its fun to be swarmed in the moshpit. But contrast that with do-everything-sticks that are available on other melee choices and you start to wounder what the point of some weapons is at all. Some whole classes of weapons are really just worthless.

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64

a lot of it boils down to numbers, and how a lot of blessings serve to impact numbers instead of play. If they made the base stats of each weapon perform as intended, instead of having to rely on blessings to bring them up to par, they could not only more easily balance everything out, but also let people engage in different modes of play with blessings instead of just bumping their existing metrics. Imagine if there was a blessing that got rid of the bounceback, or one that allowed it to cleave until it hit an elite. They could bring balance to the force, so to speak, in that way, rather than having to constantly tweak multipliers for a thousand different stats.

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@Reginald just wanted to add to a topic. I only have around 40 games with the Hammer and the most was before the 1-1 cancel removal so feel free to correct me if your feel like it.

My setup is +elites, +unyielding, thrush, and slaughterer.

I see the powered charged attack as dealing very good damage with thrush but powered normal attack deal so little damage it’s just weird. I mean like 600 to a rager on a headshot, what’s up with that?

Against shooters and normal enemies going slaughterer quickly stack you enough +power to get into one-shot territory so that isn’t really bad (even running it without +DMG perk). I’m mainly using light-block chained to deal with enemies, kinda whack-a-mole style. Heavies are only used for CC/Initiation and a bit of horde control. I personally don’t see hammer unpowered heavies as underperforming (evis needs more help in this regard).

With hammer already dealing ridiculous damage against bosses, I think the best course of action would be to just maybe increase the weakspot multiplier only on light strikedown attacks.

I personally am not really fond of the weapon since they removed 1-1 cancel and it was already weaker than Caxe in general due to the reduced mobility, but I think making TH good is a very fine balancing act. I’m unsure that my proposed change would be enough, and I want my 1-1 cancel back.

Bit of a side note, but I think Hammer benefits greatly from Martyrdom (even 1 stack), Rising conviction, and +Elites perk, and I don’t think it’s bad that you have to run dedicated +damage [armor type] to hit certain elite breakpoints without them being active.

Plasma is very similar in this manner (reaching breakpoint) and made me realize that while FS isn’t really good at QA they are definitely good at math. Breakpoints line up so perfectly that it’s kinda scary. Even things like damage drop-off with distance lines up so the sniper talent is useful on that big guy.

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Sorry you rolled a 60% damage roll you don’t get the break point :))))))))

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a 75 out of 80 can actually break a breakpoint

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I don’t know how much more damage you could give Thunder Hammer.

Honestly my Crucis one shots pretty much every Elite depending on Thrust hold time and hit location and two shots Crushers. I solo Plague Ogryn and Beast of Nurgle with it on Damnation. That’s no lie and no exaggeration it takes Huge chunks out of them on a Charged Heavy Head shot while using Ult. Beast of Nurgle is harder because it swallows you and I have never been able to determine the tell for that move.

I don’t really care as much if it doesn’t do Horde clear as well, because I can use Flamer for that or the Auto Pistol with Blessings. And using Slaughterer alleviates that to a large extent. But it should at least do a full half damage to the other two targets it damages rather than a quarter of it. If it’s going to be doing a quarter of the heavy swing damage, then it needs to be damaging all 8 targets it’s supposed to be doing.

I thought the Cleave for a couple of small fry allowing you to trigger it into an Elite on Charged shot would aleviate a lot. But running Ironhelm Thunder Hammer, you still get wrecked because of that ungodly animation lock time.

Now having spent most of the day swapping alternating every other match between Ironhelm + Auto Pistol and Crucis + Flamer I end up killing more Elites with Crucis mostly because I clear enough small fry out of the way with Flamer that by the time I get to Whacking the Elites, there’s only like 3-6 of them and I can dodge those because they’re so slow or slam into them with Ult to stagger them, then charge it up and whack them killing more of them.

On Ironhelm I can actually step in and whack various elites in the crowd but then get smacked around by like 5-10 small fry surrounding me on the reset. And honestly its not as good on normal heavy swings in a crowd as the Crucis because of that Overhead that comes out of nowhere in the attack pattern completely throwing off the dodge dance.

It’s the animation lock that’s killing both of them. It needs to be shortened or at the very least not prevent you from blocking or pushing during that time.

