PC Demo zombies damage is stupid...

H

Haxoonie

New member
Ok let me start off by saying I normally don't do anything but read the forums so I ended up having to make an account to make my voice/opinion heard.

Let me start off by saying that, I bought this game and play it solo. For those of you who will come at me with the (Get some friends to play with you) I say this, i SHOULDN'T have to beg people to come play this with me just to survive easier. I want to play it solo and have fun on my own. It's how I have always been. Moving on...

So I am the type that will watch YouTube videos on base builds and defense strats against the zombie hordes. I have been playing for about 3 years now off and on and through that time I have had to sit through many nerfs and exploit fixes. The exploit fixes im fine with but changing a mechanic you put in the game just because it was working in the players is kind of a d!@k move. I mean if you didn;t want it to work in the first place why even make it an option? I won't sit here and list all the ones im referring to so I can avoid the keyboard warriors that come to the defense of TFP.

Anyhow I came back to playing the new Alpha 18 and was loving the new things. So much to play with now. So I built the normal way I build I made a pillbox base upgraded to reinforced concrete. I would have done steel but on day 42 and playing solo I found having to juggle looting, farming, building and all tied up all my time and was not able to farm enough to make the steel needed to upgrade it all past concrete. I put iron spikes all the way around it with a spotting tower on the top of it if I chose to shot from above. I was having a blast. The zombies were fighting back and made me have to use a few med kits to counter their damage....buzzards were swooping in and infecting me causing me to have to use antibiotics to counter infection.THEN OUT OF NOWHERE!! comes this ♥♥♥♥ing hulking behemoth that put a giant hole in the side of the base in one explosion. I was railing him with bullets from my AK but nothing slowed him down. I heard about this zombie but didn't know how utterly destructive they truly were.

I am now going to get to my point. This zombie seems like a direct counter to base defense. I mean this zombie is ridiculous..... whoever thought of putting packs of C4 on that thing and turning him into a Sherman tank needs to rethink their position regarding their love for the 7DTD community. This zombie makes defending from a base pointless now. From what I have read they get even worse as the 7 days hordes go by so ....... WTF? Why was this zombie made a thing? Couldn't it have done a little less damage?!?!?! It took me days of playing and famring to build that frickin base just to have the retarded zombie walk up and detonate through it all. IT EVEN KILLED ME IN ONE SHOT!!! The horde then proceeded to my loot base to rinse that as well because I spawned at my loot base because the bag at the horde bas got blown the F@#K UP!!

Why every time were having fun defending from horde after horde and find a way to be successful TFP come along and say ( well sorry about your luck but that's not gonna work anymore!! ) I am slowly finding my love for this game slip away these days. Sure players used stuff the devs didn't intend ( not talking about exploits) I am glad they got fixed. I am talking about ways players used to trick the dumb zombies into killing themselves. Zombies brains are dead. They are not meant to be smart. Unless these are some kind of hybrid and genetically enhanced bull♥♥♥♥ from the future... Like how would a zombie even end up with a bomb strapped to their chest?!?! Like im so confused at this point...I guess back to the drawing board and looking up YT videos on how to deal with demolishers, but this time I wont expect the base design to work for long before they add something else to steam roll out defenses.... Its like they enjoy making people hate their game.

I'm done with this rant. To you white knights that are going to come here to defend the devs and think I will give your post the time of day.....don't bother. I don't care nor will I waist time responding or reading your comments. I want to hear from the devs about why they thought this zombie was a good idea. OR! better yet why the hell it can blow up reinforced concrete in one explosion.....that damage is stupid.... Do you not want us defending bases or something?!?! Any explanation at all would be great.

 
Thanks for the feedback. The demolishers are new and are slowly developing into what they will eventually be. They are already different than what they first were.

Their purpose is to offer a new challenge later in the game that is different than previous challenges the player has fought. The devs are not trying to make base building irrelevant nor are they intentionally designing the game as adversaries of player ingenuity. They don’t want players to become complacent in their base design that got built by day 20 and works passively for all future hordes for the next 300 days. They want to throw in new enemies that will force the player to adapt and survive the new threat.

As far as the horde attacking your loot base, that shouldn’t have happened unless you engaged with them first. New to A18 is a rule that once killed the zombies no longer gps to you unless you initiate contact with them. Sounds like a bug if they followed you to your alternate base.

In my opinion, bandits are going to be an even deadlier threat than Demolishers in the future. Best to mentally prepare yourself.

