Deamon host is unacceptably bad and unfun

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

i know that since we first saw the stupid thing it was taken back to the shop and “tweaked” seems like all that was changed is how OFTEN we have to deal with it. its not fun its never fun its not even scary or suspeneful, its just lame and unfair. the good news is that all of this hinges on ONE fatal flaw thats the difference between what they currently are, unfun, annoying, unfair, lame, and boring and what i could and should be; exciting, scary and difficult. that one thing is: GIVE US WAYS TO BREAK THE KILL MOVE!!! DUH! it could be that you have to use your ult or get like 10 headshot crits in a row or something else demanding but we need SOMETHING to do about it otherwise its a game where we have no moves! no moves other than “dont touch it and if you do perfect it otherwise tough” having a dps race being the best and only option also make it so you cant even access the UNBELIEVEABLY limited engagement with the boss until you’re high level and can do high damage all that sucks! give us a way to actually fight it and it will be much better!

also in the game i just finished one of them was able to pick me up and intsa kill me WITHOUT downing me first. this stupid boss is so bad i honestly dont know if that was a bug or a feature

7 Likes
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I think it’s perfectly fine. It’s a nice addition, but there are absolutely tweaks that can be made.

… and I’m the ogryn that accidentally charged it yesterday on a 2-grim run wiping the group because I did not recognise what it was.

The last thin you mention does sound like a bug, which will hopefully be patched, but the boss is fine as a concept.

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concept yes, its just that you cant stagger it out of the kill move. its stupid, not just because its unfair but it also looks dumb in the moment, like really its just gonna ignore 3 people worth of thier best gun fire thats doing real damage to it while it sloooooooooooooooowly kills someone instead of dropping them to deal with the others then come back and eat them when its safe? why? the simple addtion of letting us stagger it out of that animation would make the fight MUCH more fun and harrowing, giving people a chance to save thier freinds instead of the now typical “yeah whatever theyre dead. just save the ammo”

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its literally meant as an obstacle to avoid, if it wans’t punishing to walk into it, then it failed at its job.

the only thing i dislike about it is how little skill or player agency is asked.

one person desperately tries to avoid it or has shield while the other pummel on it
very boring fight.

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yeah this exactly, its boring. whether or not punishing mechanics should be here/are good or not aside (bc thats not the convo i want to have) and i agree that the thing should be very difficult but the thing is just lame, you either dont engage with it or have a lame fight, we need better options to un-duck ourselves when we have to deal with it other wise all outcomes are just bad or boring

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Daemonhost is fine as it is. It’s a tough fight, but it is absolutely possible to kill it without losing anyone, or even having anyone go down. It’s another test of your group, asking the question do you have a tank? If you can’t deal with it, you should be trying other tactics, you should be looking at your gear loadout and asking yourself what role you fill in your group. Admittedly PUGs will have more issues, but that’s natural. It’s difficult to balance for PUGs and premade groups.

Your argument that it is ‘boring’ is rather vacuous. I could say the plague ogryn is boring because it just charges into you and slams people about while you beat on it, I could say the beast of nurgle is boring because it just goes around eating people and spitting slime everywhere. Neither of these statements actually really describes these fights, just like yours. Your is an attempt to dismiss the fight without giving an actual good reason for it.

In your opinion the daemonhost is unfun, and unfair. In my opinion it is a fun challenge the adds something different to the game. You can either bypass it, or if it is in a position where you have to fight it, then you should kill all the enemies around it before waking it, then pull it back towards where you came from and pretty much be guaranteed that that is all you will be fighting. Make sure your tankiest character wakes it up, and then pour everything into it (it isn’t that tough TBH), and if you can’t kill it before it downs then kills one of your team, then something is lacking in your team. think about what that might be and try to fix it for next time.

Unfair? It will only attack one character at a time, which you can determine by choosing who wakes it up, everyone else can just focus entirely on dealing damage with no worries that it will turn on them. This fight is way fairer than the other monstrosities which can force a fight anywhere, potentially with multiple specials alongside them.

I’m not saying it could not be improved, it probably could, but I can’t think how it could be done easily off the top of my head. Your suggestion will certainly not work. All that would do it trivialise it, and if that is your goal, just play on an easier difficulty. Some people like a bit of a challenge. Also, gear level appears to be more important in this game than V2, so play on a lower difficulty until you get to a level where you have the gear and feats to enable you to beat the tougher enemies. Also, the ridiculous hyperbole just makes it impossible to take you seriously.

2 Likes
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I personally fail to see the point of this encounter to be honest. It’s mostly ridiculous, tedious and seems to come with zero rewards. So before long people with just avoid it and that’s that. At least make killing it increase the chance for a drop at the end or whatever. Right now it’s just a somewhat unbalanced chore if someone daydreams and accidently aggros it.

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Does killing any other monstrosity give increased rewards? Do people complain about that? It is part of the mission and the existing rewards which are listed at the start of the mission.

I thought everyone had played L4D, that’s certainly the impression you get from this forum of experts who know everything about how these games should be designed. Guess we’re seeing the truth now.

1 Like
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I love em. They’re not fair, but remember we’re just expendable rejects. The Warhammer 40k universe is full of terrible, terrible things. A daemonhost would be a nightmare, and it is.

