Another roll-call to nerf Vet and Psyker? (Mr E edition)

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I’ve been busy lately and had no time to play the game outside of obligatory H40 weekly clears, but it looks like Mister E completely switched sides balance-talk wise?

I’ve always thought they speak the closest to the general audience, which is not a bad thing in my book, and they don’t base their opinions on “good players vs bad players” segregation like some other creators do.

I remember seeing them ask for buffs to underpowered things and I’ve liked some of their videos, like “nerf pink modifier” etc, although they still have questionable takes like the recent “Ogryn rock is underpowered in Havoc and needs to damage carapace”, when Ogryn rock is used by many skilled ogryns to kite without depending on grenade pickups and guarantee special oneshots and mutant oneshots on weapons that are not built with 25% mutant perk (Ogryn shield takes 3 charged hits to kill a single mutant more so with Feel no Pain, Power Maul takes 5+ light attacks).

I thought high level players want to veer away from weapon/ability balancing around carapace, and yet he asks for one of the few non-carapace abilities to also damage armor? Weird.

But now it looks like Mr E falls into the same mantra of “ranged classes are bad for the game” that other high hour players tend to gravitate to, even though just 6 months ago Ogryn was the 2nd strongest class in the game after Psyker, before devs just decided to half rollback Ogryn changes with number nerfs and increased elite breakpoints; and Zealot being number 1 solo class since day 1 of the game existing, for that exact reason 90% of speedruns and solo clear videos were made by Zealot, and not Vet or Psyker players…

I’m really tired of the devs making Vet a different class every year and simply not fixing fundamental problems which existed ever since they nerfed Exe Stance and added two more abilities.

They gave away his anti-shooter role to Hive Scum with a better Exe Stance-type ability, his stealth is weak compared to Zealot and is best used for objectives, despite having a much higher CD than Zealot’s, his smoke grenade is useless in auric and blow where there’s absolutely no need for them, two useless auras that don’t synergize with the class or his team role (5% movement speed remains as is to this day).

At this point it sounds like a joke. Mr E himself advocated for substantial Vet buffs in the past year when many people considered Vet lacking in Havoc season 2, and now that devs leaned into Vet’s anti-boss role in Havoc games by buffing kraks when 99% of the people used shredders in Havoc, he wants them nerfed? And to compensate for future VOC nerfs, he wants to give Exe Stance infinite ammo which would be BEYOND BROKEN, more so than current Voice of Command?

The youtubers are consistent at blaming the balancing that they themselves pushed the game towards.

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Well the only real issue with vet is the absolute quantity of extremely effective grenades he can throw out (Also plasma cleave of course lol). I have always been team krak myself and I feel like people have caught on now that krak is ridicules when you have a bottomless bag full of them. Its not just crushers its also bulwakrs, any hoard of elites, and more over bosses. He gets just toooooo many of them currently. If vet perks gave him half as many grenades then he would be fine I think.

Psyker is and always has been insanely good at everything while getting nothing but buffs. As the playerbase gets more skilled as a whole this only gets more obvious. Psyker could go with a bit of a tone down in terms of… Well… Basically everything. Its kind of just been accepted that in every havoc game psyker will have like 2x the damage of everyone else for a while now. Idk why this was considered normal for so long.

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That’s because there was always more to the equation than the damage a class does. If you could do twice the damage yet also routinely survive a crusher overhead, like Arbites when it was first released, that would be quite silly.

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I’m not sure that’s how at least a decent chunk of us view it. Although, I can only speak for myself and those of us whom I know directly.

Veteran’s specifically too strong in Melee with Voice of Command, and against Carapace with the insane number of Krak Grenades they have, mainly. The only Ranged aspect of Veteran that’s clearly doing too much right now is the Cleave on Plasma Gun’s Uncharged Attacks.

Psyker’s… woah. Psyker’s power level right now is unjustifiable, almost across the board. Inferno Staff having Infinite Cleave is just insane because that allows it to completely bypass Enemy Density. Perilous Combustion being able to proc itself leads to it being pretty damn busted. Scrier’s Gaze in general is just absolutely insane. Charged Smite needs to have limited Charges with an inherent Cooldown for Regen, thus removing Psyker’s capability to constantly spam Charged Smite via giving Charged Smite actual downtime. This would give Players an actual reason to use Uncharged Smite, which could still be used at any time at the cost of being way less effective than Charged Smite. I strongly believe that encouraging Psykers to save their Charged Smite for key strategic moments would be healthy for the game. Psyker also needs to be less tanky, since they have access to what’s effectively an Infinite Toughness farm as long as they keep their Peril up. Didn’t Psyker used to have a lower Base Toughness? I can’t remember.

