Coherency is anti-teamwork and toxic

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
121

I am actually very appreciative of this response, finally actual dialogue in this thread!

Let’s flip the script a bit here then and instead ask what kind of system would you personally prefer that encourages teamwork still and doesn’t incentivise solo rushing that is a legitimate problem and can easily cost games?

I have my own issues with the coherency system, I don’t think it at all flawless and I personally believe the radius it works in should be much larger, and work like a chain instead of a circle, but right now it is a highly effective method to keep the spreadsheet enthusiasts in line which was a much welcome change. I do also personally believe the benefits gained from it should be more significant, mostly in the terms of the feats themselves so that you do actually gain a more notable benefit from it to make it more desirable to try and fight together.

To open up that final part there a bit more, I am mainly referring to a situation that has been described in the past, aka, a moment where you need to split off from the party for whatever reason, be that a unfortunate spawn of a Poxburster quite literally next to you or a horde cutting you off from your allies. In most of these cases, such as the one you have in the video where you go for the Sniper for the reasons you pointed out, which you did justify, the preferred method is obviously to take a wide berth and in a way ‘abandon’ your allies to go fight by yourself somewhere so you can split off a small chunk of the full threat to take it out to get the much needed breathing room to go and help your allies. Now, this is where I would like to see the game incentivise a bit more teamwork in the way you yourself describe.

Basically, have the coherency work the way it does now, but preferably increase the distance you can be from allies, make the benefits slightly more notable, but also, have the opposite of the system that kicks in when you are broken off from the coherency. Boosts to offensive abilities in such cases, be that stamina regen, movement speed, attack speed, reload speed, and so on, the idea being that your defensive capabilities do go down as you can no longer regen toughness, but you are at a better position to fight against whatever is coming for you, or cutting you off from your allies. Of course, implementing such a system would require a notable amount of fine tuning as you don’t want to make it the more preferable option to stay OUT of coherency to keep that buff on since Toughness regen is very easy to get outside of coherency to the point where you never need to actually be in coherency to keep full Toughness at all times with some classes, such as the Psyker or Veteran.

But the theory is there. I would honestly consider that win for both sides at least in my eyes. You would get the benefits of teamwork, aka the feats which would hopefully be just better in general, when sticking close to team, but should you break off from the team, you have different types of benefits that help you fight better but your durability is going to be in question. Would help with the Zealot issue for example, charging out of coherency to whack a horde or an Elite but now gaining a notable boost to damage output, or the Sharpshooter actually being able to stick back a bit to be able to pick off the necessary ranged guys now gunning for the lone Zealot.

A lot of work to functionally implement, but I see it as a win-win for both sides on this particular topic (Not just you specifically, but all those against the current system). Thoughts?

122

Somewhat unrelated but you actually don’t regen toughness unless you’re inside coherency, makes ranged damage that much more frustrating and solo clutch saving that much more difficult.

123

I think coherency is an alright idea, it could be a bit less punishing though, less hugging my allies all game and more being in the same room as them. Like maybe just maintaining line of sight could be coherency. I genuinely don’t know how you are supposed to get the Ogryn penance for keeping everyone in coherency all game, especially when the increased range ability is broken.

124

You don’t regen toughness naturally when outside of coherency, however, you do regen it via Feats and Melee kills.

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125

something must be changed about coherency for sure.

i dont think its even needed, its annoying and limits your survivability for no reason.
only thing that coherency dose is telling new players to stay together.
every average player understands that staying together is safer for a multiple reasons, you dont need coherency for that.
and it doesn’t encourage team play, as some say. just standing around each other is not a team play.

i don’t have a problem with coherency class buffs. my problem is the way toughness regen works in conjunction with ranged enemies and stagger mechanic (so annoying to deal with)

i think toughness should always regen and coherency should give toughness damage reduction (like 10% per player)

and yeah. staying together is not always an option as many people above mentioned and described

126

The issue is I don’t think there should be a direct system that forces teamwork. Whether or not you view it as punishment or reward, ultimately the game is trying to force people to stay within a certain area of each other. (Obviously this is all just my opinion, even if it sounds like I’m stating something as fact) Teamwork should be heavily encouraged due to core gameplay design, not something that goes “You must huff your teammates’ farts to survive.” Good gameplay design is spawning pox hounds/trappers to go after lone wolves. Bad gameplay design is coherency for all the reasons I’ve listed before. Even while I’m generally confident in my ability to survive by myself, I still will vastly prefer having backup due to pinners. (Also because lollag but that’s another matter) Even L4D realized people do not like being forced into things and want to have agency outside of their team. Hence things like being able to cut smoker tongues or deadstop hunters.

