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"Why Even Try?" A demonstration of the berserker perks weakness.

Zerethon

Grizzled Veteran
Nov 5, 2009
338
4
Ohio
So, let me preface this post and this video. I modified Moxel's KF-Testingmap specifically to make this video

Modification made was to shove the ammo into groups in the room, so if your perk can, you can stay in the room infinitely or until you mess up/the game crashes.

Also, WARNING: Video contains swearing, Personal opinions, etc. Viewer Discretion advised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UW5UEBhsyshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UW5UEBhsys

Text version (TLDR Version not included with admission):

So, i haven't really seen a video or post showing the berserker perk directly compared to other perks in the game, to show how absolutely mechanically flawed the class is.

So i made one.

Tripwire, i know you guys have stated "We're looking into it" but the fact that the perk got hit this hard by nerfs and has been left as-is as a newbie and veteran trap alike is rather pathetic.

In that video, i've taken the testing map and made it more "broken" as a perk grinding map, but it also works for demonstrating just how pathetic the berserker truly is, even in the most ideal-yet-adverse conditions (infinite ammo and trapped in a room with cysts spawning 5 per second or so) the 'zerk can't even hold it's own with a T3, so lets run down why:

Lawnmower blade:
Jokingly, i call this the berserkers best weapon, and right now, it basically is, it attacks and blocks very quickly, flinches light targets, and generally has no downsides beyond it's mildly low damage, but for clearing out weaker ZED's it's free, it's quick, and it gets the job done faster than the bloody eviscerator.

Crovel/Krovel: The other starting weapon, more damage but slower per swing than the lawnmower, it's best on things like gorefasts or crawlers, Targets that are generally either harder to hit due to the range of the knife, or have more health and won't die as quick to it, your fallback until you can afford....

The Pulverizer: The big daddy, the offperk special, the best g*****n weapon the berserker has, it smashes through heavy targets, it stuns targets, it's a shotgun taped to a sledgehammer. It's only downside is that the alt-fire doesn't automatically reload if the clip is empty and you have more ammo. While it's the slowest melee you have, it hits like a truck and isn't exactly cost-prohibitive to run (i usually have this by wave 2 on anything under HoE) If you aren't carrying it, there's something wrong with you or you're not playing berserker.

Vlad 1k Nailgun: Shouldn't be a berserker weapon, i'll make a full post later on this (as i mention at the end of this post) but for what it does, it's alright, it's basically the bouncing fragments of the supports grenade made into a weapon, the only thing holding it back is the longer janky reload animation and it's lack of penetration through targets

The Pathetic Evsicerator: I Don't really have enough words in english to say how useless this thing truly is, but if you buy it in a game you're seriously wasting Dosh and you're going to die horribly, it does basically no damage, barely has any use with either mode on any kind of "Trash" ZED and it's slower flight speed and odd hitbox means you're not easily going to land the headshots you desperately need to make this thing slightly less suck.

As shown in my video, even on headshots with the alt-fire it takes as long as the knife to kill a clot and has less horizontal range, actually making it -worse- at killing trash enemies

So, how do we make the berserker perk better, without making it as "Overpowered" as the KF1 bersker?

Simple (+ means "Added" - means "Remove this"):

+ Bloat/siren res go up an additional 1% per level
+ movespeed/level and attackspeed/level go up to 1%/level
+ Berserker gets a similar health boost to what commandos get per level (2hp/level or so)

- Berserker ranged weapons get moved to off-perk for another perk based around improvised ranged weapons (making a thread on this)

+ Eviscerator gets split back into the 2 old weapons that make it (chainsaw, buzzsaw bow) Buzzsaw bow moved to off-perk for the new improvised range perk

+ Chainsaw is a repurposed Scrake chainsaw that uses fuel, left click is the old revved-up attack, consuming fuel at the same rate as the current evis alt fire/right click fire, Right click is a horizontal swipe that "Turbo boosts" the saw and consumes a set amount of fuel (5-10 per use) but has a higher chance to stagger large zeds and shoves weaker ZED's away from you

= For now, skills stay the same, with the above changes that move the perk more towards a pure melee face-breaker, i'd wait to see how it plays out before changing the skills (Though bulk ammo would go away in favor of say, a berserker version of the medic armor perk or a health regen thing, all the other skills are melee based)

So what does this all accomplish?

