A cool headed thread for discussing the Vet aura nerf

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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For whomever is interested yet did not read the patch notes nor played after the patch, the veteran aura that gives ammo has been put on a 5 second cool-down.

Undoubtedly this change has been made to address the fact that the aura out shined the others by quite a good margin and I’m surprised it lasted this long before it got nerfed to be quite honest.
That being said, I believe they might have overdone it. While I believe that under damnation difficulty this change will feel marginal, in auric it’s quite a big deal. There is quite literally a stream of elites and specials running at you constantly.
Rest assured that this change will impact all of us in the following ways:

  1. Veteran - Not all weapons are created the same, there are widely varying levels of ammo efficiency between all weapon classes. This will make Vets restrict their weapon pool, so as to not be a burden on the team. It restricts weapon choice put simply.
  2. Ogryn - This nerf hits especially hard when it comes to our loyal protectors, the ogryns. If before you were tempted to pick up the big shooties that shoot a lot, now that’s basically throwing. Yes even with that side of the tree being buffed. Now there’s Kickback, a mile away there’s the Rumbler and about the distance from the moon to earth there’s just about everything else (that was kind of already the case if you ask me but now it’s even worse). So it restricts Ogryn players, with their substantially smaller pool of available ranged weaponry.
  3. Zealot - If you’re a zealot that respects themselves you were already not particularly caring about the vet passive. Won’t bother you too much. As for the mainly ranged Zealots out there, well, yeah…
  4. Psyker - Gun psyker should be pretty much RIP since it competes with potentially 3 other people which consume ammo. In such games ammo could have actually gotten pretty scarce. Now it’ll be a dire situation. Nothing more to add, somewhat obviously.

In conclusion, this change was targeting the perceived lack of choice when it came to the Vet auras, and it was pretty damn strong even if you didn’t care about the build variety. The results will unfortunately be very different, restricting not only the vet but every class in the game in some fashion. Not to mention the fun factor of being able to unload a mag from time to time. The game also needs to feel good, and quite frankly watching your ammo count every 5 seconds isn’t it.
Remember, even if you’re a psyker main and don’t care (I am a psyker main) this will affect you too. Less ammo that goes around is more pressure on you to deal with situations and will also get you bonked more often.

I do not propose to revert the changes, nor to buff the other auras. But it’s quite obvious to me that the aura can’t remain in its present form. What I do propose though is this, have the aura proc for 2 seconds and within that time frame you get all the ammo just as you used to be able to before, penetration kills and all, then after that it goes into cool-down for 5 seconds. Next time you kill a special/elite your 2 second window pops up again and so on. This I believe will be a good middle ground. The other less imaginative way is to simply make the cool-down be 1-2 seconds instead of 5, which is still a SUBSTANTIAL nerf, even if it were 1 second. Penetration kills were massive when it came to the total ammo acquired in a game. I estimate that we lost at least 50% total ammo gained from the Vet aura throughout an Auric match. My source is that " I MADE IT THE F**K UP" but it shouldn’t be too far from the actual numbers.

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

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Your take on the effectiveness of Ogryn ranged weapons is insane. That aside… Just reduce the cooldown to like 2 seconds instead of 5 and it’s fine.

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Care to substantiate your claim? There is no other weapon that can deal such a massive amount of damage withing that time span. Surely some weapons win over others when it comes to specific tasks, but nothing comes close to the Kickback if you are to consider a well rounded weapon. Not to mention ammo efficiency, which is the question at hand.

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Kickback got overtuned, doesn’t make it any less of a leap to say their other ranged weapons don’t do plenty without hitting serious ammo issues. This is just power creep brain. There’s like one stubber variant and one ripper variant that are genuinely pretty bad, everything else is good to great and I don’t think I’ve ever run out of ammo on any of them despite liberal use.

Ogryn ranged spec has some issues but it’s not the weapons themselves, people have just become stupid accustomed to spamming kickback every 3 seconds and now the goal posts have been moved to where that’s supposed to be the baseline now. Ogryn gets plenty done with ranged even if you take survivalist out of the picture.

TL;DR stop comparing things to top performers, compare to the actual content you’re meant to use them against. Ogryn ranged good.

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Gun Lugger Ogryn could already save more than a hundred ammo across an entire game if they took a Heavy Stubber given that each bullet shot into an enemy rolls for Lucky Bullet and the weapon has naturally high ammo capacity which can also be buffed up by a talent. With the buff they gave Gun Luggers the Stubber builds will save more ammo per match, presumably to somewhat offset the Survivalist nerf. Survivalist still helps all Ogryns a lot, even with the cooldown, as most of his ranged options are very strong with low ammo capacities. They’re even naturally incentivized to protect Veterans for several reasons already.

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There are some ideas I had to make it easier.

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Honestly, just remove/replace it and balance ammo economy other way.

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A sensible choice if FS wasn’t absolutely trash at balancing.

My preferred solution would be to change the aura to “ammo efficiency” meaning that shots consume less ammo. That way you get the benefits of being able to shoot more, but it also punishes pewpewbrains that can’t watch their ammo counter.

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I mean, trying to balance weapon’s ammo pool and ammo pick up is probably easier than having the entire thing play around a single skill of one of the four class.

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On high difficulties the ammo aura was extremely strong and meant that veterans could almost completely ditch their melee and I can understand why they nerfed it

however both other auras are still completely worthless and they basically only exist as connecting joints to other parts of the tree

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Then the point of contention would be what they replace it with. Currently as the change is now it only takes away from the veteran without any silver lining.

