I would say it is a great time to be a lasman. We are at the same point we were way back when “Shocktrooper” hit the deck. The ammo economy is mighty fine for certain guns, to the point where you can unload into anything that moves, and other guns got collateraled by the pyroclastic flow that got spat out during the collision between the nerf hammer and Scavager.
I am supporting FS decision to crank down on Ammo generation, but not when the way they roll it out is paved with the fresh corpses of formerly good guns.
Anyway. Right now I would rather have them work some sort of ammo economy into Executioners than just leaving the rotting corpse of an Aura hanging, which still provides more benefits than the other two. ES was a questionable choice before this patch went live. Now with less ammo, and an even higher melee focus the other two abilities are so much better, that a permanently active ES couldn’t compete with VoC, or Infiltrate.
(The buff ES received via 5 second CD reduction is like getting treated via a dinosaur bandaid on the cheek while bleeding out of an artery.)
There is not a competition between class balance. Some characters will always be subjectively or objectively stronger than others. This change in particular is irrelevant imo.
They should just get rid of the Aura completely, at least then we can all accept the decision of the many. And I can try and cut myself a place in the meta afterward.
No matter what you do, no matter how many things you nerf, people will always try and find the laziest most braindead way of farming.
Not everyone will make interesting builds or want to challenge themselves, some folks just want to complete missions as fast and efficiently as possible. Now that we can’t endlessly shoot plasma into crowds on Veteran, I will sit back and wait for the dust to settle and the next class build to become the new target.
I will say, each of the metas so far needed addressing. I just wonder how far we’re going to go here.
I hope there is still some fun left in the game when the Great Balance is at last upon us. All hail the Great Balance, kneel before the Scales of Power.
it is compulsory in that ammo returned from backpacks and from the aura scales with your maximum ammo count. I imagine some lasguns can get away without having it.
Nerf wouldn’t be so bad if they at least increased the % that you gain back. Make it around %2-3. With lasguns you dont have a problem as a veteran with the shocktrooper feat. Shotguns bolters auto guns suffer from this nerf. Overall i feel like the “team” suffers in general. Veteran wasnt required to pick up ammo they could left the ammo to the gungryn or zealot or gunpysker. But now it feels like every body is rushing to the ammo to get it. I did come up with builds to reduce the ammo consumption but all of them are lasguns. If the veteran suppliyng ammo to the whole team was a problem aura can be changed and a talent can be added so that veteran can only supply himself.
To be honest I think veteran’s other auras just need to be reworked. A tiny amount of damage and speed will always pale in comparison to the flexibility that ammo gives the team, unless they want to make it complete garbage. I do think scavenger was a bit too strong for what it was, but it getting overpicked was equally a problem of vets other passives being very lackluster.
Maybe they should all give ammo in some way? Damage —> gives ammo based on melee damage dealt Speed —> gives ammo based on how far you run
It sounds kinda silly but I feel it would put vets auras on somewhat of an even playing field, at least. They could each be specialized for different situations; speed aura would be relatively low but reliable ammo returns, damage aura would be most effective when fighting tanky enemies like bosses and elites, regular scavenger aura would give a trickle just by killing priority targets
The point of the “nerf” was to normalize it and bring back the ammo gained into the intended ranges from what it ended up scaling to with the introduction of more elite spam in aurics. I think scaling it back up is a bad idea.
To put it very simply:
Fatshark wants Scavenger to give you a certain average of ammo over the length of a match
Fatshark for some reason decided that it however has to be tied to elite kills
Fatshark noticed that since Auric now has 5x the amount of elites than the skill was designed for, it’s now giving players 5x the amount of ammo of what was intended
Fatshark introduces a cooldown to Scavenger in order to limit the upper end of ammo gains in Aurics from Scavenger
We can deduce that Fatsharks intent was not to nerf Scavenger in general, but specifically limit how well it scales off elites (which it has been doing limitlessly until now). It clearly wasn’t the original design intent that Scavenger would give you up to 6 ammo kits worth of ammo. I sort of disagree with the idea that this is a nerf in that sense, it merely brings scavenger back to what it was supposed to be in the first place.
Incase my logic doesn’t check out to you: See for example the maelstrom modifier that spawns 0 ammo pickups. Do you think they fully intended for Veteran to give the entire team infinite ammo on those?
in that sense I disagree that this change was to target the lack of choice in vet auras. It still is the best aura vet has, and the best aura in the game in general. What this change allows them to do is to actually individually tune other classes ammo economy, like they did with Ogryn by increasing his lucky bullet proc chance significantly. Had they done this change with an unchanged scavenger aura, gunlugger ogryn would arguably become very busted very fast. Consider: 12% chance to not consume ammo for 3 shots on a rippergun for example, which can kill 2-3 elites… which would give you back 4-6 ammo before the change… then you can assume that the ogryn kills a fourth or third of all elites, considering it’s a coop game… the math scales pretty exponentially on that one and might turn Ogryn into an unstoppable, unceasing, self sustaining killing machine pretty easily.
