We’ve got another Outcast Engineer problem here. There looks to be a sentiment that Hive Scum is weak, early days I have no useful feedback outside of the one build I’m using. BUT! The ranged build I’ve landed on is EXTREMELY good, and its chewing up the level before anyone has a chance to do anything. Sound familiar? Bardin’s Outcast Engineer had the same problem. It was overall a weak class, but it had one insanely strong build where, If you were a good enough player, you could overcome its fragility and completely dominate every mission. Yet, Outcast Engineer ended up getting a huge buff late in its life cycle.
To be clear, I think its good they buffed his overall kit, only having one viable build was very boring, but the changes didn’t take into consideration how powerful the class was if you knew how to use it’s one good build, and now it’s completely brain-dead overpowered.
The build I’m using with hive-scum isn’t quite to that level, but it’s close. This is a plea to please take into consideration Hive Scum’s current strengths when you start buffing it. We don’t want to end up with another minigun dwarf removing the need for teammates.
Post Script: Yes, psyker still does more damage, but it does it with DoT and still relies on its team. The build I’m using right now for Scum just sprints through a level mowing down everything, immune to range damage, and with almost no cooldown thanks to the stim-lab. Rending from both desperado and stim lab, huge ability CD reduction from stim lab, and huge stim CD reduction from the Sample Collector talent. You never stop shooting, and you can kill crushers with the autopistols.
I’ve seen one scum with twin macs doing this in auric quickplay today, sometimes when he ran ahead, he could gun down every single elite and regular foe before we even turned the corner, cleared whole rooms in seconds by themselves.
Psyker clear speed with infernus doesn’t even come close to this new level of ridiculousness
There are a subset of players who believe this and they are wrong. There is an equal sized subset of players who do not believe the class is weak. Most players are just learning right now.
Funny. I haven’t played the Hiver yet but I was theory crafting on the builder took, without having looked at any other builds, and landed on something familiar to this. Synergy of ammo regen plus that ultimate plus stim buff plus chem cooldown all seemed to be pretty slick.
I’ve been thinking about this and i think it’s not hive scum that’s wrong, it’s the other classes. Why can psyker be a glass cannon without the glass part? What about vet? Of course that puts the release of an ACTUAL glass cannon into perspective.
Like, you know what I just did on my hive scum? I had to disengage from a couple ragers. They would’ve killed me in melee if I hadn’t because I didn’t have a stagger tool for it. You know what I HAVEN’T had to do on my offensively comparably good veteran, arbites or psyker in ages? Yeah…
Although obviously I know that appealing to the idea that maybe other classes shouldn’t be ogryn level tanky and staggery while pooping out intense damage diarrhea is not very popular, and Fatshark probably won’t want to go back there.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that players who feel the class is weak are “wrong.” People are raising balance concerns in good faith, and dismissing them outright doesn’t really address those concerns.
I get the comparison, but the situation isn’t quite the same. Vermintide’s DPS careers were designed around high mobility, reliable dodge mechanics, and predictable enemy behavior.
Darktide’s environment is very different: latency issues, ranged pressure, stagger desync, and less consistent hit registration all make pure DPS play riskier.
I think there’s a two-fold problem in how people assess Hive Scum when they call it weak. Firstly, they’re comparing it to what the Havoc standard is and that’s just not gonna go well cause Havoc is built almost solely to give a challenge to the most broken and abusive stuff out there. So if you’re not running around with bubbles and gold toughness and near inifite stagger and instant problem deletion and layers upon layers of things that flip an encounter in your favour in a single button press, you don’t get to participate. I don’t think that standard is healthy even for the classes that are mainstays, cause it usually cuts their build variety down to like one build. I think the game needs to lean away from that and get rid of the outliers that make that sort of difficulty a requirement.
Second, I think a lot of people underestimate the middle of the tree. They look for the usual ways of getting survivability, in toughness generation and damage reduction. But with the right nodes in the middle of the tree the Hive Scum can become near untouchable, at least in its ranged iteration. During levelling I had some struggles with the Orthus Offensive mission as these 4 Hive Scum teams, with some of the players not even familiar with the fight, kept falling over as they tried to fight head on. Several times, it was just me, everyone else dead, against both twins, plus whatever swarm of Maulers or Ragers killed them. And neither Rinda, nor the Maulers, nor the Ragers could touch me. I had a free run of the entire arena and I could backdodge Rinda forever while shotting her in the face the whole time. The character seems to just fly across the map at the gentlest press of the dodge button with the right talents, with dodges coming back nearly instantly as long as you’re not spending stamina, and with ways to recover stamina from dodging if you are spending stamina. The main limiting factor in whether you live or die is just a) how many disablers are around, b) how much ammo you have to kill everything (if you’re just gunning down the melee twin with no elites around you get no ammo refunds) and c) do you have the kiting space.
Vermintide 2 has plenty latency, stagger desync and botched hit registration along with ghost blocks that you get hit thru. I totes agree with the ranged pressure being very different… but again, DT has skills to deal with that like literal invincibility to ranged damage in multiple ways.
I think people are putting on their rose tinted glasses on when comparing Darktide, a 3 year old game, to Vermintide 2, a near 8 year old game!
Thats not what I am doing. If you want to say that chem nades are too strong or rocket launcher is too weak or that jittery isn’t that good and should maybe be a passive we totally have room to talk. Saying the class is weak when I’m watching players consistently get value without dying all the way to H40 just doesn’t make sense. I’m seeing scoreboards where Hive Scum desperado builds are running double the damage output of two other players in the lobby combined.
The class just isn’t weak. But it is very new and hard to play. People who are used to taking hits on the chin aren’t going to understand why they’re losing games, they need time to figure out what they’re doing wrong and improve. Which is what I had to do too. It was not immediately like I picked it up and started winning, this class really is hard to play. But I have a not insignificant lead time on the public playerbase in terms of practice.
Sadly this is established at this point that with well optimised builds Auric has been mostly delegated to tutorial difficulties. Especially if anyone else on the team is competent.
Don’t worry people. In a week the “meta” will be established, buggy talents likely reported.
When it comes to survivability, some people have to learn how to build for sustain, and accept that not every class has to be arbi or zealot on the frontline. HS is intended as a skirmisher, not a tanky frontliner, but there is plenty of TDR, DR, toughness regen and safety talents to grab, even if there is no True Grit or Holy Revenant here.
I am pretty sure voice of tertium does not work correctly. I use mostly pistols and it does nothing to my Thoughness. However, if I use it with 90% Thoughness regen on curious, I get like nonstop regen most of time. So there is something fishy going there…
