An early feedback on "Elite resistance" new modifier

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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First of all, I want to point out that I’m very thrilled that FS is adding new difficulty modifiers and I think it’s a very clever way to add replay value to this game!

Before stating my personal point of view on this particular modifier, i will illustrate my 3 games experience that I have had so far with it (I did all 3 games on the veteran class):

  • 1st game: Bolter/Combat Axe
    I hadn’t played this build in a good while, and didn’t notice anything wildly different from a normal damnation mission appart from the smaller hordes/increased specials and elites spawns (which was fun btw), although i noticed a couple times how I felt my axe wasn’t hitting as hard as I remembered… Difficulty was subpar, we didn’t face any real challenge and mostly steamrolled through the map

  • 2nd game: Revolver/power sword
    same as first game, more elites was fun, but nothing incredible. Once again, I hadn’t played this build for a good while (I main zealot) and might have found the power sword a bit underwhelming this time, wondering if the PS had undergone a damage nerf recently. The revolver was performing pretty okay, which was expected due to the buff applied to it this patch.

  • 3rd game: Plasma gun/sapper shovel
    A disaster! I was under the impression that my plasma gun (which is a godrolled one) was doing near zero damage to specials and elites, requiring an ungodly amount of shots and ammo to kill them. And the shovel… Oh boy… I was hitting endlessly at groaners and poxwalkers without even making a dent in their rotten skulls…

Then a couple of my teammates pointed the fact that enemies dealt more damage and had more health and armor: and then it hit me like a truck: Elite resistance is actually the 6th lvl of difficulty! We’ve been asking for more challenge for months and we finally get it! “Awesome!” I thought! But… Wait a minute!
the addition of this peculiar difficulty modifier actually creates more problems than it solves.
How come I did a couple games without even notifying the healthpoints difference in enemies, and it felt so rough on the third?
—> look at the weapons I used

This level of difficulty increases the imbalance between overpowered weapons and lower ones. Weapons with a high overkill value, such as the combat axe, will feel only a slight difference in terms of Time-to-kill towards a specific target, while already underwhelming weapons such as veteran’s shovel, devil’s claw or chainweapons (which I don’t even dare to try on “Elite resistance”) will become absolutely useless… This difficulty modifier will increase this feeling of “I just have to take an antax combat axe and a bolter” to a raid. In the past couple months I’ve made a tremendous effort working at making lower weapons interesting to play on damnation (chainsword, chainaxe, devil’s claw, shovel etc…). With this new modifier? Forget about those weapons! Take a high overkill value weapon such as Combat axe, Powersword, Heavy sword, Force sword and forget about the rest… All those weapons’ breakpoints you have worked so hard at, where you can one-shot, two-shot etc a particular enemy is now GONE! You aren’t gonna reach those breakpoints anymore and those weapons you have spent thousands of plasteel are probably not going to be relevant anymore.

It’s been talked about for a while now, on this forum: a 6th level of difficulty involving higher enemies healthpoints is a disaster in terms of weapon balancing - which already is a disaster by itself. It also put more strain on an already much criticized crafting system, by setting even tighter breakpoints to reach and invalidating millions of plasteel people have already invested to reach those breakpoints.

I’ll finish on a positive note: the increased DAMAGE enemies are dealing is a total bliss. Having those 3 lowlife scab riflemen destroying all your toughness and 75% of your health in a blink or an eye if you don’t carefully watch your positioning really brought back that frightened feeling I once had when playing this game, making you feel like you are an hopeless deer in open field surrounded by a pack of lions. You don’t pay attention: you’re instantly dead!

Conclusion: I think the extra toughness given to enemies is really screwing up weapon balancing right now, further increasing the inequality gap between high end and low end weapon types. I would suggest either buffing all the lower weapons to the Combat axe level, or keeping “elite resistance” as is with extra damage dealt by foes but with them having normal damnation healtpoints :+1: :+1: :+1:

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imo the modifier should just work differently

Vermintide 2 has a modifier where all roaming enemies are replaced with elite enemies (regular elites of that difficulty).
This is what i expected and hoped the new modifier to be.
It would also fit much better with the modifier’s description.

