I’m a melee guy and always have been, but I just found out that Rotten Armor enemies seem to get around 70-75% ranged damage reduction and honestly, WTF?
I feel like ranged playstyles have gradually been getting disincentivized one thing at a time, the CIVI maelstrom, the survivalist nerf, the increase in elite enemy spam, and the BS in havoc like reducing ammo pickups by 75% and pus-hardened skin giving them ranged damage reduction. And now a brand new event modifier that gives melee scab elites a fµck ton of ranged damage reduction?
Players were already spending less time with their guns out on average and now this?
What’s the goal here?
I only use range for specials and maybe gunners. Or shoot a rager or bulwark who’s bullying a team mate.
I did like playing ranged veteran with the penances, but the playstyle is unreliable. I also like gun Psyker. But gun Psyker can’t sustain the ammo. Same for Gungryn. Having to suck up all the ammo makes me feel a detriment to the team and you’re forced into playing the ammo rat race if you end up with other ammo hungry players, which is most of the time.
A simple thought process would conclude the solution is more ammo, but I disagree, because being able to shoot everything bypasses a lot of game mechanics and having four players who can do that would make the game even dumber.
I’m not opposed to carving out a ranged specialist role for Vet. But I think the Ogryn gun ult should be reworked.
I honestly don’t think there’s a goal. There’s no rhime or reason to the game’s direction.
Trying to focus on ranged builds is heavily discouraged in this game yeah. Snap shooting then going back to melee is usually better than being a full pew pew build, and even the pew pew builds will switch to melee a decent amount of time because you just die if you don’t control the mobs, and wasting ammo shooting them one by one isn’t really great at helping you survive.
Unless you use the stealth skill. But then you’re using the stealth skill, and not have voc.
And then you waltz into another map arena which is full of elite and trash gunners. I don’t play Tide games for ranged gameplay, frankly speaking Fatshark has no idea about what makes good gunplay. Which doesn’t mean I haven’t done range heavy builds or that you cannot succeed with ranged playstyle. There are just some people who seem to expect that playstyle should be easier and the most optimal approach at all times.
The game builds heavily on Vermintide, because that’s why Fatshark is good at. I personally don’t want to it to be a heavily ranged based horde shooter. There is a bazillion of games like that on the market. Meanwhile what we have here is fairly unique.
The funniest thing that all Fatshark has done is inderectly “nerfed” ranged weapons that were always mid at best. All the listed changes in the OP primarily hurt Lasguns, Hellbores, Autoguns, Shotguns, etc, while mega-cleave weapons (Flamer, Rumbler, Plasma) or high-dps weapons (Bolter, Recon) are still the king.
They literally keep cementing the lame stale meta that we have now and people act like “meta slaves” are ruining Darktide, but not Fatshark.
Really? The boltgun isn’t also 75% less effective against enemies above 50% health with the rotten armor buff? …
Most of those weapons are still bad because the general challenge quotient to weapons that treat 1 bulwark the same as 40 bulwarks is impossible to alter without being brave enough to make those things not infinitely cleave into density.
They were busted in VT2, last time I played it. Infinite ammo regen - Blundebuss Huntsman. It was pretty terrible balancing, tbh.
Ranged is vital in this game, though, moreso than in Vermintide games. There are more specials, more ranged enemies. You can play without ranged but I think it’s harder.
Without the modifiers OP mentions that disincentivize ranged, it’s dominant. You can shoot down nearly every threat.
But (for now) Plasma Vet is still very strong. If you switch to Lasgun, outside of Havoc it’s usable. You absolutely can use Ranged, it’s just that they’re bringing it more into balance so it’s not “shoot everything”, it feels to me.
Seriously, as soon as I suggested we play rotten armour my Veteran friend immediately went to switch to DS4 and it makes sense why but shows it’s stupid how FS is handling things
It’s an imbalance. I know it’s cope but I still believe gunplay can come back to being a regular part of missions outside of specials and greed killing, but there’s all of this that I would like to be done first
Update to the guns that have been un-niched (lasguns, autoguns, brautos, vigilants, twin-linked mehvy stubbers, maybe more it’s always just so much with this game)
Ranged enemy threat buff (damage, spawn compositions, and/or also AI improvements so stalkers take better positions, flank)
Melee enemy comps and weaknesses
Ammo economy
I do not believe in “equip gun and shoot all game” because that’s silly and means half of your build has no weaknesses, and that’s, like, bad.
Survivalist is also bad, but 100% because it benefits Kickback and Rumbler by orders of magnitude greater than any other weapon. Like it really should just be a vet only thing, since for every other weapon it is just meh despite how much I see people insist it’s necessary for getting around Havoc…
I guess my ideal would is havoc stalkers become the norm or equivalent. They make me feel like I did at game launch, but now all of my classes have tools that work (unlike launch). Dangerous, but not impossible, and not straight up immune to mechanics like how dregs used to be immune to suppression.
fatshark sold us this game telling us that wasn’t vermintide, but this was a lie, in vermintide ammo was a consumable that was used to get a little boost in power to get trough hard sections of the map
Darktide wasn’t supposed to be like this, there should have been enemies shooting at you behind cover and gun play was supposed to have a different role, but patches after patches, the release of the game for consoles, the talent tree update, and malestorm release made the game change to look like vermintide
to the point that veteran, the ranged class, had to be removed for gameplay balance, because we now are not playing darktide anymore, we playing low key vermintide
I dunno about that, you still can and do shoot quite a bit more in in DT than in VT. Any reason you might shoot MORE in VT is simply because of the busted ammo economy there.
I’ve been playing games tonight using Vet with Lasgun, spamming it almost constantly. I had to work to make myself come close to half ammo by the end, it’s so sustainable, and I shot a LOT of enemies. Basically the only thing I didn’t shoot was Crushers.
These changes effect Helbore the least, especially after the buff. With shock trooper it has near infinite ammo, and it has good damage into all elites.
What’s still holding it back, and has been since release, is absymal sights and weapon fov.