I expect if we see some Plague Marines or whatnot to face an even more difficult.

All that said, yeah improvements can be made for sure.

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It’s easy to cheese if you know what you’re doing, (So long as you have a shield Ogryn in your party) if the ogryn gets the attention, he can just shield wall in a corner and everyone else can DPS it down easily. Just be quick about it or it will corrupt the ogryn to death. :slight_smile:

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two things: first, i dont think that adding counter play to its kill move would trivialize it, and were that to do so, the way to bring it back in would be to increase the bosses dps further. what REALLY trivializes it is ya know, side stepping it and ignoring it. id rather it be a cool fight than a glorified spike trap,

secondly you say do this on a lower difficuly but it goes the same on every difficulty with this boss bc the difficulty is just a matter of scaling, number of enemies and ai behavior; so the strength and game feel/balance of an individual move wont change. also the way you deal with the kill move is to kill it first and on lower difficulties teams tend to have lower damage so…that wouldn’t work.

Also, clearly this thing is a riff on the witch from left for dead and im sure you’ll say that bc this ISNT the witch that means that theyre uncompilable and the deamon host shouldn’t be held to the witch’s standard.
but i do, bc the witch worked really really well and that was possible bc of crowning. let me be clear, i DO NOT think that even under the best conditions we should be able to one shot ANY of the bosses in darktide, what i AM saying is that the addtion of aggressive counter play to the witch made the encounter better, and id like that here. staggering the thing absolutely should be hard to pull off, very hard even, but i think it should be in the game

2 Likes
13

Yeah it is sort of janky. The bad taste about it for me is that it’s basically third boss and, having played the game enough now to begin coming to some judgements, it’s not like the other 2 bosses are much either, nothing like taking on a rat ogre or a chaos spawn or troll or stormfiend, but then the whole darktide gameplay is questionable and I’m jusssttt not finding much there, sort of janky vermintide without any of the refined skillful vermintide gameplay. 2 janky bosses that play like a janky spam fest and now third boss is just this giant ganky witch.

but hey at least we have revolutionary improvements of fatshark realizing we’re children who are too small to see the player scores and who need to policed with severe armor regen debuffs if we’re naughty kids and go too far from the team.

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idk, i had fun kiting him. not much killing him.
because it feels that some weapons is just not capable enough to burst him down.

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Hell, some weapons can’t block/kite them lol

If a team isn’t geared to attack or defend from one an encounter is going to be nasty.

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agree, block is not even an option, you will be out of stamina immediately, if you are not ogryn. so doge is only option. that means if you have bad doge capabilities on your melee weapon you screwed.

howewer i noticed that you can avoid alot of his attacks if you doge in the right time. so if you time your doges correctly and not just spam it, you may have a chance

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I’vw tanked this on difficulty 2-3 as every class. As stated, ogryn can cheese it with shield. However, I’ve also tanked with a cleaver as an ogryn, with a hatchet as a vet, psyker and zealot. It comes down to blocking what you can and dodging the rest. As the zealot, it downed me and the team killed it just after it ate my soul. But it died and I was the only casualty, while everyone else used ranged attacks to avoid corruption.

If I’m with a random team, i tend to tell them to avoid the deamonhost. it’s like the witch in L4D, a creepy death machine you want to avoid pissing off.

I will say, however, that these monstrosities (all of them) need to give some sort of loot bonus. In VT2, it made your end of mission reward better with dice. Here, they are all just in the way of finishing the mission.

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Not every weapon has enough dodge distance for that. Hatchet and Knife are two that are great for it, but they’re not all viable. Ogryn weapons are solid and so are most of (if not all) of the other classes finesse weapons.

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i mean… all bosses in darktide are unfun, because there is no reward for killing them and deamonhost is the perfect example of why would you even kill it even if i can cheese it with a ogryn as you can evade it, VT2 at least gave you a better score for loot.

2 Likes
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Daemonhost is fine. If he gets nerfed then he is literally pointless and may as well not exist. He is here to punish bad players and to change the pace and as such alter atmosphere. Normally you are going guns blazing into the mission. When you hear whispers, see glowing green mist and your monitor starts freezing you are meant to be afraid and get more careful. If he gets nerfed then he stops fulfilling his only purpose and as such becomes pointless.

The only problem here is a skill issue. Too many players are terrible right now and play as if they never played a video game before, let alone one in this genre. Which is especially weird on higher difficulty levels. So they trigger him intentionally because they not know what he is, somehow. Once majority of fotm players will abandon this game and remaining players will git gud it will be fine. Daemonhost will then serve his role as a fun OHSHIT moment when someone will actually accidentally trigger him. Just like Witch in L4D.

This is the one thing that is not a problem with this game and I don’t want it changed, unlike rng shop, rng melkbux, rng map f*cking selection that makes this game in particular repetitive and boring, unfinished crafting, small amount of classes, missing weapons that were even in gameplay trailer, missing enemies, small map variety and in general weak map design, nonexistent story despite focus on pointless cutscenes, weak and boring Boss fight, bad dialogue and banter, bad balance, bad performance, bugs and crashes.

2 Likes
21

Literally my only issue with it is how damn often it shows up. It should be power outage only (I’d thought it was previously?), it suits the atmosphere really well there. When you see it 3 missions in a row it just becomes tedious.