I have been playing havocs solo recently, just to do my penances. I mostly did them with people for the “help others do 100 missions”. But as the game mode is already dying out (probably since there is not incentive for players to keep playing after they grinded the penances, but that’s another topic) and since I had a free trial of gamepass, I booted up my Xbox version and loaded up another instance of darktide and dropped out after letting my main account do the havoc mission solo.
After a couple of runs, I realised something that was made more glaringly obvious - that the bots in this game are not only utterly useless, but does actual harm to in a game.
It’s one thing to expect bots to do nothing in higher difficulties. But to be an actual detriment to the team is an achievement, and I wish there was an option to just not have them or kill them in a mission.
This becomes more apparent in missions like Clandestium gloria. 9/10 fails are due to the stupid bots triggering the barrels and launching me off the ledge. Not only that, they consume ammo, they take medicae when there are more urgent team members (including other bots, they don’t seem to have any sort of prioritisation - a 1 wounded bot won’t give it to a 3 wounded bot for instance). They damage you via barrels ALL THE BLOODY TIME unless you actively avoid that from happening. That’s assuming they don’t ledge you to death as well. Also, Mubarak has reminded me that they shoot pox bursters in front of your team mates as well.
The only saving grace for them is that they are durable as a single ply tissue in a swimming pool. Even at havoc 1 (Malice mind you), they are reliably downed by either of these things:
1 gunner, 2 ragers, 1 bulwark (very slowly), 1 flammer if there is a horde, any type of mixed horde with maulers, ragers, or crushers etc. If you ever get disabled, very likely they will fluff about swinging at pox walkers until you die before they slowly walk up to you.
They can’t be ordered to carry items, they don’t even stay in coherency very well - so even those who think that’s a useful trait (it’s not) it’s not even good at that either. The only thing they are moderately useful for is when you are interacting with the data interrogators or some other thing that keeps you vulnerable, they will struggle to do even that if there is more than 3 pox walkers.
In vermintide, they could at least stay with you reliably, use their abilities, carry items, prioritise saving you, and were actually competent special snipers.
I don’t expect any of this to be in your priorty.
But before you can fix any of that, can you at least give us an option to remove them from the game?
In every damnation match, when I see someone new - I tell them to just let the bots die. It’s a newb trap to save them, as they are always detriment to your team. They take resources and completely waste them by going down the next second. The coherency toughness regen is never worth it. Just please let them die and never rescue them if you are new to damnation (or heck, probably also heresy). If they had a score board, they’ll probably do more damage to you proportionally via their barrel triggers than to the heretics.
Let us PLEASE get rid of these stupid things before it can do more damage to the strike team. Or at least disable them from triggering barrels at the very minimum.
I don’t want to go through every single Clandestium, hab dryko or any map with a barrel near ledges, I make sure the bots are either dead, or if I have a range weapon with ammo to spare, make sure the barrels are popped (this is not always viable option obviously).