I only did havoc 40 so i could get havoc forged for instant party finder requests to be accepted😌
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This. This is one of many gripes I have with havoc.
I used to say to new friends joining Darktide that “one of the fun thing about Darktide is that you can play pretty much any configuration and weapon you want, and you can pull through. It gives you the opportunity of choice based on what you find fun to play as and with.”, but in havoc, this is not even remotely the truth.
You can tell how the gamemode is poorly balanced, since there are so clear meta builds there, which is a shame, because what I personally find fun in Darktide is swapping around weapon and class builds, trying out new things without having to opt for “the meta”.
Fatshark really messed things up with havoc.
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Reduced ammo and toughness should be special conditions:
Reduced ammo and toughness should be special conditions and not tight to havoc levels. Here is why:
Currently the H40 meta favors ammo efficient weapons and gold toughness to make up for those modifiers.
I think for the future of H40, it would be the best if the meta would change based on the special conditions (e.g. beacon of purity for blight missions or bubble for fading light). For this to happen the special conditions modifier must be more impactful than the level modifier.
However, those two level modifiers have a stronger impact for squad composition than pus hardened skin, which should not be the case. If this doesn’t change, then ammo hungry weapons, which have already a tough time, will rarely ever be used in high level havocs.
Also, this would increase variety, so that different havoc modifiers have different meta load outs.
Disclaimer: I know that H40 can also be cleared with non-meta builds, but it’s still the most noob friendly way which most people look for when assembling a team.
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I’ve rarely had a good havoc session and usually I don’t play for very long which doesn’t help with how the party finder operates.
Yesterday was really the first proper good session I can remember which ended up with ranking up to 23, but the kicker was, we were largely meta slaving quite a bit, we had a purgatus bubble psyker, a plasma vet who had smoke grenades (honestly the first time I saw that used to good effect), I was the zealot booking as often as possible, and lastly we had an Ogryn with a shield and taunt, which isn’t surprising both due to the health pools of somethings as well as the sheer predominance of shooters.
My take away from that experience was that it was quite exhausting as well as repetitive, spam ults, dodge and weave behind corners and into bubble or smoke, funnel enemies into chokepoints where possible because a single shooter is literally scarier than any boss or special or melee elite for that matter.
Between the common experience of pub lobbies being largely dumpsterfires, and overall the feeling of havoc bringing back that feeling of darktide during its first year where any enemy with a gun made you lose your bodily fluids but with havoc being way harsher since now they move and shoot faster and often are way sturdier and you are more fragile while at it.
I rarely find it in me to even to try, if I even can since public lobbies are very few and infrequent now, not to mention I have to give up most of the builds I use normally. Realistically we all know people only play it for some goodies (cosmetics) or other and once you get them, you basically do your one run a week if that and call it a week.
If the objective was to make this an end game mode with great longetivity and replayability, I’d say its a failure, seems most everyone agrees playing trench warfare and being scared witless by any mob with a gun is just not fun.
Also whoever thought having a modifier where you get the entire map peppered with gas grenades, I doubt you play your own game, sorry, not sorry.
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There really aren’t that many ways for them to add difficulty. More complex AI, maps, mechanics etc aren’t realistic at this point.
Most games simply make the enemies into bullet sponges doing 5x the dmg players do. If there’s something I can’t stand, that’s it. Havoc at least is trying to tweak a number of variables like toughness, tgh regen, hp, enemy numbers / hp / dmg, map modifiers, ammo and so on.
Like you I’ve played a LOT ever since release, and haven’t done a single Havoc in weeks. But I don’t see an easy way to fix its issues:
The party finder experience is horrific. As someone with ADHD I can’t stand extra steps & delays in any area of life, and stuff like WoW’s M+, Overwatch’s ridiculous 5-15min matchmaking queues etc make me wonder how those can even exist, how does anyone actually play those things?
As for Havoc itself, the main theme there is that it has to be hard. No matter which way you use to make a game hard, the result is always going to be the same: A heavy reliance on meta and your team. Balance being what it is with stuff like VoC, smite, bubble, plasma, DSword etc this means strongly emphasizing a very narrow set of builds & weapons. Which in turn strips away a large part of why I love DT in the first place: that massive variation of weapons & builds, and freedom to explore a near infinite ways to play in Auric & Maelstrom.
I don’t see an easy way to get around these issues. And so, I don’t play Havoc. But Fatshark is clearly invested in it so hopefully with future improvements it’ll get better. 
