It’s insane no one has dropped ye old ‘skill issue’ argument yet.
Jokes aside it’s one of my top tier choices for Auric Maelstrom runs. The Thunder Hammer is a highly specific weapon that excels in certain situation. It also has a higher skill ceiling than brutal momentum axe go brrrrt:
You’re eff’d if you’re bad at managing swing timings.
You’re eff’d if you’re bad at managing hordes.
You’re eff’d if you think you can midnlessly go charge brrrt.
And block pushing is basically useless most of the time.
Not to mention nuances like needing to dodge on heavy swings for efficient horde management.
It’s by no means a great weapon but a highly specialized one. It also requires certain feats (Thrust + Headtaker/Slaughter) to even properly function, but damn does it go when you get it to work.
There’s nothing else that can manage a 6-8 Mutant pack like a Thunderhammer. The only thing coming close is a Vet with perfect F/Bolter reload timing, but even that relies on ammo.
Long story short, it’s a skill issue / challenging weapon with great risk reward mechanics for players that enjoy not using vanilla builds.
It can also become pretty meta when coupled with something like the flamer to mitigate the lackluster horde clear.
My experience so far has been that 2x good Zealots with Hammers + 1 Vet trivialize Maelstrom runs.
Hmm… I will disagree with you here… several weapons are weaks, several toooooo strong.
And there is the middle ground, weapons that are average and should become the reference to balance everything.
Also, lot of blessings are totally useless.
Here is my problem (and with a lot of weapons).
Everything you said, I can verify right now cause I started to play with hammers (both). And I see the difficulties and also the potential of the weapon.
However, what makes me sad is that you have to rely on 3 blessings. And here is the problem. We have large pools of blessings and everytimes you want only few of them cause the others are useless.
On thunderhammer, there is shock & awe that could be a sort of BM for the Hammers. However, this is not really an efficient blessing. It works, but it should be buffed cause, actually, this is just a blessing for people like me that want to experiment something new.
I will continue to test it… but must say that I think it could be a great blessing, however it lacks of strengh. A little boost on the effect would be welcome (especially when you consider that you have to rely on heavy swings to use it as you need to kill someone to get it for… 0.5 seconds). Or, maybe a boost on the time it lasts…
Dev acklowledges the interaction between chastise and ranged weapons (the flamer specifically) and does not call it a bug/exploit, but mentions it as one reason for balance changes.
Dev explains the armor penetration as degradation (treating carapace as flak), not full removal.
Assuming that it was not changed since then, it should still work the same way.
So as strange as the interaction seems to be, it is officially “working as intended”.
But in a FatShark game, something being a bit strange, or simply not fitting the description, is nothing new and should not be a massive surprise.
Here is a “small” list of things that have inaccurate descriptions (TLDR: around half of the things).
I would argue a well built braced auto does it better. The deimos also does quite well.
That’s actually because, funny enough, a lot of us are regulars and more or less know we all play auric maelstrom with relative success most of the time.
This is actually kinda the problem with the hammer. I have no issue with a weapon requiring a high skill floor to be good. Its niche is armor busting and special blasting. But the problem is you need an incredibly minmaxed build to still preform worse in melee than a bolter against most targets. All these costs, from stats, to blessings, to having to lengthily charge up thrust, to needing headshots and hitting arms, to being self stunned for 0.6s, to low dodge count and distance, all work against the weapon. Only to be objectively worse against a key target (crushers) than a bolter. It doesn’t make lore or game balance sense.
A hammer on tabletop would be S6 Ap -4 with D3 damage.
A bolter would be S4 Ap -1 (at best) with 1 damage and 2 shots.
A bullgryn has T6 3 wounds and a 3+ or 4+ save depending on gear.
The bolter can stagger all 4 crushers in my test and kill them faster. Meanwhile the hammer can only stagger one and staggers you and doesn’t kill them as fast. It makes no sense and makes me mad. This goes for a lot of targets where the hammer suffers in high level missions because you can’t even regularly reach oneshot breakpoints on the whole suite of elites and theres like 12 of them at once. Bolter just goes brrrrr. The only thing it does really well is pop monstrosities in one mode.
What i am saying, badly, is:
Bolter = low cost, very high rewards
Thunder hammer = very high cost, low rewards with limited spikes on a small group of key enemies in irregular circumstances
Where costs = actual gameplay mechanic risks like time to charge thrust and self stun and risk to health bar
I don’t like this line of reasoning because it can be said for most ranged weapons compared to melee options.
Autoguns (especially the high-damage versions), flamer, ripper guns, etc. can all mow down hordes faster than Heavy swords while also being pretty good against other targets.
The main cost is usually an ammo cost. You can just shoot every horde with an autogun and enemies will die faster than using dedicated horde-clear weapons, but the team will quickly run out of ammo even with the pretty abundant ammo supply the game provides.