In my opinion positioning and smart movement is the most interesting part of games. I’m always a huge proponent of focusing on your personal survivability over pure DPS in general. You can always compensate for lower damage. You cannot replace taking too many hits, or in the case of coherency, flat out not being able to regenerate toughness without getting close to your teammates. You can adjust for it, such as in the case of me taking confident strike on my melee weapons to fix things like ogryn’s rather poor toughness regeneration feats/the coherency system on the whole, but that’s a band aid solution for a flawed system.

To (briefly) touch on your comment about auras from earlier: I’ve never liked them. Even in single player games with parties and whatnot. Unless they’re extremely large or set up in a specific manner where I’ll always keep specific characters together I do not care for them in the first place. There’s also a world of difference between a baseline mechanic for every single character in the game that affects both their survivability and important buffs, and a specific character having an aura ability that gives a smaller buff.

No thank you. I have no desire for them to lean harder on the coherency system.

As to your suggestion: While it would be better (slightly) than what we have now, it wouldn’t address core problems with it such as the heavy punishment for flankers/melee characters when getting close to ranged units/getting chipped at, nor fix issues with times where you get pinned down. If anything it would exacerbate the issue of solo runners (Both good and bad), as good players would still be relatively effective alone as they avoid most damage in the first place, while bad players will want to do maximum deeps so they’d go for the aggressive buffs. (Ignoring what I said earlier about how positioning and survivability, which is directly influenced by working with your team, is more important than damage)

127

The only real problem I have with removal of the coherency system, or in general having a teamwork heavy game where you are to rely on people’s common sense rather than in-game mechanics to work together, is that for every good player that you described there is 9 lone wolves that either want to rush through the mission as quickly as they can and as a result end up bombing the run when they go down to a pinner, leaving the other three to face the rest of the enemies in addition to the ones his actions spawned now barrelling down on them.

That’s the obnoxious part about designing games like this. Playing with pre-mades, which obviously the devs themselves are exclusively playing with when designing the game, works since communication is key and as such there is really not that much need for in-game mechanics from the get-go to incentivise sticking together with the carrot. When you are thrown into a lobby of randoms however, all bets are off as your average randie has as much conscious thought and situational awareness as the Poxwalkers we face. That’s the reason why a system like this is introduced, and in terms of numbers, odds are that for everyone that dislikes the system for whatever reason, including your actually reasonable and sensible arguments, there is easily more than a dozen of players that have managed to avoid the usual issue games like this have with lone wolves.

To me, it is a simple case of balancing enjoyment for as many players as possible, and so it is from the point of view of the devs. Do you want to cater to the 1% of the playerbase that a system such as this bothers by not having it or do you cater to the probably 10% of the players that this system is a direct benefit to as a result of curbing the worst of the lone wolves.

There are ways to make it less ‘forced’ to work as a team, but the amount of visuals and audio cues needed for that to make sure the less situationally aware people can still keep up. Either way, you make a great point there and make a solid case for not having it. If anything, I’d say you do very much make me consider for better alternatives for the system, ones that are in line with more what you are saying, aka natural and not forced, but also try to figure out how to make sure the toxic lone wolves, which obviously are unavoidable, can be made to have lesser impact of people’s own performance. Maybe a modifier to people still left standing could work, the more people go down, the better the rest might get. I do know the game director seems to have behaviour linked to this as when you are by yourself, the game stops sending out pinning enemies like Trappers and Hounds.

128

For me it was often quite the opposite.
The whole team rushed ahead many times while I was searching for pickups, especially crafting materials.
And then even though I looked around for stuff I was the lone wolf and ambushed many times.
But often nobody even looks behind themselves to see where the team is.

