Costs 1.5 stamina to push, no cleave, mediocre damage, mediocre stagger, barely faster than doing the Light1 after pushing.
Why does the Thunder Hammer, by all accounts an undertuned weapon, have the worst push-attack in the entire game ?
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You already said it yourself. Undertuned.
Should change the title to Why is the Thunder Hammer so bad?
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By all accounts my ass. T Hammer is great, the more I use it the more I like it. Most of the bad wrap it gets is from people who try it a few times and barely try to learn it. Very rarely see arguments on Zealot Discord that it’s less than great these days. Not your main point I know, just sick of hearing nonsense takes on Thunder Hammer almost exclusively from these forums.
Why is the push attack garbage? Simple. Fatshark imported the awful VT2 release version of the 2h Hammer push attack rather than the fixed version they patched later. Who knows how they thought people wouldn’t complain the move is useless exactly as they did in VT2 is a mystery to all. But yeah it’s garbage and they should fix it to have similar cleave as the heavies (again something they did in VT2 but apparently forgot they did).
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I’m pretty positive this was a buff that came later for the greathammer and they were still scabby about putting linesman on it like the heavy. So I would assume its because in whatever VT2 build they started working on this game on it was not buffed yet, since it has that same single target profile as usual.
Most other weapons put out more dps than the hammer. Tactical and combat axes, even the knife, will take half the time, or less, to take out most mobs, save for possibly one-shotting an ogryn (if nothing gets in your way, which it most likely will). The only time it shines is in dense hordes, and even then it’s just better to break out a gun.
While it is fun to use, even with +50% Power the Heavies (and Lights) only kill 1 Poxwalker and very slightly damage 2 others. It ain’t good against hordes. It just sends everything flying, and the heavies don’t slide off Carapace Armor. The lights have terrible breakpoints on a lot of enemies on Heresy unless you have the dedicated perks, which makes them a pain to use unless you’re full stacks of Slaughterer.
And while the charge is very good against bosses, some specials and Bulwarks to make them drop shield, for Crushers it’s usually faster and safer to just pop Chastise and shoot them with 10 bullets from a headhunter gun or something.
Shock&Awe coupled with Momentum or a good Headtaker probably makes the Thunder Hammer decent ; but I haven’t been lucky enough to see Shock&Awe even once in any shops.
Edit : I just got to try out Shock&Awe, and actually it’s trash. I don’t believe the stacks even last long enough to carry over from one heavy swing to the next (stack duration is 0.5 seconds only).
Thrust, Momentum, or Headtaker + Slaughterer is probably the way to go with the TH.
If you stack enough +Power, the terrible cleave damage of the heavies on the 2nd and 3rd targets could even become somewhat impressive. Still a bad weapon against hordes, clearly.
It’s in okay shape as-is, but definitely needs a little love:
- Push-attack should hit at least 5 cleave targets (currently it stops at 1, which is really bad). Damage doesn’t have to be amazing, the main point of this attack is to get everything staggered so that you can start spamming heavies against the horde.
- Light attacks should probably do enough so that with a +20% vs. Flak perk you can one-shot-headshot flak horde enemies. The attacks are slow enough that this still wouldn’t make it great against those targets (which is fine, it does a lot of other things very well currently and I think most of my reason for wanting this comes from how flexible Greathammers were in V2…but in DT the average weapon is distinctly less flexible than V2. That seems partly intentional (but also partly that weapons are in rough launch shape and so it’s hard to tell where designers really want them to be).)
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