To me and my friends, this isn’t about “attacking Ranged Classes” when these same Ranged Classes are mainly considered to be OP in everything but Ranged unless Cleave is involved, and the excessive Cleave seen on specific Ranged Weapons IS a problem.

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CDR plays a huge part in the powercreep and balance of this game. I stand by the thought that most classes that have CDR in their kit, shouldn’t. Being able to just live at 100% peril while casting Smite or Flame staffing, or casting Chorus/Shout every 10-20 seconds and spamming regenerating grenades shouldn’t be possible. It take away the cooldown management aspect of the game and becomes a spamfest.

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Survivability matters don’t get me wrong. But when you are regularly outputting over 2x the damage of every other class its a little much dont you think? Especially when you consider psyker also has one of the most powerful defensive tools in its default build while still doing insane damage as well.

I think every experienced player for a while now has said that flame staff shouldnt have infinite cleave at the very least. And maybe tone down the damage basically across the board just a bit as well. Like yes it is a glass cannon archetype but we are at the point where its less of a glass cannon and more of a glass deathstar.

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Rule number 2: Most enemies should be given the chance to engage you

and a guaranteed lunch break, sicks days, a robust healthcare system and if the enemies are divorced they should be able to see their kids every other weekend!

Also the class that everyone expects to deal with the specialists before they do stuff actually deals with specialists before they do stuff and that doesn’t fit with this sudden new year rule so that’s that.

Very good :+1:

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As what he said, scum is the best rule breaker, but he never mentioned about it. Besides, do you really think he as a high skill player? Look at how he played a scrier in background video. Useless and always dragging his team back.

Infernos staff, unbound smite and soulblaze is overpowering. But the other things mentioned should keep what they are. Not all players want to play every class like the same zealot. The differentiation of classes should be keeping on.

Besides, I’ve reposted this video on Bilibili. You may be interesting in what Chinese player said.

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Got time to finish it and the thing about the BS rules has nearly a Cormac McCarthy quality to it

“The breaking was always there. Before the rule was, breaking waited for it.”

And that’s kinda my biggest issue with this pretentious nonsense. Of course the rules that you just tailored to appear broken to fit your new year flip will turn out as broken, who would have thought :roll_eyes:

And of course the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed…

You made up some rules (and somehow managed to miss Hive scum but nevermind) and you think the rules are being broken and that’s all very good and nice, but also F your rules bubz!

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He didn’t play all too badly, he doesn’t need to play perfect to get his points across, the problem is that they directly compare Psyker and Veteran to Zealot and Ogryn, thinking Psyker doesn’t deserve to be stronger than melee characters because it’s “easier” to play them, meanwhile Psyker and Vet without golden toughness die to one burster exploding in their 98 HP pool, and Zealot and Ogryn can tank/block multiple overheads

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I like to count Zealot “until death” overheads survived as number of times they’d have died playing psyker.

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In a game with multiple character types, one of them enevitably will overperform the others, unless all classes are almost identical.

I think the devs made a mistake by nerfing Ogryn after their rework, but then they buffed Psyker’s survavibility which is weird because Psyker already has both unlimited ammo and great damage. I don’t think it’s fair Psyker is also great at self-sustain.

But that being said people absolutely have scoreboard bias, because they see Psyker dealing 2 million damage in Havoc and instantly think they carried the game, but let me tell you something, across my hunrdreds of games playing Havoc 40, I’ve seen only a few times where Psyker was THE ONE who saved the run multiple times by doing bold plays, and not other classes supporting them so they can rack up their damage numbers on hordes and random procs of auto-Brainburst. Ogryn is usually the most impactful player on the team, but they also deal the least damage according to scoreboard…

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Solo’s are made with zealot because they have the passive, which gives you one get-out-of-jail-card every 120 seconds. No other class have something like that. Given how Darktide works, where you can go fine 30 minutes, and die in 1 second due to small misshap (or even just bad luck), the passive is ultra strong when there is no one else to help you.

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You are preaching to the choir m8

As a matter of fact i might be a radical with this, but i personally think that players at this point should have no say in balance whatsoever and it should be all left to the devs alone, who should ignore our inputs as much as possible!

