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Berserker Nerf

I understand what you're trying to say about berserker being nerfed, but its not like the nerfs completely wiped out any viability for berserker to play on higher difficulties. In actuality the nerfs kept those reckless zerk play styles in check, and encourage actual cooperation and coordination with your team. Rather than running off solo and being a liability to your team. Given that zerk received the hemoclobber it made those reckless play styles more worse. As a zerk main myself, sure the nerfs were tough, but as long as you work as a team, time your attacks/blocks, and understand how each enemy should be engaged; then the nerfs would not be bad as it seems.
It took away the fun of being that class, and makes you a glorified body guard if played cooperatively. In fact it’s more or less useless while so many other classes are much better suited. You can’t blame a class on an individuals play style. Anyone can run off doing their own thing and screwing a team. Someone can choose medic and work just to keep themselves alive and be a battle medic instead of a team medic. It’s not the class you’re talking about, it’s the players, as far as keeping them in check? It just makes them useless, which imo is worse.
 
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It took away the fun of being that class, and makes you a glorified body guard if played cooperatively. In fact it’s more or less useless while so many other classes are much better suited. You can’t blame a class on an individuals play style. Anyone can run off doing their own thing and screwing a team. Someone can choose medic and work just to keep themselves alive and be a battle medic instead of a team medic. It’s not the class you’re talking about, it’s the players, as far as keeping them in check? It just makes them useless, which imo is worse.
Intentional design decision. Nerfs are meant to pressure people who play Berserker into purchasing the Piranha Pistol DLC
 
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And the end result is that you'll take a lot of damage even if you time your parries correctly, which will make some players want a weapon that can thin out hordes in preparation for a melee engagement.
I mean yeah it’s a good weapon, but I don’t think they needed an entire class just so people would buy one weapon that honestly isn’t as good as some other ranges options for the class that are free. There was just a lot of people crying that it’s to OP or that people ruin the game with it. Toxic player base.
 
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I don’t think they needed an entire class just so people would buy one weapon that honestly isn’t as good as some other ranges options for the class that are free.
This is just a thing flashn00b does. That's something they've been squawking about since the Piranha Pistols were introduced. Their line of reasoning, when you sift through the approximately eight-thousand whineposts about it, roughly follows something like this:
  1. A single Piranha pistol is slightly cheaper than the VLAD, so a Berserker player who doesn't get as many kills in Wave 1 could still be able to afford it wave 2 in lieu of the VLAD
    1. A first subnote here is that flashn00b insists getting $750 in Wave 1 is impossible, never mind the fact that I and other players have ended Wave 1 in 6p HoE games with over $900, so there's that
    2. A second subnote is that you can always ask for dosh
  2. Because of this, a player who is not good enough at killing things to afford VLAD wave 2 but makes just enough to afford the single PP on Wave 2 will have a much easier time (in Wave 2, which is already very easy) because you are not limited to the Crovel
  3. Therefore, because it is a thing you can buy with real world money, it is P2W, and the Berserker is thus dependent on P2W DLC mechanics to simply be playable
What they are missing in this context (and refuse to understand despite having this pointed out, multiple times, in fact) is the following points:
  1. Buying the single PP sets you back on money for a loaded VLAD for Wave 3, which is almost mandatory Wave 3 and up because dealing with Scrakes and QPs with just a Crovel can prove unnecessarily difficult and using a single PP for the task is extremely time consuming compared to the alternatives
  2. Even in 6P HoE, Wave 2 is not hard enough to warrant spending money on a PP. Most perks are powerful enough when played with appropriate skill that splurging for Tier 2 weapons at the end of Wave 1 is unnecessary because of econ reasons, and that absolutely goes for Berserker as well. The Piranha Pistols fall off quickly enough in higher waves that I would consider it the equivalent of buying the Bullpup or Tommy Gun as Commando on Wave 2 instead of saving for the AK.
  3. Their primary argument when the above points are raised is that "Berserker takes too much damage," which outside of parrying individual hits for attack boosts implies the player is not good enough to reliably kill enemies before taking hits, which is a skillset most perks not named Firebug have to deal with to win HoE. Therefore, the answer is to "get hit less."
They don't even vocally complain about any other DLC or even really the HRG weapons (which 9 times out of 10 are waaaaaay more broken); their entire hyperfocus is literally the Piranha Pistols and how the Berserker is basically unplayable without them. Even Berserker itself has far bigger offenders of P2W potential, such as the Frost Fang, but that doesn't matter to them.
A point of order is that flashn00b also considers HoE to be an unbalanced joke difficulty despite proof that many players can and have beat it without that much of an issue, and has repeatedly advocated for on-perk hitscan weapons for Berserker so Berserker can be played like other gun classes but with a built-in life leech for killing things. Let that stand for itself.
 
