Ain't "Only in Death Does Duty Ends" sub-talent of VoC punished too harshly?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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tl;dr:
“Only in Death Does Duty Ends” sub-talent of VoC makes your Ability was too worse on top of costing an extra talent point, making it a deal almost nobody takes. Removing the radius reduction cons from it would make it a more reasonable trade-off, while still costy enough to not make it a no-brainer choice (your CD is still increased by 50% and you pay an extra talent point).

This sub-talent (allowing to revive your downed allies in radius) plays very nicely into power-fantasy of a support kind of role, the closest probably you can get to paladine or cleric in DT - but it’s mostly taken for meme builds, so you don’t see it in the field remotely as often as you would like unfortunately.

And I understand why, it goes against the “correct” way of thinking that goes like “you must not prepare for failure”. I.e. if you spend some valuable resources (an extra talent point) for a safeguard that will be used only in case when everything goes wrong (when 2+ your comrades go down and it’s so bad you can’t just revive them normally), you kinda jinx it by doing so, because instead you could spend it on something that would be constantly useful - and thus would prevent things going south in the first place.

But that’s only part of it in case of this talent. Not only you spend an extra point for something that you may not really need that much in your typical mission - you also seriously hamper effectiveness of your Ability which you’ll be using off CD most of the time. Not only you increase its CD enormously, you also reduce its effect’s radius as well.

So, in a nutshell it’s “your ability is much worse all the time now, but you may sometimes do something useful with it, on rare occasion” kind of deal. No wonder almost nobody takes it.

I think at this point we could just completely drop the radius reduction part of it, especially now, after VoC was nerfed with its CD increased in recent patches. It still will cost you one extra talent point, and you’ll get your CD increased - pretty harsh price to pay. No need to finalize it with a kick to your nuts, to boot.

What do you think?

EDIT:

It would be really interesting to see “Only in Death Does Duty Ends” being split into two mutually-exclusive nodes instead:

  • One that increases your VoC’s CD by 50%, but leaves its range unmodified
  • One that reduces the range, but leaves CD unmodified

So that player would be able to choose what kind of trade-off they prefer, for being able to un-down teammates with it.

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I think that more abilities should have some trade-off stuff and not just straight up buffs. Anything that will make the Powercreep worse is an immediate No in my book.

1 Like
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This particular talent already has too much trade-offs (+50% to CD and radius reduction to the stagger effect VoC does), so not sure how what you said applies to this case; the general balance practices are kinda beyond this thread’s scope. It has so much trade-offs it isn’t worth to pick it actually, as what it does is really very niche and rarely required (only for cases when you can’t just revive your teammates after knocking down everybody around them with normal VoC). So in this particular case there is no “buff” whatsoever, it’s making a niche, rarely useful thing to be at least worth picking to some players.

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It would be really interesting to see “Only in Death Does Duty Ends” being split into two mutually-exclusive nodes instead:

  • One that increases your VoC’s CD by 50%, but leaves its range unmodified
  • One that reduces the range, but leaves CD unmodified

So that player would be able to choose what kind of trade-off they prefer, for being able to un-down teammates with it.