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Issue Description:
Crucis Mk II Thunder Hammer ignores the Heavy Attack damage distribution stat and caps at 3 targets instead of the listed 8+.
Steps to Reproduce:
Use any Crucis Mk II Thunder Hammer with a Crowd Control stat over 70 in Meat Grinder.
See that the hammer lists a Heavy Attack Damage Distribution stat over 8 targets.
Test it on 3+ targets and see that only 2.1~ take damage instead of 8+.
Even using a Crucis Mk II Thunder Hammer with 80 Crowd Control, Slaughterer 4 stacked, and Thrust 4 fully charged, I still cap at 2.1~ targets instead of the expected 10+ targets taking damage due to power scaling cleave targets.
Mission Name (If Applicable):
All
Platform:
GamePass
Player ID:
[GamerTag] Rhax2U
Approx. Time of Issue & Timezone:
4/12/2023, 06:00AM EST
Reproduction Rate:
Once - Rare (<10%) - Unusual (<25%) - Common (<50%) - Often (<75%) - Constant (100%)
Constant
Upload Supporting Evidence:
[Screenshots, recordings, links to Twitch VODs, etc.]
Upload Console Log:
Press the Windows key + R
Enter %appdata% within the search input and select ‘OK’
Navigate to AppData\Roaming\Fatshark\Darktide\console_logs
Locate the console log that corresponds with the session in which the issue occurred, by looking at the timestamps in the log names
Upload here
Upload darktide_launcher.log:
Press the Windows key + R
Enter %appdata% within the search input and select ‘OK’
Navigate to AppData\Roaming\Fatshark\Darktide
Locate the darktide_launcher.log in this directory
This is not a bug just poor stat communication. The cleave values listed are for stagger cleave, not damage cleave. Damage cleave is unique to each weapon, unchangeable by blessings or boosting, and not really viewable anywhere in game. Many weapons have a 3 target limit after which their cleave does 0 damage. This is consistent and not at all unique to T Hammer.
The weird thing is you typed that response to me, but if you do exactly what you told me to do, it says the hammer should cleave 8 targets baseline, and 11.3 with Slaughterer and Thrust 4 active. So no, the hammer is in fact bugged.
The different columns are normal hit, headshot, crit, and crit headshot respectively. The rows show the damage taken by each enemy cleaved, first row is first target etc.
See how from the 4th row onwards it displays 0 damage. Here it is again with slaughterer and thrust active.
So TLDR hammer is bugged by intetional design, along with all weapons with HARD caps which make no sense becuase it all makes cleave stats worthless. You dont need to ragdoll enemies around, you need to kill them
The values shown in the stat screen define the hit mass you can get through and not the number of targets. Each enemy has their own hit mass value, and hitting an enemy will subtract their hit mass value from the remaining hit mass “budget” for the attack - as soon as this reaches 0 or less, then the attack is stopped.
The Thunder Hammer, being a tank gestalt weapon, will allow you to hit a lot of targets but will only damage a few. So as mentioned above, damaging three targets is correct in this case, as the Thunder Hammer can only deal health damage to the first three targets it hits, but it can still keep going and knock further targets back.
Cleave and Power bonuses do increase the amount of hit mass you can get through, but do not change the damage settings for the weapon.
Cleave though shown seperately from Damage and Stagger will always be the same value.
Thank you for replying, but can we use this opportunity to push forward the feedback that hard capping how many enemies weapons can damage is a bad design?
Why have cleave - dmg - hit mass stats / and then cleave, dmg, power increasing blessings which do nothing to actually increase weapons cleaving power?
Hopefully this gets though to the design team and they remove the hard cap for damage, and instead connect it to cleaving power. That way we can actually build weapons around breakpoints for single/two target kills OR weapons around mass damage cleaving
Absolutely! Our designers actively monitor and discuss feedback posted on these forums
I relayed this to one of our designers just now, and received this response:
Those are separate systems and tweakable values per weapon, which in the end works together.
A blessing that increases cleave will allow you to hit more targets, and if the weapon considers every target damagable you will damage more targets, but it won’t shift the “damage indices”. Similarly increased power blessings will increase the overall base power of the the attack, including maximum cleavable hit mass and the base value used to calculate health and impact damage.
There’s currently no features that allows shifting of these damage indices, as which targets in an attack receive what distribution of health and impact damage is integral to the gestalts of the weapons.
Can you elaborate a bit on this? I don’t quite understand what you mean by this.
Overall, the descriptions don’t do a great job of conveying their actual meaning. Cleave Damage/Stagger Distribution is actually Hit Mass budget (right?), even though the term Hit Mass is not used here despite it being used elsewhere ingame (Brutal Momentum), and the absence of target caps makes it very easy to misunderstand these stats even more.
I think FS have done a good job overall with providing important information on a weapon’s capabilities, but cleaving capabilities is one area that falls short IMO. For me, the questions I would like answered by the cleave stats are
How many enemies/how much hit mass can I cleave through?
How many of those enemies can be damaged?
How many of those enemies can be staggered?
Can I improve these values?
I think you’ve answered #1, #2 and #4 (is there a hard target cap on stagger, or is it only limited by hit mass?), but the game should be able to answer those questions, without having to go to the forums first.
Hello, combat team programmer here!
I’m gonna try and answer #3 as well as possible without going into absolutely every detail and making it too much of a wall of text.
First off, there is actually two cleave values behind the scenes, one for attack (dev term for Damage) and impact (dev term for Impact).
