During a recent dev stream over on Twitch they were asked a few questions about combat, havoc and how they liked the game generally. During the replies one of the devs said they were happy with the state of combat and that it was great.
It is great but it can certainly be better.
One aspect I see (short of class tree rehauls) that can easily add more depth to build diversity is reworking Curios to have a more similar power spike system that weapons have.
Generally I’m sure there is a lot of variance in their data with which curio options people pick however in meta builds and high skill gameplay you end up seeing A LOT of the same curio combinations being picked. Making Curios look more like weapons would add more variety and power attribution to them. What I mean by that is to give curio blessings that are impactful to gameplay like you do weapons.
The current Curio Blessings and Perks need to be reworked, the blessing need to be combined into a perk and a few of the perks need to be all combined into one for example.
All of the 20% Damage Resistance vs X could all be combined and turned into three options:
Damage resistance vs melee
Damage resistance vs range
Damage resistance vs AOE
Another example is the increased exp perk. It should be combined with the other farming/ leveling perks to be. (This would also introduce a way for people to farm mats faster.)
10% Increased Dockets, Experience, Plasteel and Diamantine
Curio Blessings would be where the devs could create interesting build decisions and interactions. Like adding attack or move speed to weapons and classes that dont already have it. The MAIN POINT to all this is to solve problems you cannot with the build tree when youre trying to create new and fun builds; to introduce more build diversity.
Blessings on curios is a ludicrous idea. It would make the characters even more broken than they already are. I dont think curios need changed because they are what they are and ive never once thought they need expanded upon and especially not blessings. Why on earth would we need 4 perks and a blessing on curios? How broken do you want this game to get? There will always be things in a game like this that noone uses and there isnt anything inherently wrong with that because build crafting games are just like that. If anything needed changed you could say perks could use a tune up cuz rarely ever is it worth it to take anything other than a flat 25% increase to various forms of damage. Changing curios in my mind would be the least of our concerns as players.
VT2 has blessings on “curios” (Trinkets) that effected the consumables (bombs/potions), which could be thing here too. Vet’s Field Improvisation Talent is a great example for this, could be one or two separate “blessings” on curios.
I wouldn’t give (permanent) damage boosts on it tho, would be too broken.
Yeah some stim related blessings would be cool. Like if they could make one that lets both players juice off a needle (except HP), and then have to weigh using that or longer lasting individual stims or more powerful scaled bonuses. Those sorts of RPG things. Curios are just there atm and even a very rarely proc’d item blessing would be so much better than the bland number bonuses they are now.
The example image is… yeah a bit overtuned lol but we’re here for the concept.
In vermintide 1 & 2 they had something similar in fact its basically exactly that its just the flavor thats different.
Thats where the devs can really introduce build diversity. They can add blessings that make the game more engaging and interesting like… changing the way weapons abilities blitz skills even work with these blessings. Its not really about increasing player power, that can always be adjusted by tweaking the numbers its about allowing for options to change things in our builds more.
Gotta generally agree with both main points made so far in this thread.
OP’s example is way over the top and not advisable.
Curios in general are a lot less interesting to pick and interact with than VT2’s equivalent, charms, trinkets, and necklaces (not a high bar lol), and the lack of a blessing option for them is definitely a key factor in that. You absolutely could come up with some nice little defensive and niche utility blessings to spice them up a bit without causing significant power creep.
@MarxistDictator’s stim suggestions are great, this is another place where they could just about rip ideas straight from VT2 with potion traits and profit.
I wouldn’t even mind some of the RNG traits/blessings coming back. 20% chance to not consume medkit on use? I mean it would lead to some memorable moments while being weak enough on average to not even proc most missions, so I wouldn’t really be scared of power creep there.
Explosive/fire barrels do x% more damage to enemies and y% less damage to team mates could be another fun one.
They’d definitely have to be a bit more creative and balance sensitive than they usually are to implement it without making super obvious options without also making them too limp to even care about, but I do feel like it would be worth the time investment to implement well.
But as others stated vt2 did have a system that was more diverse. Even if they only added a necklace/charm with new options that would be a good change.
They could start by letting us upgrade any curio to the max of 21 health / 17 toughness / 3 stamina. It’s an easy change and I don’t know why we still have to camp the shop in order to get those maxed curios (those of us who need one anyway).
my standards are a lot lower tbh.
remove useless perks like curio chance, muties, hounds
make the curios available scale with level at brunts
and most importantly show you what the perks are in the inventory
class items could work as well like ogryn implant, psyker collar, zealot imperial charm. and use that for smaller additions. im thinking something like 5% extra ammo on pick up or maybe auto crafting mats pickup
*Merging Exp and Docket gain into one.
*Blessings on Curios as long as they are all utility based and not damage focused. I’m towing the line on the “Lets steal things from VT2” bandwagon here, but I also like the idea of removing damage from explosive barrels so I get more opportunities for “movement tech”. There’s some good ideas being thrown around this thread.
*Having curios work with the Empower/Sacrifce/rebless systems (We need more mat sinks).
Things I dislike:
-4 perks. No, no I don’t think that’s good, not with the current perk system.
-Aggregation of damage resistance types. I am a bit of a hardliner when it comes to things that boost outgoing damage or reduce incoming damage. So far to the side on this issue, I think we should remove all of them (At least the flat % ones).
-Adding diversity to curios might be putting the cart before the horse a bit. I am of the opinion that the current selection of blessings/perks (Berks) need to be reworked, maybe not all at once but it’s clear that a lot of the berks are either too good not to choose, or too bad to ever choose. (Not to mention booooring!) A rebalance of weapon berks on weapons could open up space to improve curios, but not the other way around.
