Darktide spams a lot of specialists, but for what it’s worth, I’m not actually sure if these specialists are all that dangerous. They’re fragile, announce their exact location well before they become a threat, and don’t do that much damage. Even a player that’s on their own can pretty handily deal with them - Auric True Solos are more and more becoming less of an impressive accomplishment.
A quick rundown:
Trappers are the most deadly, as other enemies can still attack you while netted, but the net can be cut in half a second if a teammate is nearby
Hounds are more annoying than threatening unless there’s a bomber, and can be easily dislodged, although their movement and attacks are jank
Mutants are a boon more often then a curse, throwing you out of danger rather than into it, and barely dealing damage
All of these enemies have simple preventative solutions - trappers can be dodged or staggered, hounds can be pushed, and mutants can be matador’d with a melee weapon
The danger of these enemies more lies in the fact that there’s a lot of them and you probably won’t be able to get them all, and maybe if there’s a bomber or flamer targeting you they’ll kill you.
When you compare to the OG of Left 4 Dead, the specialists, especially on Expert, can and will maul you once they disable you. Hunters have an absolutely insane damage per second, Smokers and Jockeys drag you into the horde, and Chargers disrupt your team, pull you away, and are tanky. While there are fewer of them, each individual specialist poses a greater threat and are also harder to pre-emptively get rid of, making teamwork all the more important in making it through alive.
To wit, Darktide’s power creep lies not only in the players, but the way the Director is made to respond to player power, and I don’t think disablers are all that scary anymore. Even if there are many, they’re easy to deal with.
Are you new to the game or something? Mutants are a boon? If so why there’s blitz that can 100% one shot them and sometimes don’t one shot other specials if they are not hit in the head? Why there’s waves of mutants and dogs as difficulty modifier? All disablers very dangerous, i had similar opinion about mutants when i was new and inexpirienced player, but i realised how worng i am. All of them can start chain of events that lead to a total wipe on high difficulties.
More often than not a mutant will grab me while I’m out of position and throw me towards a safer location with less enemies in the immediate vicinity. It’s uncommon for them to throw me into danger.
special spam is a pretty big issue to darktide but it’s largely because every ranged weapon either has really good bps or really good burst dps versus maniac. Then, because there are so many specialists, they’ve ended up having to spend most of the time straight up nerfing them, from flamer fire being an instant 0 to toughness and shooting a flamer’s back dealing hp damage to nearby players to just being a tick to toughness and negligible damage from backpacks. Dogs got nerfed, muties got nerfed to be easier to kill, trappers are easier to dodge, etc.
The most dangerous special imo is the dreg bomber. Trappers are only really threatening if your positioning is terrible, and occasionally when they decide a surface or wall can be shot through. They’re very quiet, throw from pretty far distances, and instead of hurting the enemies like the regular fire specials do, they instead buff them in a large radius that also ends up hurting you if you stick around. This is mostly deadly in havoc, and kinda negligible in auric since enemies can’t really hit you and hitmass is a joke anyway.
I think you could make some armor adjustments to them as buffs, maybe hp buffs as well. scab flamer should be flak armor with a carapace helm imo as a counter to knife headshots, dreg could stay the same but shoot at longer distances or something. Scab bomber should have like twice the hp he currently has, maybe 3 times. Dreg bomber needs like 1.5x more hp. Mutant needs to take less damage from melee attacks, then maybe its 4000 health pool might be a real number, and allow it to deal damage on the initial grab.
I think Mutants should also slam you against a wall for a chunk of damage (maybe slightly less than the normal pounding) before they throw you. Right now walls are a really cheap way to not get mutie’d.
To add to this, if you hear a lot of mutants approaching you, and not many other specials, it’s actually easier to push forward into gunner/reaper seeds, as they will always stagger all of those enemies unless final toll (maybe nurgle’s blessing) is in play. This means the gunners will stop targeting you and be forced to reposition and readjust for you and makes your team’s lives easier.
They are more annoying than a threat, coupled with the fact that 25% of the time they don’t work as intended (ie: no sound cue, unable to be staggered, janky movement etc).
Makes the game a chore of “Where is Waldo” with the trapper/dog every time you hear a spawn cue, even if you are currently dance dodging crusher overheads or cross gunner fire, is that fun? It’s definetly “challenging”.
I would say giving the player more agency over this (Cyber-Mastiff), and making their behaviour more honest (like the cackling trapper mod) helps alleviate their annoyance, but what about people that don’t use mods/dog? It feels awful to play against imo.
DRG has a solo friendly approach to this with the iron will + anti-disabler perk I forgot the name, and bosco came for all classes and could help you with disablers/revives. DRG was still challenging to solo in the highest dificulties, so I don’t think giving more (solo) player agency would break the game or anything, It would be more fun (to me) to focus on actual threats like crusher blobs, captains, twins etc, than make a full paranoid stop and wait for trapper to come in your FOV while clutching.
To add to this, maybe it’s a hot take but, I know Zealot, Ogryn and Arbitrator have their own “push dogs away” talent down in their respective defensive keystones, but that shouldn’t be that restrictive, all classes should be able to have a “push enemies away” talent/curio perk/ability with ease of access to make it more fair.
Yes thanks to “hidden” Darktide modifiers: hyperdensity, broken audio and a Swedish obsession with a colour palette composed mainly of different shades of mud.
If you play with new or inexperienced players you will see that they are very threatening. Once you get the hang of them, they are reliably avoidable.
You can also still get insta-gibbed if you find yourself in a bad situation. Recently I had a mutie pick me up while a Reaper was blasting me which killed me during the hulk smash animation. Crusher + Trapper has also featured during the Rotten Armor event – bad aggro means instant death to net.
I’m not sure that disablers need to do anything more than simply disable with the amount of crap thrown your way!
Think Disablers just have the issue that taking control away from the player for ANY reason in a video game (baring death/getting knocked back with limited movement capabilities) just sucks, and is bad game design. I know in said Left 4 Dead series it’s meant to encourage team work and call outs, but there’s a reason it’s the only game (besides said tide games) that really ‘got away with it’. If you’re getting slapped in a room with a bunch of rejects and in a 20-30 minute session you get trappered once but now the entire game is lost because you where the only one actually clearing/killing everything and now all your noobs are dead? Yeah, feels like horse, no matter what you do or say that’s BS and poor game design.
But in a pre-made? Where you at worse have to watch a slide and fall animation before the half second is up and you’re free and every dog/mutant is ended before it even reaches the squad? Yeah, they don’t really do anything.
It creates a dichotomy in player experience that really isn’t great, and now has been equalized thanks to Arbite trivializing the game. So now specials are basically always just dead, getting CC’d, or even if they do impact you actually no they don’t. The trapper’s the only one that’s left, and even she gets pounced a majority of the time, so there’s little ‘threat’ left when everything’s getting staggered or knocked over or bleed/electrocuted to death.
So at this point, I’d concede to making disablers ‘punishing quick time event’s, where you take heavy corruption damage and have to mash your way out of them if you get subjected to them, while mutants fast ball you into walls or are actively coded to throw you into the horde instead of in a random direction. Would be nice, given as Zir pointed out, ‘their annoyance is in the fact that they have to be spammed so you’re often getting BS’d more than rightfully going down to them, thus they get nerfed continually to compensate and now aren’t able to do anything’. That, or only allow 1 spawn of them up at a time but said spawn is like super juiced, either or I’d be ok with, but this ‘middle ground’ is just tiring.
“Poor game design” is a bit subjective for my tastes
It’s punishing, but the high stakes make for a thrilling encounter. So the theory is sound imo, but the implementation certainly leaves much to be desired…
