I might come back to this thread at some point but I'll just leave a few things here.
---The three toughest enemies (scrakes, fleshpounds, and Hans), are all 50% resistant to slashing weapons. This makes the eviscerator useless against these enemies (unless you exploit with circle strafing). I remember reading someone suggesting the Dragon perk would be strong against these enemies, but seeing as their first weapon is a katana--a slashing weapon--I highly doubt it.
---The constant flood of enemies on HoE virtually demand that you need a medic to heal you. You are practically guaranteed to take damage on the front line, which is expected as a melee class and this is acceptable. However, this then these leads to two problems:
---Berserker has the least amount of survivability in terms of taking damage. He can dodge yes, and with his melee weapon out he can block, but when it comes to unavoidable damage (and it's everywhere on HoE), you will have the least survivability of all the perks. His health remains at 100 while other perks get 120 and 150 respectively, and medic goes completely balls-to-the-walls on survivability with 175 armor (more on that later). This armor value would be far more suited on a berserker. I think it would still be balanced to do this because of his other problem:
---Berserker has very little self sustain. I honestly haven't even tried his +10 max hp ability because it just looks so weak on paper, and with armor healing from medics I actually "don't" want this. Even still, without percentile damage reduction, any amount of self healing just won't be enough to deal with the zeds in the later waves. If you run into double fleshpounds or triple scrakes on the later waves, chances are you will take damage, and if you don't have armor you will most likely die. I'm almost tempted to say to put the medic's armor heal and syringe refersh speed on berserker in some fashion just to give him something to speed up his healing, or dare I say, give him life steal in some fashion. Some sort of undying or last stand ability would be very useful too, where when he hits 20 hp, he can't take damage for three seconds, once per wave or something like that.
---In regards to armor and damage resistance, the medic far outshines berserker because of this extra armor. This reddit post is an interesting read also in regards to armor. http://www.reddit.com/r/killingfloor/comments/3454y6/killing_floor_2_movement_speed_and_armor/ I can't wrap my head around the math right now but just having over 75 armor makes the armor the most effective, and having 175 armor means that when a berserker's armor becomes 0 from damage, medic will likely stil lhave a huge chunk of armor remaining, which in turn still provides huge damage resistance to health.
---EMP needs to be looked at. The self damage is grotesque, and I am almost tempted to say to make it an impact grenade with no self damage. Either this or make it a more rapid, point-blank area of effect ability.
---Berserker needs an answer to Hans. Obviously more weapons will be coming down the road, but right now berserker is entirely useless to bring against Hans. Medic does his job far better in trying to parry lock him for the team and his grenades are far more useful. DPS belongs to the AA12 and the pulverizer won't be winning any awards for DPS, but parrying and locking down Hans can be immensely useful... if you can time it. For me it's hit or miss on the timings, but at least as medic you have a much larger buffer of armor and health if you screw up, and your increased syringe speed and armor heal allows to you reverse damage from a mistake. (Also if you do this strategy, parry chip damage is actually less when you use the pulverizer as compared to the crovel or knife https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...x8cZCuErwxZLiBKl9SyY/htmlview?pli=1&sle=true# ) Need to do tests to see if the katana is better than the pulverizer for blocking, but it probably isn't.
---The Pulverizer's reload can be canceled with the melee bash but not primary fire. This feels more like a bug.
Other than that, the pulverizer has actually grown on me a lot, and it's a pretty fun weapon to use. I've gotten a lot better at aiming the weapon and it does chunk the weaker zeds quite nicely (although bloats are a problem, damn bludgeon resist).
---The three toughest enemies (scrakes, fleshpounds, and Hans), are all 50% resistant to slashing weapons. This makes the eviscerator useless against these enemies (unless you exploit with circle strafing). I remember reading someone suggesting the Dragon perk would be strong against these enemies, but seeing as their first weapon is a katana--a slashing weapon--I highly doubt it.
---The constant flood of enemies on HoE virtually demand that you need a medic to heal you. You are practically guaranteed to take damage on the front line, which is expected as a melee class and this is acceptable. However, this then these leads to two problems:
---Berserker has the least amount of survivability in terms of taking damage. He can dodge yes, and with his melee weapon out he can block, but when it comes to unavoidable damage (and it's everywhere on HoE), you will have the least survivability of all the perks. His health remains at 100 while other perks get 120 and 150 respectively, and medic goes completely balls-to-the-walls on survivability with 175 armor (more on that later). This armor value would be far more suited on a berserker. I think it would still be balanced to do this because of his other problem:
---Berserker has very little self sustain. I honestly haven't even tried his +10 max hp ability because it just looks so weak on paper, and with armor healing from medics I actually "don't" want this. Even still, without percentile damage reduction, any amount of self healing just won't be enough to deal with the zeds in the later waves. If you run into double fleshpounds or triple scrakes on the later waves, chances are you will take damage, and if you don't have armor you will most likely die. I'm almost tempted to say to put the medic's armor heal and syringe refersh speed on berserker in some fashion just to give him something to speed up his healing, or dare I say, give him life steal in some fashion. Some sort of undying or last stand ability would be very useful too, where when he hits 20 hp, he can't take damage for three seconds, once per wave or something like that.
---In regards to armor and damage resistance, the medic far outshines berserker because of this extra armor. This reddit post is an interesting read also in regards to armor. http://www.reddit.com/r/killingfloor/comments/3454y6/killing_floor_2_movement_speed_and_armor/ I can't wrap my head around the math right now but just having over 75 armor makes the armor the most effective, and having 175 armor means that when a berserker's armor becomes 0 from damage, medic will likely stil lhave a huge chunk of armor remaining, which in turn still provides huge damage resistance to health.
---EMP needs to be looked at. The self damage is grotesque, and I am almost tempted to say to make it an impact grenade with no self damage. Either this or make it a more rapid, point-blank area of effect ability.
---Berserker needs an answer to Hans. Obviously more weapons will be coming down the road, but right now berserker is entirely useless to bring against Hans. Medic does his job far better in trying to parry lock him for the team and his grenades are far more useful. DPS belongs to the AA12 and the pulverizer won't be winning any awards for DPS, but parrying and locking down Hans can be immensely useful... if you can time it. For me it's hit or miss on the timings, but at least as medic you have a much larger buffer of armor and health if you screw up, and your increased syringe speed and armor heal allows to you reverse damage from a mistake. (Also if you do this strategy, parry chip damage is actually less when you use the pulverizer as compared to the crovel or knife https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...x8cZCuErwxZLiBKl9SyY/htmlview?pli=1&sle=true# ) Need to do tests to see if the katana is better than the pulverizer for blocking, but it probably isn't.
---The Pulverizer's reload can be canceled with the melee bash but not primary fire. This feels more like a bug.
Other than that, the pulverizer has actually grown on me a lot, and it's a pretty fun weapon to use. I've gotten a lot better at aiming the weapon and it does chunk the weaker zeds quite nicely (although bloats are a problem, damn bludgeon resist).
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