Reason for that is that i have a rather large social network in Darktide and lot of the sentiments that are pronounced on this board ain’t really that widespread outside of it. Or better said, there are quite lot of people that are happy with the status quo and see what we have right now as a decent equilibrium.

And you might have noticed that this demography isn’t really that much represented on this board!

Furthermore, with such a sizeable social network i have plenty of opportunities to see people actually self-balancing themselves just fine, good example being the Plasma gun that went literally extinct in our premades months ago and the DS IV that was on the retreat until rotten armour was reintroduced!

And i also know for a fact that there are ton of people with ton of hours, ton of hard earned experiences and opinions on how things should be done and very few of them want to see crayon paintings from a loud minority magneted on their fridge…

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When you play zealot, you intentionally play more risqy knowing you have the passive, so you really shouldn’t translate it 1 to 1.

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Well yeah psyker is the hardest class to clutch/do anything bold with since they work best when inside of a team to support them. They also have the highest skill floor and the highest skill ceiling. Doesnt change their absolutely bonkers DPS though. Judging a class based off of solo clutch potential is silly. It is still a team game, it just kinda sucks when one class has the best ranged damage, best melee damage, great defensive tools, and also now doesn’t even have that bad survivability.

Just consider this. Who is going to have the bigger impact on the game. A scrier’s gaze force greatsword psyker or a charge relic blade zealot?

Sure the zealot is going to have a much easier time once people start going down. But the psyker is going to stop the situation from going bad in the first place by just killing everything.

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I don’t think there is any bias in this at all, because it is an expected outcome for anyone familliar with Havoc: Psyker deals damage, while frontliners like Ogryn or Arbitrator control the enemy and don’t let them near Psyker. If the damage dealer (Psyker) is endangered, their performance drop significantly. It is a very common concept in video games and there is nothing bad about.

People usially bring up scoreboard when it’s the other way around and instead of being on top (like expected, usially with OP Inferno Staff/Soulblaze/DoT galore build) Psyker brings griefer anti-meta build like Bolt Pistol + Assail and has 2-3 times less damage and kills than tank characters.

That being said, I’ve stopped playing Havoc completely this season because the meta has gone so stale I can’t take it anymore. Let’s hope the new major patch brings new content and massive balance changes that fix this tedium.

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Flame staff psyker, sure, they will perform better overall in most cases.

I have to say, I rarely meet melee Psykers in public lobbies who can perform to this degree. I know they exist, I just seldomly meet them.

Most melee Psykers in H40 still go down first or second when things go south, and Relic Blade Zealot with Chorus or FOTF is a preffered teammate to me personally (as the melee frontliner).

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Well that’s a skill issue thing lol. Assuming good skill the psyker is going to be doing easily %50+ more damage and basically just doing the same role but better. Its just annoying that in terms of DPS psyker is just THE role no matter what. 99% of havoc comps want a psyker and those that dont would be improved by having a psyker. Of course psyker should do more damage, that’s the point of a glass cannon archetype. But like %20-%30 more not double.

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People are sooooo quick to call anybody doing YT videos expressing their opinion on Darktide ‘pretentious’ or other juvenile name-calling. At this point it doesn’t even matter who it is. It’s no surprise there are so few still engaging with the community. And with the Dueling Sword nerf debacle we’re aware of what the chinese community thinks ; any attempts to contain the player’s power creep is gonna meet with their disapproval, no matter that it’d be healthy for the game. So whatever.

Back to the point at hand, it’s pretty obvious that nobody is calling for a carpet nerf bombing for Psyker or Vet, least of all Mr E. Vet’s main issue isn’t his versatility and damage, which is kinda compensated by his inferior mobility. It’s the billions kraks per game, which at this point are also just better frags (given that other classes are now in a competition to see who can take out hordes faster). Psyker’s problem isn’t that he’s decent at everything, in addition to having really good dps. It’s the current state of Scrier’s, the infinite ammo flamethrower, Warp Unbound + Psykinetic’s aura allowing for infinite Scrier’s and uninterrupted staff spam or smite, and such.

Honorable mention also to the Force greatsword special attack, stun mines with regen, infinite Tauntgryn, and that specific Ogryn build with Rumbler/Big Boom/Fire away that staggers and burns everything in a 3-mile radius.

All this stuff is gimmicky nonsense that’s nice to have when contending with Havoc-levels of difficulty, but actively hurts every other game mode. This is probably what Mr E means by ‘rule-breaking’. Whether or not your teammates are using these tools literally defines whether your Auric run is gonna be the expected level of challenge, or a completely boring cakewalk.

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