i know people who have dozens of hours in veteran and only dipping champion, some even go in the hundreds, you don’t develop the neccessary skills to complete high pressure situations if you don’t put yourself into high pressure situations.
if that means you f*ck up, and cause a team wipe, so be it, learn from it.
the real problem is that knowing what caused a wipe in the first place takes skill especially if you can’t engage or dicuss with the group and are given no context information.
so everyone just plays and blames others being dumb. where in actuality many things lead to the wipe, and small mistakes even from the better players add up also.
I could be wrong, but, imo it’s not so much that it’s gotten easier as that it’s gotten more bursty. Around launch, hi intensity maps were more like a constant stream of enemies, although the individual encounters were never too crazy – usually just a lot of poxwalkers, bruisers, etc. Now it’s more like the map overall is kinda chill, but it’s punctuated by a few super intense encounters. For example, I did a damnation hi-intensity + dogs map yesterday and it seemed reasonably chill, and then suddenly the AI cranked it up to 11 (chaos spawn + dog packs + specials + shooters at the same time):
^ craziness starts at 19:47 or so. Ymmv but to me the bursty crazy encounters are more interesting than the steady flow of enemies!
damnation was quite easy before too, also with randoms. 1-2 occasional failed mission bc some rare impossible situation or bug or some player who did not belong on damnation.
after 1-2 months on malice I skipped heresy entirely bc that and damnation is rather similar if you got the skills. and no, I was not carried.
You got better, your gear got better. This is why the present mission selection terminal is a total failure. You cannot select the most difficult modifier atm: hi-5 shock troop at will. There should be always guaranteed few missions with hi-intensity and hi-shock troop mods. Instead we get this random garbage.
Fatshark has probably different priorities now sadly, likely they are pushing for console release and basically making the mistake CDPR did with Cyberpunk. They can barely handle the scope of the game on PC and they are splittign their limited resources further. Just wait for the crash/slide fest on consoles.
They intended to release this at the same time as the Hunting Grounds modifier back in late December, but pulled it at the last moment due to “technical difficulties regarding it’s implementation”. Then we got left with endless dogs for 2 months… While I wish they’d implement it (it seems like a fun gamemode), it seems like it’s been totally scrapped at this point for the aforementioned technical reasons. What I’d really like to see is:
A mission condition where the endless horde bug is intentionally on. It would slow down missions a lot while not necessarily making them harder, but the game has a very different dynamic when you can never catch a breather and have to move intentionally from chokepoint to chokepoint. It’d be fun occasionally.
I’d also just like to see a mission condition where there’s less resources / inactive medicae stations. Some of the most intense situations in Darktide I’ve had were when the team ran completely out of resources for one reason or another, and had to struggle on until we could get them. It would actually force people to work as a team for once.
I think maybe the main thing keeping me from being excited to play Darktide anymore is the lack of meaningful challenge most times I play. Anything up to and including High Intensity Damnation has become pretty mindless muscle memory at this point, and I’m beginning to develop bad habits as a result. I make mistakes I shouldn’t be and when things go bad I’m not able to react to it as well as I used to be when we all played more cautiously. We really need more difficulty options that incentivize good teamwork and decision making.
I also think that Melks challenges actively work against the flow.
Ideally players would be incentivized to play as high as they can for better loot (eg vanilla VT2) but in DT they aren’t. Emperors gift is totally rng, most often pointless, but Melks coins you at least get to choose a blessing.
I think that feeds the play stats on lower levels that otherwise probably wouldn’t happen.
Hi int on damnation and heresy should be the baseline.
Hi int shock gauntlet should replace hi int.
And something even worse should replace hi int shock gauntlet.
Unless they changed it over the last 3 or 4 months that isn’t true. You have to be like level 8 or something before you can enter damnation. You, otherwise, require a friend to bring you along.
