Can we get a Dev Walkthrough Video for Veteran on Damnation?

[IshanDeston]

I would like a Developer to walk me through how i am supposed to use the Veteran these days.

Apparently i am not supposed to mark enemies, unless i can kill them myself and there are no more than one enemy every 10 seconds.

Or i am supposed to crouchwalk after the team, while the Zealot is already running full tilt ahead.

Or i am using the weapon swap, but can no longer have any ability that removes suppression from me, unless i am taking a blessing to that effect.

Please, can we get a Developer in here to explain how any of this is supposed to work? Because i tried 2 evenings now, and i can’t make it work.

Veteran went from my most favorite class before the Class Overhaul to my most dreaded to play. I am now down to playing my Veteran as a knock-off Zealot. Gone are the Marksman days where i stand at a ledge and take care of the ranged threats that are highlighted by my Volley Fire, because i can’t have people babysit me on a HI Damnation run, i need to look out for myself. And that means dodging and moving… i am not even given a charge to rush into position.

AFAIK i am still getting more damage for sprinting. And maybe i just suck at this. I went from being pretty decent in my fixed group, to one of the guys that contribute the least to the team. I haven’t changed. If anything my skill at the game should have gone up.

And it isn’t that i can’t just dodge around and wip out my gun here and there to snipe a Sniper or a Bomber. I can do that just fine. But know who can do that better? My Zealot. Everything i do right now it feels i can do better on my Zealot. Voice of Command? My Zealot’s Choir is better. Shortrange engagement where i need to swap weapons frequently? My Zealot does it better.

Murdering Monstrosities? My Zealot does it better.

So please… please… i want a Developer to walk me through behind the thought process how the Veteran is supposed to work, because i have absolutely no idea how it does.

Am i really meant to play like a Zealot where i am pulling out a Revolver or Plasma Gun mid Melee?

I tried the Stealth, and it just doesn’t last long enough to actually build charges for the Focus keystone and to really take care of the 6+ Gunners that are shooting the team apart (discounting the fact that it takes forever to pull out some of the guns, like the Helbore). By the time i am done building the charges, i am surrounded by horde, and out of Stealth’s secondary effects… so i need to stop fighting and murder stuff in melee around me, which removes my charges i just build. I can’t bring a headhunter Autogun, because it doesn’t have enough ammo, and the “save ammo on crit” only works with laser weapons. The Helbore takes ages to draw and equip, which since you swamp us from everywhere in damnation these days can’t just be pulled out mid fight (and everyone else will have taken care of the threat)… and so i am left with what?

The Volleyfire Upgrade is entirely pointless now, because it lacks the “Camouflage” on Damnation to allow me to stand still. I need to be on the move to use it, but the Keystone below it, tells me not to move… or crouchwalk… have you actually tried to crouchwalk after the team in a Damnation mission?! I have… it’s not fun and leaves you left behind.

And why am i punished for highlighting threats to the team with the middle keystone? I cannot even highlight a Poxbomb running in the middle of the Horde, so people are aware of the threat… because i am actively loosing charges i am trying to build. Like WTH?!

So please… please explain to me, how any of this is supposed to work, because it isn’t working for me. I cannot figure it out… and i don’t need another Zealot.

And when i say “please explain to me”… i am fine with a youtube video where you guys play Damnation and run us through how the mechanics are supposed to work. Just record yourself plaiyng a few Damnation matches with a few of the different playstyles and show us how its meant to work.

I am sure there is something i am just to stupid to “get”.

[se05239]

I don’t think the devs play anything harder than Malice.
Not that I would know cause I’ve never seen them play.
Fatshark is nothing like the DRG devs, who livestream themselves play Deep Dives twice per week.

[Lt.DavinFelth]

I’d like the idea. I want to see how dev handless Auric Damnation, what build does someone with great internal knowledge use? Maybe I’m missing some synergy that is obvious to someone who designed that thing. I am genuinely curious.

[felandi]

I approve of this challenge.

[2tangoplz]

nope, the developer can’t play above tier 4. All of their vedio is in tier 1.

[Forsion]

@IshanDeston

Apparently i am not supposed to mark enemies, unless i can kill them myself and there are no more than one enemy every 10 seconds.

Or i am supposed to crouchwalk after the team, while the Zealot is already running full tilt ahead.

Or i am using the weapon swap, but can no longer have any ability that removes suppression from me, unless i am taking a blessing to that effect.

I am developer, just play as you were, buff uptimes will be fine.

[IshanDeston]

@Forsion

I am developer

Me: looks at post history

Yeah… right.

[Mr.Muddy]

It’s our punishment for being OP in the early days of this PVE game! Jokes aside yeah Veteran seems like its lost its identity and meele vet play style seems to be only viable one at higher levels.

[Quorin]

I don’t think you want that to be honest.