What? Should I stop searching for stuff and rush with them?
No, I’m too stubborn for that, I’ll just have to make do without coherency, I guess.

Coherency is not gonna force people to stay together.
It’s just an additional challenge to survive without it.

EDIT:
Now that I think about it most of the time I don’t even take coherency into consideration myself.
I just play like it didn’t exist.
If I have to seperate from the team to flank some enemies I’ll just do that.

There are situations where it’s obvious you should stick to your team, the same situations were in vermintide without coherency.
There are situations however where you know you’re gonna survive it alone, and you can still survive it and disregard coherency.

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I didn’t pay too much attention to coherency while playing for a long time because I didn’t need it, but after awhile I realized it’s not just for me, it helps the team in ways beyond just my class buff. Sometimes I’m better use to the team a little bit out of range, other times it’s good for me to be stuck in beside them. I don’t see a problem with both options being on the table. I hope Fatshark continues to introduce mechanics that synergize with your teammates.

130

To be fair, having been on both ends of the spectrum on this one, seeing my teammates rush ahead while I was trying to pick up stuff and seeing people left behind for that reason, it is more a matter of own personal situational awareness and decision making. If I see that people aren’t searching for stuff, I just go through the spots I know have spawns on them that don’t take me on a sideway path as all chests, healing stations and secondary objective spawns are in the same locations, what you can find there is what changes.

And you just hit the nail in the head there. That is the point of the system, to teach people to realise you shouldn’t be dropping your team unless you can survive without it for whatever reason. There is quite the difference between people that think they can solo and those that actually can do so.

And there is the other wonderful part about the system. I have seen it to be more a psychological in its actual importance to the individual. The benefits of it are not significant, they are not core to your survival, the biggest factor is your own personal action, and working with your team. It is there for those that are too hyper focused on their own personal optimal performance and think that 7,5% Toughness Reduction buff is absolutely necessary to their survival and so they stick with their team no matter what, which is better than the alternative of them wanting to focus on their body count being the highest it can be, which they achieve by rushing ahead by themselves.

I spend probably half to quarter of the time within coherency, and I never actively try to make sure I am in coherency. I simply track my team and make moment to moment decisions based on the situation, even when I sit almost across the objective area from most of my team at times.

131

I think staying together is usually not the issue.
And splitting up is often not only the better choice but necessary or even forced upon you by the circumstances.
You can survive without the coherency thing, no problem.
Just don’t get hit.

The most important thing that many players don’t get is that you have to react, as a team, immediately when someone is knocked down or trapped.
Well, not in all situations, but in the tricky ones.
Even more so than in vermintide.
But everyone thinks “I’m busy right now, someone else can do it”.

That’s the biggest issue right there imo.
And coherency doesn’t fix it really.

1 Like
132

If everyone tries to stay in coherency they’ll likely be close enough to respond quickly. Which is super important, because the AI will 100% break from cover (at least on higher difficulties) and counter-attack when someone goes down. The longer it takes you to get them up, the harder it’s going to be.

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Yeah, I see how coherency was an attempt to change player behaviour in that direction.
But apparently it doesn’t really fix a whole lot in practice.

I’ve had many situations where I was downed and only one player came to pick me up and couldn’t do it alone and I died even though other players were right there a few meters away.
I’ve had situations the other way around where other players where downed and I tried to pick them up alone and couldn’t do it.

Fortunately in the last beta I was playing mostly ogryn so in 9 out of 10 cases I could pick the person up.
But if there is no ogryn you have to act.

I’m not arguing to take out coherency btw.
Because as it is I don’t really care about it either way.
For me it’s just a buff that exists but sometimes you have to live without it.

If they really wanted to force people to stay together they should increase the radius a bit and make it do corruption damage when you’re out of coherency.
But then it’s gonna be a lot more annoying to be the crafting material searcher who lags behind.

134

I’ve changed my opinion on this over time. I originally didn’t mind it and thought it was a neat mechanic to get everyone grouping up and working together. This is a good thing.

