The speed of the knife and the Zealot toolkit promotes anti teamwork and encourages the worst style of gameplay in this game.
While I don’t play Zealot past lvl 30 (also pre tree rework) it’s becoming apparent from many hours in auric mael as Ogryn and Psyker, that Zealot needs a nerf so they aren’t able to trivialize the gameplay mechanics and ignore the teamplay aspects of the game. I login to play coop, not watch you treat the match like a true solo
Running around spam sliding, cheesing the mechanics of the game isn’t what I want to see in my games. It’s extremely toxic to the other 3 players who are actually staying together, watching each other’s backs, pinging enemies, yet end up being pelted by gunners while zealot dances around an elite with his knife.
The saddest part is that I see many people who think they are really good, because they can cheese this one aspect of the game, yet are pretty mid to dogshit at the other classes because they have pigeon holed themselves into that selfish and what should be a nonviable playstyle.
What winds up happening a lot with these builds is they feed their team to ranged enemies, force themselves into a clutch position and get caught by a horde or disabler or 2 gunners, then pat themselves on the back for being the last one alive.
/vent
FS please consider reworking speed of the knife, sustain of zealot or both. It’s getting really annoying leaving games because this class encourages main character syndrome.
there is no treamwork actually in the game… everybody rushes
So this is clearly not an argument… and a STRONG argument for keeping loner that is more useful than it has never been
After a long discussion about knives and the speed, I have changed my mind after reading arguments of others.
The speed of combat blade should be nerfed, just cause it is too much.
You may think that… but I am always behind cause everybody run far away ahead and don’t even try to loot (even medikit, now people waste them on floor).
The only time I can loot chests and still not be far behind is when I play a zealot.
I am not part of the problem as I think that rushing is not playing as a team.
We still see players waiting each others, but now there is always one that tries to rush (and usually 2 players trying to run after him).
And sometimes, worst, this is the one that die and rage quit.
I love my stealth knife zealot. I stick around the team. I don’t feel like it promotes me to rush ahead. More to get behind enemy lines when my team is pinned down by ranged fire and to take down gunners and tie up shooters and gunners in melee so they’re less effective so my team mates can come out of cover.
It also allows me to take more circuitous routes to vacuum up plasteel and diamantine and then catch back up with them.
I think other classes/builds can make the game easy. I love playing this build.
I had a whole essay typed out on this, but nobody’s going to read it so I deleted it. The TL;DR is that the game is designed to be playable by randoms with random builds, so the requirement for teamwork has been intentionally limited.
The issue with speedrunner zealots is their impact to the gameplay experience for everyone else. Their capacity for teamwork is the same as anyone elses’, they just have the ability to run away from their problems and make them someone elses’, while just about every other build/class has to face them at some point.
Speedrunning-type behaviour should be restricted in some meaningful way.
100 % this
bad game design.
Would be interested to refute that essay. I don’t think builds are the issue, it’s balance and game design that rewards “running away” or kiting on zealot
This is 90% true.
Teamwork can be expressed in Darktide both by being close together and by being far apart. When playing challenge games, like auric monstrous duos, being close to one another all the time is a detriment. The best way to play is fight together in parts and then to occasionally split up to split aggro and enemy density then return together again to help. A zealot in a 4 stack can and should be out ahead. Even if he’s “too far” ahead as long as he’s killing what he finds its no problem. The issue, as other’s have pointed out, is when he dumps all the aggro on the remaining three and just speedruns. But if the other 3 players are half way competent this is also not a problem. Hell, more fun for me really.
I always play in teamwork… when I can.
But when you are at 50 meters away and that your teammates have the idea to die, I won’t run to my death just cause they never wanted to wait a little.
Let’s be a bit more precise. We don’t have to wait each others, especially in auric / damnation. If we are here, we perfectly know how to survive by ourselves, or at least the player here should know it (except if it begins in this difficulty).
However, if I finished to explore and that we are at a no return point, I never jump until everybody is here. Sadly, I have seen players that don’t wait others… worse, I have even seen several times players that I helped and that have run away letting me in middle of 360 enemies…
Is it teamwork? for me it is not.
Again, after a lot of discussion about the combat blade movement speed, I agree that the move should be nerfed. But Fatshark has to pay attention to not nerf it to the ground like they do sometimes. But the reason is not about teamwork, it is purely cause it is a little too much…
The game moved heavily into an anti teamwork meta after the class overhaul. It is so much faster paced now, to the point of annoyance. Gunners are a complete joke now. Recently, when shooters were buffed, the game felt challenging and more engaging again. You actually had to slow down and gun down the shooters instead of mindlessly sprinting into them. They were a real threat. But a bunch of noob tourists complained about them, so the buff was reverted. It is so infuriating how afraid of touching the balance of the game Fatshark is. The players have been OP for months and almost nothing has been done about it. The enemies get buffed in a fun way though? Immediately nerfed in the next patch.
I have about 800 non-zealot hours in the game, and I have seen one (just ONE) “speed runner” miles ahead of the group, and tbh, I loaded in mid-game so don’t know the circumstances to that. My last 18 months have been a mix of levels 3 through to Auric Maelstrom - mixing levels and avatars almost every session… so I’m basing this on a wide spread of levels, teams, and games.
Is it that much of a problem? Not in my experience.
When I play zealot, I admit I do prefer a knife. Always have - since that first bleed crit build came popular in Jan’23 and I got the lacerate blessing. Speed & distance of dodging is why I think it’s so good. Short range sprints also handy to melee ranged.
Racing off in to the distance is the last thing I want to do. I couldn’t finish the level any faster, so I might as well take part in it?
I don’t use the heavy attack cheat-sprint action; I mean you could nerf that right now and people would be hard pressed to complain. That’s one half of the problem here I think, where you can out-run any enemy with that action.
And I’d be happy if they up the stamina sprint-cost ~ it’d bring it back in line sharpish if people can’t race for more than a few seconds?
But if you take away the speed over short distances/dodging, then we all have to go in to heavy block-dodge fighting styles and the game loses something.
No, I meant increase stamina sprint-cost just on the two knives. See picture.
Or also with tactical axe if that has the same thing (dunno, not tried it much).
The sad thing is that Ogryn is the only class that needs someone else around. I’m fine with most zealot knives because releasing gunner pressure and drawing a lot of aggro helps a lot. It’s just something you can’t “see”. Everybody staying at the same spot drawing intense aggro is not as good as having 1 person drawing half of the aggro away.
The only knife zealot that I don’t like is when they push way way too far and draw extra roaming enemies and enter boss spawning spot. Now, that is bad. Other than that it’s fine.
It won’t affect much, considering that Zealot retains 75% of their sprint speed while running at no stamina. This is also almost entirely circumvented by incorporating slides into your movement.
I don’t have any problems with the combat blade nor with the fact that it promotes speed-play for some players.
The weapon has enough positive and negative qualities (besides Uncanny Strike being an utterly silly blessing for finesse-based weapons) that making even small changes to it will be detrimental to potential of play styles that actually use the weapon to its potential: firstly as an aggression-enabling tool and secondly as a decent anti-single target damaging option.
Seriously?? you have so many ways to recover your toughness with Ogryn, that I don’t feel you “need” teammates.
Won’t solve anything
Zealot has a talent that permits to continue running even when you run out of stamina. And I believe that a lot of us when using dagger builds (at least me, I do) take this one…
Not in my experience.