Fatshark is not a japanese dev team where everyone on the team can beat a soulslike, underlevelled and with a blind fold.

I think Fatshark is more in the “dad with 6 wives, 13 kids and 20 jobs” category.

Feel free to prove me wrong, but looking at the industry as a whole; most game devs are not actual gamers anymore like they were in the 90s and early 00’s, but at most casual gamers that barely have any real insight how their game actually work.

See Diablo 4 and their dev play streams. It’s embarassing to be honest.

I often talk highly about Ghost Ship Games, but they constantly prove themselves with their weekly gameplay streams where rhe community often can give them challenges while playing.

[Ragnarok101]

That’s a pity because a playtesting division in Fatshark may have helped with, well…gestures at every immediately obvious bug, stupid nerf, and OP item introduced in Darktide so far.

[IshanDeston]

@Quorin

Feel free to prove me wrong, but looking at the industry as a whole; most game devs are not actual gamers anymore like they were in the 90s and early 00’s, but at most casual gamers that barely have any real insight how their game actually work.

I have no issue with gamedevelopers coming out and say “the intended experience for our game is Normal, but we added 3 mode difficulty levels beyond that, just don’t expect them to be balanced”.

It helps me understand that i should not expect everything on the skill tree to work “as intended” at the highest difficulty.

But right now, and maybe that is my skewed perception, everyone in the community seems to be striving towards Damnation as their goal to play this game. As such i kinda assume the game is balanced around the idea of the operatives eventually having 370+ item modifier ratings, 500+ item rating, running through Damnation level challenges.

I am not even expecting them to do am Auric Maelstrom on Damnation or a HiST Damnation run and pick up some Grims for the lulz.

I am fine with a regular damnation run, although i would prefer a HI Damnation run… show casing the different playstyles we are meant to assume with these Keystones. It is quite clear that they do not want us to “branch out” to much from the paths in the Veteran tree, as you barely have points left to spare.

And whoever came up with this new tree must have had some thoughts on how it’s meant to be played.

I also, gamers or not, expect someone that is creating a product is testing the viability of the product. Which means i am sure that, even if not intensive playtesting, someone in their office had to go and play the game with this new build.

Surely they wouldn’t just cobble together a tree, move around nodes in a “move fast and break things” kind of way.

So surely they can show us how they are meant to be played.

I don’t think it is asking to much either, given how many forum posts seem to exists across Steam, Reddit and here that are unhappy with the changes.

And if they can’t do it… get some Twitch Streamer that can do it… and make them do it for you, as one of the Devs sits down and talks about what their thought process was. How it is meant to be used. Which weapons they had in mind when people use these and where they see the Veteran Class in the greater whole of the game.

I don’t think i am asking to much. I am just trying to understand it. And who better to explain it than the people that created it?

[Ragnarok101]

@IshanDeston

But right now, and maybe that is my skewed perception, everyone in the community seems to be striving towards Damnation as their goal to play this game

Damnation, iirc, is where rewards ‘cap out’. Anything above that is mostly bragging rights, which is a good thing - you want the nutso challenges for the people who like that and you don’t want to encourage randoms showing up undergeared for it.

I kinda do think that at least some of Fatshark’s devs think Malice is the ‘normal’ difficulty setting, because stuff like Brain Burst appears to be balanced around it then.

[Quorin]

I agree with you, and anyone who has seen my scribbles on the forum knows how much I enjoy the game, but I feel like Fatshark has one idea of how they want the game to play, and the community has another (depending on difficulty and individual), and both ideas do not seem to mesh.

Designers are great at designing systems, but they are rarely good at understanding what makes games enjoyable to play; consider Blizzard, World of Warcraft, and the issues they have had with all of the systems and the emphasis on designing them over the last decade.

If we were to choose someone from the content creator side to playtest, Claysthetics would be my first choice. It makes no difference to me whether he is the best or not. What matters is that he is one of the few who is not sponsored by Fatshark and thus does not have to constantly praise everything they do.

It would be fun if Fatshark could take a page out of Ghost Ship Games book and do weekly streams with challenges, determiend by the community, but the companies operate in such different ways.

GSG stream because they want to have the same experience as the players. Find the pain points and determine whether something outperforms or underperforms, or if something is simply not fun. I mean, Ghost Ship streams for 1.3-3 hours, which is a great time to gauge the game’s enjoyment factor and stay in touch with the community.

There is probably someone who playtests at Fatshark, but as far as I know, they do not interact with the community, so they either: go on their own ideas, listen to content creators (who are few and far between), or have the CM’s collect feedback for meetings, but the live and organic back and forth between devs and community is simply not there.

I understand that it is business, but it is a shame, especially when I consider the playerbase loyalty that Ghost Ship Games has, and for good reason.

All current efforts to balance the game are also thwarted by the locks and crafting systems.