 
[snipped]
Click to expand...
I agree... mostly...

I do like the concept of the demolisher. But I already explained why he is not good design, since he is everything:

He is a tank, he has dmg and he has an ability to demolish bases.

He should have one or two of those things. But he is just an all in one boss.

At least they already nerfed him by not letting him explode anymore when he is already dead. So "counterplay" is to kill him quicker then he can detonate. But since he has massive HP and armor, that negates that counterplay.

If there was ever only one of them... but sometimes there is multiple.

So first what I like:

I like the mixup. I like that there can be something that can ruin plans.

I like his looks and I like his detonation dmg.

I also like that he is only coming very lategame, so you should have tools to deal with him (somewhat)

What would I do to fix him:

a - reduce his HP/armor, but increase his speed slightly (more like an urukhai suicide guy in LotR)

b - Make his C4 either easier OR harder to trigger by trap. Somehow you never know if a trap (blade or dart) will or will not trigger it and it is in a weird spot where sometimes he will blow up and sometimes he wont.

z - rework him into a fully blown tank, where he has 5x the hp/armor that he has now, make him 10x slower but leave his melee damage, remove his C4 and give it to something small and nimble that can run at the base with full speed.

I like this the most, but I know they wont ever do something this massive for what they consider "little change".

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I agree that the demolisher is a real problem for which there is no simple solution yet.

To fight the demolisher effectively you need to know some things about him. First of all it has to be said that it is immune against spikes. He just tramples them down. Barbed wire gets destroyed when he walks through it.

He has 1000 HP and his armor reduces all damage by 40%. Shotgun shells and HP ammo have no effect on him because of his armor. Only AP or regular ammo works.

He does not explode by itself. The explosion must be triggered. To do this, the trigger must be hit by the player, another zombie or a trap. Blade traps and turrets trigger the explosion with high probability. Dart traps do not trigger the explosion.

If the explosion is triggered you have 2 seconds to escape or kill the demolisher. If you kill the demolisher in time it will not explode anymore.

If he explodes, he does 5000 damage within a 5-block radius. If he hits a block he will do 500 damage.

I have built several bases to deal with the demolisher with more or less success. A base with low resource usage that suffers little or no damage will only work if you exploit the AI. Otherwise you sink a lot of resources into the late hordes. My dart trap base consumes about 90000 iron per horde and about 1000-1500 rounds of ammo.

The safest approach so far is to let the zombies fall into a pit and kill them with grenades. If the pit is deep enough a demolisher explosion will not harm you. Also, if the zombies have no way out of the pit, the damage to the pit won't matter.

An example for this type of base are these bases:

But you have to be careful not to blow yourself up when handling grenades.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
On Warrior difficulty, which I believe is the most common difficulty, it takes 8 headshots from a tier 6 Sniper Rifle with 4 good mods (it deals 132 damage per shot) using AP ammo, to kill a Demolisher. However I was not specced for rifles, so...shrug. On Insane, it takes 30 head shots from a tier 6 AK with good mods (gun was dealing 74 damage per shot) but using normal ammo. Tested all this in creative.

 
On insane difficulty with zombie block damage turned up it takes them two blasts to destroy reinforced concrete and I feel that's appropriate.If they destroyed your reinforced concrete blocks in one shot than there's some sort of bug in your world. What I do not like however is how the explosion damage goes through blocks even if the top block is not destroyed - it still goes two blocks beyond it. That's extremely annoying because sometimes those blocks can be hard or impossible to reach to repair them. Another thing I hate is how they take out defenses like blade traps. I'm fine with a single blast making the trap not function anymore but destroying it is such an enormously high price that it effectively makes such traps such a bottomless resource-pit in the end game that it's not even worth making them over and over, and aren't these traps supposed to be end game items? Demolishers really make so many of these traps useless because they'll trigger them or get one-shot in a blast and that sucks because it feels like endgame has become a place where technology and interesting base designs have too high of a risk/reward cost.

 
Im playing on Standard difficulty and 1 or 2 shotgun slugs in the face is enough (I specialized in shotties). Just make them fall in a pit and kill them there. ~750 slugs is more than enough to last a night.