1. This makes the berserker a melee perk who can actually survive in melee range on difficulties over normal, and has the tools and incentive to do so

2. Gives the berserker it's old trash-wrecking ability, the chainsaw was one of the best weapons in the entire game in the hands of a skilled 'zerk up until the DLC weapons (Claymore, Scythe, etc.) were added to the game and having a repurposed Scrake saw as the new eviscerator would just be awesome

3. Actually makes the health-level perks useful, with increased health and extra resistance to being cheap-shot by a random bloat or siren, you're less likely to die while trying to make use of them, and a skilled player with those and good parry timing, will be able to go toe-to-toe with bigger enemies with less problems overall

4. Removes the newbie trap from the perk. As alright as the ranged weapons are in theory, they're terrible in execution because they get next to no bonuses from it, so moving them to a totally new perk and focusing the berserker on melee is better for balance.

And overall, that's what we want, is berserker to be it's old self with it's "I want to smash things in the face" feeling intact.

So, what about this new perk i keep mentioning? Well, we had some improvised ranged weapons in KF1, and we have some improvised ranged stuff in KF2, so we have the following potential weapons for a new "Improvised ranged weapon" perk

Blower Thrower, Buzzsaw bow, Nailgun

Which gives us a T3, T2, and T1 weapon (Or T4/T3/T2 if you're so inclined to call them that) All one needs to do is come up with a starter weapon, like a Zip gun or other "Backyard Boomstick" type thing and you've got the weapons for a perk, as i outline in this thread:

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?p=1413892#post1413892

In summary, if you made it this far or you just TLDR'd through the wall of text and the video, the berserker should really be refocused purely to melee, since the off-perking viability of other weapons is higher here (and if we're going to be stuck with it, lets make use of it) and his upper-tier weapons should be redesigned and balanced to compensate, so that the perk can once again reign supreme as the melee king
 
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I don't disagree with what you say... but...

TBH I think the Zerkers main weapons are largely fine. You are right that the nailgun needs looking at, cause it serves no purpose right now, and the eviscerator is awesome in principle, a large portion of bullcrap and chips in effect, but the croval and the pulv are spot on in my opinion.


Quite honestly I feel it's the Zerkers skills need a drastic overhaul. In regards to your changes, I am horribly agaisnt movement speed buffs as a rule. In my mind they should never go beyond 15%, especially now given the fact we can sprint. The Bloat and Siren resistance is kind of meh, I feel his damage resistance in general should be increased, but ONLY if movement speed is brought down in return.

This whole "better while wounded" stiche however is his biggest problem. His perk bonuses are very counter intuitive to a survival game. I made a thread about my proposed changed to the class, to get much more reliable use out of his skills, but sadly noone bothered replying.

I would link it, but I doubt anything will change ;)
 
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Well, the whole Berserker concept has been changed in the second game. In the first game it was a tanky-melee-bruiser but now he is using makeshift weapons and not melee weapons only. There is a perk that has the icon of a dragon and Katana belongs to him and this might hint that the Dragon perk will be the all melee perk and the Berserker the makeshift weapons guy or something like that. Sorry for bad English.
 
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I don't play zerk, so I'll not talk about it.

But for the "pulverizer don't auto-reload" thing, sorry but it's not a bug... How are you supposed to keep doing heavy attacks (even without ammo) if you have an auto-reload ? Ammo or not, heavy attack still have to be usable.
I mean... The reason of no auto-reload was obvious, don't you think ?

Oh and just another thing, if this explanation wasn't enough. Imagine an auto-reload on the pulv, while on a fleshpound : "Oh sh*t sh*t sh*t, auto-reload, I can't parry... *dead*" < Great idea !
 
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It simply needs to be able to tank more. If you disagree with this, I don't understand what is wrong with you. Hey, but at least we have 5% DR ":D"
Meanwhile commando gets 2hp per level. I cannot understand this decision.

Tried evis once or twice, never touched it again, just not worth it. I would take a support over a zerk any day in my team. I like playing with it, it just simply is not worth it.
 
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Edited to add link to my other thread in the first post

I don't disagree with what you say... but...

TBH I think the Zerkers main weapons are largely fine. You are right that the nailgun needs looking at, cause it serves no purpose right now, and the eviscerator is awesome in principle, a large portion of bullcrap and chips in effect, but the croval and the pulv are spot on in my opinion.


