Are toughness and sprinting pointless? Help me figure it out,

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
21

Ok thanks. If you’re not a veteran of Vermintide 2 this is how Temp Health mechanic worked in that game. Melee rewards you with Temporary health. Fortune favours the brave and so on.

So being overly agressive and avoiding Ranged is working for me too as a Sharpshooter(!) as I pile in blasting with shotgun for the stagger and wail around with Melee. I think I’ve even got a higher pool of toughness than Ogryn too. 0.o. Coupled with the Camo skill I think I’ll hone being a shock trooper/Leroy Jenkins.

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22

You forgot the most important thing. Ogryn have the single highest toughness regen rate before it being doubled. They don’t need +toughness, but they can go from 0 to 100 in something like 10 seconds with the +100% talent, if not less time.

It’s part of what makes them so much better in melee than zealots.

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To be fair, I’ve never picked that talent, in the middle combat I prefer active regen

24

Don’t need the talent for insane regen to begin with at least.

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25

The feats to regain 20% toughness on a ‘hit’ is pretty darn useful. Pair that with a weapon with the perk(?blessing?) to replenish X% per successful chain attack, combined with kilsl which rewards toughness, I’d argue these are was is keeping an Ogryn on this feet.

Increasing that toughness pool, results you gain more toughness for the percentage based replenishing feat and perks.

As for % Toughness Regen speed, likely more beneficial for those not getting hit and have a large pool to begin with, like the veteran, who more likely will have a range weapon and has means to ‘regenerate’ toughness already when beyond 8 meters from an enemy. Getting hit pauses regeneration as far as I’m aware, so more toughness I’d argue is more beneficial for an Ogryn.

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Toughness’ primary function is protection from ranged damage, its not supposed to be a console game “shield HP” from melee damage, the reason the Vet has so much is his “intended” role includes duking it out with ranged enemy packs.

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Except that the zealot needs that buffer to close into melee since sprinting and their charge is interrupted by ranged fire. It also doesn’t help that to everyone besides the vet, they might as well not have any because a couple of shots blows right through their toughness.

One vet isn’t going to be dealing with all the ranged at higher difficulties, while also trying to deal with the melee that is there. The ogryn and the zealot, from my experiences, can’t keep the vet and psyker clear of melee while also not getting shot to death by the ranged grunts, and the psyker will just get eaten up trying to get some head pop locks.

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Yeah I think most classes people are figuring out that Melee happens too often and it’s too punishing (through toughness) to ignore so more and more players are meleeing and trying to close distance rather than ranged. I had a really good run frontlining with a Psyker who blasted the flames for the stagger then we both piled in with melee. Literally spent 85%+ time in melee and figuring out how to get into melee fast… and we were the ranged classes.

Vet with Bolt Gun is really only effective ranged weapon at Higher diffs. Everything else suffers with low ammo spread through level or cant deal with armour/Muties/Crushers etc.

29

I might be misremembering but i think Ogryn gets a passive 20% less toughness damage perk as well, so coupling that with the single target heavy attack that gives toughness on hit and the 50% less damage from big enemies, you can easily tank most big things, as with every attack on you, you can return a heavy attack and recover most, if not all, the toughness you lost.

hordes are slightly worse though, because they can easily swarm and get a lot of hits at the same time making the heavy hit regain less effective especially if coupled with ranged mobs… but toughness on multi hit perk on weapons help with this.

I was getting about 45 toughness on each heavy hit last i checked and about 20 on multi hit.

I wanna add that Toughness as it functions right now is balls and much worse than it used to be and it was already rather pointless and deceptive, as it doesn’t function at all as the tutorial tells us.
Since unless you can pump back to 100% as soon as you lose toughness, you’re going to be downed and stunned, since it’s going to snowball rather quickly.

This is why ranged enemies are so incredibly lethal, since they can just keep shooting and every hit becomes bigger and bigger damage AND they can also suppress you, making you stagger and walk slower and fire back at worse accuracy.
Hordes of smaller enemies has become a juggernaut of pain as each strike increases rapidly, since the small damage from them that used to be manageable will now snowball into a big punch.
This makes the backstab spawning enemy’s a very dangerous thing, since they will take the 100% toughness, you’ll turn in panic to deal with them, and the swarm will get you instead.

So you’re now one mistake from being downed. increased toughness isn’t going to help you, but might actually be detrimental and increased health is most likely the only buffer you have now. Since as soon as you notice you take a hit, run away and recover. You can’t take a second hit, because that will most likely end you. So push like you’re on steroids and dodge-slide out of there and relocate, that’s your choices now.