But this is mostly for legacy reasons from early implementations, and in actuality the highest of these values are used for the hit mass budget calculation. (And both, and therefore the final, value should be influenced by buffs and other bonuses.)
The absolutely shortest answer to #3 is that the calculation for the which enemies can be staggered are done the same way as for damage. But we should always apply some kind of stagger or hit reaction as long as the weapon haven’t been stopped in its sweep.
The more technical answer is along these lines:
All hit mass decide is “will this target stop the attack, or let me cleave through to the next one in line?”. Then the damage profile for the weapon can define (somewhat simplified) that “target 1-4 will take diminishing health damage and target 5+ no health damage, and target 1-6 will receive diminishing staggers, and target 7-infinity will take a step back”.
Almost all weapons will continue to lightly stagger or make enemies flinch as long as the sweep can continue, and then trigger what we call a hitstop animation when your hit mass runs out (regardless of damage or stagger being inflicted). This animation however can be somewhat subtle depending on weapons. For example the Devil’s Claw sword first heavy attack hitstop animation is a slight catching/stopping of the weapon and then a bit more downwards continuation of the sweep.
Regarding presentation of all this data and stats, personally I’d love to improve it and show more in depth stats. But that of course hinges on the wider focus, plans, etc. of the teams and company. (And I want to stress that this is just my wish, and shouldn’t be taken as a promise.)
Thank you for the detailed response, I appreciate it!
Almost all weapons will continue to lightly stagger or make enemies flinch as long as the sweep can continue, and then trigger what we call a hitstop animation when your hit mass runs out (regardless of damage or stagger being inflicted)
So, with Brutal Momentum on the Antax Mk V Combat Axe for example, you could (theoretically) stagger any number of enemies (to varying degrees), so long as those enemies are in range of your weapon swing and there isn’t any obstruction like a shield* to trigger that hitstop?
For example the Devil’s Claw sword first heavy attack hitstop animation is a slight catching/stopping of the weapon and then a bit more downwards continuation of the sweep.
Ah, I see what you mean. I probably wouldn’t notice it during a game, but you can see a stutter once the hitstop occurs
Hopefully you’ll get the opportunity to show this area of the game some love, it’d be awesome if some of these more nuanced game mechanics were better able to explain themselves in-game, but I can appreciate that the wishes of individual contributors may not necessarily align with the business priorities.
*I assume Brutal Momentum cannot cleave through a shield, I haven’t used it in quite some time so I’m not certain.
Exactly. As long as the sweep continues you will (read: should) make some effect on the enemies in range.
Carapace armour will normally always stops an attack, regardless of hit mass budget left, but a few traits, Brutal Momentum included, ignores that and uses normal hit mass calculation.
But to be honest, I can’t actually recollect that actual interaction between that trait and the bulwarks off the top of my head. If I get the time I can try and verify the actual behaviour (both actual and intended) some time during the week.
This specific one might actually be too subtle IMO. And I actually had to go into our test levels to verify what I was saying when typing of my first reply.
The designers especially reads a lot on the forums and reddit, so if there’s a general consensus about a few of the hitstops being hard to read they might be tweaked to be a bit more obvious looking.
So if I’m interpreting everything right, and to put it in the simplest terms, hit-mass determines when your weapon stops swinging, and their are semi-separate calculations for how many targets are damaged and/or staggered within that swing. The number of damaged/staggered targets are hard-capped and can’t be changed on the fly.
Yes and no.
Currently that’s how it works. But there’s nothing technical to prevent us from modifying which target index is being used and how much hit mass is consumed. This is more of a question that falls into the design space and the rules, decisions, and constraints set up there. But that is a spot I’m not 100% comfortable with making certain statements in.
Nevertheless, to give a hypothetical example: A blessing could to effectively ignore target index if a target is killed by a headshot, thereby “extending” the amount of damaged targets.
So first target gets damage as if it’s the first target, if it was killed by a headshot, that hit mass gets refunded and the second target gets damage as if it was the first target. If that target was also killed by a headshot, the third target in line will take damage as if it was the first target, etc.
Hi sebgra and thank you so much for taking your time to respond in this post. I know you might be busy but I was hoping to get some clarity around when you describe the two cleave rules (one for attack, one for damage).
The Latrine Shovel has the following profile for Crowd Control (highlighted inconsistency)
I must add that I have a latrine shovel with Brutal momentum and one without… both act the same. They do cleave damage to only 3 enemies… This was reported here.
It’s a mess because it both does and doesn’t. The third attack in the light chain (L3) can hit and injure any number of enemies with Brutal Momentum (except Infested for some crazy armour reason), but the rest of the attacks can never hurt a 4th enemy. Without BM the third attack in the chain can barely hit the second enemy with its incredibly poor cleave of 1.2.
Lastly it’s not easy to maintain BM on Shovel since the attacks have a priority to hit the body instead of the head.
I wish they could take a broader look at it since right now it’s missing that little bit of love.
If the third attack in the chain had head priority and a better damage profile the weapon would become pretty good pretty quickly.
I don’t get how you did your tests.
Last time I tested, I used one latrine shovel with BM T4 and one without BM. Both were damaging 3 enemies and not more and in same proportion.
In another words, BM did nothing.
For the tests I used the spawning mod and health bar mod, created a lot of groaners and used light attacks and heavy attacks.
Every swing hit 3 enemies regardless of the presence, or not, of brutal momentum.
