Thunderhammer Buff ideas

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

We all know the hammers are laughably bad compared to some other melee weapons. My suggestions to improve them would be -

TL;DR -

1. Gain strength based on bonus attack speed

2. Sweeping heavy attacks to the legs force human sized enemies to fall over, empowered attacks to the legs from behind cause ogryns and bosses to fall over. Fallen enemies are more vulnerable to overhead attacks

3. Buff damage against carapace to compensate for recent buffs

4. Empowered attacks break Captain shields quicker, similar to the twins shields

5. QoL : Crucis empowered light attack is a sweeping strike, Ironhelm does more damage against carapace.

First suggestion - Attack speed grants extra strength.

This should honestly apply to all blunt weapon types. Unlike edged weapons, a lot of the effectiveness of a blunt weapon comes from the momentum, makes sense to have quicker swings hurt, stagger and cleave more. A percentage of the attack speed buffs being granted as weapon strength, a higher percentage for slower heavier weapons
like the hammers.

As an example - Running Faithful frenzy and Maniac at full stack grants 40% attack speed. at 80% effectiveness it’ll grant the hammers (40x0.8) 32% strength. Not as good as thrust IV but applies to all attacks.

Currently attack speed doesn’t really help the hammers, as they are still very slow and their special attacks do not get any speed bonus either, this would be a good reason to want the extra attack speed.

2nd suggestion is - Leg sweeps.

Darktide has a surprisingly detailed hitbox system, that is really under utilised in my opinion. The legs and thighs are modeled as different hitboxes that have their own armour and damage reduction, however that is about it. I think it would be cool if attacking the limbs would grant some boons in exchange for the lower damage. Currently no weapons gain any benefit by not aiming for the head as far as I am aware. So would make for a unique interaction with the hammers.

How it will work is sweeping heavy attacks from the hammers to the legs would make all human sized enemies fall over, and enemies not on their feet will take significantly more damage from strikedown attacks.

As an example - A cultist rager with 2000 health. A hammer dealing 600 dmg per light attack to the head will need 4 swings. But a heavy attack to the leg drops the rager to the ground and now takes 3 times the damage from the light attack to the head for 1800 dmg and dies in 2 swings. A unique way to deal with a group of ragers, you slide and heavy attack to drop them all and try to hit them in the head before they get back up.

This could also work for larger than human enemies with the special attacks. For ogryns, an empowered attack to the legs from behind would topple them, and for bosses it will drop them to their knees so they will recover quicker, But you will do more damage to them while they are in this state, maybe 1.5x instead of 3 for larger enemies. Since we aren’t allowed to 1 shot bosses as easily, maybe atleast we can have flashy looking kills on them. Obviously wouldn’t work on the daemonhost or beast of nurgle but they are quite squishy as is.

Damaging limbs should honestly have more interactions with all weapons, other than just doing less damage. Maybe shooting the legs slows enemies down while hitting the arms reduces their attack speed or damage or stops certain attacks temporarily.

3rd Suggestion - Armour penetration.

The hammer boss damage was severely nerfed and in exchange we could 1 shot crushers easier. Except they got buffed and now you can’t unless you pick carapace damage and gain many stacks of bonus damage first. The hammer doesn’t kill bosses nor crushers anymore.

The hammers weren’t really making light work of crushers pre buff, they were not weapons that needed a tougher fight. You took significant risk trying to 1 shot a crusher in a group of them, locking yourself out of dodging at the wrong moment guaranteed instant death.

Solution is simple, buff damage against carapace.

4th Suggestion - Captain Shields take damage from empowered attacks

It currently takes both hammer marks 17 strikes to break the captain shields, regardless of attack type or weapon damage. It takes the dueling swords 15 heavy attacks. Which are significantly faster. The hammers are terribly slow and needing 17 hits to break the shield takes forever.

Simply letting the charged attacks deal more damage like they do with the karnak twins shields solves this issue. Hammers are the boss breaking weapon, makes sense for them to be able to crack the boss shields easier.

Chain weapons and shock mauls already do massive damage with their special attacks to shields. It wouldn’t be very taboo for the highest melee weapon to also break shields quicker

This problem applies to all slow weapons, not just the hammers, and in turn makes these weapons a lot less viable in Havoc and recent expedition missions.

