Hi there,
I’ve played 22 hours in the preorder beta now, 17ish in the previous beta weekend, level 27 on Zealot now and somewhere around 17-18 in the previous on I think.
Main reason for posting this right now is the Thunderhammer, it felt incredibly buggy to use. I’ve had a lot of instances of activating its charged strike, the animation playing, and then it not being charged, I’ve had a similar issue with the eviscerator but far less frequently. If the charged strike does activate properly, I often strike enemies, get the explosion, the attack stops on the first target as it should, it feels like I get mildly staggered / attack animation just ends (that part seems to be a normal part of the attack), and then it turns out the enemy i struck took 0 damage, wasn’t even staggered or anything, the attack just didn’t actually go off. Frequently that gets combined with the Thunderhammer still being charged afterwards.
I don’t know if this is actually a bug or just poor control on my part after becoming more and more frustrated at attacks not working correctly, or maybe the Thunderhammer just has different controls, but it feels like often Heavy Attack simply end up being light attacks. I hold LMB, let go, and an overhead swing comes in instead of a sideways one, particularly frustrating when its a charged attack that deals significantly more damage on a heavy; I used my ability to rush to a Reaper, held LMB the entire way, let go and did a shitty light attack (Heavy would’ve instantly killed him) and he just started walking away as I got swarmed by commons. It feels like either heavy attacks are bugged, or the Thunderhammer has to have LMB held down significantly longer than other weapons to properly do a heavy attack; I haven’t had this issue with other weapons.
Other Zealot feedback:
Please, for the love of the Emperor, remove the knockback/stun on ranged hits. It is absolutely ridiculous with even just 2 enemies shooting at you, dealing nearly no damage, but completely preventing you from moving and cancelling everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if the things i described above are in large degree caused by micro-stuns from ranged hits just cancelling all sorts of animations/actions.
Related to the above, but worth being a second paragraph: Make the zealot immune to CC during their ability. Half the time the ability does nothing because a single ranged enemy attacked me, most often the one I’m trying to get close to by using the ability. Similarly the ability becomes unusable when there’s a small fire patch near me due to a grenade or barrel explosion, and its particularly annoying with the Beast of Nurgle as you end up with nearly nowhere to dash as the slime just stops you.
The zealots ability may also end up feeling a lot better if instead of a dash it just grants massively increased movement speed, so that we have more control over it and don’t lose the entire ability to hitting our toe on a prop.
The zealots grenade feels absolutely awful to use. Swapping to the grenade takes way too long, throwing it takes way too long, its fuse is way too long, and then the only thing it does is stun people. The incredibly long time it takes between pressing G and the grenade detonating, and particularly also the amount of time you don’t have your melee weapon out due to that, makes it practically useless to use on enemies you are already fighting; Even if you don’t get mauled to death trying to just throw the damn thing, by the time it goes off the things you wanted to stun are probably already dead. When used at long distance, I often find that most enemies I wanted to stun don’t get stunned because a prop/knee high wall is breaking line of sight between the grenade and enemies in the group i was trying to stun, which i often can’t predict because it’s impossible to see at 50m range, which is frustrating because that feels like the only good time to use the grenade and half the time it feels like it just doesn’t work. This grenade would feel so much better if it detonated on impact, and was faster to grab and throw. At the moment it very rarely feels good to use, most of the time I just feel like i wasted time and HP trying to use it.
That’s all I have for now. Overall the game feels very enjoyable, I hope there’s more to it to come out in the next weeks, there doesn’t seem to be any crafting and at the same time we haven’t found any materials in-mission as we did during the previous beta, so I assume a lot of content is disabled for now. I look forward to seeing what else there is.