Add electric fences at the bottom and they can barely hit your walls before you explode their face. And the repair cost is extremely low (I do more damage to the opposite wall with my slugs than the actual zombies)

20191211231607_1.jpg

 
I agree that the demolisher is a real problem for which there is no simple solution yet.
To fight the demolisher effectively you need to know some things about him. First of all it has to be said that it is immune against spikes. He just tramples them down. Barbed wire gets destroyed when he walks through it.

He has 1000 HP and his armor reduces all damage by 40%. Shotgun shells and HP ammo have no effect on him because of his armor. Only AP or regular ammo works.

He does not explode by itself. The explosion must be triggered. To do this, the trigger must be hit by the player, another zombie or a trap. Blade traps and turrets trigger the explosion with high probability. Dart traps do not trigger the explosion.

If the explosion is triggered you have 2 seconds to escape or kill the demolisher. If you kill the demolisher in time it will not explode anymore.

If he explodes, he does 5000 damage within a 5-block radius. If he hits a block he will do 500 damage.

I have built several bases to deal with the demolisher with more or less success. A base with low resource usage that suffers little or no damage will only work if you exploit the AI. Otherwise you sink a lot of resources into the late hordes. My dart trap base consumes about 90000 iron per horde and about 1000-1500 rounds of ammo.

The safest approach so far is to let the zombies fall into a pit and kill them with grenades. If the pit is deep enough a demolisher explosion will not harm you. Also, if the zombies have no way out of the pit, the damage to the pit won't matter.

An example for this type of base are these bases:

Click to expand...
The one thing I see most people using effectively is the one thing I didn't see you mention. Electric fences. That slows them up good from the videos I've seen.

 
Thanks for the feedback. The demolishers are new and are slowly developing into what they will eventually be. They are already different than what they first were.
Their purpose is to offer a new challenge later in the game that is different than previous challenges the player has fought. The devs are not trying to make base building irrelevant nor are they intentionally designing the game as adversaries of player ingenuity. They don’t want players to become complacent in their base design that got built by day 20 and works passively for all future hordes for the next 300 days. They want to throw in new enemies that will force the player to adapt and survive the new threat.

As far as the horde attacking your loot base, that shouldn’t have happened unless you engaged with them first. New to A18 is a rule that once killed the zombies no longer gps to you unless you initiate contact with them. Sounds like a bug if they followed you to your alternate base.

In my opinion, bandits are going to be an even deadlier threat than Demolishers in the future. Best to mentally prepare yourself.
Click to expand...
The problem is that demolishers are much too durable for the damage they do and the quantity that can show up.

Even if it isn't INTENDED, the result is that bases are more or less pointless unless you use some very specific exploits of the game AI.

As I understand it hordes not zeroing in on you on the 7th day after you die (in effect, losing you when you die) is a bug that has been fixed in a recent patch. They absolutely will track you to any fallback respawn point now, just like they used to. At this point, its best to just stay dead all night long.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
As I said, they are a work in progress. They will continue to evolve. You should neither assume that the current demolishers are the final intended version nor should you marry these demolishers and then get upset when they change. :)

If the zombies are back to how they used to be on horde night then that is the bug that needs to get fixed. It is intended that you are safe after dying unless you engage first or are seen. The devs don’t want a night long death loop that encourages players to stay unspawned until 4am.

 
i like the demolishers! i like the look . his sounds and how much of a persistent he has.

but he dose has his problems (most of the stuff people said here)

if i was going to make/add some changes for him.

- 8 or 10 sec timer for C4

- add a front glass on the helmet (Makes sense for what the demolishes was)

- slower movement (due to the armor and bombs

- Add a weakness, his legs would be lightly armored and able to cripple him "somewhat easily"

happy new year!

 
Maybe his weakness could be water like it really slows him down to move through it so you could dig a water moat and then have a chance to shoot them while they are slowed.

 
The one thing I see most people using effectively is the one thing I didn't see you mention. Electric fences. That slows them up good from the videos I've seen.
Click to expand...
It slows them down and stuns them, but does little or no damage. You still need several head shots with AP ammo to kill a Demolisher.

The biggest problem is that the demolisher does not stand out in the mass of zombies that come at you in the horde night. One notices him relatively late. And if you fire into the mass of zombies it can easily happen that you hit his button by accident.

The strategy is mostly to use HP ammunition that can not penetrate the zombies. But you also have many soldiers and against them HP ammunition is useless. So you often have one weapon with HP ammo and one with AP ammo and you are constantly switching between the weapons. This can easily lead to a mistake. Kage848 for example has two hordes where he shot the demolisher with HP ammo and wondered why it didn't work.