TL;DR this change was required in order to buff things like lucky bullet. They’ll probably follow up with more buffs to ammo economy that isn’t Vet’s aura.
how about it auto-generates an ammo crate every 10 minutes, and elite kills take 5 seconds off the cooldown? Either that, or ammo refund on headshot like kruber huntsman could be incorporated into the left keystone that I don’t remember the name of.
Eh, Lucky Bullet is still pretty bad, was bad from the start. The fact that it’s used in semi-official build guides doesn’t make it any less bad, it just devalues those guides. There’s been a lot of questionable stuff pinned to the launcher and promoted with FS’s apparent blessing, bad is still bad even if it’s got a purity seal tacked on.
Quite frankly they should have had the follow-up normalization in with the nerf, like a small ammo increase on the map maybe. This is a classic game design flaw that’s repeated for decades now, and FS seems to do this more than its fair share while having a slow turn-around too: Over-nerf or over-buff with long, too long, periods in between tuning.
I’d love to be proven wrong though, I really would.
A.) To have an aura provide ammo Regen, without making you be able to both shoot at all targets, rarely engaging in melee, and become indifferent to ammo pick ups on the map.
B.) To have the other auras feel competitive.
C.) It should promote team play and efficiency… Which I argue the cool down does not do, as it incentivizes delays to how you kill.
I think better alternatives to cool downs on aura procs are cool downs on when you receive the ammo in some capacity. Or to make it easier to find ammo on the map, and/or that ammo found to give you more (and ideally the team since the aura is supposed to be a team buff not just a “you” buff).
I think an ammo crate every 10 minutes or so makes sense since you can’t just shoot everything as you may have to spend some time without ammo when you really need it. It helps the team (an ammo crate). So why not?
Or like I said, literally copy and paste the grail knight strength pot mission from VT2 to darktide. The numbers change with difficulty, and maybe with modifiers too, that you need to kill like 100 specials/elites as a team to get an ammo crate. Something like that.
As I said before in other places, forbiding vet from heavy ranged gameplay, while psykers have that, or zealots have melee only, just isn’t fair.
My solution to this entire problem:
Replace Scavenger Aura. Maybe weakspot damage or ranged damage thoughness reduction or reload speed. Something that would make it similar to other auras.
Remove the left keystone (the bad one), and put Scavenger without cooldown there. As it wouldn’t be an aura, it wont upset general balance of pickable ammo. As it would be a keystone, it would be fair, if that changes way how does class plays. You couls also put some funny upgrades there, like chance for nades instead of ammo.
Anyone who thinks that more ammo would allow everyone to shoot sans melee on damnation is clearly off their rocker lol.
I love shooting as vet or ogryn and would pound the trigger at every op - and I do! But damnation still forces me to melee a lot. I’d not survive if I didn’t.
Even if everyone had infinite ammo then the mission would fail if everyone refused to melee, regardless of build.
It’s why I think nerfing guns and ammo is totally unnecessary and is merely fun sponging. Damnation was impossible to gun-only before any nerfing anyway.
If it alters the lower difficulties too much then maybe they can scale the nerf per difficulty? But easier diffcties are… meant to be easier anyway shrug
The point is more that some are saying that lowering the CD to something less than 5 sec is a good Idea.
Me and others are making the point that the lowering the CD only ensentivises the idea to wait out the timer more and more, making the nerf irrelevant in terms of changing the power but only more annoying to have to play around.
→ a nerf you can/ could fully play around is no nerf at all.
Gun psykers don’t have infinite ammo. Psykers with staves and blitzes do but they have peril. Which can kill them if they don’t manage it properly (easy enough to do). That’s part of the psyker and why with staves they’re slow and squishy. I don’t think it’s an apt comparison to say vets with guns need something similar to the “magic” class. It’s like saying in DnD the wizard can use their cantrips as much as they want so I should have infinite crossbow bolts/arrows.
The way they should be balancing that is guns are faster and have higher DPS potential than “infinite ammo” options from a balance perspective. Which I think is mostly the case.
I am just trying to rationalize why the devs would nerf the aura, and if they want to nerf it (I can’t know their reasons, only assume based on what others have said) that I think there are better/more interesting changes to bring it in alignment without causing a clunky feeling of delaying your kills.