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Other 2 aura is kind of comparable to other classes’s aura which is ‘cool, whatever’ bonus.

The only noticible one other than Survivalist is probably Zealot’s corruption heal especially on Othrus offensive hard mode if the team are struggling.

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From my perspective, the ammo economy has indeed been out of whack for a long time and needed an adjustment so that it’s a resource you at least have to think about. I also believe that this nerf was a pretty big overcorrection.

Right now, it feels bad to use by punishing the user for killing quickly, scales inversely with difficulty, and swings the balance of the game much further into melee territory.

Obviously people will have different opinions on where the balance should be regarding melee vs. ranged, but even as someone who has mostly melee (or staff) focused characters who use 0 or near-0 ammo pickups, I’m seeing my friends having a bad time playing the game already. It’s also fostering even more of the toxic everyone-for-themselves playstyle in pubs where everyone is rushing to gobble up all the ammo pickups for themselves due to the scarcity. It can’t be healthy for the game.

Personally, I’d like to just see the Survivalist aura replaced with something completely different in the tree and for ammo regen on taggable enemies as a universal all-class feature that doesn’t require a Veteran around. Maybe something like 0.5% ammo on kill. That would allow things like Gunluggers and Gunpsykers to still exist (along with those of us who enjoy the less-loved weapons) and would make it so that having a Veteran or not on the highest difficulties wouldn’t be such a night-and-day difference. But the cooldown has definitely got to go, regardless.

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Aura that let’s you resupply more ammo from the pick ups?

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other two auras are absolutely not comparable to other classes and 5% sprint speed is absolutely nothing compared to psyker being able to grant 5% crit and reduce cooldowns by 5% for every elite killed, 20% more damage on suppressed enemies on gunlugger ogryns or just being able to passively purge corruption as zealot

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Hmm, maybe you are true.

Although tbh I actually like the sprint speed aura, totally not because Agile Engagement, 5% seem pretty minimal but when I’m in the mission the speed boost is noticible while zooming around. Would be even better if it’s 10% or something

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I like that.

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incorrect, scavenger/survivalist got nerfed in patch 13 along with the overall ammo pool of the vet with the Fully Loaded scam

the most value of the aura went on those under 100 capacity weapons like revolver or half the ogryn kit

i don’t believe autoguns lasguns and bolter/plasma are affected by this patch whatsoever, lasguns were getting very little charges even before patch 13, autoguns were always ammo hungry weapons since the very start

the bolter was getting the most of the value off scavenger before patch 13 when it would get 2 ammo back every time, after that it felt like not having the aura at all, (exept for those famous no pickups malestorms) you still have to clear all the map from pickups anyways

i did a dozen of missions today with bolter, the first one with survivalist, all the others without, i didn’t notice any difference, so yes, you can just remove survivalist from all your builds, even if you play with revolver now, and you be just as if you had it

moral of the story survivalist has always been worthless since patch 13, unless you were very much into revolver meta (which i wasn’t thankfully), or just wanted to help the ogryns

needless to say, it does affect one other thing, executioner’s stance, now its at his lowest possible, even though they buffed the cooldown

been a joke since patch 13, didn’t think it could get any lower, but here we are

only thing left to nerf of the original veteran kit are grenades

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I can tell you the columnus autogun was extremely ammo efficient prior to this patch as you could stack damage buffs and be able to kill specials weaker than a mauler in like 2-4 shots while the gun restored 7 per kill, in general i feel like most weapons used to benefit a lot from scavenger even after patch 13 (which just removed the rounding up on awarded ammo and meant orgyns didn’t have infinite ammo)

but yeah I feel like this nerf is way larger than patch 13 (for non-ogryns) as more often than not i see people killing elites in droves rather than one or two in a five second span

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I’ve said it in other threads already and I’ll say it again: no cooldown number changes!
It does not matter how short the CD is, it encourages shitty gameplay. A Cooldown to the ammo aura says nothing else than: “How much ammo you generate is completely fine but you can’t do it faster than in Xsec intervals.” which then leads to people waiting out the timers. Which is probably exactly why it’s 5 sec so you can’t reasonably do that, in high difficulties.

This whole discussion comes down to two phylosophies:

  1. You are fine with the idea that ammo shouldn’t be the be all, end all resource to balance guns around and a team-wide aura for regening ammo can exist, it’s a question of X ammo per Y activation.

or…

  1. You are not fine with the idea that a team-wide ammo regen should exist because that’s so strong of a utility, it cannot be nerfed to allow for any other aura to ever take it’s place.

We first need to come to a consensuses on which of those two is the way we want it.

If we want case 1; Ammo regen needs to be handled not in a flat %-ige across the board but in weapon cathegories instead. Las weapons get back a certain amount per E/S kill and single action grenade launchers way less while boltguns get a different amount and bullet based weapons a different amount still. You get the idea.

If we want case 2; Ammo regen should be made a vet passive/ talent. This way it’s a strong reason to pick the veteran, it removes it from competing with the other two auras as it blew them out of the water and it allows for something a little more sensible as a 3rd aura like a decent bit of recoil reduction combined with faster handling for guns across the team or increased range for guns or better ranged damage or something which is fair competition to the other auras (while buffing those a bit since they currently serve no purpose)

I personally think a team-wide ammo regen can exist, for as long as the numbers are tuned with some thought and nuance. I do however see the other side here as well and would be acceptably happy with the compromnise I layed out for said side.

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