Arbites is a major success, but there's a few duds

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Arbites is close to perfection, in my eyes. The variety in builds is great, but, there’s room for improvement. Particularly Nuncio Aquila and Terminus Warrant.
Nuncio Aquila is very thematically consistent with the Arbitrator’s hold-your-ground playstyle, the problem is, it doesn’t do enough to actually prevent a wall of enemies from breaching an area. A wave of armor such as Maulers, Bulwarks and Crushers can easily force you out of NA’s pathetically small field. One single bomber can force you out. The main issue is that 3 of the 5 buffs that this ability gives you within it basekit are worthless. The only ones of note from the basekit are the 7.5% toughness per second regeneration – which is not actually much to write home about – and the +15% damage to anything within the field. The rest is entirely inconsequential… and why is the stun immunity only applied to when you are in alternate fire?
The left sub-node is the real interesting one. 30% toughness damage resistance and 30% ally revive speed. Both very welcome, however, it gives the idea that the ability is supposed to be used to save teammates… which, Castigator’s Stance does a MUCH better job at, and I don’t think I need to explain how.
I believe it is easy to fix Nuncio Aquila. Firstly, give a damage buff to every ally within the field, rather than a debuff to enemies within. Secondly, maybe increase its effective size a little. Thirdly, maybe let the damn thing move…

Terminus Warrant is a whole different can of worms. It’s simply unsustainable and unintuitive. It offers close to zero utilities compared to the competing keystones: zero damage resistances, zero cooldown reduction, no stun immunity, no movement speed bonus… While I do get the idea that it is a heavily damage-focused keystone, it misses the mark. The other keystones can provide a respectable amount of firepower while also providing great levels of valuable resources, (rightfully) defeating the shoddy intended purpose of Terminus Warrant.
The fact that the subnodes require you to be over a certain amount of stacks, and that simply swapping your weapon can disable those subnodes’ effects, is extremely jarring. This particular limitation incentives players to needlessly hold onto their currently selected weapon, whether it’s a good choice or not, so as to not entirely miss out on their talent point investments. This easily leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths. Why does a keystone come with such downsides? A risk for very little reward.
And let’s be honest. Melee stacks are just unsustainable… 30 hits go by in an instant. The ranged stacks are naturally disproportionally more interesting. Thing is, as anecdotal as this is, I believe that the more you play the game, the less you will use your gun and the more you will use your melee. The other keystones provide simultaneous, general buffs to both your gun and melee while requiring no ammo investment. Ammo that, the higher in difficulty you go, becomes more and more limited.
My simple suggestion, make the stacks equate to seconds and have stacks of ranged-to-melee a 1 to 3 ratio. Have the timer tick down as you have your weapon out. Adjust the total duration of the buffs accordingly. This is just one idea, I’m sure there are better, but the one currently in the game seems untested.

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You might like this idea. I think it sounds pretty nifty.

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Yeah, I completely agree with all of this. The more I play with Arbite to finish up their penances, the more I realize just how much is located on the left and right side of the trees, and how little actually encourages you to go into the center (on the bottom half past and including the abilities I should say). If it weren’t for the 20% Ogy/monstrosity damage, and the damage from hitting things connector node leading from left to right and vise versa, I wouldn’t see a reason to ever go into the middle at all.

Terminus Warrant as the comment/other thread stats is just worse Weapon Specialist, I tried to use it for a boss melter build with the boltgun only to realize Execution Order did the same exact thing (30% extra damage at all times to the target that matters while getting 15% damage after the first kill to everything else) but I didn’t need to waste ranged shots against chaff just to keep a melee bonus going, and just got the damage for free on pounce/getting a marked kill. Beyond that, I just had no reason to ever use the keystone that felt good, as it feels like the only reason to ever use it to be to equip it with a braced autogun of some sort and dump your 30 rounds before swapping back to your melee, which is like, why? As you pointed out, the better you get, the less you shoot to conserve ammunition for what matters, and I found myself at 30 ranged stacks infinitely while only ever getting above 3 ranged stacks when I needed to mow down a line of gunners or ogy’s or something, in which case those stacks vanished in an instant and I went back to 30 ranged again. Just felt like a strictly worse Weapon Specialist, as that at least only requires 1 shot every 10 seconds to feel like you’re ‘maximizing the keystone’, while this one demands 30 every 30 melee hits and it’s like ‘cool I swing my melee twice in a dense horde and now I should just dump ranged shots I guess?’.

Would adore a better ratio there, or maybe adding some form of ammo refund to the ability to encourage it’s use? Like getting to 30 stacks makes the first X percent of the mag cost no ammo, allowing you to get multiple hits off with the riot shotgun or something and properly swap back and forth like the thing wants you to. Getting a swap speed bonus feels like it would be nice too, along with ranged shots counting for melee stacks at the ratio you describe. Sounds all good to me.

And yeah, the fact you start with the Nuncio Aquila really did not do the class favors, I thought the class was incredibly boring while leveling until I got access to the other two abilities. It just, doesn’t do anything, has a radius for ants, and while it’s ‘supportive’ for sure, you’re pushed out/actively push forward out of it’s range basically instantly, and don’t even really feel like going back to it half the time given how broken you are as a class in general. I actively forget I have a Combat Ability a lot of the time while playing Arbite, and Nancio certainly doesn’t help me remember XD. I’d say either increase it’s range massively, or reduce it’s CDR by it’s duration, then have it not start cooling down until it ends, but in turn have whenever you press the button it moves to where ever your cursor is pointing. It already has the functionality where if you hold the cursor down when activating it it will glid through the air to the location you pointed it to, just use that again but from the location you initially placed it at. Would make the thing feel like an actual ‘mobile speaker’ you’re taking with you to push the advantage, verses just a tiny little apple i pod that you forgot in a bus seat 3 years ago.

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