Yesterday I tested a base design of JaWoodle from his "Fists only Challenge" against a high gamestage horde with demolishers. It is a non-cheese base with a elevated corridor and hatches on the floor. You open two hatches and stand behind the second one. This way you are just in range for close combat.

This base was also built as a non elevated version from Farket:

I have tested this on default settings. That means adventurer, 60-minute days, 8 zombies at the same time. My character is maxed-out in strength, Boomstick, Pummel Pete and Sexual Tyrannosaurus. Furthermore I have all books from the series Shotgun Messiah and Batter Up.

That means I have a high chance of dismemberment with the shotgun and when I kill a zombie with the baseball bat my stamina fills up. My weapons are all Q6 and completely filled with mods. As ammo I used slugs which are considered AP ammo since 18.2.

It worked very well. I also tested it with 32 zombies at the same time. It worked but I wouldn't recommend it for this type of base as it gets too crowded and you can easily lose track. Since you are up close and personal with the zombies, head shots are easier and there is less danger of accidentally triggering the explosion of the demolisher.

 
Maybe his weakness could be water like it really slows him down to move through it so you could dig a water moat and then have a chance to shoot them while they are slowed.
Click to expand...
You and apparently the developers think that the only kind of defense players should use is shooting the zombies.

Apparently none of the developers ever thought of a trap that would be effective against the demolisher. For example dart traps with AP steel darts.

And what about melee bases? I can try to kill a demolisher with a hammer or a club but it takes forever because none of it is equal to AP ammo.

You always insist that 7 Days doesn't become a shooter, and yet players who want to fight the horde other than with firearms are not supported. Shooter players on the other hand are given new weapons and new ammunition. This is sad because shooting the zombies is the most unimaginative defense you can use. 7 Days to die has a great building system and the developers don't seem to appreciate it.

 
The one thing I see most people using effectively is the one thing I didn't see you mention. Electric fences. That slows them up good from the videos I've seen.
Click to expand...
However, if there is only one or two tricks to stop it, the concept is flawed. Then we're back to the days of one or two concepts (stilt base or similar). I have to agree with people stating that the demolisher is simply over the top in its current state.

 
Lol...I just made a simple suggestion based on what I read in this thread from others who say that the demolishers close too quickly with your base. You’re reading way too much into what I said.

Having water slow down demolishers could work in conjunction with a trap or turret. It doesn’t have to be the player shooting them directly.

Of course you won’t be happy unless 100% of the defense can be accomplished passively with little to no costs. I’m not really that surprised you used my simple idea to slow them down using water to go off on your pet peeve again.

 
Lol...I just made a simple suggestion based on what I read in this thread from others who say that the demolishers close too quickly with your base. You’re reading way too much into what I said.
Click to expand...
It's not just about what you wrote. Madmole also only writes about shooting. I've seen his base design with dart traps and blade traps. It was clear that he has no experience with electric traps at all. Do any of the developers use electrical traps ?

Having water slow down demolishers could work in conjunction with a trap or turret. It doesn’t have to be the player shooting them directly.
Click to expand...
Not a good idea to use turrets. They will most likely trigger the explosion and with the strange water physics in 7 days you will have holes in the water.

Of course you won’t be happy unless 100% of the defense can be accomplished passively with little to no costs. I’m not really that surprised you used my simple idea to slow them down using water to go off on your pet peeve again.
Click to expand...
What is wrong with having a 100% automated defense as a goal? Using your mind and strategy instead of brute force is something positive for me.

As far as the costs are concerned, they should be reasonable but currently the costs are really very high. My dart traps currently consume about 90000 iron per horde, even though I use additional firearms. Fortunately I love mining.

You can't use anything else but dart traps because other traps can trigger the explosion.

I can place a blade trap at a height of 3 blocks and put 1/2 blocks on the ground. Then only the head of the demolisher is hit so that the explosion should not be triggered. However, the Demolisher is knocked down by the blade trap and then stands up in the air again so that its torso is directly at the level of the blade trap. This triggers the explosion and destroys the blade traps in a 5 block radius.

Turrets are a very bad idea as mentioned before. From the front and from the side, they will most likely trigger the explosion. And from behind it doesn't work either because a Ragdoll movement makes the demolisher turn around and then the explosion is triggered again.

Believe me, I have studied the demolisher in its current state thoroughly and others have done the same.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top