[Crayvun]

@IshanDeston

And whoever came up with this new tree must have had some thoughts on how it’s meant to be played.

@FatsharkCatfish

Yes perhaps Rodriguez, the creative lead, would like to explain his thought process?

[Rainman]

my favorite vet builds are like the previous iteration, where you don’t even engage with the keystones

[Reginald]

@IshanDeston

Apparently i am not supposed to mark enemies, unless i can kill them myself and there are no more than one enemy every 10 seconds.

What did he mean by this? Do you not know how Focus Target works?

@IshanDeston

Or i am supposed to crouchwalk after the team, while the Zealot is already running full tilt ahead.

Just let your buffs expire between fights like everyone else and then click heads in fights. You can aim can’t you guardsman?

@IshanDeston

Or i am using the weapon swap, but can no longer have any ability that removes suppression from me, unless i am taking a blessing to that effect.

OH NO. anyway.

@IshanDeston

Please, can we get a Developer in here to explain how any of this is supposed to work? Because i tried 2 evenings now, and i can’t make it work.

Look I get that a lot of people are having trouble here. I think vet is way too squishy. I tend to find an average of 1 down per vet per game, sometimes two. Hes just got no sustain the second anything bad happens. Like patch 6 psyker. For sure. But I wish vets would stop with the hystrionics. Its actually embarressing. Your keystones aren’t bad and stop being so resistent to learning how to use them. I am clearing auric maelstroms with vet. I played it a bunch the last two days and have a couple solid builds that aren’t too squishy and play pretty much how patch 13 vet played with some fun new keystone tricks.

[Rocker_Fox]

@Quorin

I think Fatshark is more in the “dad with 6 wives, 13 kids and 20 jobs” category.

I now REALLY want to see it. A lot of the dads with kids and jobs types can pull insane stuff at times.

I’m mostly just curious if it’s taken from the perspective of “we have a specific team setup we play with where all the bases are covered” or “we utilize this weird synergy that works internally but woops the live version is broke, let’s fix that”

[Quorin]

@Reginald

Your keystones aren’t bad and stop being so resistent to learning how to use them.

I do not use any of the keystones because:

1. Huge waste of points
2. None of them improve my “Bard Build” with Recon Lasgun.

Veteran currently has the most nodes in their skill tree of any class in Darktide.
It is mostly bloat that needs to be condensed, manageable, and actually affect your playstyle, which it currently doesn’t.

[Crayvun]

@Reginald

But I wish vets would stop with the hystrionics. Its actually embarressing. Your keystones aren’t bad and stop being so resistent to learning how to use them. I am clearing auric maelstroms with vet. I played it a bunch the last two days and have a couple solid builds that aren’t too squishy and play pretty much how patch 13 vet played with some fun new keystone tricks.

I been using them, bud, I just think they’re boring and unfun to use.

Lot of my old playstyles just aren’t viable, I feel starved for skillpoints and I’m not even coming up with any interesting new ways to play.

I’m just as open to testing skills in games as you are, I played MUDs long ago and my old Sorcerer friend said that every tool I had could be used, if I had the creativity to figure it out. This led to me coming up with some fun combinations.

But the dissonance here for me is that they are too damn boring to make use of. My viable build options have gone down.

When talking to my best mate the other day, I had to tell him that if he comes back to play right now (he hasn’t played since pre-patch13), he’s going to be weaker in every single way.

[Reginald]

@Quorin

I do not use any of the keystones because:

1. Huge waste of points
2. None of them improve my “Bard Build” with Recon Lasgun.

You are welcome to play short and wide or deep and long. And I may well agree that vet has too few points, I always feel about 2 short on any build. I want like 1 more node over there and need to spend two or three points to get it and would be willing to sacrefice another node for it, but I just don’t have enough. But the keystones are strong, at least two of them are not sure on the third. They aren’t a waste of points. When I dump 44% extra damage for the whole team against a monstrosity or spend the whole game with 12% extra damage for pretty much the whole team thats not a weak keystone. If you think a zealot thunder hammer supported by a vet focus target with +44% damage and a plasma gun isn’t going to seriously mitigate the worry any monstrosity might cause a difficult run…well, you’re nuts.

Also I keep hearing vets say “oh, no, i have to kill my pinged target. Oh no I can’t ping anymore” what are you even talking about. Just ping spam. Absolute minimum 4% buff, typically 12% by the time you kill the target and re-target for every target. Plus the ping doesnt seem to have any kind of timer so you can track a fleeing trapper indefinitely. Plus the ping always takes from the highest stacks applied so you can re-ping if you want. Plus the ping can stack Shift-Targets additively. Like…you have to just not use this keystone to think its bad. (Oh and if someone else is running the 5 stack instead of 8 you can both apply seperate team aoe buffs on target kill lmao)