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  1. Even in 6P HoE, Wave 2 is not hard enough to warrant spending money on a PP. Most perks are powerful enough when played with appropriate skill that splurging for Tier 2 weapons at the end of Wave 1 is unnecessary because of econ reasons, and that absolutely goes for Berserker as well. The Piranha Pistols fall off quickly enough in higher waves that I would consider it the equivalent of buying the Bullpup or Tommy Gun as Commando on Wave 2 instead of saving for the AK.
And yet, I remember the good ol' days when people usually skipped the AK12 and jumped straight for the SCAR. Of course, you couldn't really count on the Varmint alone to survive that long, so the Bullpup saw some love. Glad to see that the good ol' AK is now favored by way more people, always knew it was bloody sweet !

I obviously fully agree with you (some things however, DON'T change), although I must say that I like "non-gunslinger pistols" usually because they're lightweight and affordable... It ain't the best, but that's comfort. You'll have to pray my single Spitfire from my burning hot hands ! As such, I do run a single piranha pistol once I get my weapon of choice, from time to time. But ever since you mentioned how efficient it was to have good ammo management with the VLAD, I sometimes sacrifice a little more speed for it too.

As for hitscan weapons... Is the Teslauncher not bull**** enough already? ☠️


Last words : what's your loadout of choice regarding the Zerk? I must admit it's my least played perk, not because it's weak but just because I don't find it very fun. I tend to run a Pulverizer (with upgrades), either a single Piranha or the Vlad (upgrades only when I can afford them) and a good use of EMP grenades. But I guess other stuff might be more worthwhile than being a FP buster.
 
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Glad to see that the good ol' AK is now favored by way more people, always knew it was bloody sweet !
2nd best designed weapon in the game; the first is M14, and that IS a hill I'm prepared to die on.

I sort of kid about the Bullpup because I'm biased from the days when it was basically a Varmint with a dot sight; it's received enough buffs now that it's a competent early game weapon, especially now that it can actually 1-tap Stalkers when it couldn't for a long time.

Last words : what's your loadout of choice regarding the Zerk?
On the offhand chance I play it (I usually don't because I find it pretty meh in this game; if I want an actual melee horde game I'll just play Vermintide 2 because frankly it's actually designed as a melee game first and foremost), I econ with Crovel for a few rounds and end up at one of four endgame loadouts:
  1. Static Strikers / VLAD if the team is decent and I can count on them to shoot Zeds while still providing support via EMP
  2. Zwei / VLAD if it's a small-size team and I'm going to be doing most of the killing
  3. Bone Crusher / VLAD if it's a boss wave because that means I'm on boss duty
  4. Frost Fang / VLAD if the team is really bad and I decide I feel like carrying for once in my life; I don't like how cheesy the Frost Fang is but I cannot deny it's exquisitely effective.
 
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And yet, I remember the good ol' days when people usually skipped the AK12 and jumped straight for the SCAR. Of course, you couldn't really count on the Varmint alone to survive that long, so the Bullpup saw some love. Glad to see that the good ol' AK is now favored by way more people, always knew it was bloody sweet !

I obviously fully agree with you (some things however, DON'T change), although I must say that I like "non-gunslinger pistols" usually because they're lightweight and affordable... It ain't the best, but that's comfort. You'll have to pray my single Spitfire from my burning hot hands ! As such, I do run a single piranha pistol once I get my weapon of choice, from time to time. But ever since you mentioned how efficient it was to have good ammo management with the VLAD, I sometimes sacrifice a little more speed for it too.

