Thunderhammer actived damage calculation: squared instead of multiplicative+additive?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Bugs
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Issue: boss insta-kill with Zealot. Observed a damnation difficulty boss insta-kill from ~2/3 health to dead during multiplayer match. Unreasonably high damage output with activated thunder hammers against unyielding targets.

To reproduce: use a zealot built for backstab with an optimal load out for unyielding enemies. Use a mk4 hammer. Cloak, activate, push swing n’ miss, and then transition to heavy overhead strikedown (line 981: damage_templates.thunderhammer_m2_heavy_active_strikedown). Profit? I can’t find the double multiplication. It looks like the damage might square somewhere with thunderhammer activation against unyielding targets.

I did a bit of testing in the psykhanium: it’s the tool I’ve got. I used the 1st heavy attack with the mark 4 hammer – the numbers get big enough quickly that you can’t really see what is happening otherwise (line 719: damage_templates.thunderhammer_heavy).

A few example damage values listed as heavy then heavy active (H/HA). Cloaked heavy then cloaked heavy active (CH/CHA). Percent increases are listed for each category. All attacks are backstabs.

Crusher, carapace:
H/HA - 177/827 (467%)
CH/CHA- 660/3254 (493%)

Berserker, flak:
H/HA - 279/1293 (463%)
CH/CHA - 1093, 1309 (119%)

Berserker, maniac :
H/HA - 167/1357 (812%)
CH/CHA - 675/1525 (226%)

Charger, maniac
H/HA - 500/3995 (799%)
CH/CHA - 2079/4000 (themoon%)

Bulwark, unyielding
H/HA - 400/3600 (quitealot%)
CH/CHA - 1573/3600 (atadpastsufficient%)

Extrapolating the numbers out for a cloaked, backstab, activated, strikedown heavy attack gives a likely minimum linear damage of 28314 against unyielding bosses. And I’m fairly certain the damage calculation is not behaving in a linear fashion. In casual in game testing I’m pretty sure I’ve chunked a 1/3 of the renegade captain’s health on maelstrom difficulty. That would be 8000 damage in one hit given 16000 hp x 1.5 = 24000 hp. And I missed the heavy strikedown.

I’m guessing a multiplication is happening someplace within the additive damaged calculation: (X + Y + Z + (W x Y)) x 150% trait damage bonus = overkill. I think it’s one of those things that normally isn’t a real problem until somewhat figures out how to input a big number for “Y” or “W”.

It is specific to thunderhammer activated attacks and unyielding enemies as far as I can tell. The backstab and the trait bonuses only help bring the overall damage number up but do not act as a multiplier. I think.

Maybe this is an intentional part of the game and I should just run hammers and get gud. From my previous experiences playing Fatshark games I am guessing this is not an intentional design choice.

Platform: Steam

Player ID: 4995289058

Sunday, 5 Nov 2023

Reproduction rate: constant.

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Had to get the spawner mod to do a bit more testing. I’ve got it hitting consistently for about 40 000 damage.

The one shot boss is the Beast of Nurgle because of the rear side weakpoint. You can one shot them with a thunderhammer mk 4.

Daemonhost can be 2 shotted with the first shot hitting while it is on the ground.

Plague Ogryn is 1 cloaked shot and 2 follow ups. That’s 60 000 damage in 3 or 4 seconds.

Chaos Spawn is 2 shots.

All damnation. It would be hard to mechanically pull it off in game – but – it confirms that I’ve seen it being used already. I’m fairly certain I haven’t fully optimized the build. Just want to confirm that this is as the designers intended.

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The other night I was testing out a new stat screen sub mod, and it had a single highest damage entry. There was a hammer assassin zealot in that game and the stat screen recorded a highest damage in one hit dealt of over 13k. Pretty sure it was a boss that took that hit and exploded.

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The Thunder Hammer is good at one thing. You’ve just figured out what it is.

For everything else, especially hordes, it is weak and slow.

1 Like
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The Mk 2 Thunder hammer also 1 shots a beast of nurgle with a single heavy attack: no fancy miss and line up the heavy strikedown attack. It is an all-round easy to use and functional stagger based horde control weapon; as it has been since the original Vermintide.

The Mk 2 can hits a Chaos spawn for approximately 23500 damage. This sits more in the range of a specialist assassination weapon – however – it’s still a lot.

You’d have to be god tier to actually pull off a charged backstab headshot on a daemonhost – it might be possible. The Mk 2 can still hit for about 3/4 of it’s health with a charged backstab. With a correct build including a max stacked Martyrdom I think a one shot is very achievable with a Mk 2. There is a definite disadvantage to playing Martyrdom – and going after a daemonhost with a single wound of health is a dangerous decision. I think that could be a reasonable risk / reward scenario based on skilled play.