You should also look into using the melee weapon with the highest dodge distance and focusing on CC abilities imo. As I Psyker I’ve been mostly using the flame staff as it is cheap and staggers everything, couple that with the constant toughness regain of passive quelling and gaining warp charge in coefficency, i’ve managed to be the only one with full hp in my missions.

The reason why you see Ogryns survive as well as they do is because of their toughness regeneration mentioned earlier. they can quickly recover to 100% and they’ve got a lot more health and they take less toughness damage when they’re damaged. it doesn’t mean they are gods and that toughness is fine, it just means they are the only ones that can slightly coupe at the moment. However, if you’re not spamming melee or stagger in someway, than you’re just as bad off as everyone else and that kind of forces us Ogryns to yet again be pigeon holed into always be using the Shield…
But I’m going to try a bullrush focus build tomorrow, maybe I can use that as an escape and reset ability.

Personally I think this is the wrong approach to toughness, since it encourages ignoring toughness and keeping it low. Sure, that encourages a lot more dodging and pro-darksouls get-gud gameplay, but it also removes choice imo and becomes counter-intuitive, which might lead to players feeling cheated… because no one in their right mind is going to go, less toughness has to be better? right?

I think it should function where 100+ it functions as a shield, and below 100 it has bleedthrough like it has now, because than you have a state in between safe and broken which is what toughness is lacking… They’d still be able to get the snowball effect below 100, but at least players can control when that happens as each one needs different buffer to manage.

It also gives us an actual progression of growth(which seems to me to be missing completely), as our characters actually becomes physically TOUGHER by increasing our toughness… because we can take more hits before being caught out.
Too me this seems like a much better way of using it, since it becomes a lore friendly way of showing a seasoned warrior on the battlefield and his grit.

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30

With the toughness discussion already in full swing, let me preface this post with my thoughts on sprinting first. Sprinting has fairly low combat utility beyond initiating for melee. Beyond that, its utility for fleeing is limited as enemies can catch up fairly reliably if the player does not dodge.

What I found with my Ogryn on Heresy+ is that the knife family of weapons gives him the most sprint speed of any in his weight class. My Bull Butcher knife with 80% mobility gives me + 0.71 sprint speed. That sounds like a wasted stat, and if I was going for a usual combat-only build, that’d be true. BUT, I don’t use it for that.

I use it to roam the map. For the sake of collecting crafting materials and finding scriptures. Sometimes lugging along a single grimoire can be a fun challenge if the group is up for it. I think that’s meant to be the use of additional sprinting speed: To allow you to scout the map and scour it for items faster and cleaner without getting separated from your group too far to catch back up to them if necessary. To do this, the player has to be able to take on every threat, including disablers like hounds and muties all by himself in a speedy manner. That requires practice and sometimes liberal use of the Ogryns grenades, otherwise the player can become an annoyance or even a dead weight to the group if they have to go back to pick him up.

As for toughness… I haven’t used any trinkets that raise toughness on my Ogryn for any of the builds I take out for Heresy and Damnation pugs. With the crafting system not really functional yet, I haven’t been able to experience with much of anything yet. Two of my trinkets give around 40% more health altogether, and the third trinket adds a wound along with some other stats that I can’t quite recall but which I doubt are utterly crucial for survival. Bottom line is, as far as I have experienced playing solely with pugs, stacking health and some wounds has been working out splendidly for me. For feats, I take Lynchpin, Heavyweight, Bullfighter, Die Hard and Non-Stop Violence. Unstoppable can work as well though.

Secondary is the Rumbler, to provide the CC and armor-piercing damage that the knife lacks. The Rumbler is also very quick to switch to and easy to handle, perfect for maintaining mobility.

When I go for a more combat-oriented build with my shovel or club, I usually switch out the Heavyweight feat for Blood & Thunder.

I pretty much never use the shield. It’s probably the overall ‘best’. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the best, in my opinion. It is definitely the safest, most reliable in the hands of everyone. It is very hard to screw up with the shield. But in the hands of more skilled players that can handle risk and decision-making under pressure, other weapons can easily outshine the shield. Making a wrong decision, such as a wrong charge, can easily spell a non-shield user’s doom.

31

That fact the sprinting doesn’t allow you to escape enemies and they skid onto you like they are on roller skates it the worst offender to me.

I currently only sprint for two reasons:

  • Skip the initial 500mt of running into empty introductory part of the map because I’ve listened to the shallow banter >9000 times
  • Run to someone that is being locked by a special to free him/her

That’s it. Sprint doesn’t serve any other purposes.

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