Generally, the upside of melee weapons is the ability to get your toughness back and to force shooters into melee and not require resources (ammo). In the DPS department, they don’t keep up with ranged options usually.
TH is pretty meh weapon on its own without the need to compare it to ranged weapons. Only thing it’s clearly best at (and by far) is boss damage, which is nice.
Its not really a complaint about the ranged weapons being better but specifically a complaint about the internal costs of each weapon vs their effectiveness. The hammer comes with stupid high costs but preforms worse than a weapon that lore and crunch should be far its inferior on those specific targets.
Though in my view there does need to be some balance accounting for melee vs ranged weaponry. They do share the same play space. If one always dominates the other, especially considering the general ubiquity of ammo pick ups, then the balance is going to be bad. I mean heavy sword vs braced auto gun on poxwalker clear isn’t the same comparison as carapace ogryn busting. Sure sometimes its wise to mag dump a horde to keep things moving or bail a bad situation but most of the time experienced players know its best to save the ammo. But sniping elites and specials is a great place to spend ammo. Thus a melee weapon that specializes in this should be competetive in TTK at least, if not safety.
It’s better against bosses at least. I mean I’m not going to argue that TH couldn’t use a buff, even with the thrust bug it wasn’t competitive with Caxe (outside bosses which got just deleted).
If you look at your charts outside chastize which isn’t a bug but kinda broken anyway, the numbers seem comparable to what I would see TTK-wise in (percentage) difference between ranged and melee options in general.
Either with an anti-horde perk or if you build up some deathspitter+fire frenzy you will one-shot poxies with the heavy autoguns on Bodyshot and penetrate 2 more, but yes it isn’t really ammo-efficient outside Vet who can absolutely lay into hordes from time to time.
That’s kind of the thing. With current balance it’s not going to really happen. Outside boss damage ranged weapons just have faster TTK in general (for an ammo cost).
Anyway, I think that you mainly take TH to eat bosses and not for Crushers. With chastize any ranged weapon is an anti-crusher weapon and Caxe is also just better.
Maybe TH should be able to one-tap Crushers with charged heavy and chastize without building for it. Better carapace modifier perhaps?
Can i add here that dodge limit balance on weapons and mobility overall is a bit off to me and maybe even too overcomplicated aswell as not intuitive. Like
Bolter
Th
Evi
Plasma
Flamer
Mg12
So bolter i suppose leans to a heavy weapon category, but got same mobility as Mg12 lasgun. However flamer and plasma are heavy weapons too got x2 less dodges, higher dodge distance penalty, but lower sprint cost (why?) Shouldn’t they be just in one category - heavy weapon? And even if keep mobility differences it shouldn’t be x2 difference in dodge limit inside one “category”?
Meanwhile Th - meelee weapon is 2 dodge limit aswell and lower sprint speed then bolter, when you probably want to dodge dance and charge towards enemies.
I don’t know how it’s in the tabeltop, but just from gaming expirience i see it like this:
Strong heavy melee weapons got overall worse mobility then light melee
Strong heavy range weapons got overall worse mobility then light range
Strong heavy melee weapons got slightly better mobility then heavy range
They all have some ups and downs, and the general rule that melee weapons have more efficient dodges (better ranges and faster dodges) holds.
It could be argued that the MG12 is out of place and should have a bit more mobility (something like auto guns) or that the Bolter should have a distribution closer to plasma/flamer.
Right but it shouldn’t. Even if we assume ranged weapons are better performers in general circumstances the simple fact is it doesn’t have to be this way at all. The TH should absolutely out perform the bolter against Crushers based on lore, tabletop crunch AND gameplay sense. Yes you have to do all kinds of things like close the distance and yadda yadda. But all it needs is big damage to make up for that. It simply doesn’t have big damage.
That’s precisely my complaint in any case. The TH in lore and tabletop crunch is way WAY better than a bolter against Crushers. So why is that not the case here? There’s no good reason for it other than bad balancing. Take away Bolter’s shattering impact blessing and we narrow the gap some but the reality is the TH needs better carapace damage, and flak too, and maniac. The plasma gun does too. Both plasma and thunder hammers are literally the two weapons you would expressly take to bust open armor in tabletop or an 40k RPG like Dark Heresy. But here they are needlessly weak. Another component to this is stagger. The ability for the bolter to distribute stagger to the crusher horde is, in and of itself, a huge benefit that allows me to safely dodge dance groups of crushers at melee distances. The idea of giving the hammer some limited AOE stagger on special hit has grown on me as a consequence.
Sooo what’s the diffrence? And where am i wrong? Why bolter, flamer and plasma being heavy range weapons have such different mobility? Or bolter isn’t a heavy weapon?
Again. Melee weapon with x2 less dodge and lower sprint speed then bolter, dodge distance penalty is different yes, but still.
