Inherently I’m going to make some comparisons to VT2, so sorry if that upsets anyone.
I seem to fail more missions than I succeed when we go for Grimoires, even in premades. I admit, this could be because I am bad at the game and need to get better.
I just don’t understand how their mechanics are fun or needed, as their risk/reward aspect seems heavily skewed towards risk. They also seem to more heavily favour levelling up, due to their exp bonus, rather than being sought after at level 30. In VT2 they were necessary to get the max reward. But in Darktide the bonus isn’t that great. In addition, the loss for losing is much greater.
The issue I have is the way the corruption bleeds down, which seems to cause a number of issues:
Antithetical for searching - we need to search for the 2nd tome but as we search our health gets much lower.
One shot by snipers - with corruption at its lowest a sniper can wipe the team if unnoticed; or in the middle of a horde with trappers/dogs/mutants.
Chip damage - when corruption is maxed out chip damage becomes lethal.
In missions I go into with grims I chat to the team, and sometimes they feel the same and we just skip them. They just seem to create a lot of unnecessary stress. The only part of the game that needs them is the weeklies, and that can be re-rolled.
Grimoires aren’t necessary, so I don’t understand why their mechanics are harder. I was looking forward to them and scriptures being introduced, but having now tried the grims out in premades and pugs, I avoid that part of the game. Seems like a waste.
I straight up refuse to play missions with Grimoires, because I don’t even want to give some idiot the ability to pick up an item that will likely make us lose the game.
Yes. They had a point in Vermintide to give you a better chance at unique gear, but there’s nothing like that here. You don’t need exp at 30, and cash quickly becomes irrelevant.
The payout presently is way too low for the added risk. I don’t like how it interacts with the wounds system either, I don’t think going down should be tied to corruption. Just limit number of times you can be picked up before a rescue is needed based on difficulty.
Grims are a trap, plain and simple. Its a book of heresy, and you completely gimp your team by even touching them. Something that they are useful for is if you pick one up and immediately destroy it, IIRC, it will purge some corruption from the team. So at the very least if your group is got some purple on each of their bars, you can grab and smash a grim to fix that.
The risk is even worse when you realize that when your corruption ticks high enough, you CANNOT be downed once, or you WILL die, as the corruption counts as your wounds.
Be it a sniper, a Pox Burster, or a particularly poorly timed overhead.
You will die, and if you’re one of the two people with the grim, that grim is then gone.
I’m of the position that Grimoires make the game actively less fun and should be removed entirely from the game (and to a lesser extent, Scriptures). I quit playing Vermintide 2 because of them.
• I hate searching for them; when you’re with newer/casual players, the game simply gets slowed down running around to nab them.
• I hate that I have to suffer because someone else chooses to go after them; I refused to get them entirely in Vermintide 2, but others still would, impacting my gameplay either way.
• The game becomes so much harder against my will; I’d rather just decide up front if I want to play with reduced health for greater rewards.
For the people who like the mechanic, the only excuse ever given as to why they like it is due to the rewards. If you refuse to remove them, then at the very least don’t make them affect the entire party.
I appreciate, at least a bit, that they’re more or less optional and not especially valuable to Darktide, because it means most groups likely won’t deal with them… but I have a feeling Fatshark is only going to increase their value in the future. I just want to state my opinion that this would be the wrong way to go about it, in my opinion.
For the people who like the mechanic, the only excuse ever given as to why they like it is due to the rewards
For me I just enjoyed that it both rewarded map knowledge, and was a choice on increasing difficulty/lowering the amount of mistakes I was allowed to get away with. It’s an optional challenge that you can get rid of at any time if its too much. idk, I just like the added difficulty and the bonus gear was an incentive to get better.
Agreed this change doesn’t make sense, as toughness is supposed to replace temp HP from VT2. Yet in VT2 your temporary healthy had to be completely depleted before your actual HP could be touched. In DarkTide your HP can get chipped away even with your toughness at max. This style of play would make sense in VT2 where your temp HP would normally protect you. But here, you can easily just be attacked in the back by a random mob and die with a full toughness bar. It seems like whoever made this change decision wasn’t in contact with the people who designed the toughness mechanic.
Valid points, but I prefer other ways of increasing difficulty as opposed to Grimoires. I just find them to be an exceptionally anti-fun, anti-team mechanic
EDIT: Specifically they don’t feel like a reward until the end of the mission, they’re just an extreme punishment to the team until they can be capitalized on at the end. I’d rather reward players who can search quickly immediately with some kind of benefit for them/the team.
Grims, as they are, worked well in VT2 because of THP. DT having chip damage makes the Grims a nightmare to work around especially in high difficulties.
I enjoy grims, they are an optional challenge. some extra reward would be nice but you shouldn’t always need extra candy to make something enjoyable
They are a pain in random groups at higher levels tho, as mentioned, they always get picked up even if the teams not doing great, but at least in Darktide you can just not take the grim missions if not in a full team and be fine
Yeah, I mean I’ve read a lot of thoughts/opinions about these and it always comes down to 2 main issues:
the reward is not justifiable for the extra difficulty - which IS high. Pretty much no one wants the extra money and XP. They served a purpose in VT2 where it dramatically increased the chances of getting a good chest which could get you a red weapon. That was a legitimately good reason to want to get them, as opposed to here.
The chip damage makes the mechanic make absolutely no sense. Got 2 grims? There a horde? Your Toughness at 70%? Well, guess you die if you get hit in the back.
Both of these issues point at greater issues with the game I think. The weapon acquisition outside an RNG time-gated shop is non-existant. XP after level 30 does nothing. Money isn’t a super vital resource. So…what’s the incentive here?
And the Chip damage mechanic is just bad and I haven’t heard a single person say that they like being downed even though they still had toughness. If These weren’t issues, the grims wouldn’t be nearly as bad as they are now. The issue here isn’t the grims, the issue are flaws in the game’s design.
Yes they are. In vermitide 2 grim were fine always in same place, it was cool to look form them in hidden places. Also i don’t really like that grim and scripts are only when there is 2nd mission in the map, because of that im stuck on 11/12 script because i can’t get a mission with them.
Not even considering the rewards, as secondary objectives, that’s just not something fun to do, imho.
They’re just objects at spawn points spread out in the missions.
Nothing specific defends them, no event occurs when you collect them (except getting impaired by locking a crate slot and lowering your max health), there’s no specific side area, timer, gameplay phase (defense/survival/assault/etc.), no increased danger from enemies/enemy types, any future reference or explanation in what they are or how important they might be, and they’re not thematically specific to the missions (individually).
It’s very simplistic but I get it’s also reminiscent of Vermintide and probably not particularly difficult to implement in current and future missions.
I wish we had more meaningful side objectives if that’s a content that should be considered.
As a possible comparison: GTFO has a set of optional and increasingly difficult side objectives the team can try to complete (or just ignore).
I’d prefer having to retrieve an optional servo-skull and defend it as it follows us to the exit/extraction point, then continue the mission (just a rough idea).