Quite honestly I feel it's the Zerkers skills need a drastic overhaul. In regards to your changes, I am horribly agaisnt movement speed buffs as a rule. In my mind they should never go beyond 15%, especially now given the fact we can sprint. The Bloat and Siren resistance is kind of meh, I feel his damage resistance in general should be increased, but ONLY if movement speed is brought down in return.

This whole "better while wounded" stiche however is his biggest problem. His perk bonuses are very counter intuitive to a survival game. I made a thread about my proposed changed to the class, to get much more reliable use out of his skills, but sadly noone bothered replying.

I would link it, but I doubt anything will change ;)

You're right, the actual zerker weapons (Knife, Pulv, Crovel) are all great, and the perk gets -MELEE- damage per level, so they only get better as you go on. It's the pointless ranged weapons that don't work at all (Evis, Nailgun) hence my point of "split the evis back into the chainsaw and bow and make a new perk for the ranged"

And i decided on the movespeed specifically because of the low health shenanigans, since i'd be adding health to the perk, paired with the speed you might actually be able to make use of the bonuses more than once without getting instantly killed mid-pulv swing

And point taken on the pulv heavy attack thing, i just generally don't use the alt-fire unless i have it loaded and i only use that heavy attack when i'm totally out of ammo in it. Since the normal attack hits like a train anyways
 
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While zerk is underpowered at some point, I guess it will change with new weapons.

I agree with getting more hp, but not with getting more resistances/level. They should just add a general 15 % dmg resistance to everything and keep the 2 other resistances the same. So it should be 40% resistance for Bloat and Siren and 15% in general for any other attack.

Does not matter if nail-gun is zerk weapon or not, they just put it in so you can defend yourself at ranged too, for now (until they add some pistols and stuff).

Attack speed at 30% is ok, as long as it does not make the animation quicker for the Pulverizer. Else the spam would be infernal and kf1 rince-repeat fp-brawling by 6 zerkers with tons of resistances.

I suppose the most annoying part about Zerker is that his Skills are bullsh1t, except for 2 (stumbling and anti-grab). They will change this I guess.
 
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The zerker just needs to be able to absorb more damage than it currently can. Primarily a melee class, he just can't take the pain he needs to survive on his own. If you are not playing near a good medic, you are pretty much guaranteed to die. That and the eviscerator could use some attention. Also i think they need to open up the parry window a bit more. Otherwise I think the perk is rather solid. The pulverizer is a great weapon for large zeds. If I time the alt fire just right, I can stop a FP dead in his tracks w/o taking much/any damage. Plus it can stumble a scrake and parry almost all of his attacks. I actually like the nailgun just as much as the pulverizer. It's also the first purchase I make at the trader. You see, the crovel is good for only the first couple of waves. And the pulverizer's main attack is too weak to use that weapon as a primary. The nailgun is very good at taking down large groups of trash quickly, and it can one shot a bloat/siren/husk at close range. I have played on suicidal and had top kills by a margin using the nailgun as a primary. I don't really think they need to give that class a complete overhaul. Just a few tweaks to help balance it out.
 
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Alright, my video is going to take time to upload and I've been "sarcastic" and said some mean things about you(going to redo the entire thing), so here's written tutorial: The Eviscerator can repeatedly stumble the fleshpound and give your team some time to throw all their grenades and spam bullets into him, easily killing him. The Eviscerator has a melee attack when you press V that does not use any fuel and can stumble fleshpounds(if you keep hitting him with it), 1 shot clots, 2 shot gorefasts(if you headshot him its 1), 1 shot crawler's and stalkers, 2 shot headshot a siren, 3/4 shot husk(headshot). It's not effective against scrakes but it's saw blade can stumble him. You know what else is good about the Eviscerator? it's sawing attack can repeatedly stumble zeds(flinch locking) This makes husks easy to kill, hell! They won't be able to flamethrower you and it uses like 2-4 fuel just to remove his head? It is a completely good weapon. You can carry the crovel to parry scrakes and kill multiple zeds fast as well. So as you can see, there is nothing wrong with ANY of the berserkers weapons.
 
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So as you can see, there is nothing wrong with ANY of the berserkers weapons.

I know all of the above, it's still pathetic.