Now I can’t really totally judge Ironhelm right now because of the bugginess we all know about so I’m holding off judgement for now. When it works… it works pretty decent minus the Animation Lock. And you can use this one with normal ranged weapons since you won’t get body blocked. I could easily see a beginner using this hammer rather than Crucis, which takes more nuance and skill to use.

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I have actually been trying to get a similar build together myself (RNG hell makes it hard), but I have a few now and will be trying them out. In my mind any design that requires specific blessings to be even worth kinda bringing really isn’t a good weapon design.

As to your weapon choice, personally, I would ditch Unyielding for either Carapace or Maniacs. That being said I haven’t really played much with thrust so maybe it puts you over break points on maniacs and other things regardless. I’ve probably played about 100h of nothing but hammer. Maybe quite a bit more, hard to say. I tend to find weapons I like and play the hell out of them and the hammer appealed to me because I really enjoyed the 2H hammer for Warrior Priest Saltzpire.

The reason I take +25% Maniacs on Crucius. is with my hammer I can almost hit the breakpoint for oneshotting muties. And I kill plenty else. Any stacks of any buff I can snag drives me over the edge for oneshotting a mutie (without Thrust being accounted for). Even just standing next to an Ogryn. I’m not sure that’s happening with my Ironhelms but I THINK that’s because of my rolls.

The hammer is great at dealing monstrosity damage. But its rather poor in the arena it should be best in which is armor busting. An improved light powered attack might help the crucius and the ironhelm, but it doesn’t solve the general problem of the weapon having a ton of commitment for kinda meh payoff. Like Silverquick says here:

Basically, in my view, the self-stun is part of the weapon’s identity but simply has to payoff or it isn’t worth it. We can look at the Deimos force sword for a possible path, since it is dealing considerably similar damage on force attacks but also doing considerably more single target damage while being far faster and not tying up the user at all. If we consider this from a design stand point the Deimos right now is the better weapon flat out. Similar damage capacity but normal attacks, at least, deal way more damage while not really sacrificing safety due to the evasion capabilities of Force Swords and the speed with which the weapon handles. The Thunder Hammer then should be very similar in damage on first target, like the deimos, but instead of its safety coming from slick dodges and quick strikes, the hammer is a big stagger stick on top of its first strike damage. This makes it possible for the hammer to swing into groups of enemies and come out with reasonable TTKs against single target elites. But still use those powered attacks for BIG VALUE. That’s my hypothesis of solution, anyway. (and I do like the way the hammer plays with all the stagger. It feels good, and its a safe way to fight if you work out the timing of things)

Proposed ideas:

  1. the charged attacks get a bit of buffing so they clear more breakpoints without literal godrolls on blessings and perks.

  2. The normal damage on first-target needs to be increased. Yes the TH has great stagger, unlike the Deimos, but the Deimos gets incredible safety while delivering 800+ headshot damage on Heavy 2. Meanwhile I have to either swing a slow hammer 3~ times to kill a single gunner or I have to used a risky power attack. Increasing base first target damage might make the hammer feel better in general.

Furthermore focusing on higher base first target damage might be a good differentiator with the TH and the Crusher.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I still have to play with the Ironhelm some, it certainly solves a few problems but it opens new ones.

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Beast is only able to eat players with 1 or more puke stacks on them (the movement slowing/screen blinding debuff that stacks 3 times the beast inflicts from its puke attack). It has a red skull icon and like 10-15s duration. If you get splashed while its puking on its aggro target it will immediately turn and try to eat you.

When someone has enough puke stacks it seems to drop everything to beeline it to them and eat them which is even funnier to witness.

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I’d like to update my thoughts above and keep the conversation going. I know there are some differing opinions and I think that’s interesting. But I think we all agree that hammer’s do not feel good right now despite being kinda fun to use. After a fair number of hours using different Ironhelms that I rolled up (i think I built like 5 transcendent ones looking for something I liked) I have learned a lot about the hammer.

First of all I am finally using a hammer with Thrust instead of Momentum. I’m a less survivable but I can bonk things a bit better if I’m patient and get the timings right. I think I am missing the reliable breakpoint on muties by a bit since none of my Ironhelm hammers have 80% damage stats unlike my Crucius so I have to rev up Thrust to consistently kill them. Of the hammers I rolled I have three I reliably use. One that is bricked pending unlocks on Perks One that is even better than that one but is also bricked until Perks and Blessings are fully unlocked. (I can feel the zealous hate flow through me). The three Ironhammers I have available 2 are 20% flak and 25% maniacs. One has Thrust 2 and Slaughterer 3 and the other is Thrust 3 and Slaughterer 2. I prefer the former. I also have one with 15% unyielding and 25% maniacs, Thrust 3 and Slaughterer 3. I like this one the least.

