Zealot Rework

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Mod Discussion
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Hello everyone,
I’ll start by saying I’m not here to complain about zealot. Only to brainstorm about how he might be tuned a bit to fit more in line with the other careers. I’m a Salty player myself, so I’m invested in making the career as compelling as possible, while not making him utterly broken or useless.

As far as I’m concerned, the premise for this character is a high risk - high reward melee monster. A frothing berserker with greater Mobdro utility the closer to death he gets. BUT his temp health generation, his damage reduction, and resist death talents/perks make that risk comparably small. And so I would like to see a rework to his talents/ult/overall design.

To my mind there are really four ways of adjusting zealot, two rather minor, one middling, and one major.

The two minor adjustments tweak his survival. Firstly, Flagellant could be removed from his rank 10 talent slot. This talent gives zealot quite a Lucky Patcher bit of damage reduction for a hero that’s already high health. Suppress pain could accordingly be toned down as well.

The second minor change could adjust his temp health gain. Removing temp health on kill is one option, removing temp health on ult hits is another, and lastly both could be removed. Having zealot struggle to generate temp health would certainly make low health play far more risky.

The middling change is something I’ve seen someone else suggest and so I’ll parrot it here. During Holy Fervor, zealot takes increased damage. This would mean frothing becomes dangerous. It is a boon to attack faster and generate temp health, but it’s risky as a big hit can ruin you. This is a pretty interesting change and I quite like it.

However, the change I would be most interested in seeing is the removal of his ranged weapons. One of the things that makes zealot so good is that he’s able to do everything. He can brawl nearly as well as slayer, better on full stacks, he has good horde clear, excellent armor clear, decent sniping with crossbow/BOP, and then excellent boss clear with BOP. Which to me seems to betray the premise of a frother. I would really love to see him lose his ranged weapon and play similar to slayer. Perhaps this paired with some of the above changes as well.

This to me would be the most compelling change to his character and I would absolutely main him with falchion and axe, instead of running axe and falchion/BOP all the time.

Well, at any rate I’m here to discuss possible adjustments to be made to his character, not simply complain “zealot OP pls nerf”. I’m sure this has been posted a dozen times and if so I apologize.

7 Likes
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Good points. I agree that something needs to be done about the Zealot, but it’s nice to see when there’s a reasonable discussion about it.

I’m personally against removing Flagellant. As a Zealot, yes, you want to take damage, but you’re also supposed to fulfill the fantasy of staying just on the edge of life, and that’s difficult come Legend difficulty when even the most basic enemies deal 1/6th of your healthbar in one hit.

Instead, I’d advocate for him to be moved from 150 health down to 125 health. 150 health is mostly meant for tanks such as Foot Knight and Ironbreaker anyway. It’s strange to me that Fatshark would give a predominately damage-oriented class like Zealot the same amount of health as them.

Now he has to stay on >25 health if he wants to get the maximum damage increase from Fiery Faith, instead of being able to stay on >50 health to get the max bonus currently.

Another, perhaps a bit more controversial opinion from my side, is to reduce him even further down to 100 health. Reducing his total health to 100 would, by extension, also be a nerf to his temp health generation, as he’d reach the cap on it much quicker.

Fiery Faith would have to be buffed to grant 5% damage increased per 20 health missing instead, of course, which would mean he’d get the damage increase buffs faster, but he has less health overall and has to stay on >20 health to get the full bonus.

Ehhh. Much like Flagellant, I’m also a bit against removing these. They’d have to be replaced by something else, and I’m having difficulties coming up with something to replace them.

I’ve mentioned this in another thread before, but I’d rather nerf temporary health, as a whole, than nerf individual temporary health talents.

Not a bad suggestion. It could both be beneficial to you if you’re trying to get Fiery Faith stacks quickly, or detrimental if you’re already teetering at low health, and would really emphasize the “risk versus reward” playstyle that Zealot is supposed to embody.

This I can agree on. When you’re a maddened, insane lunatic that’s screaming about the end of the world, it’s strange that you’d have time to carefully aim a ranged weapon from a distance to pick off enemies from afar. You really should be all about getting in there, just like the Slayer.

It would also mean that weapons such as the Flail or the Two-Handed Sword, which see little to no play despite being staples of the Zealot class or Flagellants in the lore as a whole, would see more play (assuming that you mean Zealot is going to be able to equip a secondary melee weapon instead of the removed ranged weapon just like the Slayer), which I see as a good thing.

Some miscellaneous suggestions (some of these have already been suggested by others) include:

  1. The aforementioned reduction in total health that I mentioned earlier.

  2. The aforementioned nerf to temporary health that I also mentioned earlier, but didn’t go into details about.

  3. Changing Heart of Iron so that, instead of being immune to damage for the 3-4 or so seconds it lasts, you become immune to damage for 10 seconds, but is downed after those seconds have passed (with the exception if you are healed during this period).

  4. Instead of outright removing Flagellant, make it so the damage reduction only applies to green health, and has no effect on temporary health.

  5. Nerfing Axe & Falchion. I don’t know the specific things that would need to be nerfed, but considering it’s the go-to weapon on almost every Saltzpyre career, I consider a nerf to it to be warranted.

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Nerfing dlc weapons should be done, but i’m more worried about the effect it has on the arguably weakest classes. In this case BH, which I almost never see in game. Nerfing weapons which are used by all classes affects others too.

Talents and passives could be changed without this issue. I have always thought “flagellant” is too strong of a talent anyways (Slayer has this too).

And lastly Nerfs take away something and Buffs give you something. Can we try buffing?
(Give me back my ranged meta? pls.)

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I like the idea of making him melee only like slayer.