As for hitscan weapons... Is the Teslauncher not bull**** enough already? ☠️


Last words : what's your loadout of choice regarding the Zerk? I must admit it's my least played perk, not because it's weak but just because I don't find it very fun. I tend to run a Pulverizer (with upgrades), either a single Piranha or the Vlad (upgrades only when I can afford them) and a good use of EMP grenades. But I guess other stuff might be more worthwhile than being a FP buster.
You most likely don’t find it fun because of how weak it is compared to other classes now. The Tesla Launcher is a good weapon but is outclassed by many weapons of other classes. And it defeats the purpose of the berserker class in general. People will argue “The Hemclobber.” Which is good but why do you need to have a weapon to survive. Berserker is still playable as is every class, but it is weak.
This is just a thing flashn00b does. That's something they've been squawking about since the Piranha Pistols were introduced. Their line of reasoning, when you sift through the approximately eight-thousand whineposts about it, roughly follows something like this:
  1. A single Piranha pistol is slightly cheaper than the VLAD, so a Berserker player who doesn't get as many kills in Wave 1 could still be able to afford it wave 2 in lieu of the VLAD
    1. A first subnote here is that flashn00b insists getting $750 in Wave 1 is impossible, never mind the fact that I and other players have ended Wave 1 in 6p HoE games with over $900, so there's that
    2. A second subnote is that you can always ask for dosh
  2. Because of this, a player who is not good enough at killing things to afford VLAD wave 2 but makes just enough to afford the single PP on Wave 2 will have a much easier time (in Wave 2, which is already very easy) because you are not limited to the Crovel
  3. Therefore, because it is a thing you can buy with real world money, it is P2W, and the Berserker is thus dependent on P2W DLC mechanics to simply be playable
What they are missing in this context (and refuse to understand despite having this pointed out, multiple times, in fact) is the following points:
  1. Buying the single PP sets you back on money for a loaded VLAD for Wave 3, which is almost mandatory Wave 3 and up because dealing with Scrakes and QPs with just a Crovel can prove unnecessarily difficult and using a single PP for the task is extremely time consuming compared to the alternatives
  2. Even in 6P HoE, Wave 2 is not hard enough to warrant spending money on a PP. Most perks are powerful enough when played with appropriate skill that splurging for Tier 2 weapons at the end of Wave 1 is unnecessary because of econ reasons, and that absolutely goes for Berserker as well. The Piranha Pistols fall off quickly enough in higher waves that I would consider it the equivalent of buying the Bullpup or Tommy Gun as Commando on Wave 2 instead of saving for the AK.
  3. Their primary argument when the above points are raised is that "Berserker takes too much damage," which outside of parrying individual hits for attack boosts implies the player is not good enough to reliably kill enemies before taking hits, which is a skillset most perks not named Firebug have to deal with to win HoE. Therefore, the answer is to "get hit less."
They don't even vocally complain about any other DLC or even really the HRG weapons (which 9 times out of 10 are waaaaaay more broken); their entire hyperfocus is literally the Piranha Pistols and how the Berserker is basically unplayable without them. Even Berserker itself has far bigger offenders of P2W potential, such as the Frost Fang, but that doesn't matter to them.
A point of order is that flashn00b also considers HoE to be an unbalanced joke difficulty despite proof that many players can and have beat it without that much of an issue, and has repeatedly advocated for on-perk hitscan weapons for Berserker so Berserker can be played like other gun classes but with a built-in life leech for killing things. Let that stand for itself.
I still believe the Berzerker class was needed to the ground. It is playable, but it’s not that much fun to play it. Skirmisher isn’t even useful anymore, and if any class should have a movement speed boost, Berserker would be the obvious choice. I can understand the need to Skirmisher to 1hp per second, but what does that matter when you literally get swarmed and die instantly lol. Most of the match is spent running away, or holding block if you have a good medic. Berserker shouldn’t even have to rely on a ranger weapon, it’s a berserker class. It shouldn’t have to rely on the Hemoclobber, but it does, as well as needing literally needing a ranged weapon now. No I don’t think it was nerfed to get people to buy the DLC weapons, but I still maintain it should be buffed. Yes you can survive, anyone can survive with any class, but it isn’t fun anymore. It’s probably the least played class, it’s said when a class like survivalist is basically just as good with 1 perk, not to mention healing grenades and global damage resistance. They have the same movement boost (actually 5 percent better when not sprinting), the same attack speed bonus, they do 95% bonus damage with melee attacks in general, which this is all assuming Zerk equips Skirmisher and Butcher which who does that now? Then there’s Smash and Massacre, which the Zerk doesn’t get to pick both, so let’s go with the obvious perk picks which are now Dreadnaught and Vampire, meaning the Zerk gets 75 percent more damage with Heavy attacks and 55 percent more with light attacks. Sure there’s some stumble power, but that doesn’t really matter when your surrounded now. There’s parry of course, but in moments when you actually need it, you can barely even sustain the bonus long enough to do anything significant without being dropped. And with no skirmisher, there is no running away anymore. The class has been boxed into a corner, it’s just not fun anymore. Survivalist with one perk literally can be just as good which is sad, again nvm healing grenades and also Zed Splosion, paired with the fact they can choose any weapon in the game to pair with their chosen melee weapon. It’s ridiculous dude. They nerfed it too hard. I could see a slight nerf to some of the perks, but not the damage resistance, like what is 10 percent resistance gonna do when you’re literally taking 10 times the amount of damage as everyone else would. It makes no sense, even survivalist gets 25 percent global damage resistance. It’s weak, we all know it, barely anyone wants to play it, and without a medic your just a straight liability. Of course it’s playable, but it’s not nearly as fun if at all like it used to be, which at the end of the day, is the entire point to even playing a game.
 