5th Suggestion - QoL changes for the marks

The Ironhelm is currently just a worse hammer. Being worse of the 2 terrible weapons is quite rough. It does not gain much for it’s lack of damage currently.

It looks spiky so maybe the ironhelm could in exchange have higher armour penetration than the crucis against carapace, to compliment it’s agility.

The Crucis since the major changes has had an empowered overhead strike for both it’s light attack and it’s heavy attack. In the middle of a fight it gets a bit confusing when you can’t tell if you hit the crusher with a heavy strike or a light one, and don’t know which 1 to follow it up with.

would be quite nice if the light empowered attack was instead a sweeping strike. Would also make it easier to perform the 2nd suggestion on ogryns and bosses.

Final words - Obviously the numbers used for examples are placeholders to help showcase the concepts, playtesting would be required to check for break points and balancing. But most of these changes would be simple enough to implement, I think.

Almost every enemy already has animations for being knocked over. And I do think it would look cool executing a plague ogryn on it’s knees.

Doubt these changes would make the hammers the new meta weapons. Nor do I think all of these changes need to be implemented simultaneously, but they will surely feel a little more interesting and fun to use.

Thank you if you read through all of that :smiley:

3

The Thunderhammer is simple.

Buff the damage to the stratosphere.

It’s a clunky weapon with a special that leaves you vulnerable on the attack (with Thrust) and after (the self stun).

It should be able to one-shot a Crusher if they want it to last in the current paradigm.

If they showed any inclination to NERF like I keep saying is important, I’d be saying something different, but that’s unlikely.

4

It definitely isn’t? The fact that it’s overshadowed by Relic Blade, which is simply overtuned comparing to any other zealot’s weapon, isn’t a reason to call it “laughably bad”. You can play with thammer on any difficulty of the base game just fine. There are two issues with it:

  1. It’s one of those slow single-target weapons which are getting more handicaped due to game becoming more and more fast. You need to spend too much time to charge it and then prepare a strike with 2-3 stacks of Thrust to kill, say, a Crusher - when there are 5 of those and also tons of super-agressive mobs around hitting at you.

  2. A bunch of single target killing tools entering the scene lately, like buffed kraks, toxins, rocket launcher etc. So you quite often will charge your slow hitting thing to just hit air - because your big targets go down too fast for you to hit them even. But that’s problem of overtuned abilities on other classes, not thammer. Those need to be nerfed

5

It does? Either with the FotF, or martyrdom and Thrust on the weapon (if you fully charge the later) it one-shots the Crusher (when a hit goes to the head at least). The problem is how long it takes to hit one, it hasn’t been updated in ages, and some other classes can just brainlessly one tap them these days.

6

Clarification: I mean at base, no Thrust, nothing. You should be able to hit the special and delete a Crusher with one swing. Thrust should be the ‘I want this monstrosity vaporized’ option.

7

Then with Thrust you may start killing bosses with just one fully charged hit, even without the Shroud / Martyrdom gimmicks. That may be undesirable.

8

If Relic Blade is OP then I’m part of the Hong Kong never nerf review bomb squadron.

9

Tough luck, should’ve nerfed the players and the Dueling Sword before embarking on the path of power creep. If you want to make Thunderhammer worth using you either need to make the downside irrelevant (ie, make it do AOE damage/stagger so nothing can usually hit you) or buff the damage to the point putting everything into a single shot is rewarded accordingly (what I’m suggesting).

In a reasonable world with reasonable levels of player power and no carapace spam the thammer would already be a reasonable weapon, but it’s competing with the dueling sword and crusher clown cars.

10

It’s (afaicr) limitless cleave (when charged) weapon that removes hoards with no skills required, by just spamming light attacks. So yea, about as OP as Flame Staff. It’s just being so much signature weapon for zealot class at this point they won’t probably do anything about it.

And regarding our Chinese fellow players - whatever thoughts they share about balance in the game is done with head so fully stuck in Havoc 40 thoughts that it can be completely disregarded at this point. What happens in Havoc only concerns a tiny bit of players, game must not be balanced around them, it won’t make any sense for the rest of the game played by absolute majority of players.

