The Chastise armor penetration nerf gutted viable ranged options. I suggest making Chastise give full, melee armor penetration as the same duration as the attack speed lasts.
This would open up melee options for the Zealot to match the combat blades, cough hack Heavy Sword forgotten forever.
Alternatively give the Zealot rending in the tree somewhere. Why does the Veteran have godly rending while the Zealot has nothing?
How come I never abused that bug on zealot and still felt more than viable vs armour?
It might be unpopular opinion, but rending isn’t a good mechanic, as many other mechanics which allow you to ignore the core gameplay “physics” like cleave, armour etc.
@Reginald you might revise that like on this, I just threw a grenade above. Sorry not sorry 
Two of my “builds” rock devils claw and Mk VI heavy sword. DC has a shotgun as the ranged weapon…on the heavy sword I have been rotating both revolvers. Sure dealing with a pack of crushers takes longer, but that’s the whole point of mixed horde situations, those SHOULD be more challenging and test your movement, dodging etc. Chastise before the nerf basically gave you “Press X to win” button…
I also almost never abused this and always felt fully competent. Zealot has lots of armor handling capabilities. This game needs less rending not more, so nerf rending across the board and for veteran too.
Onslaught really needs to go. Plus rending/brittleness should not affect dots at all.
Why?
Potentially too much carapace damage is only a problem on a few weapons.
Crushers are a boring enemy type that already limits players in their options, because of no proper weakspot.
Having rending on some weapons to at least make them viable by stacking the buff with multiple headshots, is the least we should get.
That would be terrible.
One day, if all synergies are removed and nothing has any interaction with anything, the game can finally be boring and builds can finally be monkey proof…
No fun allowed.
I’m not against building talent specifically to increase rending for specific dots (eg: purgatus blessing that gives rending to soulblaze), but bleed/soulblaze/burn gaining bonus from brittleness and uncanny, or general rending above something like 10% for example is just too much.
It makes these damage types/abilities harder to balance.
Uncanny on DS making soulblaze go through armor is way too much boost for it, or take bleed nades stacking onslaught (which is thankfully no longer the case), I do suspect is in large part responsible for shredder getting nerfed to hell in patch 13 (since with onslaught granadier builds were still super powerful even in the sorry state Vet was back then).
Soulblaze and burn should get back their inherit 10-15% carapace armor damage and should not benefit from rending unless it’s super specific.
I find it much more interesting, if your dots are affected by blessings.
You want to make your dots stronger? You can do that by swapping to melee and stacking your rending up.
It makes it more difficult to keep the dot on the enemies and it requires a specific loadout and constant weapon swapping and juggling of 2 effects.
Completely fine in my book.
Even with 100% rending, 15 stacks of soulblaze still take quite some time to kill a crusher.
I don’t think the melee part of zealot has any issues, especially certain weapon types which excel at almost everything (Caxes, eviscerator and combat knifes) sure the heavy sword, thunder hammer and chain swords might lack some oomph and could use a buff but it’s not the end of the world.
But I do agree with the fact that zealot ranged is kind of lacking, I already barely interacted with it pre-nerf besides using it to mag dump crushers but now I just stick to melee regardless of what the game throws at me.
I think it is and was always stupid, even with damage boost. Remember when pre-patch 13 the best damage boost to soulblaze was brandishing illisi aggressively after the shriek, or running chain axe on Vet to skyrocket bleed nade damage (and in turn max stack blessings through the bleed and explosions instantly).
Dots need built in support from tree or from weapon blessings that are specifically for them.
Synergies between the weapons that you bring, are more interesting though.
I agree with you regarding the power blessings affecting dots.
But rending affecting dots is a good thing, and requires you to actually keep headshotting.
Heavy Sword is an amazing weapon? Especially with the change to how FotF works on your 1 melee attack it’s still a very powerful option. It still has alright damage just spamming the special attack on Crushers. Just because it can’t roll through them doesn’t mean it’s a bad weapon.
Just pick up AiB, IJ and DoD and you have some stupidly good ranged damage output. It’s basically Vet with Exa stance active, but (almost) all the time. Brauto for example is just melting everything with damage setup (due to the close range increase that also affected AiB).
Ranged play on Zealot is basically too good.
Heavy sword struggling with carapace is the only thing that keeps it balanced. It’s like having all the speed of a knife while being better at horde clearing and one tapping most elites/specials. Give it more rending and I will have literally no reason to use anything else.
well said
Zealot still has pretty powerful ranged options. Fury loosing ranged rend really just restricted Zealot’s choice of ranged weapons if they didn’t bring a melee weapon that can deal with Crushers. All the other classes have a Blitz that they can choose to take to deal with Crushers so they aren’t as restricted in weapon choice.
Make Crusher armpits flak or unyielding. Now the player can take a risk to deal good damage without anti-carapace weapons.
Basically every melee weapon on zealot other than heavy sword is perfectly capable against carapace. All the chastise nerf did was force zealots into melee to deal with armor, which I think is fine for a melee-centric class. Build diversity took a minor hit in exchange for significantly improving class design.
The problem isn’t that zealot has no global rending, it’s that other classes do.
#MakeArmorGreatAgain
Rending as a mechanic as it has been implemented is all upside. You can take any pea shooter and zip right through the most heavily armored enemies for incredibly quick TTKs when leveraged properly. It is part of the reason that dregs are tougher than scabs. Plus rending over 100% is just free damage too. It literally invalidates carapace and flak as an armor type in the balance.
Yes there needs to be ways of handling carapace, i get that, but the reason we have 9 man crusher clowncars instead of the 3-4 pods we used to have is because they all melt instantly.
Special spam is unironically perfectly adequate. Combine that with chastise or stealth and you’re fine.
Recon lasgun melting Crushers (and everything else) when you run Onslaught is so damn stupid. Armor types make close to 0 difference, it feels so boring.
I tend to agree. Too much rending just creates problems and its going to keep creating problems whenever something is buffed or added.
I know there’s some level of “build diversity” you gain by being able to run any combo any time. But you lose a greater ammount in meaningful distinction between weapons by allowing rending on every weapon to this degree. Needing to consider which weapons compliment one another to cover all weaknesses is also more interesting than grey mush anything is fine.