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I did the “unlock” assignment and haven’t reallly touched it since, as I mostly play with pugs and they are already struggling with simple Aurics.
Havoc 30+ is hard in ways specifically to appeal to an audience that thinks the Auric mission board is boring. If that’s where you are still having plenty of fun and a sufficient challenge, then it’s not for you. This is also why the cosmetics rewards don’t require more than 25, which is slightly harder than the hardest Auric Maelstrom modifiers.
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I genuinely love havoc because it provides challenge xd
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problem with havoc as a whole, to even consider it “content” i’d need to be able to pull it off multiple times in a row in the time i got that day, not spend the better part searching for a match or group.
reduce ranged by just a tiny bit so bubble and book get back to “meh”, lose the demoting and i’ll be recording 10 matches of havoc a day instead of one (if any) 40 for the week and the rest HISTG’s
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I mean I generally find Aurics too easy overall but have zero interest in Havoc.
It’s just poorly designed difficulty and balancing. (or lack thereof) Designing a mode around your overpowered abilities rather than nerfing/reworking said overpowered abilities is certainly… a choice.
“Gold toughness is too strong”
“Better remove regular toughness gating” (or grace period, whatever you want to call it)
Just oof. It’s just going to make more problems down the line if they ever actually address the current outliers balance wise.
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I don’t think
It could be interesting if:
- it was not restraining so much the builds
- there was a diversity in the conditions
- there was a true difficulty increase from rank 20 to 40 and not a random difficulty each time it generates a new mission
- we could choose any “difficulty level” under our own level
- no demotion… I want to play something interesting, if you make it interesting such mechanic are not needed… I would even say these mechanics are just based on frustration… it reminds me clearly the crafting locks
I don’t play havoc. I have been able to up my level to 32. Then I did not pay attention you could be sanctioned for playing havoc. Played an only level 20, then got demoted from 32 to 20 cause I played, instead of 1 if I had not played it at all.
But, maybe I will try it after I complete my last penances not havoc. Not even sure considering how this game mode is not actually pleasant for me… and when I say don’t pleasant, I mean boring, frustrating, annoying, tiresome and badly designed.
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I’ve been trying since it’s release to reach 25 for that cosmetic.
My best is 24. I can never get past it. Even if I beat it, I can’t beat 25 with randoms so my best remains 24 for next week… which I then need to redo to stay at 24…
Havoc is killing my will to play Darktide so hard.
I’m the kind of player that goes all in on difficult content and has cleared 40 a bunch of times, but this mode is just flawed. The health, mass, and spawn increases feel good but a lot of the rest sucks. Corruption puddles exist to punish people who want to melee in the melee game and getting shot to death has never felt good. They did nothing to stop gold toughness immortality or Psyker having infinitely scaling damage; so people feel compelled to force those onto others since they added a penalty for failure. Nowadays I can’t even play it if I want to because party finder is dead.
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I wanted to like this mode but there are way too many head scratcher design choices which leads to a frustrating experience rather than a fun one. So yes, i stopped playing this mode too
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I personally really enjoy high havoc, but this is absolutely the predicted response to the content. Only a handful of people were even asking for a harder difficulty to begin with.
That said, I think havoc >25 expects a level of teamwork from random lobbies that isn’t realistic, you really need to have a full party of people in voice to do the content and then its not really that hard. Slow walking a 40 with domes and shout still has its challenges of course and there is little room for error, but I digress.
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Well I ended up getting invited by a buddy of mine like 4 hours after making this post and we cleared a 39 and it was definitely as much a pain in the a** as I expected. I had to play damn near perfect to not get absolutely demolished by the gunners.
If my teammates weren’t running Chorus/Shield/Shout I would of died 10 times over. Not to mention the ammo pickup situation - I pretty much limited myself to melee unless absolutely necessary to keep our vet stocked up properly. I ran a crit revolver/relic blade build that is just pure damage with the toughness reduction on crit. Pretty much what I have been running forever except I recently swapped out the Rashad Axe for the Relic Blade. Here is the build I ran - Death to all - Build for Darktide - Darktide WH40k - Edit: swap the flak for reload speed on the revolver and the build is right lol
Is the difficulty there? Oh yeah. Is it tedious? Not as MUCH as I thought it would be, but I had a great team. Gunners and ammo pickups are the main things that kind of threw me off - increasing enemy health marginally while making certain enemies damn near instant kill level would give most people the idea that we would get MORE ammo, not less. There were 3 separate occasions I literally stepped outside of cover, saw a gunner like 50 yards from me and in the time my brain could process getting back behind cover, my ENTIRE toughness/health bar would disappear. If I didn’t run until death, minimum of 5-10 downs.