Before I get into it I’m going to post a video of various hammer use cases and how things went. I know I misplayed against those two crushers, if I had used a dash there I would have taken no damage.

Here is my analysis:

First:
Losing out on the 20 or 25% (in the case of my crucius) flak damage really puts that breakpoint for shooters, stalkers and assault troops way out of reach. There are a lot of flak armored enemies that can take a lot of hammer hits until you get a fair few stacks of Rising Conviction or whatever else. It feels horrible. Plus I seem to struggle against flak ragers. So I had to go back to a hammer with Flak damage in order to not feel totally gimped against common enemies. That’s a decided demerit against the Hammer for not being able to reliably kill the first target of a generic flak mook on a heavy swing.

Second:
Thrust obviously has good value and helps increase the odds of reliably hitting a breakpoint on a 1HKO. But it also demands additional commitment. Now I’m having to charge the hammer, commit to a lengthy heavy attack windup, then commit to the self-stun effect after hitting my target. All for damage that just doesn’t feel that good against a lot of different targets.

Third:
I, still, do not find the self stun that punishing. Its not really different from using a force sword or chain sword. Except with both of those “latch” attacks you’re still able to move decently while the self stun here goes all the way to your feet. Its actually only about 1.25s long by the way. So maybe a way to make it feel better is to reduce the slow effect by about 50%. Might be enough to make you feel less exposed while waiting to get that block up. However using it by yourself without a team around to help beat things up is quite a bit harder. Still, its totally viable in a melee to use it.

Fourth:
Light attacks on the ironhelm feel awful. I liked them better on crucius (obivously for the damage). But otherwise it feels like the same hammer. The swing pattern took getting used to but is basically the same weapon, in some ways its more fun because I have more to do in managing what heavy swings I want. There’s some utility in using powered attacks on lighter enemies. Still playing with that.

Fifth:
The cleave on the Ironhelm definitely solved the GET DOWN MISTER PRESIDENT problem. But it has its own quirks that I don’t love. Still think its fundamentally a better hammer, however.

Final Thoughts:
I think I’m basically right here. I don’t think the 1-1 exploit was necessary to make the hammer viable. But I do think the risks of using it are way too high for what you get out of it compared to other weapons like it (diemos anyone?). For a giant two handed weapon that swings slow it hits pretty weakly. Antax has the same basic damage stats and swings far faster. Why not let the hammer be big, slow, and kinda hard to use, but give it appreciable first target damage? Let me hit those damage breakpoints on shooters without 4 different buffs in play. Let me actually power kill muties reliably without an 80% roll with 25% maniac damage and +an ogryn around and +a stack or two of rising conviction. Etc. Can’t we tighten up the constellation of requirements just a bit?

Sorry, getting long winded here.
Summary

  1. More base damage on heavy swings (first target)
  2. More base damage on light swings (first target)
  3. More base damage on powered swings (first target)

that’s what is needed.
GOOD DAY.

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Well in all honesty here,
The way you used Ironhelm in your video is generally the way I use Crucis, I do actually charge it up that much and am constantly charging it to hit things. The real difference is I generally use the Flamer to hose of all the small stuff so only the Elites are left.

Your spot where you are taking out the Ragers and Crushers one after another is the norm for my Crusis. But the Ironhelm I have even though its max damage does not do as much damage to Elites as my Crusis. Monstrosities they’re about even as far as I can tell…

But for the Ironhelm to perform at that level It will need a damage increase.

Also I prefer the heavy swing pattern of the Crusis to the Ironhelm. When I’m in a crowd I’m dodging left to right and right to left into the swings of the weapon. So a stray overhead out of nowhere completely throws all that off.

I don’t actually like it in comparison to my Crusis, but I want to be able to use it because I don’t like using Flamer all the time. I would like to be able to change it up with other things, but due to both the lower damage, hit mass issues, and the change in attack pattern I cannot say I actually use it much at present.

I however believe the animation lock needs to go before Ironhelm will be competetive, mostly because you do have to use it in crowds for it to be able to compete with Crucis. Right now… unless things change. I’ll continue to use the Crucis + Flamer as its far more effective.