We don’t really need a larger increase to player power in this direction. Passively making players resist a massive amount of damage means that they have to rebalance everything around that. Melee is already a joke, and making ranged in auric and lower even worse at doing anything to the player is a bit much. If we make these buffs mandatory, then you end up taking the obvious meta options and never touching curios again anyway.
but while we are throwing around badly balanced concepts, I personally want them to remove abilities, blitzes, and auras from the skill tree and instead portion those out between the 3 curio slots. One slot for grenades, and the perks you would roll would be to enhance said grenades (i.e. additional kraks or immolation nades, faster BB, increased effective radius nuke). A slot for an ability and then a few enhancements for said ability (skill tree stuff and more), then a final slot for auras, which is all of the current passive upgrades we are familiar with for keystones. Instead of a blessing slot for a lot of these, you would instead reroll the ability/blitz/aura benefit. This would allow for future updates to add more abilities, blitzes, and auras to the game without having to completely rework the skill tree, or rebalance each ability in a more interesting way from touching the individual modifiers to tackling the abilities themselves.
The obvious issue is that now all of those points and point taxes and requirements in pathing will completely restructure every class’s talent tree, but this also means that it allows for a lot more build diversity. Zealot won’t have to path from the right side of the tree to the left and back to the right, ogryn won’t be locked going right from the left side, veteran won’t have a weirdly proportioned top half compared to the bottom half, psyker will still be bland. All around positives imo.
Adding Blessings to curios sounds like a terrible idea. I’m in just so I can give Bromentumn to every melee weapon in the game and further invalidate more core game mechanics.
Since people are taking the image I haphazardly put together (my bad honestly i shouldve known better, heres another one xd) in a couple seconds heres one that a bit more accurate to what i mean.
To the comments about damage reduction being to much I implore to research how effective running 3x 20% damage reduction to gunners actually is. An unfortunately spoiler is that its not great, its why all those perks are simply not great. They are very inefficient even though it seems like it should be really good but its not.
heres a vid explaining it in detail. i know the dudes insufferable but just observe the content
Now thats all to say that I feel those perks are meh in general. Lets say they did combine them all to one perk for range attacks but nerfed it 10-15% resistance then fine thats great give me more interesting perks in the place of the ones they combined.
To the comments about blessings on curios being a bad idea I disagree with you and so does Fatshark, in vermintide 1&2 there was a form of this on the trinkets necklaces and charms(at least in v2). I will say, porting all the current blessings as options for the curios would be a bad idea i get that but you ought to infer that the point is new blessings that would change, enhance and created variety in the current gameplay.
Im gonna go out on a limb and say that the reason why we dont have blessings already on them and why curios are so uninspiring is because of the fact that they simply ran out of time and money at the end of development.
Making the curio system more interesting and engaging than just a few base stats is undoubtedly a way to improve on the game that is very much so in reach.
The types of blessings that would be appropriate are the nodes that are in the class tree. Things like: (NOT EXACTLY but simply like this, where they affect gameplay in a fun diverse interesting way.)
Anticipation: +50% Dodge duration. Increases the number of Dodges before Dodges starts becoming ineffective by 1.
Second Wind: 15% Toughness replenishment on a Successful Dodge
Ammo Stash: Increase your Maximum Ammo reserve by +25%, round down.
Field Improvisation: Medipacks: Heal +100% faster, Replenish 1% Toughness per second, Cleanse Corruption up to the next Wound.
Ammo Crates also restore Grenades.
Some talents are incredible strong some are very meh but the devs can actively add blessings to the game in this way to keep adding flavor to the game to allow people to make new builds. Its no different than adding new weapons.
I’ve seen this and tbh this dude is playing a different game from me. I get shot a lot lol. Easy to dodge and run around like a headless chook with your dueling sword or high mobility weapon, Ogryn doesn’t have that luxury. Or, mine doesn’t!
So I run one or two gunner res perks because while I’m aware of the diminishing returns stat-wise, I still find myself eating enough lead to be grateful of the extra survivability versus elite gunners and reapers.
Yeah and I totally see where youre coming from. There is value in it and im sure a lot of people use it and are glad for it.
And even if the mitigation was overtuned it would not break the game or make people way too powerful. Even with full resistance you can still be blown in 1/2 a second.
To me its just uninspired. If you want to give players mitigation just give them mitigation from things in a simply encompassing way so that it can BE A BUILD where you are giving up a lot of opportunities for other things. As well as giving us more interesting things to put there. The current system just feels so dry to me.
On every class on all the different builds im running the exact same curio setup on all of them. Theres just not enough variety to them. Adding things like movement speed, reload speed, dodge distance, attack speed etc etc., (it could be anything) would just add the ability for people to tune their builds more and make things work that otherwise just doesnt workout in higher difficulties.
And Vermintide 1 had even better trinket building despite the lack of stats since you could stack the types of trinkets rather than only being able to equip one of each (meds/potions/bombs). Granted that was also because characters had no innate passives or abilities outside of their weapons, but building trinket sets was more fun.
A training curio would be great, assigned at level 0, and it should stick around until level 30. It flashes big red words on the screen:
“Don’t Shoot the Pox Burster!”
“Don’t Mag Dump Your Boltgun Into a Horde of Poxwalkers!”
“Pick the Stim/Medpack/Ammo Crate Your Teammate Is Pinging Up!”
“Block!” “Push!” “Dodge!”
“Look For the Loot Boxes With Game Changing Powerups!”
Could improve mission quality quite significantly, worth a shot.
There was really no need to make this statement. It’s your opinion and you didn’t need the rude insertion to someone who contributes a lot to high level Darktide content and play. The guy is in the forum here as well, so it might even break a rule.