If a weapon is balanced in a way – say – that the majority of your team would have to use it in a coordinated fashion to speed kill bosses – that’d be cool. 4/4 of a zealot power team all shitting on a boss in tandem. The problem becomes when 1 or 2 members on a team can do that. Because: every game you play a month from now on damnation will involve 1 or 2 zealots insta-killing bosses. Probably with the Mk 2 because it is a more flexible weapon. And then the developer panics and nerf hammers the hammer and the class.

I know this. Why? Vermintide 2, beam staff, pyromancer. Crit = ult recover speed. Ult is a flaming skull that kills the map. Beam staff has a repeated hit rate that is near instantaneous for like 1 damage. So now you can fire off a death skull every 5 seconds at everything. The class gets nerfed to a point it is no longer really enjoyable to play – for like – 2 years. The beam staff gets balanced out a bit.

If you enjoy playing the game and the zealot class it is far better to recognize when things are unbalanced and give the devs time and information to solve the issue in a balanced way before they are forced to by the new trash hammer meta. Trash hammer meta is coming.

I like the Mk 2 hammer and want to see it do it’s job adequately. The Mk 4 could use a polish IMO – it is currently painful to use.

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As a point of reference: the Mk 5 combat axe. That is a dedicated anti-elite weapon that suffers in hordes due to it’s chunky nature. It is specifically designed at a strikedown / armour piercing weapon. It has 2 traits that can enormously buff a first heavy strike. My quick throw together build with it will hit the weakspot on a beast of nurgle for about 32000 damage. It’ll hit a plague ogre for about 12000 damage for a cloaked, full charged backstab. 4 players can kit up specifically to – heavily damage – a plague ogre with a coordinated barrage of stealth attacks. 1 player can do that more efficiently – and – finish the ogre off a few seconds later. Min-maxed perfectly: you probably don’t need to finish off the ogre. 99% chance this is unintended. 100% chance it will seriously effect game play negatively.

Beyond on that. I can grab the mk2 hammer, mash the power up button, and kill every single elite unit except the crusher with a single heavy backstab or a headshot. Because it is a horde weapon it has a perfectly straight horizontal headshotting heavy swing.

Meanwhile 6 headshots later you’ve killed a maniac with the Mk5 combat ax. 3 headshots later you’ve killed one single armoured maniac. “Spec yer gear better nub”. So what? So it takes 5 headshots to kill a maniac?

Jesus I’m salty.

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Wee update, 1st 4 hammer zealot match. Could be random chance. I think it’ll be a common thing in about 2 weeks tops. People are noticing the insta-kills and massive health chunks off of bosses; they are mentally linking it with hammer zealots. They just haven’t been given the build yet. I’ve literally spent two days reading code and testing to replicate it – however – once a few hundred people are jamming logical combos into the machine it’ll be solved and posted pretty quick.

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It’s an anti-monster weapon, that’s what it’s good at, and if it doesn’t have such a powerful one-hit ability, then the price to pay means that this weapon won’t be chosen at all.
It moves slowly, has poor dodging ability, takes a long time to attack special attacks, and cannot effectively deal with multiple targets, it is not an axe, so please do not compare it to an axe.
It’s a boring weapon in battles other than facing monsters.

1 Like
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Props for doing the number crunching on all this. A bit absurd just how high the hammer can go.

It would be nice for the weapon not to be a one trick pony - I personally dislike the idea of one-shot boss killers (it’s a bit of a meme), but changing that (and leaving the rest of it untouched) may not be a good call. I don’t use hammers often enough to say what’s good/bad about them, so I won’t list things that I feel need changing if one-shotting bosses was removed - given the change to Shroudfield in the last patch, I think it’s fairly clear that insane one-shot capability isn’t a desired outcome in terms of balance.

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I don’t think that nerfing the boss damage of Thunder Hammers is a good idea. It’s strong in that one aspect but below average in all other areas like horde clearing, attack speed and DPS.

Plus the high boss damage requires quite a bit of ramp up; you will need to charge your heavy attack with thrust (which is 3 seconds?). And you want your special ability timed right as well. If the boss is chasing after one of your teammates this can easily go wrong. Or in the case of the Crucis MK2 if a trash mob jumps into your attack then all your efforts are also wasted.

There are ranged weapons which do remarkable damage on bosses as well without the need for perfect movement and timing.

Nerfing the Thunder Hammer boss damage would definitely require buffs in all other regards. But what’s the difference to other weapons then? You could bring the Antax MK5 Combat Axe instead which btw. has very high damage on light attacks, a very easy attack pattern and with brutal momentum you can clear hordes pretty reliably.

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