What changed is me being Ogryn, and having to immediately charge at any noteworthy mob of gunners, specials, elites, etc on higher difficulties. This is arguably my job in a lot of situations, and doing it takes me out of coherency range and, particularly, the toughness bonuses it gives me.

While you can survive outside it, it still severely handicaps your toughness generation outside specific weapon perks and feats. And it really hinders the last stands we loved in VT2 so much.

4 Likes
135

With ogryn coherency is a joke anyway.
If you chose the right talents and weapons you can charge in a group, get toughness for each hit enemy.
And then you just spam light attacks with your knife.
And your thoughness just fills right up everytime you hit multiple enemies.

Ogryn is basically a thoughness factory.

At least that’s how it worked for me somehow. XD
Don’t remember the exact details.

136

They even have guns that can give back toughness on kills or sustained fire. One thing I really felt on my Ogryn was that, when I charged into an enemy formation, that was the perfect time for the rest of the team to move up (thus putting us back in coherency.) Zealots and even Psykers would move up usually, but Veterans tended to hang back until everything was dead THEN they’d move up lol

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i don’t see why you so fixated on lone wolves and why you think coherency will encourage them to not wander of.
lone wolves are usually people who either overconfident or just new and lost. coherency will not keep this types of people togathere + there will be looters now.

wander off and die alone is just a bad play, you can do bad play in coherency to.

i didn’t really care in v2 if some elf will rush and die. i will just res him later, so he can do the same thing again and rage quit.
it takes at least two good players to be successful in v2 cata. sometimes even one dwarf will be enough if its a right dwarf.
it’s kinda same in darktide but you have that coherency system that just getting in the way and make things more annoying and doesn’t really fix any issues with player behavior (lone wolves/teamplay).
you can’t force team play from people who doesn’t want it or can’t manage it.

coherency creates more problems than solutions in my opinion.
however i think it can be fixed and dose not need to be necessarily removed

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138

Question about coherency bonuses. Do you get your personal career’s coherency bonus all the time, or only when you are within coherency range of at least one other party member?

EG if I’m playing Zealot with the +15% toughness DR in coherency feat (in theory bringing it up to +22% DR assuming it’s additive with the base aura), do I always have that DR or do I need to be near at least one other person to benefit from my own aura? If the latter, I definitely think that’s going a bit too far with Coherency bonuses.

As a side note, I wouldn’t be against a small base toughness regen being added regardless of coherency, like 1-2% toughness per second or something so at least you’d top off naturally when people split up after clearing an area to loot.

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Did OP really say Coherency is anti-teamwork and toxic?

I’m sorry, the only thing being anti-teamwork and toxic is usally that ONE player. I don’t care much for staying in coherency all the time. When a horde comes, you probably should be. There’s enough chokepoints to use in which you can stay coherent and defeat the horde.

What is anti-teamwork though is the behavior of a lot of players. Especially if you play quickmatch. Theere’s always that one player who thinks he has to run miles and miles in front of the team. Only to die to the deamonhost they thought they can tackle alone. If it were up to just me I’d rather not rescue them. Alas, it is not.

A lot of people compare this game to Vermintide 2. And it makes sense. Some things are quite similar. Others are not. Just get used to this NOT being a simple reboot of VT2 in the 40K verse. There are differences.

As for being punished: You are not being punished for being a lone wolf. Not by the coherency system anyways. The game will punish you for running away. Staying in coherency is a reward. A buff. Not having that buff is not automatically being punished. The punishment comes when you think you can do everything solo.

And to be frank: OP, you sound like that ONE player who wants to go on a solo-run and do it all by themselves. You might not have noticed, but you bought a co-op game. Those players are nearly as aggravating as those who hit the CTRL-key so rapidly as if they have one minute left to check if it really needs to be replaced after 2 million keystrokes.

Just chill, go a bit slower. Get immersed. And think about the consequences of your actions. Not everything has to be a speedrun.

Sorry if this post sounds a bit toxic in itself. By now I’m just getting enraged by the amount of self-entitled and to be blunt - stupid - players in this game. I’d actually welcome the idea of punishing those.

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140

Not gonna lie, when someone runs way ahead of me and my buddy, we get a good laugh watching their outline getting manhandled by a mutant.