11

And HS, which is why I noped out. It was already struggling but at least rewarding and had a boss killer role. HS enters the picture and melts packs of armor with toxin or whatever and I’m just jorkin my peanits thinking about the emperor. And that was before more HS buffs, haven’t played with one since that.

@OP, I like the speed to strength idea. Thrust being affected by attack speed seems like the easiest solution (and why the fluck isn’t it already (still hate you for the truth kuli)), but that speed to strength for all attacks idea would probably satisfy my hammer bloodlust.

12

I quite like its boss and elite damage, it feels weaker into hordes than some alternatives, and you lose some safety from its lower speed and dodge. I’ve been taking it on havoc recently and having fun! Maybe a built in +5% toughness on hit would help it? If it had more damage you could drop some damage nodes for defence perhaps? I personally don’t like the relic blade, it just feels awkward and wrong somehow. Thammer feels familiar like bardins 2h hammer.

PS swinging at air is the true zealot Thammer experience

13

I like that idea. Make it so a charged hit with 2-3 stacks of Thrust kills the Crusher - and trash mobs around it to boot. And staggers everything that isn’t killed.

And make the other modification of thammer to work more like relic blade in terms of hoard clearing. You charge it and get, say, 3 horizontal hits which destroy everything unarmored human-sized in certain area to the side of a target you’ve hit. And uncharged heavy hits must be strike downs on it, so that you can still deal with ogryns and bosses.

And still, I think it needs its animations , especially charging and hits after charging, sped up. It’s too slow for current DT.

14

Good. It’s probably the only power weapon doing what it’s supposed to.

15

AOE empowered overhead does sound really cool. Imagine that into a massed crusher & bulwark blob

16

I take everyone has forgotten the crushers exist, the AOE version of thunderhammers, all my buff ideas apply to the crushers as well, except those also really need the AOE to do a lot more damage.

17

I think rather than buff the Thunder Hammer (except by removing the self-stun entirely, making it far more ergonomic and economical) it’d be better to tone the constant hyper-aggressive everything-at-a-million-miles-per-hour enemy spam through carefully targeted nerfs.

(also the Relic Blade is both overtuned AND it feels weirdly like a pool noodle without martyrdom speed boosts, as if the blade is being slowed down by air resistance. More of an animation/hitstop/screenshake issue I think)

18

What? No. Bosses are unyielding crushers are carapace. You wouldn’t increase the base damage that’s stupid. You’d just up the carapace multiplier till it achieves head shot one shot at base.

19

Firstly Relic Blades are not overpowered, they should be the gold standard of what melees for zealot should do, the melee class having a melee weapon that somewhat comes close to being well rounded is the ideal state.

I will concede there are worse weapons than the hammers, the crushers for example. But my suggestions aren’t meant to all be put in at once, I’d say only a couple of them would make the hammers one of the best choices, which it should be, these are the face of WH40k, they are war hammers.

I do not like the idea of hammers getting cleave or be more like the relic blade or get AOE, that’s just turning them into different existing weapons. Part of the hammer’s charm is the big payoff for the risk, currently it just doesn’t do the damage to justify locking yourself from movement for half a second in front of angry people. It has always been a hard to use weapon and that’s what it should be, just that the rewards needs to match.

My first 2 suggestions I think would be enough to make it hurt again and be handy at crowd control, which is what the hammers are meant to do, not slice off heads but throw people around. And the hammer absolutely needs to break shields quicker than 17 bloody hits

20

Half of melee weapons zealot can use are worse than thammer. Why do you try to push the narrative of it’s being on the bottom in their arsenal so hard? Have you even actually played thammer builds long enough? It’s not true at all. All chain weapons are worse than thammer, taxe and caxe are worse, devilclaw and heavy sword are worse (they are on the bottom actually, not thammer). I would dare to say thammer is on about the same level as combat blade for an average player (not the top one which can cheese the last bit out of CB and work around all its flaws). Both are high single-target damage weapons, and though thammer has much worse mobility, it makes up for that with times better hoard clearing potential due to decent cleave, damage, reach and stagger of its horizontal (heavy) attacks.

21

My problem with the hammer it’s uncharged mode. This mode feel too weak. I need 3 or 4 heavy to kill one single elite/specialist with the very same build that i kill a crusher with two charged heavy. maybe a buff on raw damage or some new bless to uncharged mode should fix that weapon.