3 Likes
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From the sounds of people playing it, this modifier is actually making you play on one difficulty higher on low intensity. It’s a trick.

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So i tried once this condition with ogryn and it feels weirdly balanced. Rend blessing (can opener) makes it so there is almost no difference for armored melee elite. However non-armored enemies like bulwarks or reapers feels more tanky, same thing for elite shooters. Shotgunners and gunners can be comically tanky if you are in a gunfight with them and can’t apply can opener, so ogryn feels even more odd now cause of how many rippergun shots regular humans can take, same for BB. They should just manualy tweak armor/hp stats for different enemy units and release it as t6 (or either tweak some rend blessings, but still will be unimmersive condition for ogryn).

UPD: almost no difference for bolter, cause you can apply shattering impact easly.

1 Like
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Yes, that’s what it felt like… Only now we don’t know how much hp the enemies hvea, since we can’t test against them in meat grinder.

Which gets us what the op says, people will simply use overkill weapons because anything else is too risky. This turns it into a meta farm condition which will most likely feel easier than regular low intensity.

Personally I like the concept of the condition but I feel like it should be it’s own thing, not a mission condition.

This is a perfect thing for a global event. A special mission with a different take where you play more like a dark souls game of fighting harsh enemies as you struggle to survive. Could also be good to add something to them so it’s clearly a different type of enemy than you are used to. Maybe give them all a green nurgle glow or poisonous fumes coming off of them.
This would allow the meat grinder a toggle to test out these “champion” variants.

This special mission would have much smaller quarters, maybe fighting on High ground with pitfalls so dodging is risky and a very different feel from the regular game.

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I don’t have an answer myself, but it makes me wonder if there’s a way to get away from enemy HP/player damage as a scaling mechanism.

I haven’t tried the new modifier yet - boosting enemy health as a modifier, with the goal of applying sustained pressure to a team, seems like a fine idea as-is, but for the future if a 6th difficulty is added… is there a better way to do it than “Add more health”, so that player ability (rather than weapon performance) is the biggest factor for stepping up a difficulty level?

EDIT: for example, Killing Floor 2 adds additional behaviours to enemies e.g. Gorefasts using their blades to protect their heads

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If I were to give FS as much credit as possible I’d say maybe they’re using modifiers as a way to test the dials they could tweak for an enjoyable difficulty 6. I personally would quite like to see health scaling similar to DRG, where common trash enemies retain their hp values from D5 so breakpoints against hordes and shooters remain the same, but elites, specials, and bosses get scaled up.

Enemy attack speed could also be an interesting value to tweak for higher difficulties.

Anyway I’m glad they’re playing around with something other than just special spam for more difficulty, after all HSTG definitely biases towards certain weapons too.

Edit: Apparently this modifier gives specials 50% more HP than Damnation. That’s uhhhhh kinda absurd.

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IMO this mode is garbage. I expected it to be a mode where we faced off against an increased number of elite enemies. Instead it is like low intensity, but with HP and stagger resistance cranked all the way up to the heavens. In other words it is bullet sponge mode. An absolute disgrace of wasted potential.

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Good post - just want to add some perspektive:
I’m not a top tier player - I hold my own quite well on normal damnation and am hard pressed by HI Damnation. HISTG Damnation I can only do when I’m carried, so I don’t play that mode.

I played Heresy Elite Resistance with a friend yesterday who’s not on Damnation skill yet.
I got to say we liked it - it changed the pace of the game and brought some variety which is a good thing.

I think it’s a good thing that we don’t only get just harder modifiers (not everyone finds Darktide to easy mind you!) but modifiers that bring variety.

PS
We collected over 600 Plasteel in that game - usually I ended up at 350-450 on Heresy. Did something change? Or does this modifier increase ressource drops? Or have I only been unlucky up til now ^^

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