I will say it requires much more coordination and game knowledge than probably 90% of the player base is ready for - which is good to an extent considering people wanted more difficulty - but the entire de-ranking/limit attempt should be removed. I also think limiting ammo and forcing people into a very specific playstyle while expanding practically every opportunity an enemy has to f*ck you over doesn’t bode well for a difficulty increase.
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Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Havoc is just the penalty system. It makes the high end players that actually enjoy the difficulty (me) completely ignore it due to either the threat of losing their access to it or not having access to it at all because they aren’t engaging with it, while making those ‘just trying to get by’ never getting the teams they need to actually succeed (as can be seen so heavily in this thread/in game with anything between ranks 20-25) since those that could carry them/do them easily are ONLY ever going to be playing the highest level, because if they touch anything lower and then don’t clear a 40 that week they get rocketed down to whatever low level they cleared at, and that is just absolutely something that should not have been shipped with this at all.
I know I made my own post involving my greivences and what I think would let the mode shine for those that wanted to engage with it, and I still stand by them. I know I’d actually find it rather fun popping in to 20-25’s and trying to help people that just want the legs to get them like se05239, but I don’t want to lose what I’ve gained as I do actually really enjoy the one havoc 40 I’ve been able to do a week WHEN I get a good team that’s willing to do it.
Like literally this past Sunday, I got into a 40 with a random squad with 2 vets and 2 chorus zealots (me as one of them), and had it not been for 1 trapper dropping my ass into the flames and baking me into a downed state through my undying before my team could get to me, it would have been a true survivor run. Full randoms, no mices, just god gamers running around casting their golden toughness and keeping with the team until completion. Had only one scary moment where there was a captain + a nurgle on the bridge section, and we had to keep running circles near the elevator with use getting lower and lower as it went but eventually succeeding. But outside of that? Clean run, no complaints, felt fantastic using all the best builds to truly live and thrive in the hardest content known to this game.
But sadly, many, many people aren’t going to experience that, as the barrier to entry as Elodie pointed out is ‘to dam high’, and results in all the good players just going back to auric with their build variety and only touching Havoc once a week if even at this point, or just burning themselves out due to it being very strict on what builds it allows and then going back to where the game is open and fun. I know I did that going for finishing up the armor during one of the weeks and it just tanked my desire to touch it, as the low level havocs where you can still mess around are boring af, but the high level ones require X build with pure perfection and I can only really stomach that at best a few times a week, or like maybe once a day, before I’m off to enjoy my build variety again.
It just isn’t conducive to a ‘punishment system’, as there’s already going to be few players wanting to ‘go through the hassle’ to begin with, let alone lowering that number even more by not having people want to host. I know this week I actually for the first time since havoc started have a really easy 40, but didn’t run it/likely am not going to run it because I got my 40 in from someone else and now don’t want to risk it especially for no gain. But if that punishment system wasn’t there, I’d totally just throw it up and see what happens.
But yeah, Havoc is just in a ‘systems hell’ state, that exacerbates all it’s pain points and makes it feel that much less fun to try and engage with. Top it all off with all the high end players (at least on this forum for sure) pointing out how ‘they got all they wanted from it and are done with it’, and that just makes it that much worse as all the people entering it or still trying to get it done to their satisfaction are forced to run around with literal drivel, with no hope of a good player just being like ‘yeah sure I’ll just play a game because I want to play the god builds and actually feel like it’s worth doing so, why not’ coming in to pull them over the finish line.
Just feels bad, and I do hope it gets revised.
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Its fun, but when I could usually sit for hours, I’d only have the capacity for 3 Havoc40 games because of a culmination of things that aren’t really “player friendly”. But at the end of the day tho, why the fk would I be playing the hardest difficulty of a game for a pleasant time.
Luckily no one is forcing to to grind through all 40 levels. Except one person in this forum that does want that to happen to everyone.
I’ve read it only up to ‘could of’. People who write could of shouldn’t vote and their opinions are irrelevant.
I would say the contrary.
Even someone that cannot play havoc 40 can voice an opinion.
But you may be right, considering the success that this game mode encounters.