"Stumble locking" a husk? they don't scale health with level and i can decap one in a couple quick shots to the head from halfway across the map with a 9mm (i have a lot of practice, i'm kind of the guy who made the all husks mutator in KF1) so the whole "Killing it before it can flamer you" goes out the window for less than a hundreth of the cost of the Evisefailure

Same thing for scrakes and FP's, you can do it with the evis, sure, but the pulverizer also does it and you can parry their attacks with it so there's almost no chance of you taking damage from one unless you mis-time it or it sneaks up on you.

Overall, since you can only carry something like the crovel to back it up, i'd still rather do something like Pulverizer + Boomstick that gives me the same advantages as the evis (Stumbling/stunning/Parrying big targets) but also gives me the ability to drop a moderately-sized trash group in one spank.

Also, the EMP nade negates the husk special attacks, scrake rage, FP Rage, etc. so there's also that route of wrecking one as well.

And it's seriously not like levelling up actually means anything 25% melee damage would help on big targets for sure, but basically all of the skills evoke the loudest "Meh" i can possibly bring to bear and actually trying to force myself to play it and use purely its weapons to level it up makes me endlessly think "I'd rather just being playing medic with a pulverizer" compared to KF1 where my feeling was best summed up with the following:

"WAAAAAAAGH!"
 
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I can't wait to see what they do about Zerker. Honestly, to me it sounds they're more or less happy with how the perk plays minus a few minor issues or bugs.

Personally, I think it's just weird... on one side they streamline the **** out of the game (like the HUD for example) but on the other side they make perk passives which are all over the place:

  • Support claims +dmg% for all shotguns - It's only perk-shotguns though.
  • Commando claims +dmg% for all weapons - doesn't even affect 9mm, not to mention off-perk weapons.
  • Berserker claims +dmg% only for melee weapons - which is true this time around all of a sudden.
  • Medic grenades don't receive increased healing potency for some reason - works as you'd imagine otherwise.
There's a lot more but the point is Berserker seems to get the shortest end of the stick with these inconsistencies in many cases or at least seemingly so.


Seemingly? Sometimes yes. A lot of people complain about 5% dmg resistance compared to +50HP or +75Armor. However, for tanking DPS you need damage resistance - not a bigger HP pool.
The reason is that damage resi. effectively increases the HPS you receive from your medic. The only thing that could come close to that is +Armor, since armor repair is based on your max armor value.




The bottom-line is, there is a lot of stuff going on with all perks so there is no simple cure to their problems. They are just too complex for that already. Alhough, giving zerker ranged weapons is, all things considered, a good move given how useless the perk used to be for (non-cheesy) team play back in KF1. They just have to integrate them properly into the perk, whatever that takes...
 
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The bottom-line is, there is a lot of stuff going on with all perks so there is no simple cure to their problems. They are just too complex for that already. Alhough, giving zerker ranged weapons is, all things considered, a good move given how useless the perk used to be for (non-cheesy) team play back in KF1. They just have to integrate them properly into the perk, whatever that takes...

Actually, with the Pulverizer and zerks ability to consistently stumble & short circuit ZED's, you don't really need the ranged ability at all in a team, stumbling an FP and then totally disabling it's rage leads to it's immediate death at the cost of a small amount of your armor, it just completely relies around teammates killing the trash around it because none of your weapons on-perk can do so with any kind of efficiency.

So the melee side of it plays quite well, but having such a lackluster top weapon and very little resistance and crowd control makes it very hard to get the full usefulness out of the perk in most teams.
 
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Actually, with the Pulverizer and zerks ability to consistently stumble & short circuit ZED's, you don't really need the ranged ability at all in a team, stumbling an FP and then totally disabling it's rage leads to it's immediate death at the cost of a small amount of your armor, it just completely relies around teammates killing the trash around it because none of your weapons on-perk can do so with any kind of efficiency.

So the melee side of it plays quite well, but having such a lackluster top weapon and very little resistance and crowd control makes it very hard to get the full usefulness out of the perk in most teams.

Then again, once I started playing support I also began to hate the zerker on my team. One just can't dodge and strafe Scrakes properly when someone constantly blocks your movement.

As a Commando I can't stand teams who block line of fire so much they soak up more bullets than the ZEDs. Berserker is once again the worst offender.

So depending on where and how you play having a decent ranged weapon still benefits Berserker.
 
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