The burning floor and clouds of gas is none stop and it is making many of these maps unfun, boring or annoying. It doesn’t feel like an actual challenge, just “Got to wait for this to disappear to move”.
They are constantly being laid at areas that are basically choke points and you have to stand around and wait for the effect to go away.
Scab bombers despite having their burn time reduced are obnoxious to deal with because they spawn in packs.
Tox bombers can throw grenades from really far way or just no clip the grenade through geometry and you have to run long distances and or back track just to stop him from harassing the team otherwise the gas just becomes overwhelming. That clouds damage seems to last forever and the visual effect is misleading so its hard to tell when it is actually done or not.
Dreg flamers don’t seem to be designed the best. Their sprays leave large areas of fire and if their tank gets punctured they explode when dead, not from the tank taking a certain amount of shots, and not a ticking time bomb. If a teammate shoots the tank you have to get ready for the disruption in melee. Melee weapons shouldn’t not cause them to detonate.
The red barrels are just too much. The knock back is manageable but the burning effect is annoying, especially on high difficulties. It last way too long and is not a threat to the enemies Scabs can stand in the fire while still fighting and are barely affected because they have armor and high health pools. Plus teammates constantly trigger the barrels as they are running by them causing those in the backline to be separated and forced to just stand around before playing catch up. Why cant we pick them up like vermintide?
The worst part of these mechanics are the choke points like the narrow bridges on no mans land. It can take ages to pass them because the 4 bombers that appear are spamming them mix with scab flamers spraying flames and dying in the spots leaving more ground flames that bypass toughness.
let’s say for a second we take out all of em (which I don’t support but still)
what are your suggestions to make the game substantially harder to beat then ?
I don’t play for sightseeing the maps or indulge the art design at a snails pace, I want frantic dopamine filled action at 1/10 seconds intervals.
what’s shaking up lazy teams that simply trot forward of there’s no area denial splitting them up?
modular map design?
floors crashing down and taking 2 of 4 to a different area forcefully splitting them up?
a timed “nurgle growth” that increases as time goes on eventually pushing players apart, needing to hack and whack themselves through at the expense of ammo/time/being exposed to attacks?
there’s options, sure.
but in a game design you need simple solutions aka rock paper scissors to get complex gameplay results.
so flamers&bombers (the later particularly) rose in priority for expeditions vs normal maps as you need to stay in place to auspex longer.
them flinging from behind a rock is jank that should be fixed, not the class removed based on that oversight in design
Well the core issue is these things are not adding any real challenge just forcing players to stand around and wait. No one should want them removed but they need adjustments. the visual effects have same problem as psyker shields where the visuals stick around longer than the actual damage zone which makings it harder to judge timing. Darktide desperately needs QOL patches. Flamer packs should only explode when shot a certain amount of times. It would be nice to pick up barrels and/or take toughness damage first.
Flamers blowing up from melee hits is punishing players for engaging in melee. Teammates blowing up barrels at choke points doesn’t really add value or test skill. Fixing these would be a huge improvement.
Speaking of challenge. Once you build muscle memory your combat skills are very solid. You do not die from gas or fire. You die when disabled, or blow off a ledge. damage over time does not kill skilled players. The disablers are the real loss conditions. I don’t know, maybe it’s the way toughness regens but darktides implementation of disablers seems extremely shallow compared to other coop games but maybe that was done out of necessity in conjunction with the static immovable barrels and excessive hazards like none stop grounds fire and gas clouds being a force multiplier for them particularly so to address the lack of actual difficulty might require changing other systems like regen and horde behavior.
depends,
clandestium gloriana inner corridor first drop off
2 barrels at its end and usual spot for a boss spawn.
i ping each barrel twice BEFORE jumping off as to clean the playground and not have obstacles in an already narrow corridor fight,
you can bet aquilas one or two idiots are racing towards it like flies to
if i dont pop the barrels before, them numbskulls set em off with a boss in their faces, if i explode em preemptively they do all in their savant power to catch the pinged splosion-radius.
dodos gonna dodo one way or the other even if by now everyone playing should know each map by scent.
Yeah this is the real point. Fire and gas don’t do enough damage to kill a competent player. The reason they matter is that rescuing a netted or hooked teammate means physically running over and holding F. There’s no ranged save. So a burning floor between you and the disabled player turns the disable into a death. without the disable mechanic the bombers and flames are just speedbumps.
That’s also why “just position better” doesn’t really work always. The worst spots are chokepoints the no man’s land bridges, narrow corridors. There is no alternate position in a hallway. And a lot of the annoyance isn’t even about difficulty. It’s the jank, flamers exploding from melee hits, barrels your team sets off near you or in your path.
L4D actually solved this problem already. The smoker can disable from across the map, but the tongue is a visible line you can hit. The pull is slow enough to react to. Threat and counterplay are matched. The trapper has none of that. Its a instant net with no projectile to track, can’t be melee’d off the teammate, and she does an instant 180 and sprints away when she misses so even the whiff doesn’t punish her… And she can net players that leave her line of sight around corners and doorways
Honestly I’d rather see bombers redesigned to be more lethal and less persistent. Frag damage on the throw, brief slow plus corruption tick as the player is covered in goo or just burn dot the player.Players get a debuffed in gas clouds along side corruption gain, but the clouds only last a few seconds. That gives them a real "kill it now " identity instead of their current job of just slowing the team at chokepoints.
Trapper needs better counterplay. Visible projectile line, ability to push or melee the net off, real animation lock or an actual turn and retreat for cover animation you see scab shooters do when she misses.
from behind a rock is jank that should be fixed, not the class removed based on that oversight in design