Thunder Hammers are absolutely iconic 40k weapons. Fatshark has killed it on the feel of using this weapon, but has a long way to go in terms of effectiveness.
Strengths:
Huge single target burst potential on bosses
Good aoe stagger
Ok range
Satisfying animations
Awesome sound
Weaknesses:
Low cleave
Low mobility
High stamina use on sprint
Low damage on unpowered attacks
Slow attack speed
Self stagger on empowered hit
Reliance on a singular blessing (thrust)
Reliance on talents (melee stun immunity, damage to unyielding, +stagger to deal with ragers)
Easily interrupted
No one else gets to hear the thunder smash
This leaves the TH with basically only one job which is to murder bosses. This it does very well and absolutely does not need to do more damage on.
The issue is this is supposed to be a primary weapon, currently it is designed as a secondary specialist weapon. It has a lot of downsides and very little upsides.
To compare it to the knife (which is definitely overtuned). The knife has high mobility which makes it safe to use. Good horde clear with bleed. Great at killing armoured enemies with rending. To top it off its easy to use. You can literally spam dodge and left click to do perfectly well.
If a crusher pack shows up it’s terrifying for me to fight because I can’t kill them in one hit and I’ll probably eat a crusher maul after hitting one with an empowered swing. Meanwhile my mate on knife can bleed out the surrounding horde then happily shank each armour plate clad enemy while staying perfectly safe.
I love this weapon and will keep using it regardless, but man does it feel bad to be a fan of it.
So what would you do to make it the primary weapon it deserves to be?
One shot Crushers more consistently, hopefully with minimal stacks of thrust. Thats all it needs. It still wont be a god tier weapon but it will be usable.
Also revert the Ironhelm ebola (real) change ASAP.
I had other suggestions as well but people got mad at me so . But this would be a very strong foundation.
I do agree that it needs to be buffed but its definitely not the worst, its also the only weapon with the niche of being able to to one shot bosses which is pretty cool i guess
Also i agree, the combat knife is overtuned as hell for some reason, it has no right being as strong as it is, but it is certain damn fun to use so I dont mind it being overtuned personally
I don’t like simply because it makes no sense thematically. If there was some sort of power blade or something it would be better. It makes absolutely no sense for a thin knife (not even a Catachan Blade like it claims to be) is cutting through carapace armor like butter.
Just from a “lore” point of view I hope its eventually put in the same balance realm as the Auto Pistol right now which is thematically bad, and just give Zealots a Death Cult Assassin Ppwer Blade for those who want to larp as sneaky boys.
I don’t think this will help honestly. Sure it would be nice but if you want something to cleave hordes, bring a cleave hordes weapon. The hammer is supposed to be a single target destroyer, but it doesn’t do that very well.
Ewwww no, stop trying to change it into something it isn’t. Absolutely nobody who has spent significant time with the weapon would actually want this. Also what the hell sense is there in making a hammer have a similar cleave distribution to a sword?! This is just moon logic stuff.
It literally just needs to have good breakpoints for the special attack, which the elites HP increase butchered. Then it’ll be good again.
It’s absolutely crazy how different weapons do different things. Almost like there are a bunch little knobs and dials the Devs use to actually make the weapons we swing around feel like what they are rather than all just feeling like differently shaped light sabers. From acceleration curves mid swing to, y’know, cleave distributions.
Hammer doesn’t need to kill hordes faster, it already had that weakness very significantly reduced in patch 13. It just needs to do what it’s supposed to do, REALLY BIG BONKS that deliver on the single target damage you’d expect.
Why is it so hard to imagine in being able to do both?
How slow the hordeclear is, is the only real problematic part left that the hammers have and if I think of how greathammers worked in VT2, they could do both.
There is exactly 0 reason for it to be killing 1 to 2 zombies per swing when a sabre can kill 4 to 5.
It doesn’t have to smash through hordes faster than a weapon which is desgined to do so but killing hordes 1 to 2 enemies at a time is just bad.
The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure VT2 Hammer has similar horde killing to pre patch 13 T Hammer, where it doesn’t damage things beyond the first 2-3 enemies cleaved. It has been a while so I might be misremembering, but that is definitely my memory.
T Hammer has a lot of cleave and impact, so despite killing slow compared to a bunch of weapons it does chip and control a lot of horde at once, so it manages to be relatively safe and reliable despite low mobility. Ironhelm can also legitimately use special heavies to speed up horde clear these days.
It’s not that I can’t imagine it being more generalist, I just think it’s less fun and becomes more bland to go that route, also becomes less interesting to build that way. I’d really rather see it properly excel at the thing it’s clearly meant to excel at.
it would be nice to be able to swing through hordes with the charged heavy, one-shotting them, maybe stopping if you happen to hit an elite or specialist. i don’t think that’d be too much to ask for.
Sounds like the powersword to me! But oh no we cant have that on the zealot, itd be op. Its hilarious how many things die to the mk6 powerswords empowered push attack. Sometimes i forget im not a zealot.
. But this would be a very strong foundation.