I don’t think it’s about mg12, shotguns have the same stats, except spread
Imo, just weight system would be much better - the more heavier your loadout overall, the worse your mobility stats.
Or maybe each category should have specific but unified stats, something like:
1h light melee and range weapons give +1 dodge limit (knives, pistols), some mobility buffs (or no cons atleast)
1h medium melee and range - doesn’t affect dodge limit, but have dodge distance and sprint speed penalties, range has higher ones (all kinds of regular infantry guns, swords, axes)
2h melee -1 doge, some dodge distance and sprint speed penalties (evi, th)
heavy range -2 dodges, signifficant mobility penalties (flamer, bolter, plasma)
Oh don’t get me wrong. That is exactly the case with veteran bolters. Especially if there’s more than 2 for infinite ammo regen.
I’m just saying that the fun lies in it’s clunkiness. There’s a certain sense of achievement when you’re able to clutch 6 mutants, a beast of burgle and random specials, whilst going from 1 HP to full with just the right swing.
Objectively spoken it’s trash when it comes to clearing auric maelstrom as efficient as possible. There’s better options for that
The only modifier TH excells at is the increased boss spawn one, where the ai director almost always spawns regular bosses instead of weakened ones.
Yeah, maybe it’s the disconnect here. There are weapons like TH boss damage where melee weapons could shine more, but in general, I think it’s good for the game that ranged weapons perform better damage-wise.
Bolter is basically in the second least mobile category for ranged weapons, while TH is in the least mobile category for melee weapons.
The two weapons are more or less the same mobility-wise with different upsides and downsides. The dodge distance is actually huge and TH gives more dodge speed too (bolter also has it, but less. It’s super impactful stat for -dodge distance weapons), and it has a bit better sprint cost and stamina.
My problem with your post is that it was really misleading and shown the differences as much bigger than they are. Evis for example either clearly better or equal in all stats to all other weapons at equal mobility stat, while in your post it look like it has less sprint speed than bolter (which isn’t actually the case).
This idea sounds good, but IDK if it would be actually good. You can already kind of do this by mixing high and low mobility options in the 2 slots. I for example take braced autogun with high mobility and stripped down blessing with TH so I can run fast.
I don’t really agree with that position. I think the lore needs to inform the weapon balance. Especially in the case of powerful melee weapons they should not be underperforming weaker ranged weapons. But also from a pure gameplay balance perspective it doesn’t make sense. Yes guns need ammo, but that’s rarely so hard to come by that its run ending. Meanwhile there are weapons in the game that have enormous costs associated with using them that don’t have any benefit other than having maybe some pretty good monstrosity damage.
Melee weapons are naturally balanced in their effectiveness against their power by having to be in the most dangerous position for the player: melee. In melee the player is exposed to melee enemy attacks AND ranged enemy attacks. Whereas ranged gameplay allows the user to avoid engaging in melee threats entirely. Simultaneously melee weapons don’t have any range, thus requiring the user to physically move to engage (a time cost). Plus weapons like the hammer have bad dodges, slow swing speed, single target only effects, low safety, long windups for Thrust stacks, self stuns and then, on top of all of that, the weapon is actually pretty fething bad at horde clear (not bad for management though). Purely in game balance logic this weapon is stacked high with costs so why isn’t it stacked high with rewards too? 40K is a hybrid combat game and always has been. One of the ways the tabletop game has balanced that over the years is that ranged weapons are flexible and able to actually shoot at range while melee weapons tended to hit harder (not just from morale effects). Meanwhile ranged weapons in Darktide are just win more options that have far fewer risks. A powerful ranged weapon doesn’t have as many balancing negatives. Which is a big reason why the bolter is so dominant as the meta weapon of choice in high tier play where shooters aren’t always as big of a concern.
First I wrote something really long and a bit heated so I deleted it for something shorter and more diplomatic.
This is highly class-dependent, both ogryn and zealot are very much safe in many melee situations. Apart from very, very open areas, I prefer going into melee against shooters to force them into melee and to have a good toughness regen from melee kills.
I think it’s preference. This is a mixed game, if I wanted to play a game where ranged is only used for… ranged, then I’d go back playing VT2.
Anyway, I think we can agree to disagree, but even if you delete bolter from the game, TH still won’t be a good weapon.
I think it’s really contra-productive to talk about bolter or ranged vs melee in TH’s case.
You’re not wrong, but not exactly right. Fighting multitudes of crushers or other specialists is very hard in melee. Not least because of overlap and swing-through mechanics. Especially with the hammer. I enjoy the challenge and don’t want to see it nerfed or reduced per-se. But its definitely way less safe than bolter rounds at point blank.
I think we’ll have to. But just to re-state my view the fact is weapons will be selected based on the totality of the options. If a bolter is a better melee weapon than a thunder hammer there’s a problem. I want to see big hammer buffs on armored targets, elites and maniacs. But not monstrosities.