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Really, the main problem with the old Berserker class was that Skirmisher was too good. I'll grant that Dreadnought is completely ridiculous with Medics in play but that does at least require two players to make it completely unkillable (instead of Dreadnaught/Vampire which is "just" pretty hard to kill).

It shouldn’t have to rely on the Hemoclobber, but it does
nah

the Hemoclobber is just an easy-mode stick on a class that already tilts towards being too effective for its difficulty; you cannot make a weapon like that good while also making it fair

it's currently more reasonable as opposed to when it had waaaaaaaaay too many second-chance "get out of jail free" charges and was crossperked for the two tankiest perks in the game, but it still doesn't need to exist

there's a reason why every bad player used the Hemoclobber when it came out, even offperk: the worse players are, the more appealing a stay-alive stick is, because they play with the expectation that they need it for healing the damage from all the Zeds they're not killing in a timely manner, as well as being a "get off me" button for when they get surrounded by Crawlers and Stalkers (which is supposed to kill anyone)

Yes you can survive, anyone can survive with any class, but it isn’t fun anymore
...
Of course it’s playable, but it’s not nearly as fun if at all like it used to be, which at the end of the day, is the entire point to even playing a game.
Define "fun?" Some objective metric we can work with?

I don't find Demolitionist fun because spam is boring and this game is designed around getting headshots but clearly other players disagree with me, as evidenced by the retina-searing explosions and screen shakes present in most games. Many players find Commando boring because "it's all assault rifles and the only '~*fun*~' weapons it gets are the M16 and the Stoner," which is a statement I disagree with on so many levels.

I can kill 2 Fleshpounds faster than the vast majority of Sharpshooters as a Berserker and that brings a smile to my face every time I pull it off; is that not "fun?" Is crunching multiple heads in one swing with the melee weapons not "fun?"

It’s probably the least played class,
lol nah

granted i don't have hard numbers for that but antecdata over the past few years and the past couple of years since the Summer 2021 nerfs says otherwise

there's literally at least one berserker in every single HoE and HoE+ server I've played on since the Berserker nerfs unless it's a CD team intentionally saying "no chaos perks, they're annoying"; there's even double Berserkers often enough despite that being a bad tactic on most maps

the least played class across pretty much every difficulty is Sharpshooter because Sharpshooter is fairly unforgiving of screwups and most players are allergic to headshots (and not hitting headshots is in most cases tantamount to screwing up)

it’s said when a class like survivalist is basically just as good with 1 perk, not to mention healing grenades and global damage resistance.
This is a different argument for a different thread. You're not wrong that Survivalist is dumb, but it's still not as good as a Berserker who knows what they're doing. I will absolutely rally behind Survivalist being too easy to use, though.

I have railed against Survivalist getting buffs for years now because Survivalist is (and always has been) the very definition of a comfort perk, not a perk for players who reliably want to kill things quickly, which is something that this game should heavily discourage on the highest difficulty levels (and has been doing the exact opposite of discouraging, much to my dismay).

Also, the math has been done on Berserker vs melee Survivalist DPS; Berserker wins that hands-down and with literally all weapons, where Survivalist only gets as much as it can on a handful of weapons.
 
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