A Balancing Hot Take (Wear Gloves, Plug Nose)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I said this as a joke awhile back, but part of me is starting to find the notion more appealing. Perhaps I’ve grown so accustomed to them, I can no longer detect the stench of bad ideas.

What if we heavily nerfed or completely removed all the +25% damage perks entirely?
(And the “Weakspot Damage” one too, maybe all damage perks? Would that be too far? Or are we so far gone already the notion is meaningless)

Before you hang me, hear me out.

1.) Their existence completely invalidates every other perk outside of niche exceptions/memes.

2.) As it stands, most players simply go with flakiac by default instead of choosing based off preference or build setup.

3.) Their removal could give us space for other perks, some suggestions:

% more reserve ammo. (Ranged only)
% less spread/recoil (Ranged only)
% Stamina Regeneration while active.
% Perfect Block Stagger (Melee Only)
% Toughness Regen on kill (Melee Only).
% Swap-to Speed

4.) Removing them would simplify the balancing equation. At the very least, going with a nerf instead of buffing the other perks wouldn’t contribute to power creep. I also don’t like doing math.

5.) Even if their removal is too much, reducing them to be more aligned with the other damage perks (Capping at 10% instead of 25%) would still open up more options (I.E. the other damage perks).

6.) While 25% extra damage might help an underperforming weapon become “good enough”, it being a percentage means over-performing weapons benefit much more. If a weapon’s worth is strictly contingent on doing 25% more damage against two armor types, perhaps said weapon should be buffed instead.

7.) Removing Damage against armor types shifts the perk situation from “Doing the most damage against the most targets” to “Doing the most damage to the enemy type I’m specializing against/have the hardest time with”. This could be doubled-down on by adding perks for specific enemy types instead of armor types:

% Damage against Monstrosities.
% Damage against Ogryns.
% Damage against Shooters.

(Although I find it hard to fathom any case where you’d not pick damage over other perks, unless said perks ultimately mathed out to more damage).

8.) There’s a distinct presence of “Godlike Generalists”, where they excel at dealing with most enemies and have few or no weaknesses. Is this how we really want Darktide to play? Maybe. It’s certainly easier if you don’t have to worry about team composition. But if not this could be a step towards encouraging specializing.

10.) It might not be the ultimate way to fix darktide’s balance, but it would simplify things a bit, no? Make it easier to balance weapons from the get-go? Or perhaps perks are too small a drop in the balance bucket to matter.

Hel, should we completely revise perks to consist solely of non-damage stats? Would we also then want to ditch crit chance and crit damage too? Does having slightly faster reload convert to slightly more damage? How deep should we descend down this rabbit hole? I have strayed so far from the Emperor’s light. Help me.

So, how stinky is this? If it’s as bad as I think it should be I’d very much appreciate some cogent counterarguments on the subject, or at least some discussion on the matter. Balance is a very hot topic these days.

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It would make much easier for fatshark to balance their weapons… I’m not opposed to this.

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I like how there are just

Deal more damage perks, like why wouldn’t you take them. Kinda makes balancing anything a nightmare when there are perks that just give you more damage. Hell perhaps at least for veteran replace deal more damage perks with actual weapon stability and accuracy as a hey they’re more experienced they can handle a weapon better rather than well you see the veteran just thinks really hard and makes the las hit harder.

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Its a very interesting thought. Though I can see how the priority just switches to anything that raises crit, or attack speed etc etc.

Still, now you have me thinking, aren’t bonus damage talents kinda lazy by design? Hmmm. I wish you hadn’t started this!

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It’s Bethesda tier design
Like look at the balancing nightmare that is fallout 4. All the ways you can increase your damage and how ridiculously enemies health has to be scaled to keep up.

A human can be made out of tissue paper or tougher than a deathclaw doesn’t matter what they’re wearing or using. Hell it’s such a nightmare over overlapping systems of ‘deal more damage’ that creating a mod let alone load order that actually balances everything out like the j sawer patch for fnv is next to impossible

Im very biased against just deal more damage perks for the most part, especially when it comes to guns in rpgs/progression systems. Like I’m fine with do thing to build stacks or doing specific thing grants more damage for a bit because that actually still requires you to play the game in a specific way to be rewarded with it. But for guns I mean there are better ways to make guns more effectively and more consistently deal damage rather than gun hits harder now.

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I generally think the game would be easier to balance if the weapons just had static stats, too. There is no meaningful tradeoffs here, everyone dumps the same stat

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It is indeed lazy ass design, and a nightmare to balance. I’ve been saying this since we got the new talent tree. It’s bad both for talents,for blessings and for perks.

I mean, people always use the same 4 perks: 25% dmg to unyileding, flak, maniac, carapace.
Same with the blessings +%dmg on kill/hit/repeated hit/. Or crit chance if the weapon allows it… which translates as more dmg really, with the extra that you may proc bleed depending on your build…
About talents… well, if you are good at the game, martyrdom is king, that tells you everything. Heck some weapons are even useless without it.

