W40K Inquisitor – Season of Judgement Overview

40k Inquisitor Martyr’s fifth season is here: The season of Judgement! Neocore looks to be capitalizing on the many things that made the previous seasons fun. There’s a lot of extra destruction, and some cool bosses to fight. There were also some much needed changes to the base game that were a long time coming, so I’m really happy and excited to see what kind of new builds will come along.

In the season of Judgement, you’ll be followed by a holy floating orb that will target nearby enemies, applying a “Mark of Judgment” every few seconds. This mark of judgment does a few different things, first and most noticeable, every hit on a marked enemy has a chance of casting spells, A stunning holy nova, chain lightning, or an AOE firestorm. If you’re not able to kill the marked enemy for a certain amount of time, that mark will turn into a Mark of Heresy, which will give them a lot of bonus damage. When you kill a marked enemy, you gain a stack of emperor’s judgement, that gives you 0.2% bonus damage and 0.1% bonus speed per stack, up to 100 stacks for 20% damage and 10% supreme movement speed. The amount of stacks you get per kill, and the amount of time it takes to transform into a mark of heresy depends on the type of enemy that is marked, from normal all the way up to elites. For every 25 stacks of Emperor’s Judgement, you’ll get an extra holy orb to follow you around, up to 5, so you could potentially apply these marks 5 times faster, making combat feel a lot more destructive, and also a lot more dangerous if you’re not able to keep up and let the marks transform.
There are also new Seasonal Missions, that you unlock after killing a certain amount of marked enemies. You’ll have to collect a total of 500 shards across normal missions to unlock a seasonal one. You can either do the seasonal mission right away, or continue playing regular missions to kill more marked enemies and re-roll the seasonal mission, raising the level each time. There is a base 20% chance for the mission to have one of two new bosses, and that chance goes up by 10% for each re-roll. The archeotech shard for this season is all about generic vulnerabilities: it gives a chance to apply one when you take a hit when on armor, a chance to apply one when you hit an enemy in a weapon, and adds effectiveness to any vulnerability debuffs in other items. Speaking of items, there are of course several new items that come with this season. These items are a lot more unique, and powerful on paper than what we’ve seen before, like this shotgun that gives you a warp damage aura when you apply vulnerabilties, this force field that gives you a chance to trigger a judgement spell on hit, whether or not the enemy is marked, and this Inoculator that has a chance to deal a ton of damage if used while you have a debuff. Those are just 3 examples of stuff I found in the beta while playing a crusader, there are a lot more items for the other classes.

There have been quite a few changes to the base game, that will affect everyone even outside of the season. First of all, Datahunt missions are no longer the most boring mission type, instead of having to hold F for 90 seconds, you just have to press F once and stay in the area while enemies attack. The process actually completes itself early if you’re able to kill all the enemies, so you no longer have to sit and wait, which is awesome, because the old Datahunt missions really killed the pacing of an otherwise really fun game.
As for items, 43 relic enchantments from previous seasons have become permanently available. So you’ll be able to roll gear that affects Thunderbolts of Authority, everything that said “Inferno” now works with regular burns, and some of the other enchantments we lost like the chance to get 100% crit chance for a few seconds, that my old heavy flamer build used. This is going to open up so much more build diversity, and bring back old builds, so I’m really excited about this change. 15% reduced materials for re-rolling has been added to a tech tree node, to make up for the larger pool.
The Heavy Bolter got a big re-work this patch! I played mostly with the heavy bolter in the beta it feels a lot more powerful and fun, especially since you can move while channeling the 1 and 2 skills! There are a lot more balance changes where that came from, I’ll be sure to leave a link to the full changelog in the description.

That’s all you need to know about the Season of Judgement, that came to PC on June 23rd. If you’re playing on console, you’ll likely have to wait 2-3 months before the season comes to you. I’m personally really excited about all these balance changes and reworks, I was honestly kind of bummed out that there weren’t any last season, but now we will have so many new and returning things to play around with, hopefully it won’t feel like the same game with the same old builds.

Thank you for watching this video, I hope I was able to answer any questions you had about the season, and have a great time spreading judgement to the heretics!