Bullet Weapon Balance

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Getting over the furor over Hive Scum, but thinking about them in regards to current balance, I was trying to make use of a lot of the ballistic weapons, just for fun.

I just ran through Maelstroms with the most optimized builds I could make for these weapons, thinking that this is the lowest level where weapons all need to feel good to have any relevance.

A lot of these weapons are in dire need of changes to have any point in the game and I wanted to give my thoughts on a few.

Braced Autoguns - In a bad spot
A fun weapon to use, and good in its niche of horde clear.
Braced Autoguns suffer from three major drawbacks that are common among these weapons.

  1. Low accuracy. Long range enemies can be difficult or impossible to pick off. This can lead to snipers piling up at long range, and you can’t make up for this with your melee.
  2. Can’t hurt Carapace. At least you can make up for this with melee, but it’s nice if your ranged weapon can potentially help against dense packs.
  3. Bad Ammo economy. Even with the massive ammo pools these weapons have, it’s just not enough and you will have to hog most ammo pickups.

Suggested Solution: Problems 1 and 2 are somewhat by design. However, I don’t think this weapon would break the game if it had at least some armor piercing at very close range. Not efficient, but also not “dump three mags into the head of the Crusher to kill it”.
Also, I’m going to suggest a radical solution here; double its ammo pool. This weapon felt very fun during the event when ammo was doubled. Is it too much? I’d lean towards thinking yes, but a bold over-correction will mean the sweet spot is somewhere within that set.

Combat Shotgun - Decent. The ammo buff and their magazine size makes the low damage work okay. I would highly suggest, though, that the weapon get reloaded two shells at a time. This is a real technique and I see no reason that it couldn’t be done in the grim darkness of the far future.

Double Barrel - Garbage.
This felt worse to me than the Shredder Autopistol, which I’ve heard many call the worst weapon in the game.
I was running as optimized a build as I could, triple barrel on Vet, and I still just was not impressed. It performed just barely adequately at the things I would expect it to perform well at, such as one-shotting charging mutants - though only with the double shot, as without some extremely high boosts it seems impossible to one-shot a Mutant with one barrel. One-shotting a Trapper at the ranges they shoot from doesn’t feel comfortably consistent, and as a result the weapon feels anemic. It’s also not that great at killing dogs unless you get a perfect bracketing at very close range.
I think this weapon needs a very, very short range innate armor piercing. If it was realistic to run up and pump two barrels into the face of a Crusher and very comfortably kill it, I do not think that would break the game, but it would be very fun and give it a unique niche.
Also, a slight increase to base damage so that it’s more consistent one-shotting Mutants. I would even say it feels like it should have some special rule for dogs. While you’re at it, you could give it nice if not broken damage against bosses. Why not, honestly?
Everyone loves Double Barrels, THE SUPER SHOTGUN. Doomguy went into Hell and made Satan **** his pants. I say do not be afraid to make it good, because then it can have its own playstyle that’s more than a meme.

Infantry Autogun - Meh
After being too good for time, these have fallen off hard. I honestly have not played with them a lot so I cannot add much here. Please, make suggestions in the comments.

Revolvers - Power Crept.
The hip-fire revolver is quite usable, and even the aim one is still very good in its role, but it got power-crept. The long reload that used to be a good balancing feature is now too sharp a downside with the spawn numbers being what they are.
Also, despite its phenomenal damage profile it has just too little ammo. I don’t know how much of an increase it needs, but I don’t think double is necessary or advisable here.

Shredder Autopistol - Bad.
It’s not actually as bad as I thought it was. I was completely able to use it for runs and it felt better than the Double Barrel. It could actually kill stuff out to pleasantly long ranges.
Like the Braced Autoguns, it has the same drawbacks of poor accuracy, no armor damage, and bad ammo economy. Just like the Braced Autoguns I’d recommend doubling its ammo.
Also, you could give it at least a decent chance for picking at long-range targets by making the first couple shots in braced mode almost pinpoint accurate and then blooming out, so that with burst fires, given a few moments, you could concievably pick off a Sniper. It would add a little skill and fun to the class.

Vigilant Autoguns - Good. Reworks were nice on these, I like them.

As a final note, I think that the Veteran talent Lock and Load needs a big buff. 25% is meme-tier. Considering how far down the left side you have to go, it’s a big reach and means you have to make hard choices. So what if it was doubled? Double ammo, increase reload speed perhaps, like by 20-30%. Makes it a clear trade-off. The only weapon that could become absolutely broken because of this would be the Bolters, I think. At least, the potential burst damage of mag-dumping 30 Bolter rounds would be insane. Other oddities would be Combat Shotguns and Revolvers with just how many bullets are now somehow crammed in there, but I personally wouldn’t mind that, and we already have revolvers with seven rounds in five chambers so at least now every chamber would have two bullets? A little more logic?

Honestly I think this would have been a great capstone talent.

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ammo economy blows. thanks ammo haters

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double barrel is very strong on vet and good on zealot too? have had a very different experience, personally.

the main improvement I’d want to see there is more differentiation between single fire and double fire. how about reducing the reload time for reloading one shell (as far as I can tell, it’s the same number of frames as full reloading), and giving double blast a little more cleave? yes I know it has extra cleave already, just trying to make both firing modes a little more distinct so there’s more decision making there.

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I have no words.