Then again, speaking of lazy design, imagine having 3 versions of the same weapon, only one being useful for the most. But hey, the game has 75+ weapons! That’s a lot!

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These are all excellent.

This is how it’s necessary to play in a game that pits 4 complete strangers against a completely randomized director who at any moment could throw a variety of different surprises at players with often only seconds to react.

Unless it’s a coordinated fireteam with voice chat, the specialists die and the generalists survive. :man_shrugging:

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Well it’s pretty close to a half-and-half situation… mostly. Ok maybe 1/3:rd vs 2/3:rds? As in, 2/3:rds of the perks are weak and mostly pointless. In that sense, it would be easier to just nerf the 1/3:rd instead.

I don’t really like the idea of adding perks which infringe on what the blessings already do, but more options certainly wouldn’t hurt. The power creep has been pretty massive tho so this might be a good way to drag that back a bit, giving Fatshark some other means to up the challenge other than just spawning more of everything and making them stronger & tougher.

As long as they do it in a way that doesn’t make perks meaningless. Take that 10% weakspot dmg for example, it and other buffs like it only apply to the extra dmg granted by weakspot hits. For most weapons that’s ~+30% dmg, meaning that 10% perk gives them only +3% dmg and only IF you got a weakspot hit. That’s barely ever going to be enough for any meaningful breakpoints. As opposed to that flak which gives +25% on all flak hits including DoTs, with flak being common enough to be all over the place.

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I think you’re right. But I think there might be a way to settle both accounts.

It’d be a nightmare, but I believe the ideal would be “Generalists can survive, Specialists can thrive”, where you can make quickplay builds that handle everything in a slow-but-steady fashion, with high survivability and no strong weaknesses. But specializing is what gives you those juicy one-hits and frag-worthy moments at the cost of a more demanding playstyle with no “Hard Counters” but lots of weaknesses (Your Glass Cannons, for example).

But right now I don’t see much incentive to want to specialize outside of simply getting bored with the same-old-same-old. I mean, why pick a thunder-hammer when the DS has a better TTK on armored targets, and everything else, and be extremely mobile. As someone fond of hard-hitting, hard-to-master weapons this pains me.

Removing the damage perks would help simplify this mess. Of course, FS being willing to do anything in a timely fashion would also help. Ah, perchance to dream!

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A good argument for removing damage perks entirely. They should really be QoL esque “tweaks” to weapons, or slightly-more-restrictive curio slots. The kind of bonus changing out your stock or grip on a modular weapon system might do.

And keeping damage bonus’ strictly in Blessings and Talents would help further separate them from perks.

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opens mouth

closes mouth

Yeah, no.

This actually checks out.

I endorse this and will be linking it in the For the Metaperor thread.

I hate ‘just more damage lol’ perks unless they’re intended to be singular picks. People are almost always going to pick simple, consistent, reliable damage over anything else. So we have a meta where +Flak, +Unarmored, and sometimes +Carapace dominate over everything else.

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Power or Strength (the stat that gives cleave, impact and damage) has always kinda been a mistake, especially when they implemented it in a way that the things that give power for some reason usually gives higher values with easier to fulfil conditions than things that give more specialised stats.

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Oh look!
Another great idea FS will entirely ignore.

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Honestly? Yeah, this is just a good idea.

As another individual said, while damage Blessing and Talents I feel are fine, despite there ubiquity, because you have to actively do something to proc the effect, and thusly it makes the act of playing the game more rewarding, so long as those effects don’t bring you into ‘I am actively deleting everything on screen without thinking’ levels coughs warframe and destiny 2 coughs weezes.

But the Blessing design is pretty on point, and is pretty much just ‘thing that increases your damage’ and ‘thing that makes your weapon feel good to us’, which I like a good amount/works well in other games too. But the perk system was absolutely something that could really let someone ‘make a weapon their own’ with exactly what they wanted on it, be it stamina, holster speed, block efficiency even, etc etc.

But then they just slapped armor damage amps on them and it’s like ‘op…well I guess I’m never using anything else, cool’. Flak/Maniac, Carapace/Unyielding, Flak/Carapace, Maniac/Unyielding, the only four combo’s I ever run these days, with one knife with +5% crit on zealot because infinite crits is funny. It’s just too good having one do literally a quarter more damage without even doing anything, but also something that severely hampers any form of build variety as it just becomes ‘put the thing on that the thing does good against so it does better’, never think about it again.

With weapons now actually being able to be made perfect, it makes even more sense to do this, as now you have an incentive to make multiple of the same ‘perfect weapon’ with different perk combos, instead of just ‘cool I made this one weapon that serves all my needs, I’m good’.

Can even couple it with a ‘buff’ across the board to damage numbers for all underperforming weapons, while leaving the top end weapons largely untouched/maybe giving them like a 5-10% boost instead. ‘’‘’‘’‘’‘‘Easy’’‘’‘’‘’‘’’ massive balance pass to the entire weapon sweat, giving stuff like the lasguns a 30% bump and the Plasmagun a 5% and a head nod, and see how it goes from there.