Another solution is to make his damage stacks only work with melee. Why would bullets do more damage because he’s angry.

The A&F should be dropped down to the same damage profile as the Elf Sword and Dagger. The S&D is already one of the best weapons in the game, the A&F gets all of its buffs currently and then nearly triple the damage. It’s beyond broken.

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FatShark can also do these changes to balance Zealot:

  • I agree with @LordRhinark’s comment regarding his HP. Reducing it from 150 down to 125 would be reasonable.

  • Reducing his HP would also reduce the damage buff stack from 6 to 5, since he gets 5% power increase for every 25 HP missing.

  • Remove the innate damage buff stack for all of his ranged weapons only. However, put this effect in conjunction with his Ultimate instead so it cannot be abused all the time and it can be used moderately in the game. In line with this, FatShark can opt to increase the duration of his Career ability anywhere between 6s to 10s, but they should also increase the cooldown from 60s to 100s at the same time, since the ranged damage buff is, imho, one of the two reasons that makes the Zealot OP (other one is Flagellant).

  • As for Flagellant, they could put an internal cooldown (3s - 5s or more) so once the Zealot gets hit, any further succeeding hits will hurt him badly, since these hits will not be reduced by Flagellant. This will encourage the player to think his next move carefully rather than mindlessly charging through hordes / specials / bosses.

  • With all that, I don’t think nerfing his THP would be necessary. I believe the change in THP regeneration in the game is fair enough (at least for me).

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According to what I can recall from the in-game description, the maximum damage bonus is capped at 20%, meaning that reducing his health below 150 hp won’t reduce the maximum amount of stacks.

A 150 health Zealot would thus reach the maximum bonus at >50 health, a 125 health Zealot would at >25 health, and a 100 health Zealot, assuming Fiery Faith is adjusted to grant 5% per 20 missing health, would grant the maximum bonus at >20 health.

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He´s mashing his pistol triggers a̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ with maximum zeal :rofl:

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I don’t see any description in-game that states any cap on its passive damage buff though. That, or I’m just blind as a bat. The 150 health is the only limiting factor of the stacks itself (and the source of a visual bug I seem to notice at times whenever I go down; damage buff indicator stacks at 99 (!!!) whenever I go down).

I also got confused by your post. “A 150 health Zealot would thus reach maximum bonus at >50 health…”. Did you mean <25 health instead? Because from what I can understand…

Let’s assume there’s no 20% Health necklace equipped.

150HP (full HP) to 126HP = no stacks; no bonus damage
125HP to 101HP = 1x stack
100HP to 76HP = 2x stacks
75HP to 51HP= 3x stacks
50HP to 26HP= 4x stacks
25HP and less = 5x stacks

I tested these values in-game just now, and the HP threshold is accurate according to my tests.

If we’re to put in 20% Health from necklace, our HP will go up from 150HP to 180HP.

Now, applying the same idea above:

180HP to 156HP = no stacks; no damage buff
155HP to 131HP = 1 stack
130HP to 106HP = 2 stacks
105HP to 81HP = 3 stacks
80HP to 56HP = 4 stacks
55HP to 31HP = 5 stacks
30HP or less = 6 stacks

I also tested these values now, and the HP threshold is accurate at 180HP. That is why it’s a good idea to put in 20% Health on Zealot in order to get that 6th stack of damage buff, because it’s impossible to get that without that 20% Health from necklace.

Since you mentioned that the damage bonus is capped at 20%, are you telling me that the damage buff indicator is wrong / misleading in the game when you reach the 5th stack at 150HP, and 6th stack at 180HP? The icon at the lower left side says it has 5x stacks (if 150HP) and 6x stacks (if 180HP) respectively.

Additionally, can you please send me a screenshot that says that the passive damage buff is capped at 20% for the Zealot? Thank you in advance. :slight_smile:

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My mistake. I remembered wrong. It wasn’t from the in-game description I saw it, it was on the wikia, which states that Fiery Faith has a max cap of 20%.

It would seem, however, that that information is wrong, considering you’ve just tested it in-game.

In the case of the latter, well, then reducing his health to 125 sounds like an even better solution than I was making it out to be myself, as not only would it leave him a bit more squishy, he would also gain a lower amount of overall stacks, and thus a lower overall amount of damage increase, in addition to it being an indirect nerf to his temporary health.

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NO SURRENDER!
Increases Power by 3% for every nearby enemy and stacks up to 5 times.

Mercenary and Zealot both have access to this talent, and as stacking buffs go - this is one I much prefer as it rewards positioning instead of a constant boon. If it was up to me, I’d remake Fiery Faith into a beefier version of NO SURRENDER!

We’ll see what they decide, for the better one can hope. Though I would mention that currently the movement speed while attacking with the axe and falchion is a really powerful aspect of the weapon.

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Problem with that s&d have crit chance bonus on every attack A&F with crit chance bonus and less damage would be even more broken because WHC will be just deleting everything on crits

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This is already happening due to the A&F dealing way more damage anyway. And the S&D has a 10% crit bonus on all light attacks. Where as the A&F has a 20% crit bonus on push attack, his AoE mob clear. So it’s trade off. They both have the 25% speed and distance bonus on dodge with 6 dodges though.

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the problem lies in the Axe and Falchion.

I’ve run zealot with flail and the greatsword and he’s no where near as lawnmower-ry. He just has massive tankiness which in itself will get depleted faster than a greatsword or flail can generate temp HP in sticky situations due to their overall lower damage.

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+90% healing and barkskin and ypu are almost unkillable. With GS maybe even the THP on cleave can putperform the THP on kill talent. I ahvey doubts, though.