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I’ve noticed there’s a lot of ammo in laying around and in boxes since I returned to this game a few weeks ago. The problem is, just wandering a few rooms away from the team to grab a box, even for a moment invites disaster on Aurics, especially shock gauntlets and maelstrom.

I run over to grab an ammo box or med pack at the other end of room while my teammates wait in the elevator spamming the tag ground button over and over, then like 14 specials spawn in and they watch from a distance as I dodge them and take 5 minutes to get back to the elevator. It’s stupid.

I would like if they had more talents that return ammo on kill/crit/headshot, etc. The Veteran’s ammo cooldown on special kill could be reduced from 5s to 3. I’ve noticed even after the nerf to it, nobody seems to use the other two, so perhaps Veteran needs more ammo perks.

Gun Ogryn could have Lucky Bullet chance to proc go up from 15% to 50% for 10s on using his ability.

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Hey, I didn’t look up any builds, how do you recommend running it?

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Just not my experience. How are you running it? It just feels rare to get a one-shot on a lot of things I really want to one-shot.

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Dunno how other people like it, but the double barrel is fairly powerful if you grab the bleed stack blessing, weapons specialist and spam free crit shots into hordes with uncanny up. 99% of that work being done is by uncanny and bleed, so it’s basically a shitty flamer, but if it works it works. I’d like to see the gun stand on its own without that gimmick more though

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Agreed. That one build requires specific playstyle and using the gun way less than actually melee. It’s not double barrel build, it’s a melee build that happens to use double barrel.

If you want to just slide around and shoot double barrel without weapon specialist gimmick, it straight up sucks. Insane damage fall off past melee range.

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Build not mine and for myself i removed toughness boost, took field improvisation instead.
Melee weapon optional, curious 3 toughness or 2 toughness + 3 stamina, perks:

  1. Stamina regen.
  2. Combat ability regen.
  3. Revive speed.

Shotgun blessings, perks and everything else is exactly the same as in the link.
Bleed blessing is important, with 3-4 melee kills shotgun shot will have 100% crit chance and thus 100% chance to proc both blessings, helps kill far away targets like snipers and gunners, if they don’t die from direct hit, bleed ends them.

I also saw another veteran in havoc 40 who had such build with DS 4, uncanny and shredders, he did 2.8 - 3 million damage.

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straying from the group holding W key speedrunning usain bolt usually tends to have disastrous results.

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Oh, so a bleed build . . . Is it too much to think that the weapon should just do good damage instead of just being a bleed machine?

Still, I’ll give that one a shot. Thanks for sharing.

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Pretty similar to what I run, I like to take Covering Fire because I’m blasting a lot of hordes with the shotgun and therefore deleting some toughness Regen for the other frontliners. But yeah it’s one of my favorite Vet builds to play.

As far as the other bullet weapons go, they’re mostly kind of booty. Maybe Hive Scum will get some bullet specific talents or something that will make them more pleasant to use.

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Double Barrel shotty is excellent, tho? I like it lots on my Veteran.

I do agree that the Braced Autoguns need help, tho. They’re definitely bottom tier in terms of ranged weapons available.

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Wait, you ran Auric Maelstroms with bullet weapons to find out whether they are good enough for the level of difficulty, did i get that right?

If so, I would suggest trying the same, but with plain Damnation, since that’s the difficulty Fatshark seems to balance things around. I think right now just about any weapon that can’t go through armor isn’t relevant.

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I run mainly shotgun, laspistol, and bolter these days. Suppression alone discourages me from using anything else. On vet there are just better choices, especially in high difficulties. I suppose this is fairly lore accurate, but not great for gear variety. I can think of only one reason to run any other guns these days, and that’s utility, suppression/mobility stick, Lethal Proximity, Stripped Down etc.

That’s the risk vs reward thing. Communicate with people and/or accept the risk if you want the resources.

It’s extremely power at just that. Flechette + Manstopper and its one of the few gunpowder weapons you can just afford blasting at the horde.

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If they want to positively incentivise melee for once then there should be a way of getting ammo back on melee kill/crit/headshot etc.

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I think that’s part of the experience. Do you risk spreading out and covering more ground and getting more resources? Or staying together and taking fewer resources, or taking longer?

I tend to drift away-ish from the team for boxes.

I am not sure if hive scum will have access to las weapons or not. Maybe ballistics will feel good on them.

My issue is more of them were just so very inaccurate and heavy recoil. And I don’t need a horde clear ranged weapon normally. I need something to efficiently and reliably get rid of trappers and other specials.

And it would be nice to have a weapon that’s an anti-crusher. Something like the double barrel. Even if it’s a one shot long reload low ammo weapon. Then I would run it with weapons I don’t normally use like devil claw or heavy sword with throwing knives or something.

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A good team has your back and doesn’t drop into the next area past the point of no return while people are grabbing ammo. The problem is, high intensity areas and maelstrom incentivize rapid progression. In many cases, if you have to linger too long, you’re taking a bigger risk. As specials are spammed, the more you risk being in a scenario where you’re caught with your pants down.

This means that most teams on Aurics aren’t going to wait for you to grab ammo. Some builds rely on ammo pickups more than others, so it unfairly disadvantages those.

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I see a lot of people swearing by Double Barrel Shotgun. It’s interesting, I’ve tried to love this thing, I want to love this thing, but it just feels awful. I guess if my expectations are set on it just being a bleed tool instead of a unique weapon in its own right. I would rather it have zero bleed interactions but actually be unique.