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They introduced new hammer with more problem, and old one still isn’t buffed correctly.

Like how hard is it to give same stagger to heavy attacks on hammer as those found on crutchsword special light attack(the far quicker option even with activation). And/or let at least the heavy horizontal attack one shot headshot 300hp flak shooters(it has terrible cleave so one shotting a single enemy isn’t asking much) before damage buff.

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The place where you can really feel the loss of animation cancelling for the Crusis hammer is against mixed groups. With the animation cancel, you could at least pick off individual targets with charged lights. Not perfect, but the best you could do given that the charged heavy simply wouldn’t work. Post-patch it’s a lot harder to squeeze those lights in, because each comes with a couple seconds worth of forced downtime.

The best response IMHO seems to be running flamer. Crusis already encouraged this before the patch, and it seems like it’s even more of an obvious choice now. I don’t like the flamer and run the Kantrael shotgun, but objectively the flamer is the weapon that best addresses the Crusis hammer’s weaknesses. If you run just about any other ranged weapon, you’ll absolutely start to notice that you’re no longer charging the hammer as much.

Maybe that’s what Fatshark wants, but quite frankly the charge-up ability is the main selling point of the hammer. It’s why you run it, and you have to be able to use it often enough to justify bringing it in the first place. Mowing down the occasional plague ogryn is fun and all, but it has to do more than that. Pre-patch Crusis was probably a mid-tier weapon. It’s certainly no higher now, and if anything I’m less likely to recommend it from a pure efficiency standpoint.

RNG still hasn’t coughed up a decent Ironhelm for me, so I’ll refrain from commenting on that for now.

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It’s a bit surprising that people only now discover thrust. Just in case, it stacks 3 times and gives amount of power each time so up to 60 with lvl 4 thrust. And it’s actually have same survivability(due to power gives dmg, cleave and stagger) as with momentum because of CC and more killing potential. So thrust+slaughterer most common way to play dps hammer. Problem is, with power buffs Ironhlem become very-very inconsistent due to Eviscartor problem – too much hit mass to trigger special, so even with cleaving targets special you can’t hit priority targets properly. And another problem – Ironhelm have same dmg curve(which is like 15-20% dmg from first hit to 2nd target and 5% to the 3rd target) with the same dmg cap(3 targets) as Crucis. So you not killing more or cc more or snipe targets in mixed horde, you basically doing same things which Crucis do, but with even less dmg to single target. Which makes Ironhelm inferior in current state.

About breakpoints, you want maniac anyway because t3 thrust won’t bodyshot mutie without any additional buffs but Thrust and with t4 it let you charge less, not to 3 stacks. Also it gives break point for dreg ragers. Scab ragers wasn’t a problem if you have good penetration roll.

And about animation cancel itself, it wasn’t matter of viable or not, everything is “vibale” till you are good player, it was about being on par with meta weapons and blessings which just makes you killing machine. Now thammer fell more behind because of more limited use cases(especially with more ogryn enemies after patch). Now, objectively, you don’t have a reason to pick hammer as melee weapon but if you just like it. Bosses not a threat usually it’s just a distraction(bring flamer or flame shotgun to burn them down reasonably fast), and mixed hordes solved by flamer, fire shotgun, bolter and etc. You alredy spending time to charge up special, then charge up heavy and then wasting time in stun to kill or dmg 1 target while other weapons will kill x10-xinfinite more targets. And all this just to have a not bad boss dmg(if can’t aim for weakspots it’s sad dmg).

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It was more like I never rolled a decent hammer to replace my Crucius with momentum and slaughterer 3. I certainly tried but it was only after the ironhelm released that I got Thrust 3 to put on a hammer. Boy RNG sure is fun! In the end the Crucius was hitting all the major break points I cared about except onetap facebonking muties and I was able to literally just shotgun them once on the approach and kill them from a cold start if nothing was around to provide me any buffs. Only against Crushers was I really suffering. The Ironhelm hits a lot less breakpoints but is more reliably letting me kill targets when it counts. So I kinda like it and kinda hate it.

Which I still am. Because I cannot have +flak, +maniacs and +Carapace on my two handed hammer and that’s what I need to make it feel good right now. it just feels kind of bad swinging the thing without being able to kill basic shooters.

That’s what I am arguing for. In fact I am arguing for something around 400-500 damage to first target on headshots. I don’t think that’s too much.

I agree with you that this is where the hammer suffers but I think you can absolutely do this depending on terrain and positioning and movement to string out the incoming elites. I think its a skill floor thing, but I like that some weapons are very hard to get value out of. The problem in my view is that not only is it very hard but its also not that rewarding. Its really easy to NOT hit breakpoints for flak ragers and dreg ragers with the same hammer. Its very easy to not be able to quickly deal with Crushers. Meanwhile the Deimos is getting like one or two shot normal attacks with no self-stun with a similar charged attack damage. The power sword and illis can swing for something like 5-600 damage with no self stun and hit multiple targets. If you’re going to lock me in to a self-stun animation where I become vulnerable like this in exchange for being the big single target bonk stick, then the payoff needs to be there.

I think it was their proposed design paradigm to solve against that problem. And I don’t hate it, its why I picked out the lawbringer after I got tired of Flamer. Similar swiss army knife with more range, but more drawbacks. Keeps things interesting. The Kantrael is too similar to the flamer for my taste, but I do like it. (also ammo econ blows). Agripinaa is fun and can do it with precision fire. But being forced to use a range weapon to bust elites with the priemium elite busting stick seems like a bad design paradigm to me. Why did I bring this if I can’t bust elites? I’d still like to find a way for it to not lose the self stun because I didn’t enjoy playing with the cancel, it felt weightless and kinda hacky.

One other thing that crossed my mind today about the Ironhelm is being able to swing it through enemies adds a layer of fun and utility. Sometimes I can kill a few guys on purpose this way if I can on the fly count the number of enemies right. Or I can swing it through a guy and kill the crusher on purpose with the right positioning, rather than letting him be a problem.

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Well, you have a limited time window before other weapons would have dealt with said elites. Stringing out aggro is all well and good, but if it makes the hammer significantly slower than other weapons you could have brought instead, it doesn’t much matter. And that’s assuming you manage this without parking aggro on your team. And given the frequency of mixed groups on damnation, you’ll be stringing out a lot of aggro a lot of the time.

I agree that weapons should reward skillful play, but slapping a several second long delay on the charged hits just seems like a bad way to introduce difficulty TBH. When I think of a weapon that rewards skill, I think of something like the ogryn shovel, where figuring out things like alternating properly between lights and heavys vs hordes and block cancelling for repeated overhead heavys vs crushers make a real difference in terms of your effectiveness. The animation delay on thunder hammer is just a lazy version of that and only really accomplishes two things: It makes players frustrated and the weapon more difficult to balance. Speaking of which…

I’m with you on playing with animation cancelling. It felt like an artificial extra step that shouldn’t exist. It’s comparable to sliding to activate the ogryn power maul so you avoid the crippling movement slowdown. Yes Fatshark, I know how to slide, thank you very much. But it’s a completely unnecessary extra step that might as well not be there in the first place. Just cut out the middle man already.

I’ll also agree with you that in principle there are two ways to solve the problem. Remove the recoil animation, or buff the hammer to the point where using it with the recoil animation becomes worth it. But in practice one is just easier to work with than the other. First of all, effects that are needlessly inconsistent will frustrate players. If the weapon special is only sporadically useful and unpredictable, why am I bringing a thunder hammer? It feels like the weapon is working against you instead of with you. And second, the more inconsistent an effect is, the more difficult it is to balance. If you know that players can reliably get good mileage out of the charged attack, you know what you have to work with. All-or-nothing effects are by nature more difficult to get right (look at something like Holy Revenant for proof).

But at this point, the recoil animation has been in the game long enough that I think Fatshark probably intends the design to be as is. I think it’s bad design, I hope they change it, but if Fatshark wants it that way then it doesn’t much matter what I believe.

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You just summed up Darktide

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Interestingly it looks like they’ve chosen to split the difference and give us both something similar to what we wanted.

I look forward to trying it out. My suspicion is that 0.6s might be enough that i can always get a block up even in mixed horde situations while still making the hammer feel impactful and like it has downsides that balance its big outputs.

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It was already exactly that with the cancel TBH. 0.6 s is still needlessly long when you consider the weapon’s extremely low horde DPS, mobility and generally terrible damage without special active.

I hope they go further with it than what they’ve said or T Hammer is still gonna be pretty noticeably outclassed by a lot of stuff.

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